Conversational chatbots are replacing traditional forms on a website. They are better at user engagement and provides a friendly medium for collecting data from website visitors. This change in paradigm has been going on for some time.
Collect.chat is one such product, which has helped thousands of websites to become conversational and engage their audience using chatbots. Below is a Q&A session with Aslam, one of the Co-Founders of Collect.chat. He has been working on driving engagement through conversational experiences on websites for the last two years.
Q: When did you start Collect.chat? What was the inspiration behind it?
Collect.chat started 2017 to help those from a non-tech audience to create and build chatbots with ease. We started with a Travel website. They were getting a lot of traffic on their website. However, the conversions remained low. None of the visitors was taking any action on the site. It became clear that some form of engagement was necessary to catch user attention. After trying their luck with pop-ups and live chat, we automated the process by adding a chatbot
The process was easy, and the automation with their CRM helped them to save a lot of time. Slowly they used the bot to qualify the incoming leads and assigned them to their sales reps depending on their inquiry. We realised that the same process would work with a lot of other websites. There were other platforms out there that can be used to make chatbots. But most of them were based on keyword intent or NLP and required in-depth coding knowledge. A more straightforward solution was definitely, a need of the hour.
Q: Why do you think Web forms are not working?
Forms offer a static experience to the user. They are not made for user engagement. Chatbots on the other hand are more human-friendly. These bots or “conversational forms” as we sometimes call them, are better collecting data because they offer a real-world chat experience to the user.
I think it’s best to summarise the differences using this infographic:
Website designs are adapting to the modern audience, and with this change, forms are no longer the ideal method to collect data. Functional chatbots can solve this problem much better.
Q: How is your product different? What are the features that make you stand out?
We focus on making it easier for our audience to make a chatbot in just minutes. All they have to do is create an account, choose a ready-made template, make changes in the design, copy-paste our snippet code on their website and the chatbot will be up on their site in no time.
Some of the more features include:
- Logical Jump: Our bots can change the flow of the conversation, depending on how the user interacts with the bot.
- Appointment Booking: Users can book appointments and meetings with the bot, and it will be reflected in the bot owner’s calendar automatically.
- Instant Notifications: Every time a conversation is recorded, email notifications are sent. It is also possible to integrate the bot with tools like MailChimp, Google Sheet and more.
- Campaign Tracking: The bots can be tracked using Google Analytics or Facebook Pixel
- MultiLingual: These bots can be made in the language of their choice.
- Use as a Widget or share using a link: This is a unique feature we have. The same bot can be added as a widget or it can be shared via link. This is very useful in email and SMS campaigns.
Q: You say that your chatbots don’t have AI. Well, why is that?
Nope, our chatbots don’t have AI. We make rule-based or functional chatbots. The idea is to automate the process of collecting data from website visitors. That’s our main aim. AI at this stage is not matured enough to handle the nuances of human conversations. We have written in detail about why AI is not the best solution to conversations on website.
We have also had a lot of customers come over to us after using AI bots. These bots they make are hard to create and maintain. Even after days of training and coding, there is still room for error where the bot is unable to understand the customer inquiries. Most often AI bots can’t come up with a proper answer and this leads to customer disappointment. Their end users are not impressed with such interactions.
Q: So, who uses your chatbots? Who will find it most useful?
Our chatbots are useful for anyone looking to convert their website traffic. If they want to know who is visiting their website and what they are looking for, then that’s precious information for any business. It’s primary use-case fall under Lead generation, Feedback collection and appointment booking. Let’s take some typical examples:
- If you are running an online course and use your website to attract more audience
- If you have a travelling company that has multiple travel itineraries to offer
- If you are running a Clinic or Saloon that works by scheduling appointments from customers
- If you are a real-estate organisation trying to get more clients online
- If you are an avid blogger, trying to grow your subscriber list
These are just a handful of our customers. The bots help them to connect and understand the kind of traffic that is coming on their website. They can evaluate if the marketing effort that they are putting in is paying off if they are indeed attracting the right audience towards their website. These kinds of information can only be acquired by communicating with them. But our customers don’t have the time to sit 24×7 and reply to all their queries. That’s where the bots come handy. Bots take care of automating the conversation and relays it over to our customers, who can then decide what to do with the data they received.
Q: Do you think Conversational websites are the future?
Yes, we believe that having a form on a site is equivalent to staying on the ground and waiting for others to give you the information. That’s not how things work today. You have to be proactive and engage audiences upfront.
Being conversational is the best method today to achieve this. It’ s much more comfortable having a chat. The best thing about chatbots is that website visitors are leaving on a happy note, having had the pleasant experience of chatting and sending their inquires or learning more about the product or service that they were looking for.
We hope more websites will adopt the conversational approach and see the results for themselves. Conversational chatbots are definitely the go-to solution for visitor engagement and data collection.