Customer support is no longer confined to call centers or emails. Today, there are many ways for customers to interact, such as social media, live chat, and more. It is important for businesses to offer easy accessibility to customers across all the popular communication channels. To tackle this, AI chatbots are becoming popular.
An AI chatbot for customer service can automate interactions with customers across various platforms. You can train an AI chatbot with your company's knowledge base and then let it answer customer queries autonomously. This way, you can offer responsive support to customers and also lower the in-house burden. Therefore, if you are also attracted to the benefits of AI chatbots and looking for how to deploy them, then this is the ultimate guide for you.
Here, we will walk you through how to deploy an AI chatbot for customer support with complete step-by-step instructions. So, let's head right to it.
- What is AI Chatbot for Customer Support ā A Quick Overview
- Why Use AI Chatbot for Customer Support?
- How to Deploy an AI Chatbot for Customer Support?
- Wrapping Up
What is AI Chatbot for Customer Support ā A Quick Overview
An AI chatbot for customer support is a tool that assists customers by understanding their queries with artificial intelligence (AI) technology and then responding to their queries with pre-trained data. It keeps human-like conversations with customers using natural language processing (NLP) and ensures that customers get the exact answer they are looking for.
The key features of an AI chatbot include:
- Instant Responses: It can respond to customer queries instantly in real-time.
- 24/7 Availability: It is available to facilitate customers round-the-clock.
- Natural Language Processing (NLP): It can understand and interpret human language with natural language processing (NLP) and have engaging conversations with customers.
- Multilingual Support: It can interact with customers in multiple languages.
- Direct Chats to Agents: It can direct the chat to the agent upon the user's request.
- Integration: It can integrate into various platforms, like websites, Facebook, WhatsApp, etc.
- Scalability: It is capable of handling more queries as the business grows.
- Analytics: It can provide valuable analytics related to response, resolution rate, and others to improve customer support further.
In short, an AI chatbot is like a virtual human support agent that can assist customers without involving humans.
Why Use AI Chatbot for Customer Support?
AI chatbot for customer support is becoming increasingly popular. Organizations are not considering it as a choice but a necessary component of customer support. Today, 68% of users like chatbot prompt responses.
Below are some of the key reasons to use AI chatbot for customer support:
- Fast Responses: Customers like fast responses to their queries and that's what AI chatbot offers with its instant and 24/7 responses.
- Automate Answering Common Queries: It automates answering common queries. This lowers the burden of the support team and lets them work on more complex queries.
- Cost Reduction: It saves significant operation costs, as it reduces the number of human agents and lowers the need for more in-house resources.
- Errorless Responses: It can respond to customers with the same accuracy without burning out.
- Easy to Scale: It can easily scale and handle more load as your business grows.
- Omnichannel Support: Its integration with different communication channels makes it easy to offer the same level of multichannel support.
Overall, the AI chatbot offers a modernized way to handle customer support, which optimizes operations and leads to customer satisfaction.
How to Deploy an AI Chatbot for Customer Support?
Now that we have cleared the basics of AI chatbot, let's head to the main discussion point of this guide, i.e., how to deploy an AI chatbot for customer support.
To use an AI chatbot, you need to build and train the chatbot and then integrate it into your communication channels. That's all possible with VOC AI Agent.
VOC AI Agent is a customer service bot powered by OpenAI that allows you to deploy a powerful and customized AI chatbot for customer support. It provides an intuitive interface through which you can train the bot with your company's knowledge base, including websites, documents, FAQs, and more. Afterward, it can handle customer FAQs, offer discounts, handle order processing, and do much more.
The key features of VOC AI Agent are as follows:
- Automate over 70% of customer queries
- Trainable with your company's knowledge base
- Analyze and learn from past messaging
- 5 seconds fast response time
- Personalized responses to customers
- Transfer chats to human agents on customers' request
- Integrate across different platforms, like WhatsApp, live chat, email, Facebook, Shopify, Amazon, Intercom, TikTok, and more.
- Provide analytics about AI tickets, AI resolution rate, etc.
In short, VOC AI Agent is a full-fledged AI chatbot to train and deploy for customer support.
Follow the below steps to learn how to deploy an AI chatbot for customer support with VOC AI Agent:
Step 1. Set Up VOC AI Chatbot Account
The first step is to set up the VOC AI chatbot account. Head to the official VOC AI website and sign up.
Step 2. Complete Initial Bot Settings
Once you are in the main dashboard, complete the initial chatbot settings, such as bot name, industry, color, image, and other details.
Step 3. Upload Your Knowledge Base and Train the Bot
Next, you have to upload your company's knowledge base to train the bot. You can import website content or content from files, like Word, Excel, PDF, and more. Alternatively, you can also add custom answers.
For example, if you want to upload the content from the website, click the "Import website content" option under the "Upload Your Knowledge" section.
Enter the URLs of the websites.
Afterward, the VOC AI chatbot will automatically start grabbing useful content from the websites.
To view the question-answers it extracted, click the "Knowledge Base" button from the top. It will take you to the new window which shows all the question-answers extracted from the websites. You can edit or delete questions from there.
Step 4. Test Replies
Once you have trained the chatbot, you should now test its outputs. For that, click the "Chatbot" option from the left sidebar and use the chat box to test the chatbot.
If the answer is incorrect or you want to improve it, click the "Edit" button from the right sidebar and make the changes accordingly.
Step 5. Publish Chatbot
Once the testing phase is completed, you are now all set to publish the chatbot. VOC AI supports integrating the chatbot into multiple platforms, including:
- Live Chat
- Zendesk
- Intercom
- Gmail
- Amazon
- API
Let's assume you want to integrate the chatbot as a live chat agent on your website. So, go to the "Publish" tab from the left sidebar and click "Live Chat".
Copy the code displayed on the screen and add it to your website to begin live chat support for customers.
Once done, you have successfully built and deployed an AI chatbot for customer support on your website.
Bonus Step: Additional Features to Leverage with VOC AI Chatbot
To maximize your use of the VOC AI chatbot, you should also be aware of what else you can do with the chatbot. So, some of the additional features to leverage are as follows:
Access Inbox and Handle Transfer to Agent Queries
Click the "Inbox" tab from the left sidebar. It will show all the chats the AI chatbot has responded to. You can also edit answers from here to further refine the chatbot outputs.
Furthermore, if the customer has requested for transfer to agent, the dedicated "Transfer to agent" section allows the human agent to continue the chat from there.
Get Reports and Insights
Click the "Analytics" tab from the left sidebar. It will show useful insights about the AI chatbot, like total conversations, AI response, transfer to agent, and more. This will help you evaluate the efficiency of your AI chatbot and make changes accordingly.
Strategies
Click the "Strategies" tab from the left sidebar. In this section, you can add different strategies, like after sales, delivery, order, pre-sale, referral, and more. These strategies will then allow the AI chatbot to handle those queries autonomously.
For example, if you want to automate order cancellation, enable it in the Strategies section. Afterward, the AI chatbot can assist customers who want to cancel the order. It can ask for the order number and handle the cancellation.
That's it! This is how you can easily build and deploy a powerful AI chatbot for customer support using the intuitive approach of VOC AI Agent.
Wrapping Up
The AI chatbot is a much-needed automation that customer support requires to meet the changing market dynamics and customer expectations. It automates FAQs and many repetitive tasks, which leads to faster resolution, satisfied customers, and productive employees. Therefore, it's time for action. Use the intuitive VOC AI Agent to build, train, and deploy your AI chatbot and uplift your customer support campaign.
