The company announces that its major product has been enhanced with a comprehensive integration with ChatBot. It’s now easier than ever for the LiveChat users to sell, market and support their customers using bots.
LiveChat, a customer service company founded in 2002, is extending its features portfolio to chatbots that are rich in images, buttons, cards and create limitless possibilities for companies to showcase their products or provide services. This new chapter for LiveChat product development was designed to improve the customer support experiences and to solve service issues more efficiently.
The new bot’s capabilities were achieved with the integration between LiveChat and ChatBot – a bot factory and the company’s second solution. ChatBot, formerly BotEngine, was launched on the market over two years ago. The platform is focused on delivering a simple drag and drop interface and fast bot deployment.
Since the very beginning of the chatbot trend, we were completely sure that the conversational technology will transform business and totally change how companies communicate with their customers. It meant that we – as software providers – must be there. That’s why, two years ago, we bet on a chatbot framework development. Since the product became mature enough to meet more users’ requirements, we have intensified our work to integrate it deeper into LiveChat application and now we’re presenting our vision for how bots should operate within the chat application. Working on such an emerging technology, it’s obvious that we haven't yet said everything on this matter, same goes for our competitors.Dariusz Zabrzeński, Head of Research and Development at LiveChat
The portfolio of the new functionalities designed exclusively for the LiveChat – ChatBot integration includes:
- Rich-messages: Bots can mix and match text, images, buttons, and quick replies in their conversations to show off products and services. That helps bots to send responses that are more personal and intuitive than plain text.
- Transfer: If a task requires human's attention, it can be transferred from a chatbot to agents. What’s more, a user can also customize when the transfer occurs and decide what happens after working hours.
- Ticket: During a conversation, a bot can generate a ticket in the LiveChat application that can be further managed by the customer service team.
- Transcript: Users can set a point of the bot’s story that will automatically send an email with the full transcript of the conversation. This gives insight into what is happening between customers and chatbots.
- Goals: Adding LiveChat goals to bot scenarios makes it possible to collect information about successful purchases, satisfying support, and page views.
- Tags: Using tags to automatically label ongoing conversations based on their progression allows users to keep organized archives.
The idea of expanding into the area of chatbots came from the natural observation of data. The Customer Service Report 2018 , that has been prepared by the company each year since 2015, uncovers that in 2017, businesses experienced an average of 10 572 monthly chats, compared to 9 763 in 2016. It means that there was a year-to-year increase of 8.29% in chat demand. Growing popularity of online communication has prompted companies to handle their customer issues even more effectively and LiveChat believes that chatbots are the best solution for that.
There are a couple of ideas to incorporate chatbots into a LiveChat window.
By using them you can say “hi’’ to your customers and at the same time filter spammy messages. What’s more, chatbots are able to automate your appointment booking systems. They can survey your customers and let you get to know them better, or, what we personally like the most, when your support team is offline or has a chat queue, bots are great in keeping your customers from waiting. In our case, bots that are implemented on the LiveChat website closed 36,886 cases without the need to transfer visitors to human agents.Dariusz Zabrzeński, Head of Research and Development at LiveChat
The company’s integration competes in an increasingly crowded field of bots and chat services. Unlike several available bot platforms from the live chat providers, ChatBot can be used without the LiveChat subscription. Users can create chatbots for Facebook Messengers, Slack or use a customized chat widget for a website.
ChatBot targets non-tech-savvy users, that’s why all its built-in features can be used without any programming. However, if you want to go crazy with your chatbots, an API documentation is for your disposal. ChatBot offers a profound tutorial and Academy in which creators explain all chatbot secrets and present valuable tips. It’s also possible to implement ready-to-use bots scenarios prepared by the company’s experts, e.g. Sales Bot, Lead Generation Bot or Welcome Bot.
Boston, Massachusetts – 11/28/2018
