How to choose the best chatbot for your company
A business chatbot perfectly tailored to you won't just fall into your lap. You know best what a chatbot needs to be able to do to become "your" chatbot. Think of finding the right chatbot like adopting a dog. At the shelter, you look for the right size, color and personality. Some shelters may have already trained your future dog. But maybe you have very specific tricks in mind that your dog needs to know, so you train it again at home to suit your needs. It's the same with a business chatbot. The chatbot provider can give you the basics and pre-train the chatbot. The specific training for your company happens on your side – with the provider's support, of course. This article shows what you need to find the best chatbot for your company.
Characteristics of a good business chatbot
It goes without saying that a chatbot should be polite, but it should also respect customers' time and not spam them with offers or discount campaigns. Instead, good chatbots are goal-oriented and lead your customers straight to their answers. They use simple, clear language to avoid misunderstandings. To prevent further confusion, the chatbot needs to understand context. That way, users don't have to repeat their information again and again within a conversation and get the feeling of a coherent conversation. Your chatbot should also take care not to send too many answers at once, so your customers have a chance to reply and a real conversation develops. After all, no chatbot is perfect, but it should be able to anticipate a certain amount of errors and resolve them itself.
Rule-based vs. AI-powered chatbot?
There are two types of chatbots. Depending on your company's requirements, one type will suit you better than the other.
A rule-based chatbot follows a guided conversation flow. It's especially suitable for collecting data or assisted form filling.
AI chatbots are broader. They can understand and process natural language and filter out the information they need from a text to handle the request. They're also more flexible in their conversation paths and offer a more natural conversational flow.
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You can read about the possibilities an AI chatbot offers for your customer service here.
Finding the right foundation for business chatbots
Many providers already have chatbots tailored to a specific industry or niche, whether beauty products or motorcycle accessories. So look for providers that already work with companies in your industry. That way you can benefit from the provider's learnings, and your chatbot is ready to use faster. Many providers also state explicitly on their websites when they can offer pre-trained chatbots for your industry. The chatbot can then already answer many standard questions without prior training on your part, and you can focus on answering – and eventually automating – your customers' specific questions.
No compromises when choosing!
Two aspects where you definitely shouldn't compromise are your chatbot's language and tone. Some people still picture stiff chatbot conversations where you're not understood and keep trying to tease the information you need out of the AI with individual buzzwords. But today you can have a perfectly normal conversation with next-generation chatbots. When choosing a provider, make sure their chatbots use LLMs and generative AI. Combined, they let your customers speak naturally and be understood.
It's not what you say, it's how you say it! A chatbot on your website isn't just a little helper for your customers – it's also a representative of your company and your brand. So think about how your chatbot should talk. That starts with the basic question of formality (formal or informal?) and goes all the way to the phrases it should use (maybe it can work your company motto into the conversation).
Especially if your company operates internationally, you should also make sure your new chatbot is available in several languages. It's now also possible to translate the answers of, say, your German employees for your Spanish customers – and their questions back into German.
Prerequisites for implementing a chatbot
Is your customer service team overwhelmed, or do you want to offer technical support? Do you want to make sure your customers can be looked after 24/7? Then a chatbot is the right way to go. There are no particular thresholds you need to exceed to implement a chatbot. It's much better to have a business chatbot at your side before problems even arise. Especially in customer service, chatbots have become the standard in many industries and are expected by customers. If you'd like to know how fit your customer service currently is, take the test here.
Preparing to introduce a chatbot
To implement your chatbot quickly and optimally, you need to know what you expect from it. Which channels do you want to cover? Do you want to limit your chatbot to your website at first, or also be present on social media with it? Do you need a voicebot for customer calls, or do your customers prefer to contact you by email?
What should your chatbot look like? How should it behave? Ask your customer service team which inquiries keep coming up and check whether your FAQs are up to date. Define your target audience clearly so your chatbot knows how to interact with them.
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Print 24
Print24 is a leading provider in online printing. From calendars, folded cards and flyers to banners and beach flags, towels, blankets and T-shirts – they have it all.
Manually looking up order and customer numbers took up a particularly large amount of time. With these time-consuming inquiries, the customer service team couldn't focus on answering relevant ones.
Our chatbot went live on December 1, 2023. The chatbot is now available in 23 languages, and the automation rate is almost 50%! And we're far from finished. With our support, Print24 is extending the chatbot service to its partner shops, so that 80 more websites are served in the first phase.
VfL Wolfsburg
VfL Wolfsburg-Fußball GmbH is a soccer company from Wolfsburg, formed in 2001 by spinning off the professional football department of the sports club Verein für Leibesübungen Wolfsburg e. V., founded in 1945.
With the chatbot Wolfgang, VfL Wolfsburg has become a pioneer in customer automation. Before melibo, the customer service team had to answer up to 2,000 messages on a single match day. That's impossible for staff to manage. The result: long waiting times and unhappy fans. Our project started on February 14, 2023, and Wolfgang went live on March 13, 2023.
Since going live, Wolfgang can answer fans' questions about ticket sales, away trips, shop items and stadium visits. For more complicated inquiries, he collects important information from the fans before passing the now pre-qualified inquiry on to the customer service team. That way, the team can answer inquiries much faster and more effectively.
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travelite
Allow us to introduce Travis, the new chatbot for our customer travelite. The family business from Hamburg offers every kind of luggage and focuses on the highest quality. The company stands for durability, stability and functionality. Alongside top quality, one of travelite's goals is to guarantee sustainable products and supply chains and avoid packaging waste.
Introducing a chatbot was completely new territory for travelite. Thanks to great collaboration, plenty of drive and enthusiasm, Travis was soon ready to go live with technical and content knowledge. Since then, he has been answering basic questions about luggage, vouchers and orders.
What's new here is the product advisor, which helps customers find the right bag or suitcase for their next trip. Travis keeps learning and gets better with every interaction.
The perfect business chatbot: a conclusion
Finding the right chatbot for your company requires careful selection and customization. Basically, the chatbot should be polite and goal-oriented and understand context so it can hold a coherent conversation. You also have to decide whether you're looking for a rule-based chatbot, which follows predefined conversation flows and is especially suitable for structured queries, or an AI-powered chatbot, which understands natural language and is more flexible.
When choosing a provider, check whether they already have pre-trained chatbots or experience in your industry. The chatbot will also represent your brand, so define suitable language and the basic tone of its conversations. If your company operates internationally, make sure the business chatbot can be offered in several languages.
Before implementation, you should clearly define what your chatbot should do, which channels it will be used on and which common inquiries it needs to answer. Defining your target audience precisely and coordinating with your customer service team can help you adapt and integrate the chatbot optimally.
We've put together a selection of providers in this article – find out more here.
