Chat has become a near-essential tool to compete. For small and mid-sized businesses, new AI tools present opportunities to quickly build customized chatbots that make them competitive with larger companies. Leveraging out-of-the-box AI packages to deliver personalized customer chat AND an enhanced team member on-boarding experience and knowledge base can quickly improve customer experience and team member engagement.
AI Chat Personalization 24-7
Recent research shows 81% of customers want more self-service options, and fully 2/3 prefer them over talking with a live customer service rep.
With out-of-the-box AI chatbots and some customization, SMBs can combine an empathetic, helpful virtual agent with valuable prospect or customer data like recent purchases, demographics, and website or social interactions to
- Serve up valuable prospect education
- Recommend next steps
- Offer additional services
- Update customer accounts
- Resolve customer concerns
Immediate ROI with AI Chatbots
While the buildout for an automated chatbot may feel like a big lift for a small business, the benefits are often immediate and measurable for a scaling small or mid-sized business.
- 24-7 prospect and customer interactions supplement your small team
- Faster resolution of simple customer service & concerns
- Increase your scale without increasing headcount
- Increased lead capture from your website & social channels
- Shorter sales cycle
- Earlier engagement with the potential customer.
Remember, in most verticals 70-80% of the shopping experience is happening without a live salesperson involved. Without chat you’re missing opportunities.
A 2022 study of online shoppers in Frontiers in Psychology showed that the assurance and reliability of chatbots positively impact customer satisfaction for both groups. However, empathy and interactivity positively affect customer satisfaction only for chatbots that incorporate emotional words. We recommend chatbots trained for empathy and helpful language choices.
Chat Bots Save Team Members- In More Ways than One!
An AI chat that learns and adds to the company’s internal knowledge base as new prospect needs or customer challenges arise can serve as a real-time training model for agent best practices.
Team Member On-Boarding Benefits of Chatbot Knowledge Base
If your SMB wants a more organized, current on-boarding experience that quickly engages new hires, but doesn’t have resources to invest in a Learning Management System (LMS), the same knowledgebase assembled for your AI chat agent can be the foundation for customized employee on-boarding and ongoing skill-building experiences.
Chat features can be customized to develop a guided on-boarding journey through the website and knowledge important to serve the customer.
Many companies are also using the communication tone trained into their chatbot to coach live agents on the language to use with difficult customers in the moment. As costs of live agent interaction rise and fewer, more complicated challenges get escalated by bots, equipping live service reps with additional tools that lead to resolved complaints and higher job satisfaction is essential to reduce turnover.
Protect Safety & Data Privacy
The subscription price is worth protecting your proprietary company data, so don’t build on a free tool unless you’re only relying on your website as a knowledge base. Even out-of-the-box chat agents are designed to keep your company data secure, and some offer the opportunity to segment your knowledge base, with some components available to team members but not the bot.
Choosing Your AI Chatbot & Foundation Model
While ChatGPT Teams, Microsoft Azure, or Claude may work just fine as a foundation, it’s important to think through scalability, desired customizations, dashboard reporting, and integration capabilities with existing systems.
At RevOppAI, we help small and mid-size businesses consider the best tool for their needs, balancing goals for team on-boarding & engagement, lead capture, and customer service. We help clients take an ecosystem approach, assuring a new layer of the tech stack will play well with CRM, ERP, or billing platforms.
Multi-Model Foundations
With the present AI arms race between LLM models, you may want the flexibility to test several different AI foundations as you pilot your chat. Products like Team-GPT offer the ability to switch between OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, and more to achieve the best results.
Go Multi-Lingual?
Your live agents may not be multilingual, but your AI chat can be. Tools from Amazon Web Services or Google’s Dialogflow can even help live agents translate when serving a non-English speaking prospect or customer.
Measure & Adjust
For chatbot tools to really work for your business, great dashboarding and ongoing monitoring are essential. Choose a system that not only reports chat length and common questions, but tracks resolution rates, sentiment, lead conversion, and surfaces new complaint trends quickly. Then commit to monitor and empower team members with this real-time knowledge.
Wrap-Up
AI chat has become a customer expectation, and the implementation can improve lead conversion, customer satisfaction, support employee on-boarding and team member retention, all with a single tool.
As fractional CMO support, we help companies evaluate the best tools for cost, ROI, and quick customer wins as part of our AI implementation strategy. Schedule your free consult to learn how AI chat implementation can drive up customer satisfaction and team member engagement.
