What Are Chatbots? How To Add Chatbots to Your Shopify Store

Enhancing and improving your customer service operation by hiring more employees is no small feat. You have to find the right candidates, train them in your company’s policies and standards of service, find people to manage them, and constantly deal with inevitable employee churn. To help close the gap and take the burden off your customer service reps, many companies turn to automated chatbot tools to handle basic customer queries and improve customer experience.

Chatbot platforms have rapidly advanced in recent years. They might be what you need to level up your company’s customer support system (and possibly save some money in the long run). Here’s how chatbots work and how to implement them.

What are chatbots?

Chatbots are software applications that simulate human conversation to provide information to users, effectively replacing human customer service representatives. Customers interact with chatbots as though they’re speaking to another person, asking questions, and making statements using regular conversational syntax—the chatbot replies using similar syntax, creating the illusion of one-on-one dialogue.

Chatbots aren’t limited to your website. Companies use them on social media (such as with Facebook Messenger or with Twitter chatbots), email, and SMS or messaging apps to answer frequently asked questions or handle unique customer service requests.

Some businesses use chatbots on automated phone lines, through which they can help customers schedule appointments or check account balances. A growing field of chatbot technology uses virtual assistants, like Google Assistant or Amazon’s Alexa, which can execute more complex tasks and hold vocal conversational exchanges with human customers.

What are the benefits of chatbots?

Chatbots provide value to large corporations and small businesses, which might explain why 42% of business-to-consumer (B2C) companies and 58% of business-to-business (B2B) companies use chatbots on their websites. Chatbots offer four critical benefits:

• Dynamic information
• Speedy information retrieval
• Lower costs
• Room to scale up

Dynamic information

Chatbots provide more precise, adaptable information than static FAQ lists on web pages. Because a chatbot simulates human conversation, customers can ask specific questions rather than settle for broad, pre-formulated answers.

Speedy information retrieval

In most cases, chatbots work faster than human customer service agents. They are, after all, computers. Chatbots fetch information in a matter of seconds, which can improve customer satisfaction and boost conversion rates.

Lower costs

Investing in a chatbot platform can require a hefty initial financial commitment. However, chatbots are far less expensive over time than training and employing a human workforce. Companies looking to improve their bottom line often turn to chatbot computer programs.

Room to scale up

Human customer support can create bottlenecks when there aren’t enough agents to handle every inquiry. Chatbots can handle far larger volumes of requests at once while engaging clients with the cadence of a live chat. One bot can do the job of many humans.

Types of chatbots

1. Rule-based chatbots
2. Conversational chatbots

Over the years, chatbot development has produced two main types of chatbots: rule-based chatbots and predictive conversational chatbots. Both can serve small business needs, though conversational commerce chatbots are more sophisticated and cost more to implement.

1. Rule-based chatbots

Also known as declarative or task-oriented chatbots, rule-based chatbots are usually on websites that answer common queries. They use simple computer programs where specific customer inputs generate specific chatbot outputs. If a rule-based chatbot is well programmed, it can produce conversational language but remains relatively limited in answering complex questions.

2. Conversational chatbots

Also known as conversational agents, predictive or artificial intelligence chatbots, conversational chatbots use artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and natural language processing (NLP) to generate human-like dialogue. 

AI technology helps conversational chatbots adapt to the cadences and nuances of a customer’s speech in real time. They can also track customer preferences to produce more qualified leads than rules-based chatbots. AI chatbots perform best when accessing large datasets, such as those stored in a company’s customer relationship management (CRM) software.

How to implement a chatbot

You can add a chatbot to your ecommerce store by partnering with a chatbot vendor. These vendors develop proprietary software to handle AI and natural language processing and tailor their platforms to customer interactions, such as checking order status and answering product questions.

Shopify’s platform makes it easy to integrate a chatbot. Either with Shopify Inbox or Shopify-compatible chatbots in our Shopify App Store. Popular vendors include Zendesk Chat, Zowie, Certainly, and DeepConverse. Most offer free trials, but expect to spend hundreds of dollars for a monthly subscription once the trial expires.

The best part is you don’t have to be a master programmer to add a chatbot to your online store. Vendors typically provide tech support to help you load a chatbot as an application programming interface (API). Some provide simple lines of HTML5 code to add to your website, while others use drag-and-drop modules that make it easy to create chatbot scripts.