Choosing a Good Chatbot

“I was having issues in my online store with customers abandoning their shopping carts and I couldn’t figure out why. I started to use chatbots by Tidio so when the customer was about to abandon, the bot was triggered and offered a discount code. This helped increase my sales 65%!”

Talking About Chatbots

What is the difference between a live chat and a chatbot?

This is somewhat of a trick question because both can be live—or active. But generally we associate live with human and a chatbot with robotic. If you have ever become lost in customer service phone tree prompts, you might recoil a bit at the idea of chatbots.

Need For Automation

If you have a business, keep reading.

How difficult is it for you to keep track of your customer inquiries? The same area code now reserved for downtown Los Angeles was once used for all of Southern California. During that time, most businesses were in the same time zone as their customers. Phone calls were likely to come during normal business hours.

With the globalization of commerce, the world is your customer base. On the Internet, shops are open 24/7. Responding to hundreds or thousands of calls per day in person is physically and financially impractical for small and large companies respectively. For better or worse, both companies and consumers are coming to grips with the need for effective automation.

Chatbot Primer

If you have a website, keep reading.

A chatbot has little, if anything, in common with online chat rooms filled with useless gossip. In simple terms, a chatbot provides automated online assistance. Interactive responses are triggered by a variety of actions like a typed phrase or a visit to a specific web page.

A simple chat requires a person to type responses to each customer inquiry. This limits interaction to office hours. Basic chatbots provide static information like office hours around the clock. Dynamic chatbots integrate with backend databases to answer questions about order status, product availability, or shipping destinations and collect new subscriber information. Going a step further, ideal chatbots hand off sessions to human operators for complex inquiries.

Chat Background

I wrote my first network chat application in 2004. Requiring a specific operating system to run a desktop application called Helix RADE (Rapid Application Development Environment). It was by no means ubiquitous. In the years since then, chatting has blossomed in the form of text messaging.

The ClinicalPosters website has tested several chat solutions. Either because of requiring constant monitoring or uneditable canned responses, most went down in flames. Imagine my delight when discovering one that has a codeless development environment similar to Helix RADE. Simply drag arrows into boxes in a flowchart fashion.

Your Best Conversation

If you need to communicate with customers, keep reading.

TIDIO combines an easily configurable chatbot with real-time human chat. Each can handoff to each other for the best possible customer experience. Within a short time it generated dozens of leads with thousands of customer interactions.

In simple terms, a chatbot provides automated online assistance.

TIDIO chatbot is most effective because it can be activated by different stimuli, respond with multiple-choice buttons, and deliver rich media. The animated floating icon can be static, expand with a message, or display the number of queued messages.

Promptly answer website visitor questions.
Resolve checkout abandonment.
Gain new customer leads.
Promote products.
Provide fast customer service.
Customize color to your site.

Compatible with popular e-commerce platforms like Shopify, Wordpress, Wix, and MailChimp, TIDIO can add new subscribers, lookup order status, check inventory availability, suggest products or web pages and more! Operators are notified via email and a mobile app when a chat requires human interaction.

If you have a website that services customers or subscribers, give TIDIO a try today. You will be up and running in seconds. The first 5000 interactions are free during your trial. Are you ready to begin a chat?