You may be a startup trying to find your feet, or you may be top-notch business house wanting to establish personalized interactions for improved sales and revenue, having a customized chatbot has become a must for all. Moreover, chatbots bring down business operational costs. According to industry statistics, chatbots will deal with 90% of all customer inquiries within 5 years.

This means that by 2022, cut down business costs by $8 billion. Facebook’s Messenger has gone up from 30,000 in 2016 to over 100,000 in 2018. Nearly 60% of the millennia rely on chatbots on a daily basis for business transaction or e-commerce. A recent issue of the Chatbot Magazine indicates that by the year 2020, almost 80% of businesses will have their own chatbot.

However, one must perform due diligence before setting up a chatbot for business. Here, we have brought out five quick tips to help you choose the right technology for business chatbots.

Know your business: Choosing the right technology for creating business chatbots require intensive research and inventory planning. First, find out your areas of improvement, that is to say, what business processes need to be revisited to ensure better interaction between you and your employees.

You may need a customized chatbot for marketing funnel guidance, broader reach, getting relevant notifications, or improved brand value. Choose the right technology, depending upon your business type.

Ensure seamless transition: The purpose of a customized chatbot is to help in the smooth running of the business, and not complicate it.  

Choose a technology that ensures a swift escalation path consider using a decision-tree-based mechanism or a sentiment-based framework for the faster transfer of information. Also, make sure that a workflow is defined before you sign up for that attractive chatbots offer popping up at your screen every seven minutes.

Evaluate often, to perform better: You may have invested a good deal of money on deploying a very high-end business chatbot for gauging marketing lead conversion, but the results are as not as promising as you expected. You need to evaluate your choice to select a better solution. To begin with, you can set standards with which to objectively analyze all solutions to find the right one for you.

You may include features such as Natural Language Processing (NLP), contextual awareness handling, integrations, and natural response generation, or exception handling, analytics. Accurate evaluation is critical in identifying the features and functionality required by the business and ensuring correct objective analysis throughout the evaluation process.  

Know your weaknesses: Every business has its own set of weaknesses. Find out yours. Some businesses may have manpower issues, while some others have bookkeeping issues. Many enterprises fail to analyze customer requirements. They need to develop a virtual shopping assistant or a personalized chatbot that keeps note of the user’s online behavior and posts questions accordingly. Invest in technology or tool that will address your business needs and ensure better returns.

Have a backup plan ready:  System outages happen, websites crash, and well, backend technologies to give you a raw deal at times.  But you must have a backup plan ready at all times, to ensure that your business processes do not come to a standstill or you run out of resources.

As a business, you must complete a Business Impact Analysis (BIA) to predict the consequences of the business process disruption. This will help you with a recovery strategy in the event of a technological disaster. So, what technology do you prefer for business? Let us know. Comment below.