Introduction: Optimising Your Website with AI Chatbots

If you're looking to optimise your website to drive traffic, improve conversions, and enhance customer engagement, and you don't have a website chatbot or are considering an AI chatbot for your website, this article is for you. 

For this article, the chatbots we're talking about are conversational AI chatbots with advanced natural language processing—think Claude, ChatGPT, or Google's Bard. Not the old school chatbot software that are rule based chatbots with pre-defined answers. If you've used these GPT and LLM technologies, you've experienced their power to understand context, provide detailed responses, and engage in human-like dialogue. Now, imagine harnessing that capability on your website. What you get is a 24/7 virtual assistant that can have human like conversations, guide visitors, answer questions, and tailor the experience to what each visitor is looking for. It's not just about generic recommendations; it's about creating a personalised journey for every user who lands on your site. 

For those of you already exploring how to apply ChatGPT technology in your digital strategy and are familiar with an AI chatbot platform, you're in the right place. This article isn't another AI tool comparison – you won't find a list of chatbot builders here. Instead, we're sharing our real-world experiences of deploying conversational AI chatbots across various websites. 

Our goal is to help you understand how AI chatbots offering enhanced conversational experience fits into your website strategy, what tangible benefits you can expect, and the concrete impact it can have on your online presence.

Benefits of Conversational AI Chatbot for Website Optimisation

To optimise your website effectively, you first need to understand what is driving visitors to your site, and an AI chatbot can help you do that.

When we talk to clients about implementing an AI chatbot for their website, they often come with a wish list of complex features. "Can it integrate with all my business systems like CRM, facebook messenger, instagram and all other messaging apps?" they might ask. Or, "Can it access all of my data sources, some of which are in Google Drive and OneDrive?"?

We understand the excitement. The potential of artificial intelligence seems limitless, and naturally, you want a chatbot that can do everything—integrate with all your systems, access all your data, and automate all your workflows.

But here's the reality check: an AI that does everything and integrates with everything in real time would be prohibitively expensive for most businesses. More importantly, it's not what you need to start seeing significant improvements in your website's performance.

From our experience, the most effective and economical approach is to start small with an AI chatbot trained on your website to conversationally answer any queries about your business. 

Here's why:

• Low Initial Investment: Knowledge base or FAQ chatbots are relatively simple to set up. You can start engaging customers without investing in heavy integrations or high-compute AI models. By focusing on your website's existing content as the company data, you provide value to your visitors without the need for costly infrastructure or ongoing operational expenses.
• Immediate Value: AI chatbots can instantly answer common customer questions, reducing the load on your support team.
• Insights into Visitor Behaviour: Most importantly, these chatbots act as powerful tool for getting customer feedback. They provide invaluable insights into how your visitors are interacting with your website—in their own words. You'll learn the keywords and key topics they're searching for, identify gaps in your current offerings, and understand what information they're seeking and what problems they're trying to solve. This helps prevent the common mistake many businesses make when implementing AI—assuming they know what their customers want. By gathering real data from customer interactions, you ensure that any further AI investments are aligned with actual customer needs.
• Scalability: As you learn and grow, you can easily expand your chatbot's capabilities.

Deploying an AI chatbot on your website removes the guesswork about what your visitors are looking for. It allows you to understand their needs and behaviours before investing in more complex features, enabling you to optimise your website effectively.

Case Study: The Edit LDN AI Chatbot for Website Support

The biggest mistake many businesses make when implementing AI is assuming they know what their customers want. They invest heavily in complex AI solutions, only to find that these don't address their customers' actual needs. By gathering real data from customer interactions through your chatbot, you ensure that any further AI investments are aligned with actual customer needs.

This approach—starting small and letting customer interactions guide your AI development—is exactly what we do for all our clients, including industry leaders like Charlotte Tilbury and The Edit LDN to name a few.

Focusing on SMEs and e-commerce, we'll share the AI chatbot journey of The Edit LDN, a premium trainer and streetwear marketplace. Let's explore how this strategy works in practice and the tangible benefits it brought to their online operations.

Step 1: Implementing an AI Chatbot Trained on Their Website 

The Edit LDN came to us wanting to integrate AI to improve their customer support and boost sales. Instead of immediately building a complex AI system, we started by implementing a conversational AI customer support chatbot designed to answer a wide range of questions, no matter how visitors phrased them.

It is important to note that the version 1 released required features that match the expectations of their existing audience: ‍

• Custom Training to Know the Business: This chatbot was trained on The Edit LDN's website content, including their FAQ, shipping, returns, and other policy-related pages. This enables the AI chatbot to respond more accurately and directs clients to specific source links for further reference, enhancing transparency and trust.
• Automated 24/7 Customer Support: Answers questions automatically without needing live staff. There was a handover mechanism where if the AI chatbot was unable to answer a question, it automatically sends an email to the support team with the full transcript, allowing them to easily follow up with the customer. 
• Conversational AI: Powered by OpenAI’s GPT models, it is capable of answering questions in whatever way they are asked and understands the nuances in language to respond effectively.‍
• Multilingual Capabilities: The Edit LDN serves customers globally so being able to respond in different languages was advantageous.

Step 2: Listening and Learning - Understand Your Visitors 

We let this simple yet powerful AI chatbot run for a couple of weeks, closely monitoring its interactions with customers. This observation period was crucial—it allowed us to see patterns in customer queries and identify gaps in the information provided on the website. 

There is no live chat option or handover to a person. It wasn’t necessary at this stage especially that we know people would by default click on the live chat option without exploring the self-serve solution. The aim was to understand how visitors interacted with the website - what are they asking for? What is missing from the website? Where are they coming from? 

Step 3: Analyse Chat Insights - Identifying Key Customer Needs

After analysing the chatbot data, a clear pattern emerged: a significant majority of customer queries were about order tracking. This insight was invaluable—it highlighted a major pain point for customers that wasn't being adequately addressed by the existing process.

Step 4: Adding Targeted Functionality Enhancing Customer Engagement

Armed with this insight, we added order tracking functionality to the chatbot by integrating with their Shopify Site. With seamless integration, customers could easily check the status of their orders without needing to contact customer support. 

The key difference here is that we maintained the chatbot’s conversational tone. Instead of merely listing information in bullet points, the AI engages in a more empathetic and interactive manner. This ensures that the chatbot not only delivers the required information but also enhances the overall customer experience by making interactions feel more personal and responsive.

Step 5: Continuous Improvement and Data Management

As we continued to monitor chatbot interactions, we identified other common queries. Customers frequently asked about sizing, shipping options, and return policies. We gradually added more functionality to address these needs.

Step 6: Expanding into Sales Support: AI Personal Shopper

The next big insight came when we noticed an increase in product-related queries. Customers were using the chatbot to search for products, compare options, and get recommendations. This led us to develop more advanced features, transforming the chatbot into an AI personal shopper capable of providing product recommendations and assisting with purchases.

The Result: A Custom AI Chatbot that Matches Your Website Needs

By starting small and letting customer interactions guide development, The Edit LDN ended up with an AI chatbot tailored to their customers' needs. This approach led to:

• An 80% reduction in customer service enquiries
• An 88% decrease in customer support costs
• Increased sales through personalised product recommendations

Explore The Edit LDN case study for a more in-depth look.

How to Integrate a Custom AI Chatbot on Your Website

Ready to start your own AI journey with advanced bots? Here's how you can implement this gradual, customer-centric approach to AI integration on your website: 

1. Build a Custom AI Chatbot for your website with KorticalChat
   • KorticalChat AI chatbot builder allows you to easily build a custom AI agent, trained on your business data via your website content to automate customer interaction —no coding knowledge required. Simply enter your domain name, and the platform will automatically crawl through all the pages. You can try out KorticalChat for free. If you have a Shopify website, you can try our AI personal shopper here.   
   • Customise the look and feel of your AI powered chatbot, adding your logo, and setting it to match your brand colours 
   • Test how your chatbot answers queries and, once satisfied, deploy it on your website. Deployment is as simple as copying a snippet of code and pasting it into your HTML.
2. Monitor and Analyse
   • Let your chatbot run for at least a week or two 
   • Closely monitor your chatbot's conversations and response quality
   • Look for patterns in the types of questions asked
3. Identify Key Customer Needs
   • You'll get a report that analyses your data, identifying the top queries, popular topics and message sentiments. It is a great way to see what is being asked and answered by the chatbot
   • Create FAQs to improve answers where customers seem to be struggling or where the same questions keep coming up
4. Continuous Improvement
   • Keep monitoring chatbot interactions
   • Regularly update your chatbot's knowledge base and FAQ bank if needed
   • Gradually add more advanced features as you identify new needs
5. Measure and Iterate
   • Set up key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure your chatbot's effectiveness
   • Regularly review these metrics and use them to guide further improvements
   • Consider metrics like customer satisfaction scores, resolution rates, and impact on sales

Common Challenges on Website Chatbots and How to Overcome Them

Implementing an AI chatbot, even with a start-small approach, can come with its challenges. Here are some common hurdles and how to address them:

1. Inaccurate Responses: Initially, your chatbot may sometimes provide incorrect or irrelevant answers.some text
   • Solution: Regularly review chatbot interactions and update your knowledge base in the FAQ section to improve how it answers. 
2. Lack of Personalisation: Basic chatbots might feel impersonal to users
   • Solution: As you evolve your chatbot, incorporate user data to provide more personalised responses. Even small touches like using the customer's name can make a big difference. 
3. Difficulty Handling Complex Queries: Some customer issues may be too complex for the chatbot to handle.
   • Solution: To ensure seamless support, KorticalChat includes a robust escalation process. If the chatbot encounters a query it cannot resolve, it prompts the user to fill out a support form. This form, once submitted, is automatically sent to the support team's email along with the full conversation transcript. This enables the support team to effectively understand and address the customer's needs without delay, ensuring a smoother and more responsive customer service experience.
4. User Reluctance: Some customers may be hesitant to interact with a chatbot.
   • Solution: Enhance transparency about the chatbot's capabilities and limitations. It's crucial to set realistic expectations from the onset to build user trust and comfort. Modify the chatbot's popup message and initial greeting to clearly convey its functional scope. For example, the chatbot could start with a friendly introduction such as, "Do you have questions about your order? I'm here to help!" or if you have an event to promote, “We have a 15% discount for first time purchase, ask me for more details”. 

Long-Term Benefits of an AI Chatbot for Your Website 

While the immediate benefits of implementing an AI chatbot are clear, the long-term advantages of an AI Chatbot for your website is:

1. Deep Customer Understanding: As your chatbot interacts with users, it collects valuable data that can inform not just customer service strategies but also product development, marketing, and broader business decisions. With 2.71 billion people shopping online worldwide and e-commerce sales expected to surpass $6.3 trillion in 2024, understanding customer preferences and behaviours becomes crucial for staying competitive.
2. Improved Customer Loyalty: As your chatbot becomes more sophisticated, it can offer increasingly personalised and efficient service. This leads to higher customer satisfaction and loyalty, especially important as 34% of shoppers now purchase online at least once a week.
3. Competitive Advantage: In the fast-moving world of e-commerce, where 20.1% of retail purchases are made online—a figure expected to rise to 22.6% by 2027—businesses that effectively leverage AI have a significant edge.
4. Scalability: Unlike human support teams, AI chatbots can handle virtually unlimited simultaneous interactions, allowing your business to scale customer support effortlessly as you grow. This is crucial in an environment where there are over 26.6 million eCommerce stores globally.
5. Cost-Effective 24/7 Availability: An AI chatbot provides a practical solution to provide round-the-clock support, critical in the global e-commerce landscape where customers from all time zones are shopping at all hours and 52% of online shoppers are looking for products internationally.

By integrating AI chatbots into your customer service strategy, you're positioning your website to capture a share of these vast opportunities while significantly enhancing the customer experience.

AI Chatbots are not only for e-commerce. As long as you have a website, this is a very powerful tool for you. You can check out another real-world story - Innovator International Case Study.

Conclusion: Integrate an AI Chatbot to Optimise Your Website Performance

Starting with understanding your visitors is key, and an AI chatbot is the perfect tool to begin this process. By deploying an AI chatbot on your website, you not only improve customer service but also gain critical insights into visitor interactions. These insights allow you to refine your website continuously, ensuring that it aligns more closely with user needs and preferences. This proactive approach helps in optimising the entire visitor experience, making your site more effective at meeting its goals.

Remember, the goal isn't to have the most advanced AI on day one. The goal is to create an AI assistant that genuinely helps your customers and drives real business results. By starting small and thinking big, you can achieve significant improvements in website performance and customer satisfaction.

Are you ready to start your AI journey? Taking that first small step today could transform your customer service and boost your sales with the power of AI. We're here to help you navigate this exciting new territory.

Have questions or want to learn more about implementing AI chatbots for your website? We'd love to hear from you:

• Chat with our AI expert directly through the chatbot on this page
• Submit our contact form for a personalised response or email support@kortical.com
• Book a session with one of our AI specialists to help set up your free chatbot 

Don't let the AI revolution pass you by. The future of digital work is here, and it's powered by AI. Start small, think big, and let AI chatbots transform your website.

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