A Beginners Guide to Answer Bot Automation

By Abhinav Girdhar | Last Updated on December 5th, 2022 11:26 am | 5-min read

To make your customers happy, you must understand what they want from you. Even if they are facing issues with your product, you can still make them happy by serving them better. With answer bots, you can provide customers with a quick resolution to their issues and keep them happy, engaged and delighted.

Answer chatbots help you handle your customers’ queries and give them instant resolutions. If you are using an answer bot for your business, your customers need not search their answers in FAQs, guides, or knowledgebase articles. The chatbots that you are offering them are FAQ-based chatbots and have all the information that is required to answer customers’ questions. Your customers can just type their query in the bot window and find the answer right away in the same conversation.

In this post, we will help you learn what answer chatbots are and how you can use them to get the best automated answering services for small businesses.

What is an Answer bot?

Answer bots are the best AI assistants that offer auto answering service and work right alongside with your customer support team. They help you connect with your customers and answer their questions right away.

Answer Bots are a form of advanced artificial intelligence which is why various businesses refer to them as-

• AI Personal Assistant
• Artificial Intelligence Assistant
• AI Bot
• Resolution Bot
• FAQ Bot
• Smart Bot
• QnA Bot
• QnA Maker
• QnA Chatbot
• Virtual Assistant
• AI Virtual Assistant
• AI Chatbot
• AI Assistant
• FAQ Bot

These customer service virtual assistants work fast and answer users’ questions with the three most relevant FAQs so that they quickly find the information they are looking for. They interact with users in multiple languages and resolve almost 33 percent of common customer queries, on average.

These customer support virtual assistant AIs provide your customers with a personalized experience, respect their space, time, and, dignity and help them get to their ideal outcomes.

These intelligent bots offer automated answering services based on your project knowledge bases. They need to be trained in different languages with different types of questions. Let us go ahead and understand how these answer bots work and the benefits of having an answer bot integrated into your helpdesk support system.

How do Answer Bots Work?

Answer bots interact with customers like humans. You can import data into the answer bots in three ways, by –

• Entering it manually
• Using data resources URLs
• Linking Knowledge bases

In the answer bots, you can enter multiple possible questions for a single query that customers could come up with. You can add different keywords to the database. This way, you can enable answer bots to start searching for the answers as soon as users start typing their query.

Once users enter their query, they can start a chat with the answer bot. The answer bot picks the nouns and the relevant keywords and starts searching them in the knowledge base it has been linked with. Once the bot finds the answer, it delivers it to the user and asks for further assistance.

Key Benefits of Answer Bots

Here are a few major benefits that you can get once you start using answer bots for your business.

Instant Responses

Automate your answer chatbot to answer questions instantly. The bots go through the text that the users type in the window, pick the keywords from there, search them in project knowledgebase, and share the answers with the customers. The process seems lengthy, but it takes just a few seconds to finish.

Automated Scheduling

Answer Bots help businesses keep their users engaged 24/7. They work continuously, save your time, and let you schedule a meeting with an easy to use interface.

Scalability

Most small businesses don’t have the budget to afford a huge staff to answer every question of the customers in real-time. As a result, customers keep waiting, sometimes for many hours or even days. Answer bots help businesses respond to their customers right away and fix their issues.

Direct Answers

Answer bots provide users with an accurate answer other than just giving suggestions. The answers shared by an answer bot are always relevant to a customer’s question. With answer bots, users don’t have to search the knowledgebase articles, they can get their answers in the conversation itself. Sometimes users don’t even care if they are speaking to a human or a machine, they just need their answers fast and they are good.

Customer Support

You can integrate the answer bots with your Help Center to offer quick access to support articles. Answer bots don’t need to learn how to chat with the customers, they just need to make the inquiry and chat process more efficient and comprehensive.

Now that you know what answer bots are and how you can use them to get the best out of your business, let us go ahead and check what all features you get in an answer bot.

Major Features of an Answer Bot

Here are a few major features that can help you understand how answer bots can be beneficial for your business.

Customization

When you try to create an answer bot for your business, you can customize it as per your preferences. You can enter your product information and link knowledge bases articles to the answer bot so that your users get correct and up to date information.

Bot-Flow

Sometimes users need more information about the product and service that you offer. Answer bots can be easily programmed to create a bot flow that helps your customers with the next best steps and the information required. Creating a bot flow is easy and can be done without any complex coding.

Knowledgebase

Every organization has their knowledge bases based on their products and the business they run. With your answer bot, you can integrate these knowledge bases to make sure that your customers get correct and accurate information.

Keyword Search

Answer bot picks the relevant keywords from the text that the user enters and searches for the information based on the same. With the help of these keywords, your bot finds the required information and delivers it to the users.

Multiple Answers

Not everyone has the same thought process. Different users can ask the same thing differently. Or, they could even mistype sometimes. You should be ready for all kinds of scenarios and whatever the case is, your chatbot answers need to be consistent and precise. You get to enter multiple questions in your answer bot so that it could understand what the customer is asking and answer correctly.

You have learned almost everything about the answer bots, let us now check out how you can automate one. You need to make your answer bot ready to present in front of users. It should be humanized and have a developed personality.

If a customer asks, “How are you?” the bot should answer “I am great thanks” other than a disappointing response like “Sorry I didn’t understand”. The positive response loop that is created helps users understand that someone is genuinely responding and will take care of all their issues.

Steps to Automate the Answer bot

Here are a few steps that can help you automate your question answering bot.

Step 1. Promote Self-Service

The bot makes it easier for businesses to promote self-service by suggesting the relevant knowledgebase articles that solve users’ queries. Bots are interesting as they leverage machine learning and enhance over time. The bots not only offer these informative articles but also, ask the users if the articles were helpful to them. This way they improve their accuracy by gathering feedback. Doing this also helps the support team in increasing their visibility into which articles are useful and which are not.

Step 2. Collect Additional Information

Customer support agents usually spend a lot of time asking basic information like the user’s name, contact information, or account number. Bots replace the need for this step and ask the entire information from the users proactively. Bots also give users options to select the correct one to get additional information required.

Step 3. Issue Selection and Categorization

With answer bots, you can automatically classify issues more accurately. Automating issue selection and correct categorization can get the ticket created and routed to the correct agent automatically. The bots help users reach out to the best-equipped agent available to answer their queries.

Step 4. Deploy Custom Workflows

You can also create case-specific customizable bots to help users find the path depending on the problem they are facing. For example, if users have forgotten their account password, bots could gather the required information and help the users with certain steps to reset their password. And, if the issue persists, the bot could get the user connected to the right team agent.

Step 5. Gather Feedback

Whether the whole conversation has been handled by a bot or an agent, the bot should collect feedback at the end anyways. Instead of sending a feedback email, you can automate your bot to ask the customer if they have found what they were looking for. Asking users if they have got their issue fixed helps them understand that you are concerned about what they are going through and will try your best to fix their issue, if not yet fixed.

Conclusion

That was all about the answer bots. There are many tools available online that you can use to create an excellent question-answer chatbot for your business. I would recommend Appy Pie’s Chatbot Builder. With this software, you can create both an answer bot and a chatbot. The best part is that you use the same account for both the tasks.

With Appy Pie’s Chatbot Builder you can create a QnA bot that answers questions and work like the automated virtual customer assistants. The software also helps you humanize these fully automated answering machines. This way you can help your customers believe that they are talking to a live person. The software also lets you customize it to add your product-based chatbot questions and answers.

Visit Appy Pie’s Chatbot Builder page and get to know how to create a FAQ chatbot. With this excellent software you also learn to convert FAQ to Chatbot. Appy Pie’s question answer chatbots offer all the features that you would ever need to enhance your customer support services. Try Appy Pie and create an excellent virtual assistant for customer service today!

Citations

HelpShift
Freshdesk