4 reasons why you need an NLP chatbot for your business

Natural language processing (NLP) is an area of artificial intelligence (AI) that helps chatbots understand the way your customers communicate. In other words, it enables chatbots to communicate the way humans do.

We already know about the role of customer service chatbots and how conversational commerce represents the new era of doing business. But let’s consider what NLP chatbots do for your business – and why you need them.

An NLP chatbot is an AI chatbot that uses natural language processing, based on deep learning, to understand customer inputs.

This allows chatbots to understand customer intent, offering more valuable support.

Conversational chatbots like these additionally learn and develop phrases by interacting with your audience. This results in more natural conversational experiences for your customers.

Customers like interacting with conversational chatbots since it helps them feel understood.

On the other hand, brands find that conversational chatbots improve customer support. This is achieved through creating dialogue, and gaining better insights into your customers’ goals and challenges.

A key differentiator with NLP and other forms of automated customer service is that conversational chatbots can ask questions instead offering limited menu options. The ability to ask questions helps the your business gain a deeper understanding of what your customers are saying and what they care about.

Human expression is complex, full of varying structural patterns and idioms. This complexity represents a challenge for chatbots tasked with making sense of human inputs.

But this is where NLP comes into play. Natural language processing allows your chatbot to learn and understand language differences, semantics, and text structure. As a result – NLP chatbots can understand human language and use it to engage in conversations with human users.

Customers prefer having natural flowing conversations and feel more appreciated this way than when talking to a robot.

This type of free-flowing conversation improves customer engagement. Using natural language compels customers to provide more information. This information is valuable data you can use to increase personalization, which improves customer retention.

Chatbots provide instant answers. And when boosted by NLP, they’ll quickly understand customer questions to provide responses faster than humans can.

In addition to text, these chatbots can enhance the natural conversation experience by sharing helpful images (product images), videos (how-to videos, product explainers), map locations (store or service center finders), and more.

These lightning quick responses help build customer trust, and positively impact customer satisfaction as well as retention rates.

A chatbot that can create a natural conversational experience will reduce the number of requested transfers to agents.

This is because chatbots will reply to the questions customers ask them – and provide the type of answers most customers frequently ask. By doing this, there’s a lower likelihood that a customer will even request to speak to a human agent – decreasing transfers and improving agent efficiency.

Properly set up, a chatbot powered with NLP will provide fewer false positive outcomes. This is because NLP powered chatbots will properly understand customer intent to provide the correct answer to the customer query.

To build an NLP powered chatbot, you need to train your chatbot with datasets of training phrases. For example, consider the phrase “account status.” To properly train your chatbot for phrase variations of a customer asking about the state of their account, you would need to program at least fifty phrases. And this is for customers requesting the most basic account information.

It may sound like a lot of work, and it is – but most companies will help with either pre-approved templates, or as a professional service, help craft NLP for your specific business cases.

Chatbots can be used as virtual assistants for employees to improve communication and efficiency between organizations and their employees.

Businesses benefit from providing employees quick and easily accessible information from a single source of truth. This helps ensure that everyone is up to date and on the same page.

NLP chatbots are effective at gauging employee engagement by conducting surveys using natural language. Employees are more inclined to honestly engage in a conversational manner and provide even more information.

Airliners have always faced huge volumes of customer support enquiries. Some more common queries will deal with critical information, boarding passes, refunded statuses, lost or missing luggage, and so on.

Airline customer support chatbots recognize customer queries of this type and can provide assistance in a helpful, conversational tone. These queries are aided with quick links for even faster customer service and improved customer satisfaction.

A frequent question customer support agents get from bank customers is about account balances. This is a simple request that a chatbot can handle, which allows agents to focus on more complex tasks.

NLP chatbots can provide account statuses by recognizing customer intent to instantly provide the information bank clients are looking for. Using chatbots for this improves time to first resolution and first contact resolution, resulting in higher customer satisfaction and contact center productivity.

While chatbots can’t replace human agents, NLP is helping chatbots create the type of human experiences your customers value, while freeing up your agents to do what they do their best: create human interactions and customer relationships that matter.