The use of chatbots on websites is not a new trend, but advancements in AI have allowed more powerful chatbots to appear as support assistants on websites. Businesses deploy chatbots to provide 24/7 customer support, reduce the number of support staff needed, handle customers simultaneously and increase engagement. These benefits can be derailed by a poorly planned chatbot deployment strategy. Web development teams and UX designers can avoid these negative customer outcomes by employing a well-planned chatbot deployment strategy.
Chatbot Basics
Chatbots fall into five categories:
- Menu-based uses menu options to provide responses.
- Rules-based detects keywords then uses conditional statements to give responses.
- AI-based uses NLP and NLU to understand and provide responses.
- Voice-based is an AI chatbot that speaks with customers instead of communicating via text messages
- Generative AI-based Generates new responses based on training data to create an apparently natural conversation.
The simpler chatbots, menu-based and …