Introduction to Chatbots in Customer Service
According to recent statistics, 64% of consumers expect to receive a quality service from AI bots, comparable to that of human agents.
This data shows that AI chatbots are becoming more and more “expert” and they can replace human agents in customer service activities.
Before diving into how AI can help you increase your customer service experience, let’s start by listing some significant data.
- Last year, 90% of customers had at lest 1 conversation with a chatbot.
- 62% of consumers would prefer to use a customer service bot rather than wait for human agents to answer their requests.
- 80% of customers who have used chatbots report the experience as positive.
- According to MIT Technology Review, 90% of businesses using chatbots report large improvements in the speed of complaint resolution.
As you can see, these intelligent bots are reshaping the dynamics of customer-business interactions, by leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).
In particular, customer service chatbots tackle simple, repetitive (and “boring) tasks that don’t require the soft skills and experience of a human agent.
Evolution and Rise of Chatbots
The journey of chatbots in customer service has been a transformative one, marked by significant technological advancements.
Originating as simple automations, these tools have evolved into sophisticated, AI-powered programs capable of handling a wide range of customer interactions. Initially, they were designed to perform simple, scripted tasks, chatbots have now advanced to the point where they can engage in complex conversations.
As a matter of fact, most of them can respond to diverse customer queries, and even learn from these interactions to improve future responses.
This evolution has been propelled by continuous advancements in AI algorithms and the integration of chatbots into popular messaging apps, making them more accessible and effective than ever before.
This technological leap has not only enhanced the efficiency of customer service departments but also reshaped the very nature of customer engagement.
For example, by being available around the clock, chatbots have enabled businesses to offer consistent, immediate responses to customer inquiries, a crucial factor in today's fast-paced digital world.
As we all know most customer service agents follow office working hours, with chatbots you don’t have to deal with this problem.
AI chatbots like TextYess are available 24/7, 365 days a year and don’t need to follow standard office working hours.
And, by the way, it only takes you 5 minutes to implement it on your Shopify Store and integrate it with your WhatsApp Business Account!
Try the demo for free, by clicking here and selecting your preferred time-slot.
Chatbot Technology Explained
At the heart of a chatbot's functionality lies a combination of AI applications: machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP).
These technologies work in tandem to empower chatbots with the ability to understand, interpret, and respond to human language in a way that is both meaningful and contextually relevant.
AI provides the foundational intelligence to process and analyze large volumes of data and is used by implementing 2 of its main applications.
- Machine learning enables chatbots to learn from past interactions, adapting their responses based on patterns and feedback.
- NLP is the critical component that allows chatbots to comprehend and generate human-like text, enabling them to engage in conversations that are surprisingly human in tone and substance.
If you would like to know more about these technologies, here is a great article for you.
This synergy of technologies not only makes chatbots more efficient but also more personable and empathetic in their interactions.
They can recognize customer sentiment, tailor their responses to individual preferences, and even anticipate needs based on previous interactions.
As a result, modern chatbots are increasingly capable of providing a level of service that closely mirrors that of a well-trained human customer service representative, but with the added benefits of scalability, consistency, and round-the-clock availability.
Benefits of Implementing Chatbots
When customers seek speed, friendliness, and helpfulness as the top features for online shopping experiences, it’s necessary to enable AI chatbots for customer service.
As a matter of fact, conversational commerce, enhanced by this particular AI application, facilitates direct communication, enabling your business to understand your customer needs, address concerns and provide personalized recommendations.
This not only enhances the customer experience but also fosters brand loyalty, increasing the CLTV (Customer Life Time Value).
Round-the-Clock Availability
The integration of chatbots in customer service systems ushers in the advantage of uninterrupted service, a crucial aspect in today's global marketplace.
These AI-driven tools provide 24/7 support, catering to customers from various time zones and geographical locations, ensuring that businesses remain responsive and accessible at all times.
This constant availability is particularly beneficial for online platforms and e-commerce websites, where customers expect immediate responses, regardless of the hour.
By eliminating the constraints of traditional office hours, chatbots enable businesses to offer a level of service continuity that was previously unattainable, significantly improving customer satisfaction and engagement.
Through chatbots, your business can respond to customers faster - the average response time is 10 seconds - and in different languages.
AI Chatbots like TextYess, are available 24/7/365 days, allowing your customers to get instant assistance at any time, even outside regular business hours.
This accommodates potential customers in different time zones or people shopping during the evenings and weekends, increasing the conversion rate of your website.
Cost-Efficiency and Scalability
Chatbots represent a significant leap in operational efficiency for businesses.
According to recent statistics, chatbots can achieve substantial cost savings, with up to 30% reduction in customer service costs, by handling up to 80% of routine inquiries.
By automating responses to routine inquiries, these AI-powered tools reduce the need for large customer service teams, thereby cutting labor costs and resource expenditures.
Additionally, chatbots can handle thousands of interactions simultaneously, something that would require considerable human resources to achieve. This scalability is particularly advantageous during peak periods or marketing campaigns when customer inquiries can surge unexpectedly.
The ability to manage high volumes of interactions without compromising the quality of service or incurring additional costs is a game-changer, making chatbots a cost-effective solution for businesses of all sizes.
Personalized Customer Interactions
One of the most compelling advantages of AI chatbots is their ability to provide personalized experiences.
By analyzing historical interactions and customer data, chatbots can tailor their responses to meet individual customer needs and preferences.
And data are showing this preference: in fact, more and more customers are expecting to have a sort of “personalized assistant” that helps them throughout their buying journey.
In particular, 17% of them expect to receive product recommendations and 16% of them will appreciate having a personal customer support assistant.
This personalization extends beyond mere greetings; chatbots can recommend products, recall previous issues, and offer solutions based on the customer's unique history and preferences.
This level of individualized attention significantly enhances customer satisfaction and fosters brand loyalty, as customers feel understood and valued. Furthermore, this personalization helps in building a more in-depth understanding of customer behavior, enabling businesses to refine their marketing and service strategies.
For example, with TextYess, AI chatbot you can increase your customer satisfaction by personalizing your shopping assistant, depending on the products you sell: a Home expert, a Personal Stylist or Makeup artist, … and even an Italian Food Expert!
Try TextYess for free, by clicking here: you can also read our success stories!
Multilingual Support and Global Reach
In an increasingly interconnected world, the ability to communicate in multiple languages is invaluable.
Chatbots equipped with multilingual capabilities break down language barriers, enabling businesses to cater to a diverse, global customer base. This inclusivity not only broadens the market reach but also enhances the customer experience, as clients can interact in their preferred language.
This global reach is essential for businesses looking to expand their operations internationally, providing a consistent level of service across different linguistic and cultural landscapes.
Multilingual chatbots thus serve as a key tool in global customer engagement and brand expansion strategies.
The Best Chatbots for your 2024 AI adventure
The original: ChatGPT
ChatGPT is the original AI chatbot. Its late 2022 release set off a global chain reaction in 2023, reviving interest in AI. It's incredibly easy to use: write your prompt at the bottom of the screen to initiate a conversation.
You can keep all of your threads apart and return to them at a later time by creating a new entry on the left-side menu as soon as the output is returned. You can share a link to any of them that you think are very intriguing with others so they can pick up where you left off.
Even though it sometimes puts out factual errors while displaying total confidence—what experts call hallucinations—ChatGPT is still the industry leader for now. While GPT-3.5 is already impressive, GPT-4 is much better, it definitely is the leader among the best AI chatbots for 2024. It's trained on a much larger dataset, making it even more flexible, more accurate with its writing output, and it can even predict what happens next when given a still image.
A lot has happened in the year since ChatGPT's release. You can now do text-to-image prompting (and tweaking) with DALL·E 3, directly in ChatGPT. And you can even build your own custom bot with unique instructions and data using GPTs. These bots can carry out straightforward tasks, simplify processes, or just do many things for the fun of it.
If you add TextYess’ AI Agent to it - custom AI chatbot for Shopify stores - you can access extra functionalities such as sending checkout links and have a fully custom sales agent for your ecommerce store.
Online search, image generation and text: Microsoft Bing AI
Early in 2023, Microsoft upped its investment in OpenAI and started developing and rolling out AI features into its products. One of those was Bing, which now has an AI chatting experience that will help you search the web. Once you enter your prompt, it will search the internet for you, process the results, and present you with a reply containing the links it used as a base.
Although it can display images in the chat window, it still struggles to catch the purpose of image searches, typically showing an image gallery in place of a list of image links. Moreover, you can click on each previous chat on the right side of the screen to read it again.
Aside from search, Bing AI is now integrated with OpenAI's DALL·E 3, allowing me to receive my daily feed of photographs of golden retrievers produced by AI. Declare that you would like to create an image while in conversation, then answer the prompt. You can request to regenerate with new instructions once it's out, but in my experience, this doesn't always work perfectly.
It's fully integrated into Microsoft Edge, the native Windows browser. There are some cool tools there. The best one lets you generate text in the sidebar and paste it with one click into any input field on a web page. This is useful for generating emails and pasting them into the compose window, for example. Surely it’s worth a mention among the best AI chatbots for 2024 but still needs some fine tuning in user experience.
Integration with Google apps: Google Bard
Google has been in the AI race for a long time, with a set of AI features already implemented across its product lineup. After an epic hiccup during the initial product demo, Bard left behind the LaMDA model and now uses PaLM 2 to carry out your instructions. It got a lot of flak, but it's really growing on me.
Bard can connect to the internet to find sources (even offering a handy button that lets you Google it yourself), which is a huge selling point. The search results can even show images directly on the chat window. It also lets you edit your prompt after you've sent it and offers up to three drafts of each output, so you can pick the best one. It can keep track of your conversation history, and you can share your conversations with others.
What I really like about it, though, is how well it interacts with both your Google account and other Google products like YouTube, Hotels, and Flights. Would you like to do a quick search within your Gmail file forest? Execute it. Condense the files in your Google Drive? Please say yes. Examine current airfare and lodging costs while the AI plans your itinerary. Plan that vacation time; it provides you with a packing list as well.
Bard feels less focused on text commands and more conversational in comparison to ChatGPT. That's the case for TextYess too, the AI Shopping Assistant chatbot that talks to customers in behalf of brands, the conversational aspect is much more important than simply interpreting text commands - you want to be consulted on the spot during the shopping experience as a real person would do. Don’t worry we have a section dedicated to it among the best AI chatbots for 2024.
Open license: Meta Llama 2
Meta joined the AI game in a unique way. Instead of building a commercial chatbot like all the competition, it decided to launch its own AI model with a generous open licensing framework. This means that you can use it and tweak it for free until you hit a revenue limit—but this limit is super high, designed to fence out the big tech competitors from ever using this LLM.
It nearly appears to be an open source model because of the simple licensing process, but Llama 2 can't truly claim that label because it isn't actually possible to see inside the program's development.
Although Llama 2 model deployment is a developer-only process, you can test it out on the Llama2.ai website to see how it reacts. Compared to other chatbots, the output is more straightforward and untuned; it's a base model that may be customized to meet specific requirements.
This app implementation provides the absolute minimum of controls to investigate the potential and constraints, including a chat experience and a few other features like the temperature, system prompt, and context window.
Llama's promising future is tied to its open licensing terms. While using it isn't as exciting as other options here, it's definitely a model to keep an eye on. You may end up interacting with multiple implementations of it in other apps in the near future.
For building your own sales chatbot: TextYess AI
TextYess is an AI Shopping Assistant running on Whatsapp that helps ecommerce brands automate customer interactions and increase sales. It is active 24/7 on the website and is able to do astonishing things: send product images, product links, prices, details regarding materials and availability in real time thanks to a singular retrieval process. A hallmark of automated customer service, offering a significant edge over traditional systems that work only during office hours (exactly when people are working and not buying online) - it’s conversational commerce and it’s here to stay.
As of UX/UI you can forget about hours spent manually responding to WhatsApp messages or Emails and just enter your TextYess’ account to give a look at how your custom AI Sales Chatbot is treating your customers - the average in chat conversion rate is 15%... I think that it says it all, and it is definitely worth exploring it among the best AI chatbots in 2024 if you work in ecommerce.
The adaptability of AI chatbots like TextYess to provide consistent, personalized and immediate support regardless of the time or day and the language spoken by your customer is particularly crucial in an era where consumer behavior and expectations have evolved.
TextYess AI helps you offer an outstanding shopping experience and ultimately increases the conversion rate of your website - while you and your team can focus on more complicated tasks. If you want to give it a try there is a free trial just click here - it takes 2 minutes to create your custom AI Sales Chatbot and test it!
For content writing: Jasper Chat
Jasper is an all-in-one AI content creation powerhouse. It has AI templates for all kinds of content types—YouTube video scripts, blog posts, LinkedIn profile, about page copy, you name it—and recently rolled out its own Jasper Chat, joining in on the hype.
Its ability to swiftly transform a conversation into a paper (or more) makes it an excellent tool for ideation and advancing early drafts. Jasper Chat will deliver the result of an article creation prompt and recommend further articles on related subjects.
Since both ChatGPT and Jasper use OpenAI's GPT models, the output quality is essentially the same. However, upon examining the output, it appears that Jasper's developers are fine-tuning it to better suit content creation. Jasper Chat has an internet connection as well, so you can use lists of fact sources to fact-check more quickly.
Once you have dozens of fresh pieces to post, you may need images to go along with the text. Jasper also offers an AI image generation add-on, so you don't have to leave the platform to take care of aesthetics. All these features come with a price, but if you're on the high-volume content game, it shouldn't feel too expensive for the power you'll have at your disposal. It’s definitely a game changer in AI chatbots for content creation in 2024.
For coding auto-complete: GitHub Copilot
Technically, Github doesn't have the chat-like experience you're used to when using ChatGPT. But since it integrates with your integrated development environment (IDE) and acts as an autocomplete, it sort of feels like you're having a dialogue with an AI model as you code - how can you not try it to choose your best AI chatbot for 2024?
When you start typing a comment or writing a function, Copilot will suggest the code that best accomplishes what you're setting out to do. You can tap to cycle through all the suggestions, and if you find a fitting one, press tab to paste it.
Since there can be security risks when using generated code, Copilot includes security vulnerability filtering to ensure it doesn't create issues. You'll still have to audit the code, especially since some suggestions aren't as efficient as they could be. But it surely helps in automatizing part of a repetitive task. Another example of automating a very tedious task is automating customer care with TextYess - AI chatbot available 24/7 on your website to reply to all customer queries - you’ll have the role of a supervisor that can edit the way it responds to customers based on your tone of voice for instance!
For searching the web: YouChat, KoalaChat
YouChat's user interface is reminiscent of a Google Search results page. The difference is there's a tab for AI chat in addition to the traditional video, news, and image search tabs.
Once you enter your prompt and receive the output, you can browse a list of web search results on the right side of the screen. At the bottom, you can also find contextual buttons that open up a collection of Reddit posts about the topic or maps with pins of any places discussed, for example. If you like the simplicity of ChatGPT, this might feel a bit crowded, but it's great for browsing lots of information faster.
You can adjust the priority that the engine should give to different sources by up- or down-voting them. This feature is called Apps—you can browse a huge list containing names such as Reddit or TechCrunch, and you can set the priorities based on your interests.
Like ChatGPT, YouChat has a chat history, and you can also share your searches with others. If you wish Google had a Bing-like AI chat already, YouChat is worth a look and definitely needs to be among the list of the best AI chatbots for 2024.
Which ChatGPT alternative should you use?
As ChatGPT itself might mention, the response to your query relies heavily on your intended use for the chatbot. There exists a variety of AI chatbots, each with its unique strengths and weaknesses. It's crucial to note that the majority of these chatbots utilize a similar language model as ChatGPT, and even those that differ tend to sound quite similar, especially with a casual glance.
The distinctions lie in the user interface, additional features, and integration with other tools - like the integration with Shopify CMS of TextYess AI Chatbot - are really a game changer. Most of these AI chatbots offer free trials, so it's worthwhile to spend some time exploring them. At the very least, it promises to be an enriching experience.
Stay tuned for more articles like this one about AI Chatbots and a lot more AI applications!