As you expand your business, you need to be able to properly, and promptly, handle the influx of a need for customer support. Sometimes, the questions or comments you receive can be repetitive. If you don’t have the bandwidth to fully reply to each email, Facebook comment, or phone call without sounding like you’re rushing a potential customer off the phone, you’re basically shooting yourself in the foot! Reputation management is vital. It isn’t just the fact that you respond to people. It’s how you respond, when you respond, and what your response has to offer. Many businesses today are turning to automation and an AI chat bot to help them out with this. At InnoVationV, we have recently started offering automated chat bot services to many of our clients. Let’s explore more about what this means, how it’s helped so far, and how AI is no longer the enemy!

How Does an AI Chat Bot Work?

Utilizing an AI Chat Bot on your website is a fantastic way to save you, and your customers, some time. Let’s face it… people don’t want to read through your entire website to find the answer to that one random question that they have. If you have a chat bot, this can get them the answer they need typically in seconds. But, how does the chat bot know what to say? Doesn’t a robotic response drive people away? Well, we’ve figured it out for you!

Training & Natural Language Processing

Our chat bot can safely scan over existing content on your website, along with any additional documents provided with common FAQ, to “train itself” to be familiar with your business. With some behind the scenes testing and tweaks, we can make it sound like you are answering the questions yourself!

We understand that more formal responses make people feel unseen, unheard, and ultimately drive business away. Our AI Chat Bot’s have the personal touch and friendly tone that gets the job done every time. This is technically called Natural Language Processing (NLP). As Forbes says it, is the bridge between human and AI communication that leads to outstanding customer support.

How The Bots We’ve Trained Have Worked For Us

As previously mentioned, we’ve implemented AI chat bots on a few of our client’s websites over the past few months. Mainly, the bots have been used to replace direct messaging and to offer customer support or assist in booking services. However, the opportunities here are nearly endless, and the bot has even surprised us in some instances!

Junk in the Box

If you aren’t familiar with Junk in the Box, they are a full service junk removal company here in Augusta, Georgia. They receive a lot of inquiries about pricing, dumpster sizes, items they haul away (or won’t haul away), etc. After just two weeks, we realized that this chat bot is something they could have used a long time ago!

One particular chat log stuck out to us. Someone messaged Junk in the Box saying that their curbside trash can hadn’t been picked up that week. Well… Junk in the Box doesn’t have a weekly trash pick-up service. There is nothing on their website about it and we hadn’t trained the bot to answer that type of question yet. The bot directed the customer to call their local waste management service, stating that the number would be listed on the city or county’s public works department website. A solution was provided with no human assistance rather than the bot saying, “welp, can’t help you, but you should still book with us anyways.” How cool is that? The friendliness of the bot will hopefully stick with that customer so they come back when they are in need of a larger dumpster rental or junk removal services.

The Augusta Press

Another site that we have implemented a chat bot on is The Augusta Press, a local online newspaper. Their primary usage for the chat bot is sort of similar to Junk in the Box. They receive a lot of support related inquiries from users having login or subscription troubles. We have setup their chat bot to figure out which issue the customer is having, give them a potential solution if applicable, and then ask for their information so the support team can reach back out if they need to dive deeper for a solution.

Since the support team gets notifications for each chat, they can jump in at any time if they need to and are able to at the moment. Or, we have set the bot to tell customers that support will get back to them within a specific timespan on the email they provided. This immediate acknowledgement of an issue along with an estimated response time helps to significantly boost The Augusta Press’ reputation with their subscribers!

Stop Being Shy About AI

After each interaction, these AI chat bots get smarter and smarter. We consistently provide positive and negative feedback to help train future responses on each bot that we’ve implemented so far. We know that, especially in the previous few years, many people have feared AI and what it can become. However, if you aren’t using AI to help support certain aspects of your business, you’re running behind! Everything is only advancing in the world of technology and it’s important to stay up with the times.

Let InnoVationV introduce you to AI in a way that will save you time and scale your business tremendously. Spend your time where it matters most and not responding to the same messages from different customers all day! Book a meeting with our team to learn more about how an AI chat bot and other automation features can help your business thrive.