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Choosing the Right AI Chatbot for Your E-commerce Site: Why Controllable Knowledge is Key
AI Chatbots are becoming an essential tool in e-commerce, enabling businesses to engage with customers, answer questions, and drive sales 24/7. However, not all chatbots are created equal. While some out-of-the-box solutions promise instant integration, they come with significant risks, including providing irrelevant, brand-damaging, or factually inaccurate responses.
To truly add value to your e-commerce store, a chatbot must rely on a knowledge base that you can control. This ensures accuracy, relevance, and alignment with your brand. In this article, we explore the risks of generic chatbots, the importance of curating your chatbot’s knowledge base with a controllable chatbot, and how to think of the chatbot as an integral part of your content strategy.
The Pitfalls of Generic AI Chatbots
Out-of-the-box chatbots often come with pre-trained models that are not tailored to your business. This lack of customization can lead to several problems:
- Unrelated Responses: Generic AI chatbots may answer questions that have nothing to do with your business. For example, a customer could ask, “What’s the size of the moon?” and receive an irrelevant response that diminishes trust in your brand.
- Brand Damage: Without controlled knowledge, a chatbot might inadvertently promote competitor products or include unfavorable information in its answers. Imagine a customer asking, “Why is your competitor’s product better?” and receiving an answer that praises the competition.
- Hallucinations: AI hallucination occurs when a chatbot generates factually inaccurate information. This can be especially harmful if it relates to your business policies, such as shipping or return terms, potentially leading to customer dissatisfaction or even legal issues.
〝Think of your AI chatbot as an extension of your team. Just as you wouldn’t let an uninformed employee handle customer inquiries, you shouldn’t let a generic chatbot do so either〞
Why Controlling Your Chatbot’s Knowledge Matters
An AI chatbot is only as good as the knowledge it has access to. By curating its knowledge base, you ensure that it delivers accurate, brand-consistent, and useful answers. Here’s why this control is crucial:
- Accuracy: Controlled knowledge ensures the chatbot provides correct answers, reducing the risk of misinformation. It also ensures the chatbot remains on topic, focusing solely on your business and its offerings.
- Brand Alignment: Tailored responses reflect your business’s values and messaging, building trust with your customers. Additionally, by carefully excluding irrelevant or sensitive information, you can prevent the chatbot from addressing topics you want to avoid, further safeguarding your brand’s reputation.
- Enhanced Customer Experience: Relevant and helpful answers improve the overall shopping experience, increasing the likelihood of conversion. This not only helps attract repeat customers who value consistent and reliable service but also reduces the burden on support teams and minimizes product returns by ensuring customers have accurate information upfront.
- Unique Brand Voice: By allowing you to add custom information to the knowledge base, a controllable chatbot gives your brand the opportunity to stand out. Unlike the generic, common answers provided Differentiation out-of-the-box chatbots, your tailored knowledge base enables you to highlight your unique value propositions and offer distinctive, brand-specific responses.
Treating Chatbot Knowledge as Part of Your Content Strategy
To maximize the value of your chatbot, consider its knowledge base as part of your content strategy. Here are some key considerations:
- Strategic Alignment: Controllable chatbots automatically draw their answers from existing pages such as FAQs, About pages, and Contact information. This ensures that responses are relevant and aligned with your content. Additionally, you can expand the chatbot’s knowledge with supplementary information to address specific needs or campaigns, ensuring everything remains consistent with your overall content strategy.
- Dynamic Knowledge: Keep the knowledge base up-to-date with information about current promotions, events, and seasonal campaigns. Chatbots are becoming a crucial channel in e-commerce, offering a new way to engage customers throughout their purchase journey. An effective content strategy integrates valuable information across all customer touchpoints, and chatbots are a natural extension of this strategy. By ensuring your chatbot reflects your latest campaigns, it supports your marketing goals, builds relationships with your audience, and helps guide potential buyers towards conversion. For example, during a “5-Year Anniversary Sale,” the chatbot should reference relevant details, and once the campaign ends, this information should be removed to avoid confusion.
- Efficient Content Creation: Unlike traditional content, chatbot knowledge doesn’t need to be visually polished or formatted. It’s summarized and rephrased by the chatbot before reaching customers. On platforms like Shopify, you can create hidden pages that feed information to the chatbot while remaining invisible to the public.
- Source Transparency: There are always two sides to the story. While keeping some knowledge hidden can make content creation more efficient, controllable chatbots that support citing their sources bring additional advantages. Visible pages allow the chatbot to reference its sources, enhancing trust and providing customers with opportunities to navigate to the source for more detailed information. But more importantly, visible pages are indexed by search engines, contributing to your overall SEO strategy and making your content more discoverable online.
TIP: To control whether a page is hidden from your online Shopify store
- Log in to Shopify Admin.
- Navigate to Online Store > Pages.
- Click the page you want to hide.
- Scroll to the Visibility section (usually on the right side or bottom).
- Select Hidden or Set specific visibility date and uncheck the boxes for visibility options.
- Save your changes.
Essential Knowledge for Your Chatbot
A well-rounded knowledge base is the foundation of an effective controllable chatbot. If it is not already included in your store pages, at a minimum, your chatbot’s knowledge should contain:
- Answers to common industry questions about products, shipping, returns, contact options and policies.
- Information about your brand story and unique value propositions.
- Details of current promotions, campaigns, and seasonal events.
In general, you don’t need to add product information into the chatbot’s knowledge, as it should already be provided by your high-quality product descriptions. A good chatbot will automatically draw product-specific and product-comparison answers from these descriptions. However, there are cases where supplementary information is helpful, such as details that apply to all products (e.g., "All our products are made from environmentally friendly materials") or answers to common visitor questions like "What is your best product?" or "What do you recommend for XYZ?" Adding these ensures that new customers get a comprehensive and guided experience.
Remember, an AI chatbot is only as knowledgeable as you make it. Be sure to include key information that many customers will need, ensuring the chatbot is well-equipped to assist visitors effectively.
WiseCues: A Controllable AI Chatbot
WiseCues is a powerful solution for businesses seeking a controllable and dynamic chatbot that enhances both customer experience and business outcomes. Unlike generic chatbots, WiseCues combines the best of AI chat and search capabilities to provide tailored, accurate, and brand-aligned answers. It allows you to:
- Controllable Knowledge Base: WiseCues automatically draws its answers from your store pages and product descriptions, ensuring that the chatbot provides accurate and brand-aligned responses. By adding pages, you can control the knowledge it uses to assist customers. Some pages can be marked as hidden (not visible to customers) but still usable by the AI, allowing you to provide additional information without cluttering the customer-facing experience. Tailor the chatbot’s knowledge to reflect your brand, business needs, and evolving campaigns.
- Source Transparency: WiseCues provides the reference link to the page where it found its answer alongside the response, giving customers transparency and confidence in the information they receive.
WiseCues is an all-in-one search and chatbot solution that turns your search bar into a smart shopping assistant. By unifying both functionalities into a single touchpoint, it simplifies customer interactions while ensuring they receive accurate, brand-aligned responses. By empowering customers to find products, get answers, and make decisions faster, WiseCues reduces support costs, increases sales, and helps convert visitors into loyal customers.
Conclusion
Choosing the right chatbot for your e-commerce store is about more than just convenience. It’s about ensuring accuracy, protecting your brand, and enhancing the customer experience. By opting for a chatbot with a controllable knowledge base, you can turn every customer interaction into an opportunity to build trust and drive sales.
Ready to transform your e-commerce experience? Explore how WiseCues can turn your search bar into a smart, reliable shopping assistant.
