Top Chatbot Uses & Features Businesses Need to Know About

Not long ago, chatbots were just clunky menus with very limited choices and frustratingly unhelpful interfaces. They were more likely to send users on an infinite loop than actually answer any questions.

Thankfully, those days are behind us.

With the advancements in natural language processing (NLP), machine learning (ML), and artificial intelligence (AI) — particularly conversational AI technology — chatbots have become far more helpful tools for customer support and self-service, capable of acting as virtual assistants and providing a personalized customer experience (CX).

So, how are AI-powered chatbots used today, and what features should any business look for? Let’s explore modern chatbot use cases.

1. CX

The primary purpose of chatbots is to improve CX with real-time automated support and self-service options. While there are many ways to use chatbots for customer support, some of the best uses include the following.

Answering frequently asked questions

Sometimes customers just have a simple question they need answered. You can build chatbots with access to a company’s frequently asked questions (FAQs) and knowledge base, enabling them to answer customer queries quickly. This provides customers with 24/7 support for common questions.

Self-service options

Chatbots are also excellent tools for self-service. They can guide customers through simple tasks, such as scheduling appointments, resetting passwords, or managing their accounts, without needing a human agent on call. Like FAQs, self-service options provide 24/7 support for basic customer needs.

Automated troubleshooting

Troubleshooting is another important self-service feature, and today’s customer service chatbots are advanced enough to help customers diagnose and resolve basic product or service issues. You can often resolve simple issues in a few quick steps without extensive troubleshooting.

In instances where the issues are more complex, chatbots can still help provide basic diagnostics and triage the issue before escalating the chat to the best support agent available. So even if the chatbot can’t fix everything, it can help find someone who can.

Personalized recommendations

Customers expect a level of personalized service, and chatbots can provide support tailored to each individual. Connecting a chatbot to your CRM software or other customer information provides insights into the customer’s order history, past interactions, and preferences to provide product and service recommendations picked with the customer in mind.

Order tracking & status updates

Have you ever been waiting for a package to the point where you’re constantly refreshing the tracking page? Chatbots can track orders to keep customers informed about their order statuses and delivery timelines without the need to constantly enter tracking numbers.

Emergency support

Urgent issues can strike at any time — and not just during working hours. Should any problems occur outside of regular business hours, chatbots can provide initial assistance for urgent issues and provide clear instructions for reaching human support during emergencies.

Feedback collection

Customer feedback is a valuable source of guidance and information. Chatbots can quickly gather customer feedback through polls, surveys, or even open-ended questions, providing organizations with an important look inside their customers’ heads and an overview of customer satisfaction.

2. Lead Generation

Chatbots can provide more than just customer support. In fact, they can potentially help bring in new customers. There are several ways you can use chatbots for lead generation.

Lead capture

Chatbots can help generate leads by conversationally engaging with website visitors. If you’ve ever visited a website and immediately had a chat pop up with a “Hi there, how can I help you?” then you’ve already seen this in action.

Companies can use chatbots to ask potential lead-qualifying questions, present valuable content offers, or even direct people to a live sales rep. The first step to capturing any lead is engagement, and chatbots can quickly engage with potential customers from the moment they access the website.

Chatbots for events

If you have an event approaching, chatbots can help streamline registration and provide attendees with important information. You can use a chatbot to help attendees register and collect their information as well as answer basic questions about the event, schedule, speakers, and more.

Promotional campaigns

When you have a new product or service to promote, chatbots can help get the word out as part of your marketing campaign. Similar to utilizing a chatbot to capture leads, you can use the chat to instantly provide promotional information, answer questions, and direct users to a sales rep or product page.

Live chat takeover

What happens when a potential lead is talking to a chatbot and is ready to make a purchase? Chatbots can quickly escalate qualified leads to live agents, helping provide further engagement, sales opportunities, and lead conversions without missing a beat. Sales reps and account managers can strike while the iron’s hot and turn that interested lead into a customer.

3. Product Intelligence

You can train and program chatbots with detailed information about your company’s products, making them valuable product intelligence tools. They can help with the following tasks.

Product recommendations

Chatbots can be used to provide personalized product recommendations. Enabling a chatbot to access product information in your company’s knowledge base allows it to recommend relevant products and services based on a user’s history and past interactions, providing a service tailored to their needs.

FAQs

Not only can chatbots provide answers to FAQs, but they can also be used to improve a company’s existing FAQs. Companies can analyze customer interactions to identify common product questions, which they can use to improve their product information and FAQs.

Additionally, these interactions can even provide ideas for additional content and partnership opportunities. Understanding what customers are curious about and what they’re looking for can help guide informed business decisions.

Sentiment analysis

Sentiment analysis is a common AI-powered tool for contact centers, but it’s also useful for chatbots. AI tools can analyze chatbot conversations to gauge customer sentiment toward products or features and identify pain points, which can inform product development and marketing strategies to ensure customer satisfaction.

Additionally, AI-powered sentiment analysis can be used to tell the chatbot when to hand the interaction over to a live agent, ensuring customers get that all-important human touch when needed.

Beta testing and feedback

If you’re running a beta test for a product, chatbots can be excellent tools for gathering user feedback. Chatbots can ask important questions about the product’s performance and customer satisfaction as well as answer additional customer questions and connect them with live agents if needed.

4. Additional Use Cases

The use cases for chatbots don’t end there. You can use chatbots for a wide variety of other business communications functions.

Talent acquisition and recruiting

Chatbots can help attract and guide future employees to available job listings and even help prequalify them. Several companies offer conversational recruiting software designed to automate tasks like screening, scheduling, and onboarding, which can streamline the hiring process.

Internal employee support

Chatbots aren’t just for external customer use cases. You can also use chatbots internally, providing interactive guidance to employees for internal workflows.

This can include providing information such as vacation policies or answering payroll questions as well as assisting employees with carrying out tasks like requesting time off. In any instances where chatbots can’t be of immediate help, they can still direct employees to the best internal resources for their needs.

Customer retention

Chatbots can help support your customer loyalty objectives by providing helpful services to address customer questions and concerns at a moment’s notice. This has been shown to have a positive impact on customer retention, as good service (even automated service or self-service) can keep customers coming back.

Additionally, chatbots can be used to help prevent customers from leaving. For instance, you can add retention workflows that offer customers downgrades or free services when processing their cancellations. Should a customer still leave, you can collect feedback on how to improve your services to help reduce churn.

Must-Have Chatbot Features for Businesses

Modern chatbots are packed with powerful features that help elevate every customer interaction. Let’s dive into some of the key technical aspects that make today’s chatbots so effective.

NLP

NLP enables chatbots to understand and respond to human language in a way that feels natural. By interpreting the intent behind user queries, chatbots can provide accurate and contextually relevant answers, improving the overall CX.

ML

ML empowers chatbots to learn from past interactions and continuously improve their performance. Over time, chatbots become better at handling complex questions, providing more helpful responses, and even predicting customer needs.

Sentiment analysis

With sentiment analysis, your chatbot can gauge the emotional tone of user messages. This helps your business better understand how chats are going and adjust responses accordingly. For example, if a chatbot detects frustration, it can escalate the issue to a human agent for a more personalized touch.

Integrations

Seamless integration with tools like CRM software, marketing automation platforms, and other CX software ensures chatbots can access relevant customer data. This helps chatbots deliver personalized recommendations, streamline workflows, and speed up customer interactions.

Chatbot Limitations to Consider

While chatbots offer many advantages, it’s important to acknowledge their limitations. Here are some key challenges businesses should be aware of.

Handling complex or emotional inquiries

Despite advances in NLP, chatbots may still lack deep contextual understanding, leading to occasional misinterpretations of user intent. Chatbots still struggle with nuanced or highly sensitive customer issues, while they excel at straightforward tasks. When complicated issues arise, human intervention remains essential to provide empathy and nuanced solutions.

Potential for bias

AI systems, including chatbots, can unintentionally perpetuate biases present in the data they are trained on. This can lead to skewed or inappropriate responses, impacting user experience and overall brand impression. Regular audits and diverse training data are crucial to minimize bias.

Dependence on human oversight

Chatbots are not entirely autonomous. While chatbots can automate many tasks, they still need human guidance to navigate the complexities of human language and interaction, and to adapt to the ever-evolving needs of users and businesses.

Human oversight ensures that chatbots remain effective and aligned with business goals, particularly in handling edge cases or unexpected scenarios and mitigating potential biases or unintended consequences. This human-in-the-loop approach builds trust, ensures ethical behavior, and improves the chatbot’s performance over time.

Unlock Chatbot Possibilities With Nextiva

Chatbots are powerful tools for customer engagement, support, and even retention, and their potential uses don’t end there. As the technology powering chatbots makes them more flexible, intelligent, and powerful, we’ll unlock new ways to use them to delight customers and improve business processes.

• Personalized experiences: Tailor recommendations and solutions based on user data.
• Cost savings and efficiency: Automate routine tasks, freeing up human agents for more complex issues.
• Actionable insights: Leverage data from interactions to improve products, services, and customer satisfaction.
• Seamless integrations: Connect with CRM, marketing, and other tools for a holistic approach.
• 24/7 support: Provide always-on assistance for customer inquiries.

If you’re looking for a communications platform with an AI chatbot, Nextiva has you covered. Nextiva’s customizable chatbots can be used to provide automation across all service channels as well as multilingual 24/7 customer support, helping organizations guide customer journeys while providing actionable insights and analytics.

Whether you’re looking to optimize your support experience, collect useful data for your sales team, or generate and follow up with leads, Nextiva has the best chatbot capabilities to make a real impact on your business.