Benefits of Custom Chatbots for Businesses and Customers

Timely customer engagement is no longer a good to have. 

It’s a must-have that can make or break your business’s success in delivering a great customer experience, building a positive brand perception, and in the end, driving the bottom-line revenue. 

That’s where custom chatbots are becoming commonplace in the strategy. 

In this post, we’re going to share the benefits of using custom chatbots for businesses and customers. 

Benefits of custom chatbots for customers 

Here are some of the benefits that customers get when businesses use custom chatbots: 

1. Instant support – Custom chatbots provide customers with 24/7 assistance. This ensures they get access to the right answers at the right time. This can significantly improve the accessibility to support services. 

2. Personalized responses – AI-powered chatbots use past interactions to provide personalized responses. This creates a more engaging experience for customers with more relevance. 
3. Reduced wait times – Automated responses give customers immediate help. They no longer have to wait for human agents to find a solution through phone calls, emails, or messages. 
4. Multilingual support – Chatbots support multiple languages. This helps customers easily converse with the business in their native languages, removing communication barriers. 
5. Consistent responses – With chatbots, businesses can provide consistent answers across channels. This helps ensure that customers receive accurate information every time, irrespective of the channel they use to interact with the business. 
6. Navigation assistance – Custom chatbots have the ability to guide customers through their needs to the right website pages. This makes it easier for them to find the right products/ services. 
7. Increased engagement – Interactive chatbot conversations are more engaging than product page descriptions, static FAQ pages, or lengthy how-to guides. This gives customers a more engaging way to learn. 
8. 24/7 availability – Customers can reach out for help at any time without worrying about the day and time. 
9. Faster resolution – Custom chatbots can walk customers through an automated workflow to guide them through complex issues. This helps them find solutions faster. 
10. Order tracking and updates – Chatbots can be used to provide customers with real-time updates. These can be related to order status, shipping information or even delivery timelines. This helps customers reduce post-purchase anxiety. 
11. Easy payment assistance – Chatbot solutions can be integrated with payment platforms to guide customers through payments, ensuring a smoother and faster checkout process. 
12. Product recommendations – Customers can provide details about their preferences and get personalized recommendations for products/ services. This helps enhance their shopping experience too. 
13. Reminders and notifications – Chatbots can also send reminders for appointments, abandoned carts, payments, and more. This helps keep customers informed and on track, improving the overall relationship between the two. 
14. Secure account management – Solutions like Auralis AI can come with advanced authentication and security features. This gives customers a safe and convenient way to share information securely. 
15. Accessibility – Advanced chatbot solutions come with voice-enabled and text-based input systems. This makes the interaction inclusive for all types of customers. 

Benefits of custom chatbots for businesses 

Here are some of the benefits that businesses can see from setting up custom agents: 

1. Omnichannel integration – From the website to social media and messaging apps, chatbots can be implemented across channels and platforms. 
2. Scalability – As businesses create more customer touchpoints, it becomes crucial for them to offer proactive customer support. Custom chatbots can help them easily scale support functions up/ down. 

3. Cost efficiency – Automating customer support queries removes the need for a larger team. This can help lower both the operational and hiring costs. 
4. Proactive customer support – Chatbots have the ability to learn from conversations and your integrated data sets. This helps offer proactive support to customers across the lifecycle. 
5. Lead generation and qualification – Custom chatbot workflows can collect and analyze customer data to generate leads. They can also further qualify the leads through personalized interactions, leading to a higher probability of conversions. 
6. Data collection and analysis – Every interaction with the chatbot helps gather and provide valuable insights on customer behavior. This can help businesses refine their strategies and improve products/ services. 
7. Reduced human error – Unlike human agents, custom chatbots can be set to follow defined protocols and refer to specific resources. This helps reduce errors while serving customers. 
8. Brand consistency – The uniformity that chatbots offer in conversations can help offer a consistent brand tone and style. This helps build a stronger brand recall in competitive markets. 
9. Efficient resource allocation – Chatbots can handle repetitive and routine tasks, assign tickets to the right team members, and let human agents focus on complex tasks. This helps make better use of team skills and time. 
10. Improved feedback cycle – Custom chatbots can use an interactive workflow to gather feedback from customers. This provides businesses with timely insights that can help service customers better and reduce churn rates. 
11. Better customer retention – The ability to understand customers better can help businesses enable buyers to derive more value from the products/ services. This helps improve customer retention and loyalty over time. 
12. Sentiment analysis – Unlike traditional chatbots and manual conversations, AI-powered chatbots have the ability to analyze sentiments better; positive, negative, and neutral. This helps businesses catch on to patterns earlier, ensuring a positive perception of the brand. 
13. Improve agent onboarding – As a business scales, AI chatbots can be used to assist new agents while addressing queries. Chatbots can act as co-pilots that provide training on-the-go. 
14. Improve agent productivity – Custom AI chatbots automate routine tasks – be it addressing frequently asked questions, updating customer logs, creating reports and more. They can also act as co-pilots that learn from conversations and suggest responses that can help them cut down resolution time for incoming queries. 

15. Improve job satisfaction – With routine tasks automated, the team across departments can focus on A/B testing and experimenting more in their roles. This can reduce the boredom of mundane tasks and improve the overall job satisfaction. 
16. Global expansion – AI chatbots are capable of adapting to multiple languages. This helps the business easily expand to new markets, providing localized interactions. 
17. Cross-department collaboration – AI chatbot solutions can integrate with CRMs, knowledgebase, and other data sets. This helps integrate the functions of different departments, helping run comprehensive growth strategies that lead to achieving common business goals. 

Best practices to follow when using custom chatbots 

To reap the benefits of custom chatbots for customers and businesses, here are some best practices we recommend: 

• Define clear business goals and objectives you want to address 
• Ensure the chatbot complies with privacy regulations and secures user data
• Set up well-defined instances of chatbot to employee handoff 
• Integrate all your data sets for the chatbot to get up-to-date information on products/ services
• Conduct frequent A/B tests on chatbot responses and workflows 
• Monitor key customer support metrics to measure chatbot performance
• Design chatbots for cross-platform compatibility 
• Leverage an AI chatbot solution that offers custom builds with a done-for-you strategy 

Also read: The future of customer support automation with custom AI agents

Conclusion 

Custom chatbots are helping businesses establish stronger relationships with customers through meaningful interactions. 

And solutions like Auralis AI are making this possible with the help of real intelligence. Leveraging AI, machine learning and automations, Auralis AI enables businesses to integrate their work processes and policies into how the chatbots work. 

This is helping businesses automate almost 70% of their conversations while personalizing interactions across channels. 

Want to know more about the benefits of custom chatbots? Book a demo of Auralis AI today.