LiveChat today introduced a number of new chatbot capabilities by integrating its namesake offering with its ChatBot solution, formerly known as BotEngine. The integration between the two aims to bring extended functionality to chatbots.
The LiveChat software, used by companies of various sizes and industries, has focused on high-end analytics and support features such as canned responses and message previews, but the company has been focused on automatization as a development strategy, says Dariusz Zabrzenski, head of research and development at LiveChat. “Integrating ChatBot, as a comprehensive bot-building platform, was a natural next step in following this path,” he says. “We see that bots are now great supporters of the traditional customer service teams; rich integration with our own tool works the same way, being better than the sum of its parts.”
With the integration, chatbots can now deliver rich messages—bots can mix and match text, images, buttons, and quick replies in their conversations, with the goal of delivering responses that are more personal and intuitive than plain text. Bots can also determine when human input is required and transfer customers to agents, and users can customize when such transfers should occur. Relatedly, bots can generate tickets in the LiveChat application that can be picked up by the customer service team.
Other new functions can help with chat analysis and organizing. A transcription feature can set a point in a bot’s conversation that will automatically send an email with a full transcript, with the goal of providing insight into interactions between customers and bots. The dubbed goals feature enables users to add LiveChat goals to bot scenarios with an eye on collecting information about successful purchases, positive (or negative) support, and page views. Finally, tags can be employed to automatically label ongoing conversations based on their progression, with the aim of keeping archives organized.
“The crucial challenge at the core of the LiveChat/ChatBot integration was the one faced by our customers each year—constant increase in chat numbers. This meant a further push for more efficient customer service with bots becoming our number one answer for the coming years,” Zabrzenski says. “This, however, brought another challenge of making the bot’s availability in LiveChat meaningful. Integrated ChatBot can now offer a complete customer or sales support, including checkout, in the chat window, at the same time, going far beyond simple text interactions with the use of images, product showcases or buttons.”
The integration’s new capabilities, Zabrzenski adds, also address a key point: Bots are not perfect. “Technology-human teamwork is still at the core of LiveChat, so everything still happens under the watchful eye of the customer service team, ready to take over a transferred chat or a generated ticket at any moment,” he says.