What are the reasons for introducing a chatbot?
To one chatbot To successfully implement in the company, the reasons and the specific goals should be defined. The motives for introducing a chatbot can vary from company to company, but in most cases they are as follows:
- Overload of customer serviceA company's customer service team simply receives too many messages. The resulting long waiting time on the part of customers has a negative effect in many ways. In addition, support staff are usually stressed and overwhelmed when support volumes are constantly too high. Many companies are therefore introducing a chatbot to relieve customer service and reduce waiting time on the part of customers.
- Automated Lead qualificationOnline marketers are also using chatbots. Not primarily to relieve the customer service team, but to generate more contacts or leads on the website. Especially when companies have problems with non-converting landing pages or are repeatedly struggling with uncompleted website forms, a chatbot is an ideal countermeasure. A chatbot can easily and automatically request contact details through a conversation and thus ensure initial contact qualification. B2B companies in particular like to use chatbots for this purpose.
- Cost savings
Efficient automation using a chatbot can permanently save costs. Each individual response to customer inquiries costs money. These inquiries are often not particularly complex, but simple and recurring questions. If you answer these questions automatically, this is a scalable solution that permanently saves costs and at the same time frees up time for employees to address complex inquiries. - Get customer insights and get to know the target group better
Valuable information can be viewed in the backend of the chatbot. For example, individual conversations as well as statistics and user reviews. This gives companies two types of insights: General and representative figures on popular and frequently asked topics. As well as more detailed insights into individual conversations — insights can also be drawn from this, such as how users express themselves.
After this brief digression on the most common motivations, the following are the concrete steps required for a successful chatbot introduction. To ensure that a chatbot implementation is as efficient and smooth as possible, moinAI has designed an agile project plan, which is presented below.
Introducing a chatbot: the steps for successful implementation
The path to a successful chatbot is usually not as complicated or lengthy as is often presented.
1. Definition of goals & return on investment
Now that we have taken a look at the reasons for a chatbot introduction, it is obvious that the motivations and goals of a chatbot introduction vary from company to company. You should therefore define exactly which goals you want to achieve for your company — before you start with a chatbot. The goals are usually derived from the motivations, so a goal may be to reduce support volume by 20% or to achieve a conversion rate of 15% in chat.
► Tip for setting goals: An insight into the goals that companies have already achieved with chatbots is provided by our Case studies.
In addition to achieving goals, return on investment (ROI) is also an important issue. To help you calculate the ROI, we have developed two different calculators:
- Customer service calculator: Save time and costs: Calculation of automated tickets
- Marketing calculator: Generate more leads: Calculate the advantage with the conversion calculator
The calculators allow a flexible calculation of the return on investment, individually for your use case.
2. Vendor selection and onboarding
With Chatbot solution providers There is now a wide range. The solutions offered also vary. So there are various Chatbot types: Chatbots based on natural language processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence (AI) or chatbots based on defined rules. As mentioned above, this guide is about AI-based, i.e. intelligent chatbots. These offer companies a great deal of development potential and a high level of automation, as they are based on AI features, such as Dreaming or develop reassuring independently and require little manual intervention.
Rule-based chatbots, on the other hand, are suitable for short-term and time-limited marketing campaigns. However, companies that want to automate customer communication in the long term are well advised to use an AI chatbot or a so-called intelligent chatbot.
After choosing the chatbot provider, onboarding usually continues. The onboarding is carried out by expert customer success managers who will discuss all relevant topics with you and provide you with initial assistance. The onboarding at moinAI is created individually for each individual company, and each company is also assigned a permanent customer success manager. This person will guide you through the onboarding process, which covers all topics you need to know to start the chatbot: The core elements of the chatbot solution are presented and explained to you in detail, responsibilities and responsibilities are defined and the timing and next steps are determined. In addition, there is always room for your questions.
3. Define initial set of topics
In order to clarify this step, it is first important to define what a “topic” is in a chatbot: A topic can also be referred to as a chatbot answer. It is practically the number of answers that a chatbot provides for users. Examples of topics could include: “Forgotten password,” “Get an offer,” “Return/Refund,” etc.
The topics vary depending on the industry and the company's product or service. As a first step, it is important to define the topics that have the highest priority for your company.
Insight into practice: With moinAI customer Bauportal24h (Industry: E-Commerce), the following topics have been defined for the introduction of chatbots:
- Product price
- Product request
- guidance
- revocation
- Accessibility
- Delivery status
- reckoning
- Payment options
- Access issues
The initial definition of the topics forms the first basis of the chatbot, which can be built on after going live.
If you are not sure which topics are initially suitable for the chatbot or where you can find possible, relevant topics, we recommend the following procedure:
- → Identify the most popular FAQs
Using various analysis tools, such as a heat map or Google Analytics, you can determine the most clicked FAQs. These provide a good overview of which topics are most important to your website visitors.
- → Determine the most frequently requested search terms
One important source, if it exists on your website, is search. Phrases and keywords that are entered into the website's search mask provide information about what users are looking for.
- → Evaluate the “classic” communication channels
Requests made via telephone, e-mail, telephone and chat should also be evaluated. If your company is active on social media channels, it also makes sense to evaluate the comments on the corresponding platforms. - → Talk to the customer service team
What are the most repetitive and common inquiries that the customer service team has to answer over and over again? Your employees certainly know the best about this and can give you valuable insights in a personal conversation.
4. AI training
After the first set of topics has been defined, the chatbot's AI is trained on these topics. The aim of the training is for the chatbot to understand all possible questions on the topics and to provide the correct answer. In the case of moinAI, AI training is covered exclusively by AI experts. The companies themselves therefore do not have to “deal with” the complex AI system or learn the AI with various formulations. AI training is carried out by experienced experts and only takes a few days.
5. Arrangement of answers
After the topics that the chatbot should address for the time being have been defined, it is time to design the answers. In addition to simple text answers, it is also possible to include images, videos, multiple choice questions or yes-no answers. Let your creativity flow when designing the answers that the chatbot sends when asked — so users enjoy communicating with the chatbot and staying in the conversation longer.
For example, a chatbot, which is primarily used in customer service, can also serve marketing purposes: At the end of the conversation, the chatbot can play out a card menu in which the newsletter or a product is shown.
6. Integration of the chat widget
This is probably the fastest and easiest part of introducing a chatbot. After the chatbot has been trained and populated with topics and texts, all you need to do is integrate a two-line code so that the chatbot can be played on your website. The integration of this code requires no IT skills and is easy to carry out. More information about this as well as a detailed How to integrate the chat widget available in the moinAI knowledge base.
Good to know: Tips & tips
Go live quickly and gradually expand
The moinAI chatbot experts recommend that you start quickly with a live tour after the start of the project — and not to create all topics in detail for now. It is better to start with a smaller number of topics and then gradually expand. The reason for this is simple: The faster the chatbot goes live, the sooner the AI can get to know the users, learn from their formulations and thus even identify and suggest further topics itself. Thanks to the dreaming feature, the manual search for new chatbot topics is often done by itself.
A quick live tour with a subsequent, continuous expansion of the chatbot is a resource-saving live tour that is by no means like a “mammoth project.” Rather, this method of introducing chatbots offers room for growth and continuous expansion, while not requiring too many resources at any time.
User-centred thinking and consider chatbot analytics
From the moment they go live, the conversations with the chatbot are evaluated. The chatbot automatically asks for feedback after it has given an answer. Clicks on links are also tracked so that a conversion rate can be determined in the chat. Rankings are also created: Which topics are particularly popular, which are more likely to be asked for less?
This provides good information about what users are really interested in and which topics should be expanded or optimized — in order to offer users the best possible experience. Apart from the various analytics, it is worthwhile to take a close look at individual conversations. In individual conversations, you learn how your users express themselves and how they react to the chatbot. This offers great potential to empathize more with the target group and generate previously unknown insights.
Create an appealing and brand-compliant chatbot persona
The look and name of the chatbot should match your company and corporate identity, both graphically and in terms of content. Choose the right chatbot name is important and the “look” of the chatbot avatar should also be consistent. moinAI offers an avatar editor for this, with which you can easily create an avatar for your chat widget. In the editor, the color scheme can be determined as well as the corresponding logo can be inserted (the avatar wears this on his shirt).
Conclusion: Introducing a chatbot is not complicated
It is undeniable that it requires both resources and time to get started with a chatbot. However, this effort is low when you compare it with the output and time that a chatbot saves after going live. Both costs and workload for a chatbot pay off in a short time after going live.
When introducing a chatbot, it is important to always think in a user-centered way and to orient the chatbot in such a way that it reflects the company values and gives users exactly the answers they need.
However, with a competent chatbot partner at your side who will provide you with expert advice and assistance, you are well protected — and the course is set for an ideal chatbot launch.
If you need additional information on how to introduce a chatbot into your company, simply contact our experts. As part of a demo The chatbot solution will be presented to you and there will be time for all your questions.
