Top AI Chatbots for Customer Service

Have you ever tried to contact customer support via chat and been greeted by AI?

Yes, that’s the new normal now.

Even the most basic AI chatbots for customer support can understand and respond to customer inquiries accurately and in real-time by using natural language processing and machine learning algorithms.

Businesses can leverage AI chatbots in customer support to:

• Handle a large number of inquiries simultaneously, improving response times and reducing the burden on human representatives.
• Streamline customer support by providing prompt information 24/7.
• Analyze data, identify patterns, and provide a personalized experience to customers.

By using AI chatbots for customer support, businesses can gain a strategic advantage. These AI-powered tools are efficient, responsive, and cost-effective to a degree that no human agent can match. They can reduce wait time for customers by accessing relevant information faster, and ensuring consistent, high-quality interactions across all platforms.

To leverage this technology for your business, you need to understand how AI chatbots work.

Understanding AI Chatbots

AI chatbots for customer service have the ability to engage in human-like conversations. They can do this by utilizing natural language processing (NLP) to analyze past interactions, process user input, identify intent, and retrieve relevant information to respond with. These chatbots can also leverage machine learning (ML) to learn and improve over time, refining their understanding of language, sentiment, and problem-solving.

But the extent to which an AI chatbot utilizes these underlying technologies depends on the type of AI chatbot.

Types Of AI Chatbots For Customer Service

There are primarily 3 types of AI chatbots you can use in customer service, and all of them are quite different.

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You might already be trying to figure out which of these solutions will best suit your business needs. But don’t worry; we’ll help you make that decision by giving you an overview of all the criteria you should be evaluating.

How To Choose The Right AI Chatbot For Your Customer Service Needs

Firstly, it's crucial to assess your business needs and objectives. What specific pain points are you looking to address? Do you require a chatbot that can handle complex queries, or do you need a more basic conversational interface?

Understanding your requirements will help you accurately evaluate the following criteria when choosing an AI chatbot for customer service:

• Does the AI chatbot have the ability to accurately interpret user intent, sentiment, and context? Can it support multilingual and colloquial language processing?
• Can the AI chatbot provide relevant and accurate information to users by seamlessly integrating with your company's knowledge base and content sources?
• Does the AI chatbot have contextual awareness and ability to maintain fluent conversation in natural-sounding dialogue?
• Can the AI chatbot offer personalized experiences based on user profiles and past interactions? Does it have customization options for branding, tone, and personality?
• Will the AI chatbot be able to respond rapidly, with minimal latency, even while handling high volumes of concurrent conversations?
• What kind of performance analytics and user insights does the AI chatbot provide to optimize the chatbot and improve customer experience?
• Does the AI chatbot adhere to data privacy, security standards, and applicable regulations?
• Will the AI chatbot be easy to integrate with existing infrastructure? What kind of tools are available for managing and updating the chatbot?
• Can the AI chatbot learn from user interactions and feedback to automatically enhance its performance over time?
• Will the AI chatbot be able to identify and handoff/escalate complex or sensitive inquiries to human agents?

By evaluating these criteria, you can identify the best AI chatbot for your customer service needs and ensure a positive experience for your customers.

When it comes to making a shortlist for your AI chatbot for customer service, you don’t have to start from scratch. Below, we’ve curated a list of the top 5 AI chatbots that you can use.

Top AI Chatbots For Customer Service

Here is our list of the top 5 AI chatbots for customer service (in no particular order):

Nurix.ai

At nurix.ai, we specialize in deploying super-intelligent AI chatbots that know everything about your customers, are available 24/7 to solve any issue instantly, and at minimal cost.

Features of Nurix AI chatbots:

• Resolve customer queries with highly personalized interactions using your brand’s tone and voice.
• Anticipate customer needs and suggest next purchases to boost revenue without annoying your customers
• Analyze extensive data and extract deep insights to shape your business and product strategy.

Nurix will work within your tech infrastructure to create custom AI chatbots for customer support that are tailored to your business needs.

Pricing: Since we develop tailored solutions, please contact us for a quote.

Zobot by Zoho

If you’re already subscribed to Zoho’s SalesIQ platform, you can use the AI chatbot that comes with it–Zobot–for customer support.

Features of Zobot:

• Understands customer queries in natural language and provides instant responses from its knowledge base.
• Set up chatbots across multiple platforms like websites, mobile apps, social media, instant messaging, etc.
• Supports conversations in up to 30 languages.
• Offers codeless chatbot builder with a drag-and-drop interface.
• Allows you to build AI chatbots with AI technology you may already be using (e.g., IBM Watson, Dialogflow, Microsoft Azure, Haptik, Zia Skills).

Pricing:

Zobot is available with a tiered pricing structure.

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Zendesk AI

Zendesk AI uses Zendesk’s extensive database of customer-service data to provide AI agents that can hold smart conversations with customers, as well as assist human agents.

Features of Zendesk AI:

• Use advanced automation and customization options to create conversation bots to respond to customer questions.
• Generative replies, which enable customers to get the information they need without leaving the conversation to read an article.
• Bot personas, for a consistent voice that reflects your brand.
• Analyze past bot conversations data to identify common questions customers ask that do not have existing bot answers.
• Intelligent triage to predict intent, language, and sentiment to customer requests. (Only available with the Advanced AI add-on.)

Pricing:

Zendesk has a 4-tiered pricing structure.

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Zendesk’s AI agents are available with each of the aforementioned plans. However, only Suite Professional and Suite Enterprise are eligible for Zendesk’s Advanced AI add-on, priced at $50 per agent/month.

Guru

Guru combines your knowledge base, enterprise AI search, and intranet to to centralize help resources, troubleshooting guides, and learnings. This helps resolve real-time issues, resolve tickets faster, and capture insights to improve the customer experience.

Features of Guru:

• Instant, AI-powered answers to reduce research time and accelerate issue resolution.
• Smart recommendations based on past customer conversations and agent activity.
• Smart automation for drafting docs and identifying gaps and duplicate content to verify accuracy, leveraging both AI and human experts.
• Integrates your content with ChatGPT for internal informational searches and adding to the knowledge base from the AI-generated outputs.
• AI-powered writing assistant for creating content and summarizing complex topics.

Pricing:

You can enjoy all the benefits of Guru’s AI chatbot for customer support for $15 per user per month, when billed annually.

For an enterprise-grade solution that scales with your organization, Guru will work out a customized payment plan for your organization.

Intercom

Intercom is a complete AI-first customer service platform that provides instant support and answers via AI agents.

Features of Intercom:

• Intercom’s Fin AI Agent uses the most sophisticated AI language models to instantly resolve customer issues across channels with accurate, conversational answers.
• Consolidate all incoming customer questions into one dashboard, even if they’re coming from different channels like live chat, email, SMS, Phone, WhatsApp, Facebook, or Instagram.
• Deliver in-context answers by making your help center content discoverable across your entire website or app.
• Supports up to 45 languages to serve your customers.

Pricing:

Intercom offers a unique pricing structure for its AI chatbot for customer service. It’s available in 3 tiers:

• Essential, priced at $39 per seat/month
• Advanced, priced at $99 per seat/month
• Expert, priced at $139 per seat/month

However, you will be paying an additional $0.99 per resolution for every customer query that is satisfactorily resolved by Intercom’s Fin AI agent.

Irrespective of which AI chatbot solution you choose, you must ensure you have a plan in place to evaluate its performance and impact on customer service KPIs.

In the next section, we’ll dive into the details of how to measure AI chatbot performance.

Evaluating AI Chatbot Performance

Deploying an AI chatbot for customer service is only the start of delivering excellent customer experience. You need to track its effectiveness by monitoring customer satisfaction and conversation completion rates, among other metrics.

Here’s a list of the key metrics you should consider tracking to evaluate AI chatbot performance:

• Conversation Volume: Total conversations, breakdown by time/day.
• Flow: Average length (messages), response time, abandonment rate.
• Accuracy: % of user intent correctly identified (by type).
• Resolution: % of conversations resolved and average time to resolve without human help.
• Satisfaction: NPS score and sentiment analysis of feedback.
• Efficiency: Containment rate (handled by chatbot) and deflection rate (prevented human interaction).
• Learning: New skills/intents added, improvement in accuracy, resolution, and satisfaction over time.
• Cost: Reduction in operational costs and ROI.
• Engagement: User engagement metrics (sessions/user, duration) and % choosing chatbot over traditional channels.

Tracking these metrics can not only provide insight into the effectiveness of the AI chatbot, but also identify areas for improvement, and demonstrate the overall impact on your customer service operations.

If you’re serious about implementing an AI chatbot for customer service for your business, follow the implementation best practices outlined in the next section.

Implementing AI Chatbots For Customer Service

While implementing AI chatbots for your business, you need to ensure successful integration of the chatbot with existing tools and workflows. For the AI chatbot to resolve customer queries quickly and efficiently, you must seamlessly integrate it with your current customer service platforms, CRM systems, and communication channels. This allows for a unified customer experience and streamlined data flow.

You also need to invest time in training your chatbot on your brand's tone, FAQs, and problem-solving capabilities. Make sure you onboard your customer service team to work collaboratively with the AI assistant for maximum efficiency.

It is best to start with a phased rollout, testing the chatbot on a smaller scale before expanding to all customer service functions. Continuously monitor the chatbot’s performance, gather user feedback, and make improvements to refine the chatbot's capabilities.

If this all seems a bit overwhelming and beyond the expertise of your IT team, we’ve got you covered. At nurix.ai, we will help you deploy an intelligent, adaptive AI chatbot solution that elevates your customer service, boosts efficiency, and drives business growth.

Contact Nurix today to discuss your tailored AI chatbot solution for customer service.