Local bookstore owner looking to modernize: Need advice on an AI customer support

[Liam Mon]

Hello everyone,

A bit of background: I run a local bookstore here in my country with shopify. We’ve been doing pretty well locally, and our website gets a very honest amount of monthly visitors. But, I want to take the shop a bit further and modernize it.

With the whole "AI wave" happening, it got me thinking: why not have a customer support widget on the website that can actually take voice calls and answer customer questions? I want something that I can train on my website so it knows all my book descriptions, inventory, and store hours.

I did some research and came across Intercom. It looks incredibly powerful, but to be completely honest, it’s quite complex for me and the pricing seems very high for a small business. I'm a little old for this haha, but I'm still trying to stay in the flow!
I found a few other alternatives with free tiers that I'd love to try first (I am willing to upgrade to a paid plan once I see it working well since we have the traffic for it):

• Tawk.to: I know it's free and popular, but does it actually have good AI that learns from my website, or is it mostly manual chat?
• Chirps.cc: This one caught my eye because it apparently does the same and takes actual voice calls in realtime and generates custom UI (like order forms etc) right in the chat.
• Crisp: Seems like a solid middle ground.

Can any experts here advise me on which of these is the easiest to set up for an e-commerce store? I just want something that learns about my books and can talk to my customers chat and voice would be very cool.

I would appreciate any guidance!

 

[Ozzy]

Hi @Liam Mon
Before you make the investment into putting something AI in place just because of an 'AI wave' are you sure you need an AI thing?

I would suggest running chat manually first yourself or with your team, answering the questions personally, and get a feel for what your customers want. My advice would be then, and only then, look at what chat bot fits the needs of your customers.

If feels like you are putting the cart before the horse.

 

[fisicx]

The other consideration when using a chatbot of any flavour is training. You could easily end up spending months teaching the bot about your business. As @Ozzy suggests, start with you answering the questions. Get a feel for how many questions are asked, the type of questions and how easy it is to provide the answer. If they are all highly complex would you want to trust a bot to get it right?

 

[Paul Kelly ICHYB]

What you might find is that when you start answering the questions, the issue/s is somewhere that you can adjust elsewhere, without AI.

 

[Ozzy]

The short answer is treat using AI like hiring a new trainee member of staff.
Before you hire a trainee you need to have an expert at the role working for you already, and have the process the trainee will follow fully documentated and easy to understand. Then tested thoroughly. Then, and only then, do you hire your new trainee and start training them.