At first glance, this advice doesn’t make any sense. Shouldn’t I be trying my best to meet my customers where they are? Shouldn’t my support agents and staff try to answer as many customer questions as they possibly can? The answer is obviously yes, but this won’t be done reliably with live-chat or legacy support bots.

Before we get into robust solutions that actually help, let’s address the different products and solutions that don’t fully deliver.

Solutions that invite a poor customer experience

Rule-based chatbots

Examples: Intercom, Zendesk, Hubspot, Tidio

Rule or flow based chatbots seldom address the long tail of possible customer inquiries. Customers are forced to click through a set of pre-programmed call-to-actions that have been setup with little thought. Oftentimes, these CTAs are simply the defaults provided by the chatbot software.

Programming these flows assumes we know all the ways our customers will want to interact with our products and services. This is rarely the case. It also assumes we know why the visitor is on our site in the first place, but we will get to that later.

This simple and all too common situation portrays just how painful this experience can be for a customer. You navigate to a website for a company that offers a product or service that you are interested in, and there is some information you can’t find on the site or you have a specific question you would like answered. You see a widget in one of the bottom corners of the screen and you click on it. It has a defaulted greeting message and a few buttons that you can click to generate further responses, but no area to type a question. After trying a handful of the flows and getting nowhere, you see a “Connect with a Representative” button. You click it and are connected to a support/sales rep. Because the pre-programmed flows didn’t handle your specific need, the representative has no clue what you are interested in, so you feel like you are starting from square one.

Here’s what the beginning of this experience typically looks like:

It didn’t even validate the input text to confirm it’s a name. Rule-based chatbots simply cannot handle the breadth of requests an AI powered solution can.

Many companies realize this is a very bad experience for customers, so instead of attempting a rule-based bot flow, they simply provide a live chat widget instead, which is also far from ideal.

Live chat

Examples: Intercom, Drift, Crisp

Better than inadvertently upsetting a customer with an irrelevant chat flow? Sure, but only if your support agents are on the clock. If your agents are off the clock, or if you are a small startup and you’re the sole support agent, you’re forced to show your customer the dreaded “Leave us a message” or “We’ll be back tomorrow” message. At least here, the disappointment is immediate and not exacerbated by the anticipation of a positive outcome, which we see in rule-based bots.

Of course, live chat is useful when it works. When it doesn’t, it is just another factor increasing your site’s bounce rate. To make live chat truly useful, you need a 24/7 team of live chat agents. This is not cheap. For example, I was quoted $350 for 200 minutes of support by a live chat support agency. This was their monthly starter plan.

Let’s assume you have the resources to do this. Your support team is almost certainly offshore, and does not know the ins and outs of your product and service. For any question that isn’t a part of their script, they will need to defer to someone who actually knows what they are talking about. So in the end, you are paying for expensive escalation. Not to mention that this doesn’t scale nicely, as your costs are painfully proportional to your web traffic.

What is your website for?

Seems like a dumb question, but let’s think about it from first principles. The answer depends on what industry you are in. 

E-commerce

If you are an e-commerce company, your website is critical. It is where customers search for products against their needs, compare and contrast, and ultimately checkout and purchase. Most of the customer journey happens here, so it is important to get this right. Here you might want a support bot or live chat agent that handles orders, shipping and transaction issues.

E-commerce companies have a legitimate reason to have a support bot on their website, but there is opportunity to expand beyond just support.

Real AI is here. There is opportunity to use AI agents to personalize product sales. Imagine an AI agent that recommends products specific to a customer's needs, and serves it up in a conversational way. Your customer data platform could be filled with invaluable conversational data, allowing you to personalize campaigns in a way that was previously impossible.

B2B Services and Agencies

The website of a business-to-business service company serves a less critical role than one of an e-commerce company, but it is still a valuable channel for qualifying leads and understanding your potential customers. These companies typically have a “Contact Us” form that requires potential customers to fill out a bunch of fields. Historically, this was done for a good reason. You don’t want to waste your time qualifying a lead that isn’t serious about your services.

Again, real AI is here. AI agents can qualify your leads. Give them access to the contents of your website and any supplemental information about your services. Let them nurture and qualify leads, only looping you in when there is real opportunity.

This is mutually beneficial. Potential clients don’t want to give a ton of information upfront without getting something in return. They need to learn a bit about you first. Let them learn about your services in a personalized way.

B2B SaaS

Functionally, a B2B SaaS company’s website serves a similar purpose to a B2B service/agency website, but the bar for an intuitive website is a bit higher, and more revenue is generated through the site.

SaaS companies fall victim to using support bots and widgets that are wholly misaligned with their visitors' needs. Intercom is one of these widgets. Intercom is a great product, and I would definitely recommend you deploy it within your SaaS application for support and documentation. But it has no place on your website. We’ll go into this in a bit more detail in the next section.

Common mistakes

Bots that only offer support

Biggest culprit: B2B SaaS

As a B2B SaaS company, you do not need a support bot on your website! Your existing customers can get the support they need through your actual application. 

It may seem logical and easy to just deploy Intercom everywhere - this is a mistake. Most B2B SaaS websites I visit are using Intercom. After opening the widget, it says “Leave us a message” and shows their support documentation.

As a potential B2B SasS customer, I don’t care about your support documentation and I don’t want to leave you a message. I want to understand how your product works for me. I want fast access to testimonials in my industry or vertical.

Asking for too much information up front

Biggest culprit: B2B Services/Agencies, B2B SaaS

This is a huge turnoff. A lot of companies have their bots configured to require a name and email upfront. Why would you ever do this? You are being given a free opportunity to listen to your potential customers as well as surprise and delight them.

Let’s imagine you decide not to require information upfront. In the worst case, your AI agent has  a conversation with a potential customer who decides not to move forward with you. This is an excellent opportunity to learn why. Collecting data on why you might be losing deals is critical. A lot of sales people do this intuitively, but this provides a real data-driven approach.

Making assumptions about your customers

Here’s Tidio’s instance of their own support bot:

This says to the customer, you are either here to buy our product or get help if you are having issues with our product. Pretty binary, right? What if I simply want to learn about your product in a way that makes sense to me and I am not ready to talk to sales yet?

Aimdoc gets you so much more for so much less

A glimpse into the future of customer engagement

Supporting existing customers is important, but with state-of-the-art AI we can expand the scope of traditional support bots and entirely replace expensive live chat solutions. Aimdoc’s AI can handle customer support, nurture leads and most importantly explain your products and services in a way that makes sense to every potential customer.

Aimdoc’s interface is welcoming, and doesn’t make any assumptions about the customer:

Getting the most out of your website

As outlined in this article, your website is the core of digital presence, and its main goal is to generate new business. It is important to make it as accessible as possible. Providing an alternative experience where leads and customers can directly ask questions and get instant answers can drastically improve customer satisfaction and increase revenue.

Aimdoc’s AI has access to everything on your website and any additional documentation you want to provide. You can give it explicit instructions and an explicit goal. This can be any desired conversion. Aimdoc seamlessly provides a personalized experience, getting your customers immediate and tailored answers to their questions.

24/7 availability without the high costs

Aimdoc can talk to hundreds of customers at once. The live chat agent team required to match that output would be extremely expensive. Aimdoc is scalable and actually knows what it is talking about.

Aimdoc intelligently escalates customers or leads to your team just in time, allowing you to provide support or close the deal.

Improve your entire web experience

Aimdoc’s AI actually works with you to improve your overall web experience. It will highlight information gaps that exist on your website based on customer interactions. You can work with Aimdoc to build an FAQ list for your site.

Lead management and CRM integrations

Aimdoc stores leads when a website visitor enters their information. HubSpot and Salesforce integrations are on the roadmap.

Conclusion

It is hard to quantify exactly how much business is lost due to painful rule-based chatbot and live chat experiences. Aimdoc reduces the likelihood of customers bouncing from your site out of frustration. Engaged customers who can learn about your product and services in a personalized way, are much more likely to explore your offers in greater detail, and ultimately make a purchase.

Try it for 14-days for free!

You can try Aimdoc for 2 weeks for free here.