Designing Websites with Chatbots

Avi Ben Ezra is the CTO of SnatchBot, one of the most popular platforms for creating chatbots. Based on his experience and over 40 million interactions carried out by SnatchBot bots, he believes all good websites need a chatbot. 

1. Conversational guides to web content add a whole new dimension to good website design

I believe that conversational user interfaces are the future of websites and I’m happy to see them quickly taking over the web. They provide excellent convenience and guidance for website visitors, who no longer need to dial call centers, submit support tickets or sift through knowledge bases in order to get the answers to their questions.

With conversational interfaces, they can now quickly get in touch with a brand and find precisely what they need.

But, what exactly is a conversational user interface? It’s a user interface that mimics human conversation. You’ve probably already interacted with virtual assistants, such as Siri, Cortana, Google Assistant and Alexa, so you know how well they can carry out a human-like conversation.

This is exactly the idea behind conversational websites: to implement a chatbot, which is a conversational interface, capable of guiding website visitors and providing them with the help they need when they need it. Not only are chatbots capable of answering users’ questions, but they can also provide suggestions based on the users’ behavior and personalize their experiences.

In doing so, chatbots instantly delight people and compel them to come back again. Instead of leaving a particular website frustrated, they’ll be hooked in and they’ll even provide honest and constructive feedback invaluable for further improvement and growth.

2. Chatbots are capable of handling all the features your website design needs

Apart from answering the questions of your website visitors and providing excellent customer support, chatbots can handle various other features on your website. They can process payments, help you build an email list, help you collect data about your visitors and make data-driven decisions regarding your web design.

Chatbots can also easily manage your sales funnel, as they are capable of processing orders as well. Your customers don’t have to browse through your products to find what they need because they can start a conversation with your chatbot and let it do all the work.

It’s really simple: a chatbot asks a customer what they’re looking for and provides instant suggestions based on the product type, color, size, style and price range the customer selected. When the customer is ready to make a purchase, the chatbot can then guide them to the shopping cart and process the payment, at the same time notifying you of the new order.

3. Use NLP to deepen the bot’s understanding

In order for your chatbot to truly understand human language and be able to respond accordingly, it needs to be supported by NLP (Natural-Language Processing). NLP is an area of computer science and AI used to provide a computer program, such as a chatbot, with an ability to understand human language and effectively process the natural-language data.

Without NLP, your chatbot wouldn’t be able to fully understand the context behind typed words and it wouldn’t be able to learn from the conversations it engages in. With a state-of-the-art NLP, such as the one we have at SnatchBot, you can create a really intelligent bot able to learn and recognize speech patterns, so that it isn’t limited only to predetermined questions and answers.

NLP even helps your bot recognize emotions and show empathy. You can program your bot to use empathetic language, which your customers will certainly find both fun and useful.

4. You can still offer live chat if you need it

Implementing a chatbot on your website doesn’t mean that there’s no room for live chat anymore. I personally think that you still need it, because bots are still in their infancy stage and they’re not capable of solving complex problems just yet.

Moreover, there are still a lot of people who prefer communicating with a live agent to engaging in a conversation with a bot. Therefore, don’t make your customers frustrated by not providing them with the live chat option.

However, chatbots can outperform human customer support because they are available 24/7, they provide instant answers, and they can multitask, so no one will ever be put on hold. This is exactly why you need one on your website – they’ll always be there to offer a helping hand.

But, again, you should have both a chatbot and live chat, so that you can meet the needs of all your customers.

5. Make sure your bot is omni-channel

People nowadays expect brands to provide omni-channel service, which is only natural, given the fact that we’re all using various channels throughout the day. If you’re checking out a Facebook page of a particular brand, you want to be able to get in touch via Facebook Messenger, right?

This is especially important to mobile users, as it can be frustrating to keep switching from one channel to the other in order to interact with a brand. It’s even more frustrating for you to switch between different channels when several or more customers are contacting you at the same time.

Also, everyone has different channel preferences. This is why your bot should be omni-channel, like SnatchBot chatbots are, so that your website users can continue the conversation without any friction and access all your content on their favourite channel.

With Snatchbot, you can quickly build your own bot and publish it into any channel you want, which you can do entirely for free. There are no hidden costs down the road. We also have a Bot Store with pre-built bots designed for various industries, so you can go with that option if you’re not tech-savvy or simply find it easier.

Chatbots can really revolutionize websites, but you can’t really to what extent until you implement one and clearly see it for yourself. That’s why I highly recommend you try SnatchBot, because it’s completely free and it will help you create a conversational website that will absolutely delight your users.