7 Reasons You Need An AI Chatbot on Your Website

Many businesses are rapidly gravitating towards an exciting new trend—using AI chatbots on their websites. Browse through a dozen business websites and there's a good chance that a good number have AI chatbots set up. No, businesses are not adopting chatbots on websites because they look cool or make them appear technologically advanced. From helping break language barriers to standing in for human staff during peak hours, chatbots offer actual practical benefits to business websites.

If you currently run a business website or are in the process of creating one, integrating an AI chatbot should be a top priority. Adopting chatbot technology can provide tremendous benefits that make connecting with customers easier and more efficient. If you are still on the fence about using AI chatbots, here are the top reasons every savvy business owner should implement chatbots on their websites right away.

1. 24/7 Availability

Maintaining round-the-clock support with your human staff can be very costly, and with limited resources, it might even be impossible. Chatbots offer a solution for continuous around-the-clock support without extra labor costs. AI-powered chatbots can operate 24/7 without breaks, weekends, or holidays. They can always jump in to handle customer inquiries anytime your human agents are unavailable or at capacity during peak periods. It could be quite frustrating for customers to wait on hold, have their requests ignored, or wait for a reply from a support agent who is not available at the time. AI chatbots can fix this availability problem. Chatbots enable small startups and bootstrapped businesses to finally offer the level of seamless, always-on support that used to only be feasible for large corporations. Chatbots fill the gaps cost-effectively so someone or something is always available to help customers.

If you are worried about completely offloading your customer support responsibilities to AI chatbots, that’s understandable. And you don’t have to do it. You can configure chatbots to only handle certain tasks while human agents can take care of more complicated or sensitive cases. Chatbots can provide initial guidance for customers before escalating to human agents when necessary.

2. Quick Answers

Things can move along much faster if your website visitors can get answers to their questions and concerns quickly. Without real-time guidance, visitors may become frustrated trying to find information or uncertain about using your products/services. Even a few seconds of uncertainty can lead to abandoned purchases and missed opportunities for your business. Maybe the visitor needs guidance on how to complete a purchase, how to use a new feature on your site, a product recommendation or answers to questions about specific details of your product or services. With a chatbot in place, these questions and concerns can be answered in real-time, helping the visitor make an informed decision faster. This can help reduce the possibility of abandoning a purchase due to uncertainty about your product or service.

3. Multilingual Support

In today's age of digital business, your customers can be almost anywhere around the world. This makes it important to have a multilingual support team to offer assistance to customers in the language that they understand. But having a multilingual support team is not an easy task, especially for startups and small businesses with limited resources. Using chatbots is an easy and efficient fix for this. With chatbots, like Chatbase's customer support AI chatbots, you can offer support to your customers in all major languages and dozens more. The best part is that you can do this at scale, being able to cater to even hundreds of customers, at the same time and at a fraction of the cost of using traditional methods.

4. Data Collection

You need the right data to make the right business decisions. AI chatbots on your website represent an effective way to gather key customer insights that can help you make the right business decisions. Chatbots can help answer critical questions like: What feedback do customers have about my products? Which products resonate most or need improvements? What new offerings are customers interested in? How can I enhance the customer experience? Through conversational interactions, chatbots can collect qualitative data at scale directly from your customers. This real-time feedback and commentary provide invaluable perspective for product improvement, marketing, and operational decisions. Chatbots enable businesses to tap into the voice of the customer to drive data-backed strategy. Chatbots are a smart investment for businesses seeking useful insights.

5. Saves Time and Money

Time and money are among the most valuable resources for any business. You want to get things done in the shortest time possible and to keep your expenses as low as possible. AI chatbots can help you save money associated with customer support while also reducing your time investment in those activities. Think of the cost of hiring competent support agents, maintaining a multilingual support team, training them regularly, and keeping them active 24/7. Also, think of the time it would take your support agents to sieve through hundreds of support requests, identify the most important ones, and respond to them. How valuable would that time and money be if it was invested into other areas of your business? AI chatbots take those money and time-consuming activities off your hands. They require little set-up cost and can be scaled to handle large numbers of support requests without necessarily requiring a corresponding cash investment. And yes, they can do all this so much faster than a human staff. In the end, you save time and money—two things your business doesn't have in unlimited supply.

6. Lead Generation

Leads are the lifeblood of any business, bringing in new customers and driving revenue growth. Your company website presents a prime opportunity for lead generation if optimized effectively. With an AI chatbot on your business website, you can streamline and enhance the lead capture process through gradual, non-intrusive engagements with site visitors. The chatbot can initiate productive conversations designed to collect relevant customer information for your sales team. This systematic yet natural approach using chatbots can bring in higher quality leads that convert at greater rates into paying customers. With the ability to engage visitors in real-time, chatbots are one of the most versatile and results-driven lead gen tools available. Equipping your site with a chatbot gives you an advanced lead generation system running 24/7 to fuel your business growth. Go for it.

7. Improved Customer Satisfaction

Let’s say a website visitor comes along and needs urgent help. However, the three support agents you have are busy attending to other customers and are unavailable. The visitor probably has to wait for a long time until a support agent becomes available. Of course, the customer can wait or get frustrated, abandon your site, and go somewhere else–probably to a competitor. Now, you have an unsatisfied customer and gotten some bad PR in the process. Introducing a chatbot on your website can drive efficiency in several ways and improve customer satisfaction. AI chatbots can help resolve your customer's complaints rapidly and act as a round-the-clock bridge between your business and customers to ensure they can stay engaged with your business at all times.

How to Add AI Chatbots to Your Website

We’ve seen the value that AI chatbots can bring to your website. Like the millions of website on the web, if you want your business website to start reaping the benefits of integrating an AI chatbot, the best time to get started is now. But what is the best way to integrate an AI chatbot into your website? Which AI chatbot platform should you use? And how do you set it up? We are going to walk you through it all.

First things first, let’s talk about which AI platform to use.

Which AI Chatbot Should Add to Your Website?

There are many different platforms out there and it can be overwhelming to choose one. They all offer different features, pricing models, and even customization options. The right AI platform will depend on your specific business needs and goals. However, you can narrow down your choices by focusing on these key features:

• Ease of deployment–go for a chatbot that is easy to set up and maintain.
• Chatbot type–there are rule-based, AI, and hybrid chatbots. Each have its merits, but hybrid and AI chatbots will likely bring more value to your website.
• Free trials–it might seem trivial, but always go for a chatbot platform that has a free tier you can use to validate capabilities before committing.
• Deployment channels–choose a platform that supports various deployment channels like web, mobile, and messaging apps like Slack.
• Security–to ensure your business data is safe, choose a chatbot platform that has strong security for user data.
• Conversational capabilities–ensure the chatbot can engage in conversations and can tackle fairly complex issues seamlessly.

Considering all the listed features, we recommend: Chatbase. The AI platform has a wide array of chatbot features, including the ability to deploy across various channels and deep integration with different data sources. Chatbase also has a robust free tier and its prices are reasonable for small businesses. It is easy to use and can be deployed in just a few minutes, even by non-technical users.

How to Add a Chatbase AI Chatbot to Your Website

Adding a Chatbase chatbot to your website is quite easy. A few steps are all you need to get started. To set up your chatbot:

1. Sign up for a Chatbase account.

2. Once your account has been created, log into and you will be taken to the chatbot builder dashboard. Find and click on the New Chatbot button centered on the page to start creating your chatbot.

3. Up next, you’ll see a new page where you can add the data sources for training the chatbot. There are several options but for this illustration, we’ll be using Files and Website as our data sources.

4. Now, click on Files on the left sidebar of the current page if the option is not already selected.

5. Click on the file upload area shown by the red box below.

6. Select documents on your computer that contains information about your business you wish to use for training, and then click on Create Chatbot.

7. Alternatively, if you already have the information you want to use for training on your website, you can click on the Website option on the left sidebar instead.

8. After doing that, provide the URL of your website page that contains the information you wish to use for the training in the URL input field on the center of the page, and click on Fetch links. 9. Once the process is completed, click on Create Chatbot.

10. Click on Settings at the top of the page to give your chatbot a name.

11. Click Embed on site to generate a script you can use to embed the chatbot on your website.

After obtaining the embed code for your chatbot, insert it into the HTML of any website page where you want the chatbot to be visible. This could be your homepage, product pages, contact page, or any other page where you want to deploy the chatbot. The embed code will render the chatbot widget on the pages it's added to. You can even create and deploy multiple chatbots to different pages.

Important Tips for Getting the Most Out of Your Chatbase AI Chatbot

Here are some best practices for integrating a Chatbase AI chatbot into your website:

• Place it prominently–the chatbot widget should be visible on all key pages like homepage, pricing, product pages, etc. This allows visitors to easily discover it. Popular placements are lower right corner or bottom middle.
• Use an engaging chatbot avatar–pick an appealing, colorful avatar that will attract visitors to engage with the chatbot.
• Greet visitors proactively–program the chatbot to proactively greet visitors once they land on the site to initiate engagement.
• Promote the chatbot–let visitors know about the chatbot and its benefits. Use tooltips, overlays, popups, notifications.
• Make it accessible–the chatbot should be available on both desktop and mobile versions of your site for omnichannel experience.
• Continuously improve–analyze chatbot performance to identify areas of improvement in conversations. Refine regularly.
• Monitor conversations–keep track of chatbot conversations to gain insights into customer needs and sentiment.

By thoughtfully implementing your website chatbot using these recommended best practices, you can optimize it to provide immense value to both your website visitors and your business.