Top 14 Chatbot Features to Have in 2023

This decade belongs to chatbots. It might sound like a big claim. But look at these numbers.

• By 2024, the global chatbot market is estimated to surpass $994 million

• By 2023, money generated from chatbot usage is projected to be $112 billion

• In 2022, 70% of white-collar workers engaged with chatbots daily

These stats indicate the massive scope of growth and rapid adoption rate that chatbots have. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. As we move forward in this decade, you’ll see even more rapid growth as more businesses from across niches start leveraging chatbots, giving rise to new chatbot use cases.

If you also want to start leveraging chatbots for your business, you must ensure that you choose the right chatbot. For starters, you must ensure that it has all the must-have chatbot features that enable you to tap its full potential.

But what are these must-have chatbot features? If you are also having this question, then keep reading this article where we listed the top 15 features that you must have in your chatbot.

Top 14 Chatbot Features You Must Consider

1. No-code Bot Builder

If you’re someone who wants to create a chatbot from scratch and that too without depending on anybody, this chatbot feature is a must. As the name suggests, a chatbot builder helps you to create a chatbot conversation the way you want.

For the best chatbot-building experience, you could go for a no-code bot builder. With this, you can build a bot without any coding. All you have to do is, create and drag & drop various action blocks on the bot builder’s visual interface.

Here, the key is to ensure that the bot builder is easy to use. Because if it is not, It will take more time to learn and create various conversation flows. Also, you may not be able to take advantage of its full potential, resulting in you making mediocre quality chatbots.

WotNot’s no-code bot builder is close to what an ideal bot builder feature should look like. It is because apart from it being easy to use, it comes with a bunch of additional chatbot features that make your bot-building experience further simpler, faster, and more fun. Some of these features are:

a. Auto Layout

This feature declutters and uncomplicates your chatbot flow by neatly arranging all the action blocks on the canvas.

b. Auto-save Changes

As the name suggests, it auto-saves the changes, enabling you to pick up where you last left off.

c. Undo Redo

Easily go back and forth to make or reset changes on the chat flow.

d. Minimap

Get a bird’s eye view of the entire chatbot with the minimap feature.

2. Analytics Dashboard

Collecting or recording data is one thing but presenting it in a way that tells the actual story of your business is another. This is where the robust analytics dashboard feature comes into the picture. This chatbot feature helps you draw critical business insights from the data presented graphically on the dashboard.

In addition, with an analytics dashboard, you get to visualize business impact with various KPIs like:

• Business Value Generated

• Hours Saved

• Cost Saved

• Hours Saved

• CSAT

• Average Conversation Duration

• Engagement Percentage

• Conversion Percentage

• Abandonment Percentage

All these KPIs help you to know how your chatbot is performing. With this, you can identify its strong and weak areas. And accordingly, take appropriate measures to remove bottlenecks.

3. Live Chat Handover

Chatbots are great for engaging users in conversations and solving their queries. However, there are scenarios when chatbots cannot take the conversation forward. This might happen when:

• The bot finds the query too complex to solve

• The user asks the bot to connect them with a human

In both scenarios, you would want your human agents to enter the chat and take the conversation forward. This is exactly what live chat handover allows you to do.

Here, the seamless transition between the bot and the human agent is the key. This transition should be such that it delivers a smooth chat experience whether the conversation is carried out by a bot or a human. Also, the chat should be assigned to the right team or agent with the required proficiency to address the customer’s issue.

4. Outbound Campaigns

Why wait for customers to visit you when you can reach out to them? This is exactly the principle outbound campaigns are based on. With the help of outbound bots, you can create outbound campaigns to proactively reach out to your target audience through multiple messaging channels like SMS and WhatsApp.

No matter how many contacts you have, with outbound campaigns, you can send messages to all of them within seconds.

You can use outbound campaigns for several activities like

• Promoting a new offer

• Collecting feedback

• Cart abandonment recovery

With WotNot, outbound bots become even more effective as it allows you to create a sequence of messages that can be sent to the contacts with defined intervals in between.

5. Sentiment Analysis

When we say a chatbot must converse in a human-like way, we mean that it should have emotional intelligence. Yes, you can draft witty and creative message templates to make the conversation more engaging. But how your bot would respond to the high intensity of emotions shown by the users also matters a lot.

After all, you don’t want your bot to reply plainly, even if the user is angry or frustrated. Instead, you would want the bot to quickly analyze the emotion and respond to them accordingly. This is where sentiment analysis comes into the picture.

Sentiment analysis is an advanced chatbot feature that determines the emotion behind a customer’s message. It is basically about analyzing thoughts, sentiments, or opinions from text or audio. And then influencing customer satisfaction levels. Use of this feature can add tremendous value to your customer service chatbots.

6. Chatbot Widget Customization

To make your bot more authentic, you need chat widget customization. This chatbot feature helps you to inculcate the core messaging for your brand into your bot’s persona.

In addition, it also allows you to draft engaging welcome greetings that sets the tone for the conversation that follows.

Key areas where you can customize your bots are:

a. Display Name

Name your chatbot that reflects the brand persona of your business.

b. Tagline

Choose a tagline that aligns with your brand’s needs.

c. Bot Avatar

Select the suitable avatar that gives the right feel to your users.

d. Channels

Choose channels on which the chatbot will be active, like WhatsApp, web, or Facebook.

e. Bot Accuracy Level

With this, you can select queries that match the accuracy level percentage.

7. Third-party Integrations

Businesses worldwide use various third-party applications like Salesforce, Hubspot, Zendesk, Slack, and many others for various purposes. And often, customers are looking for chatbots that can easily integrate with these tools, which allows them to:

• Fetch important data, analysis, and reports from your systems

• Eliminate manual effort and save time

• Automate lead creation on CRMs

With third-party integrations feature, you can cater to these needs and empower your customers to make the most of their chatbots.

There are several companies that offer integrations in different manners. For example, WotNot offers integrations in a whole different way. It offers native integrations for several well-known tools. In addition, it also allows you to make direct HTTP requests to tools that are not natively supported.

8. Omnichannel Capabilities

Omnichannel strategy and service have become an integral part of businesses worldwide due to their high effectiveness. Businesses adopting this approach have achieved 91% greater customer retention than others.

You can allow your clients to enjoy this same success by empowering your chatbots with omnichannel capabilities. With this, your clients can implement chatbots on multiple channels like:

• Website

• WhatsApp

• Facebook Messenger

• SMS

With omnichannel chatbots, brands can capture their customers’ preferences and interests. In addition, it also enables them to use past interactions to drive future conversations.

More importantly, customers don’t have to repeat themselves with omnichannel chatbots. This is because chatbots can offer contextual support across all channels.

9. Rich Media Message Support

One of the major reasons to use chatbots is to engage customers in a human-like conversation. And if you’re doing it with just texts, then you probably need to reconsider your strategy. It is because the usage of only texts makes the chatbot’s interface look quite dull and uninteresting.

This makes rich media message support one of the major chatbot features. With this feature, your chatbot can support images, GIFs, carousels, buttons, emojis, calendars, videos, and many more. These inclusions make your chatbot UI more lively and your conversations more engaging.

As a result, you can expect to see visitors talk to your chatbot longer, and see better conversion rates.

10. Data Security

Chatbot is an amazing technology, but it is not 100% immune from cyber security threats. This becomes even more crucial if you are looking for an enterprise chatbot since there is no margin for any security lapse in that case. To ensure that your chatbot is secure, there are several chatbot security practices that you can follow.

But first, to ensure that your chatbot is highly secure, you must ensure that it has all the required security features like:

a. End to End Encryption

End to end encryption makes your chatbot secure against the possibility of hackers spoofing data in transit. You can use Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) to establish an encrypted link between a web server and a client. This feature prevents any third person from peeping into the messages.

b. Self-destructing Messages

These messages destroy themselves after a certain interval. Thus, there is no trace left, and also no one can recover them.

c. Hosting Data on Premise

In the government and finance sector, there is a demand for extra data security. To ensure this, you can decide to choose the chatbot that offers you the option of hosting your data on your premise locally. With this, you will be able to know who has access to your data.

d. Two-factor Authentication

This security feature ensures that users confirm their identity through two different platforms to access the chatbot. Here, a verification code is sent to the phone number or email. On entering the correct code, the user is granted access to the chatbot.

11. Version Control

Chatbot building can be complicated, especially when it involves large and complex flow charts. In such complex flow charts, the chat designer must have the required visibility of all the changes made by him.

Version control is a feature that does exactly the same. It allows chatbot designers to maintain multiple versions of all your deployments. Not only this, but also you can easily fall back to a previous version whenever required.

This is quite similar to Google Docs, where you can view, maintain, and restore previous versions of your docs with just a click.

12. Nested flows

An ideal chatbot builder must enable its users to create complicated conversation flows. For this, it is required to have some special chatbot features. One of such chatbot features is nested flows.

It is a WotNot exclusive feature that allows users to create a subflow within the main flow. With this, users can uncomplicate a long and complex flow.

Have a look at the GIF below to see how it works.

13. Chatbot Trigger Rule

Businesses usually create multiple chatbots deployed on multiple channels performing different operations. Now, here they must decide which chatbot should trigger and when. For this, you must have a chatbot feature that helps you to trigger your chatbots at the right time.

A chatbot trigger rule is a feature that makes it possible. To trigger a chatbot, you can define several triggering rules like:

• Date range

• Languages

• URLs

14. Evaluate Path Flows

Creating and deploying chatbots is not the end of the story, you also have to ensure that they are performing well. Although dashboard analytics provide you with key KPIs that show how good or bad they are performing, it doesn’t identify the issues in the conversation flow, if it has any.

Path flow heatmap is a chatbot feature that addresses and resolves this issue. This feature provides a graphical representation of how users interact with the chatbot. It shows how many users are engaging in various conversation blocks in a percentage. With this, it becomes easier to identify the blocks where they are engaging the least or abandoning the chat.

For example, if the engagement percentage drops considerably in a conversation block, it means most users are abandoning the chat from that message. So, accordingly, you can change your flow to improve your engagement rates.

Conclusion

So, that was the list of the top chatbot features. These chatbot features will help you unlock your chatbot's full potential to gain maximum results. If you are looking for a chatbot with all these chatbot features, then WotNot will end your quest. Experience it yourself by signing up for free and building your first bot on our bot builder.