Top 10 Chatbot Features
Building a successful chatbot of your own is actually quite simple. If you use the right chatbot platform (like VirtualSpirits), adding a great chatbot to your website won’t take very long. A quality chatbot platform will let you get your chatbot up and running with some basic setup and adjustments.
Having said that, building a chatbot without understanding its capabilities or how to use them won’t get you the results you need. In this article, we will bring you up to speed on the top features you should look for in your new chatbot. Make use of these features to start increasing conversions from your website and reducing your incoming support calls and emails.
Chatbot Features:
1. Chatbot Triggers
Chatbot triggers are basically options that get the chatbot window on your website to open. These triggers help you get your visitors' attention.
There are different types of chatbot triggers that invoke the chatbot:
Timed Trigger - the most popular, opens the chatbot window once a visitor has been on your website for a predefined amount of time.
Button Trigger - allows visitors to open the chatbot window by clicking on a floating button on top of your website.
Welcome Message Trigger - opens a chat bubble above the chatbot's button to get the visitor’s attention without launching the entire chatbot window.
Exit Trigger - opens the chatbot window when a visitor is trying to leave the website.
People who come to your website are interested in your product or service. But did you know that a whopping 90% of visitors leave websites within the first minute? Chatbot triggers are highly effective at drawing your visitors’ attention to your chatbot and letting them know that there is a chat tool in place to help them. These triggers can have a significant effect on your website's conversion rate and your ability to talk to more visitors.
2. Chatbot for Mobile Website
Most internet users are on their mobile phones for the greater part of the day. It’s very likely that your first interaction with a new potential customer will be on your mobile website. Chatbots are ideal for interacting with mobile users. Plus, a major benefit they offer is that they instantly make your website mobile-friendly.
3. Chatbot Design
A chatbot comes with options to design and present it according to the needs, branding and graphic style of your business. Adjusting your chatbot's colors, images, logo and text will help you catch your visitor’s eye and get them focused on the chatbot to start a conversation. Chatbot design also includes the option to decide whether your chatbot has its own "human-like" personality or a more mechanical style.
Visitor attention ratio on websites tends to be low when there are too many elements on it that distract your customers from their initial intent for visiting your website. Together with the right chatbot triggers, your chatbot’s design can play a crucial role in improving visitor engagement and increasing your website's conversions.
4. Chatbot Introduction
This refers to the first few sentences that your chatbot uses to start a conversation. The chatbot introduction is instrumental in engaging with your website’s visitors, welcoming them, and accurately reflecting their needs. Here is an example:
"Welcome to our website! I am the website chatbot. I can see that you are interested in an iPhone X. How may I help you?"
The chatbot introduction separates your chatbot from other pop-ups or advertisement banners on your website. These few sentences can capture your visitors' attention and get them to see that the chatbot can offer them personalized help while using your website. A good introduction that makes your visitors feel welcome and reflects their needs is key to achieving your chatbot's goals for conversion and customer support.
5. NLP
Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a chatbot’s ability to understand what people are asking for, and come up with an instant and relevant response. Using NLP, topics and keywords, your chatbot will be able to answer questions that your customers ask in their own words.
Your website can have a lot of content, but this doesn’t ensure that your customers can easily access the information they need. Usage data suggests that websites are good for providing general information about a company or brand, but are quite ineffective at converting visitors into customers or providing customer support. Allowing your visitors to ask whatever they want using their own words creates a sense of freedom that is linked to the successful adoption of the chatbot by visitors.
6. Chatbot Answers
A chatbot can be loaded with hundreds of questions and answers to cover a wide range of topics and queries that visitors might bring up. These Q&As can be edited and customized to the needs of each business and each website. Chatbot answers can include videos, images, PDFs and external links for creating great content that will help you boost conversions from your website.
Visitors who come to your website are often looking for real information about your product or service. They may have a question or concern that is preventing them from making a purchase. Without resolving this query, the visitor can’t make a decision. You can help by designing your chatbot answers as part of a service flow that guides the visitor through your sales or support funnel all the way to conversion.
7. Q&A Feedback
Your chatbot can invite your website’s visitors or customers to write their feedback on a specific answer they were provided by the chatbot. Q&A feedback gives your business the advantage of a direct link with customer insights, preferences and behavior.
Up until today, websites have had no way of letting us know what visitors are thinking. Their opinions, queries and problems could only be assessed through website analytics – which revealed just a part of the picture. The chatbot’s feedback options open up a whole new world of information to help you improve your website's conversions for sales and support.
8. AI Self Learning
Artificial Intelligence (AI) makes your chatbot more than just a tool for dispensing information. While interacting with visitors, your chatbot’s AI scans hundreds of conversations in order to learn new questions and recommended optimizations. Once it is online and having conversations with your visitors, the chatbot starts sending you email notifications about new questions it has learned. All you need to do is add answers for these questions and the chatbot will know how to answer them from that point on.
The chatbot's AI self-learning ensures that you are always up to date with what your visitors are asking for and what information they need – a task that is unmanageable for humans. It results in a highly efficient chatbot that can start with just a small number of Q&As, and quickly progress to answering hundreds of questions with a high success rate.
9. Chatbot Analytics
Chatbot analytics and reports give you the ability to capture valuable information about your visitors’ views, motivations, obstacles, and responses to your messages. Chatbot analytics include conversion tracking, trends reporting, FAQ reports and chat intelligence to gain insights and perform optimizations.
This works the same way as checking PPC performance, using Google analytics, researching keywords, A/B testing pages, and so on. Chatbot analytics are specifically used for optimizing your chatbot’s triggers, introduction, Q&As, and service flows. This in turn helps you perform A/B testing and keep increasing your chatbot's conversions.
10. CRM integration
This feature sends sales leads and support tickets collected by the chatbot directly to your CRM. CRM integration is an important tool for escalation. It can be used by both service teams and sales teams to follow-up with website visitors who need additional help and for managing incoming sales leads.
CRM integration ensures that the leads your chatbot picks up make their way straight to your sales funnel, after which your sales team can follow up via promotional emails or phone calls. It also puts your support team in a better place to provide effective customer service. Your chatbot sends support tickets straight into the system, complete with the transcript of the customer’s conversation with the chatbot. Your customer support reps can then reach out to the customer with a proper background about their issue or query.
To build a chatbot that gets you the results you need, make use of these neat chatbot features! VirtualSpirits can get you started with a variety of convenient chatbot templates. Take a look at the available options, or contact us with your requirements.