How to Increase Your Customer Engagement Using AI Chatbot

Georges Fallah, a marketing manager at VBOUT, shares his insights on how an AI chatbot can help businesses maximize customer engagement. This article originally appeared in Insight Jam, an enterprise IT community that enables human conversation on AI.

Businesses continuously search for smart and effective ways to engage with customers and streamline their operations. With the rise of AI, one of the most impactful tools that has become evident in recent years is the AI chatbot. According to business leaders, chatbots led to a 67 percent increase in their sales. This article delves into various ways AI chatbots can improve customer engagement, offering detailed insights into their applications and benefits across different domains.

8 Ways to Use AI Chatbots in Marketing

There are several ways to use AI chatbots for your marketing. We will outline some here:

1) Automate Customer Support

AI chatbots offer a practical approach to customer support, providing instant answers to inquiries and frequently asked questions. These chatbots enhance customer service by providing round-the-clock support in multiple languages, ensuring quick and accurate assistance, which boosts customer satisfaction. They can be trained on a company’s knowledge base and data sources, enabling them to deliver highly relevant and precise responses.

For example, VBOUT, a company specializing in marketing automation, reduced their human-to-human support tickets by 14 percent in 12 months by deploying an AI chatbot trained on their internal documentation. This example demonstrates the efficiency and effectiveness of AI chatbots in handling customer support tasks, allowing human agents to focus on more complex issues.

2) AI-Enabled Calendar Booking

Integrating AI chatbots into your appointment scheduling process can streamline lead generation and conversion efforts. These chatbots allow customers to book appointments through simple interactions, eliminating the need for back-and-forth communication. AI-powered chatbots can effectively handle appointment bookings by asking for essential details such as the date, time, name, and email. This improves the customer experience and helps businesses manage their schedules more efficiently.

3) E-commerce: Inquiring Products & Services

AI chatbots play a crucial role in e-commerce by offering product recommendations and answering inquiries about products and services. They assist customers in making purchase decisions, navigating through online stores, and reminding them about abandoned carts, often offering incentives to boost conversion rates.

For e-commerce businesses, chatbots provide numerous benefits. They guide shoppers through product catalogs, upsell based on customer preferences and past purchases, and cross-sell complementary products. Beyond the purchase stage, chatbots ensure a good post-purchase experience by gathering feedback, informing customers about delivery delays, providing order status updates, handling replacement requests, and processing refunds.

4) Improve Employee Interactions

AI chatbots can access and provide information from a company’s database to its employees, improving internal efficiency and knowledge sharing. These chatbots can retrieve data, answer queries, and perform data-driven tasks such as onboarding and HR filing.

Companies like Omantel and TUATARA have successfully used AI chatbots for internal purposes, particularly during the transition to remote work due to the pandemic. The chatbots provided information on company structure, contact details, affiliate programs, career planning, and advanced IT services, reducing the workload of HR representatives and IT Helpdesk officers.

5) Lead Generation and Qualification

AI chatbots are instrumental in lead generation and qualification processes. They gather essential information from web visitors, such as contact details, preferences, and buying intent, and automate lead qualification by asking relevant questions and scoring prospects based on predefined criteria. For instance, MongoDB experienced a 70 percent increase in new leads in just three months after implementing an AI chatbot system powered by Drift. The chatbot automated lead-qualifying conversations and scheduling processes, allowing MongoDB to have more efficient and effective customer interactions.

6) Customer Feedback and Insights

AI chatbots are valuable tools for collecting customer feedback and insights. They can gather information on product enhancement suggestions, market trends, and other useful data, enabling businesses to make data-driven decisions, improve marketing strategies, and design better products or services based on actual customer feedback.

7) AI Browser Extension Bot

In-browser extension bots are designed to improve productivity and efficiency by assisting users in their day-to-day tasks and enhancing their browsing experience. These bots can perform various functions on the same page and create automation, making them highly versatile tools. For example, HARPA is an AI browser extension that provides users with responses for their searches, summarizes page content, generates blog and social media posts, translates content, converts YouTube videos into blog posts, and injects keywords for SEO.

8) Turn Your APIs Into Prompts

AI chatbots can be trained on your API endpoints, transforming the traditional platform UI into an engaging, ChatGPT-like interface. By creating an authentication process and allowing prompts to connect to your APIs, you can leverage AI models to create personalized and rich product experiences.

The benefits of using AI chatbots with API prompts include boosting creativity, speeding up content creation, and ensuring data accuracy. For instance, these chatbots can inspire new content creation ideas, generate content quickly, and maintain organized contact lists through guided prompts.

Future of Chatbots in AI Marketing

1) Enhanced Natural Language Processing (NLP)

Future advancements in NLP will make chatbots more sophisticated in understanding and processing human language, leading to more natural conversational interactions. These improvements will make chatbots nearly indistinguishable from human customer service agents in terms of communication quality.

Enhanced NLP will also support improved multilingual capabilities and sentiment analysis, allowing chatbots to handle code-switching seamlessly and detect subtle cues in language that indicate a customer’s mood or emotional state, enabling more empathetic responses.

2) AI Avatars and Voice Assistants

AI chatbots will become more integrated with voice assistants like Alexa and Siri, and AI chat avatars will add a human element to the chat component. This integration allows customers to engage with businesses through voice and visual recognition, creating more engaging and human-like interactions. Platforms like Netomi are already leveraging AI to develop advanced conversational chatbots that resolve customer support tickets in text chat, voice chat, and email, demonstrating the potential of AI avatars and voice assistants in enhancing customer interactions.

3) AR and VR

Augmented and virtual reality technologies will complement AI chatbots, enabling customers to interact with businesses in immersive ways. For example, POND’S has launched an AI-enabled skin-diagnostic chatbot that uses AR and AI to help consumers solve skincare problems.

4) Cross-Channel Integration

AI chatbots can be integrated across multiple marketing channels, such as websites, social media networks, messaging apps, email, and voice assistants. This cross-channel integration creates a seamless customer experience, improves brand recognition, and maintains consistent messaging and customer support.

Chatbot Privacy Risks and Ethical Data Practices

While AI chatbots provide several benefits that marketers can tap into, there are ethical data practices and privacy challenges that companies need to be aware of.

1) Data Collection Without Consent

Chatbots must obtain opt-in consent before collecting personal user data. Users should always be notified when a chatbot engages with them and given the preference of whether or not to share their data. It’s important to note that two new proposed laws in the US—the American Privacy Rights Act and the Generative AI Copyright Act—emphasize protecting user privacy and ensuring ethical data practices.

2) Sensitive Data Overcollection

Chatbots should collect only the necessary data that aligns with their purpose. For instance, a weather chatbot does not need access to a user’s browsing history. Collecting excessive data can lead to privacy concerns and erode user trust.

3) Lack of Proper Training

Chatbots must receive adequate training to avoid data inaccuracies. Developers should prioritize ethical and responsible bot development, including user testing and feedback gathering, to identify training gaps and ensure domain-specific knowledge.