A: A chatbot is software powered by artificial intelligence that allows users to interact with content through a conversational interface.

Chatbots answer natural language queries with natural language answers. In addition to answering questions, some chatbots provide a link to the page where the answer came from and offer more context.

Tip: Chatbots can respond to natural language questions in search, via chat or voice. (SearchAI Answers, our chat product, does all three.)

A: Chatbots improve the user experience in a number of ways:

• Chatbots allow you to scale your customer support. AI bots can answer 80% of the most common questions your search users have. That frees up your agents to focus on the 20% of support tasks that require human help.
• Chatbots serve as an assistant, supporting agents as they interact with customers. According to one recent study, customer service agents spend about 25% of their time “finding relevant personal information about the customer in a database.” And they spend another 33% of their time “understanding the nature of the inquiry.” When your support employees use chatbots as their support, they can provide faster service.
• Chatbots don’t sleep. They provide 24/7 support. And they’re patient. They don’t mind if users ask the same question over and over.
• Chatbots improve your first contact resolution rate — no temperamental telephony or epic email threads.
• Chatbots not only use AI to answer questions, they use it to learn. And they do it quickly, using implicit and explicit feedback so their answers get even better — faster.
• Chatbots offer an early customer touchpoint, capturing important analytics that help you provide prompt, personalized attention.

Tip: Avoid chatbots that can’t learn from unstructured text. They require a lot of effort to maintain. (SearchAI Answers can learn from unstructured text.)

A: We offer a simple, three-step process so you can get started with SearchAI Answers sooner.

• Step 1: We work with you to identify customer support tasks we can automate. This is the kind of information that usually ends up buried on your FAQ page or hidden in the fine print.
• Step 2: We prepare responses to your customers’ top questions and support requests using your website content and other documents you provide.
• Step 3: We deploy SearchAI Answers. The whole process takes a week or less.

Tip: Look for a low-maintenance product. SearchAI Answers doesn’t require any manual tagging, specific domain taxonomy or knowledge graphs.