Chatbot
A chatbot is a program that holds a text conversation with clients in a messenger or website chat, answering by fixed rules, buttons or a language model.
What it is
A chatbot replaces or prepares a human reply. The simplest ones work by buttons and keywords: the client picks “Order status” and gets a ready answer. More advanced ones understand free text and generate replies. In both cases the bot takes the repetitive part of the work so that people deal with what actually needs a person.
How it looks in practice
Common tasks: greeting and collecting basic data, answering frequent questions, sending a status or a reminder, booking a time, routing the client to the right department. The useful measures are the share of conversations solved without a human, the share handed over to a person, the drop-off point where clients give up and the satisfaction of those who talked only to the bot.
An illustrative example: 40% of questions are about delivery dates. A bot that answers them correctly frees a noticeable part of the team’s day.
Why it matters
A bot answers at night, on weekends and at peaks, when the line is overloaded. It shortens the first response and makes simple requests instant. For a manager it is a way to move people from routine to conversations that bring money or prevent losses.
The typical mistake
Hiding people behind the bot. When the client cannot reach a human, writes the same question three times and gets the same useless menu, effort and anger rise, and the client leaves. Another risk is a bot that gives confident wrong answers about money, terms or legal matters. Limit the bot to what it does reliably, give a clear way to a person at any step, pass the conversation history with the handover, and read the chats where clients gave up.
More in Signals
- Chatbot or a human manager: where an auto-reply helps sales and where it kills themA chatbot is good where speed and simple actions decide: reply instantly, point the way, route to the right person, don't leave a customer waiting at night. Where money is decided — objections, negotiation, collection, trust — you need a human. The rule is simple: a bot buys time until a person; it doesn't replace them where the other side makes the decision.
- Viber CRM: what a sales leader should settle before choosingBefore choosing a CRM for Viber, a sales leader settles five things: whose name the numbers and phones are in, who owns the conversations, who sees what in the chats, what the company gives to the official business channel and what to people, and what happens to clients when a number gets limited. Legality, recipients’ consent and data location are worked out separately — against platform rules, your country’s law and with a lawyer.