Chatbot in practice
A chatbot is an automatic assistant that holds a written conversation with whoever contacts you. There are two families: rule-based ones, which offer buttons and pre-written answers, and those based on artificial intelligence, which understand freely worded questions and reply in their own words.
For a business it is mainly useful for handling repetitive questions, even outside opening hours: opening times, indicative prices, where to park, how to book. The customer gets an answer straight away and only the requests that truly need a person reach you.
An example: a restaurant gets the same questions on WhatsApp every evening. The chatbot answers about opening times and the menu, collects the date and number of guests for a booking and hands it to the staff, who confirm it. If a question is unusual, it passes the conversation on to a member of the team.
Know the limits well. An AI-based chatbot can be wrong with great confidence, for example by making up a price or an availability: it must be restricted to the information you give it and must always be able to hand over to a person. Important decisions, such as confirmations, refunds or health advice, stay with a human being. Finally, customers leave personal data in chats: you need to know where it ends up and handle it in line with the GDPR.
