When it comes to integrating chatbots into business operations, the question is no longer if businesses should adopt chatbots — it’s how they should adopt chatbots for ultimate efficiency and value.
AI technologies, especially generative AI models and multimodal AI, have made chatbots significantly more powerful. At the same time, chatbots have become easier to deploy thanks to the ability to outsource chatbot development to third-party AI development experts.
Exactly how businesses should implement and manage chatbots, however, remains an open question. While there are no simple answers, here are some pointers and best practices to keep in mind.
Why Should Your Business Use Chatbots?
58 percent of B2B companies currently deploy chatbots, and analysts predict a 23.3 percent compound annual growth rate, or CAGR, for the remainder of the decade. Trends like these mean that chatbots are evolving into a critical asset for organizations that want to remain competitive.
Best Practices for Adopting and Using Chatbots
Simply deploying a chatbot is no guarantee that your business will gain a competitive edge or enjoy critical efficiencies. If you want to use chatbots to their fullest effect, you need to think beyond conventional approaches to chatbot deployment.
The following best practices can help.
1. Use Chatbots for Sophisticated Tasks
Historically, most chatbot use cases have centered on relatively simple needs, like handling basic customer support. Businesses can and should use chatbots for these tasks, but they should also use them for more sophisticated purposes, such as automating complex business processes and helping employees predict customer behavior.
Building chatbots to support functions like these requires more effort because businesses can’t simply take off-the-shelf chatbots or AI services, customize them a bit and deploy them. Instead, they’ll typically need to create custom bots using in-house AI development teams or by working with a partner that specializes in AI development. They’ll also need high-quality data to train the chatbots.
The form the data takes will vary depending on the use cases the bots support. But it could involve, for example, records from a finance department showing how employees normally process invoices, which could be used to train a chatbot that helps automate invoice management. Or, it might entail large sets of customer purchasing and support request data in the case of a chatbot that helps employees predict customer behavior.
Chatbots offer more capabilities than just directing customers to documentation databases or routing questions. Think of them as a core part of your business operations, including but not limited to those involving customer support.
2. Measure Chatbot ROI
To ensure that chatbots actually create the value you intend, you should track chatbot return on investment in a systematic way. To do this well, look beyond basic metrics like cost savings or the query volumes of your chatbots.
Instead, measure KPIs like customer satisfaction scores, support response times, engagement levels and conversion rates. By monitoring how these KPIs change after you deploy chatbots, or after you tweak the way your chatbots work, you can measure how much value chatbots are truly bringing to your business.
3. Develop the Right Chatbot Acquisition Strategy
There are three basic ways to go about creating a chatbot.
One is to build it yourself. This approach offers the greatest level of control and customizability, but it also requires extensive AI development skills on the part of your business. You’ll need programmers who understand key concepts in machine learning and natural language processing, and who possess expertise in working with tools like vector databases for efficient data storage and retrieval-augmented generation for enhancing chatbot response quality.
Another approach is to purchase an off-the-shelf solution. This tends to be much faster and simpler, but the downside is that you’re restricted to the functionality that the chatbot vendor supports, and you typically can’t customize the chatbot very much.
A third option is to work with an outsourced chatbot development firm to build a chatbot tailored to your needs. This way, you don’t have to hire your own AI experts, but you still get a custom chatbot. The best approach to acquiring a chatbot varies based on business needs and priorities. Whichever strategy you choose, it’s important to assess your options and the pros and cons of each.
4. Ensure That Your Chatbot Strategy Can Scale
At first, it’s common for businesses to deploy just one or two chatbots and to use them on a limited scale. But over time, organizations typically add more chatbots and increase the number and complexity of queries they handle. To ensure that you can scale your chatbot strategy up and keep your chatbots in sync with changing business needs, you should think from the start about how your chatbots will change and scale over time.
For instance, you might decide to use cloud infrastructure (as opposed to hosting chatbots on-premises) to help your chatbots handle increasing query volume. You should consider whether the large language models and training data you use to power your chatbots are flexible enough to support a range of business use cases, even if you don't target all of them at the outset.
Chatbots are quickly transitioning from a peripheral technology that addresses a narrow range of use cases into a core component of business operations. To keep up, organizations must develop strategies that allow them to take full advantage of the powerful capabilities that chatbots offer, while also ensuring that they have access to the AI expertise and infrastructure necessary to create world-class chatbots.
