The Importance of the Small Talk in an AI Chatbot

What many people don’t realize is that AI is not just about creating robots that can do our mundane jobs. It’s also about creating devices and software that can interact with us on a more personal level. We all know the feeling of talking to a customer service agent like we’re talking to a robot. It’s frustrating, and it can make us feel disconnected from the company we’re trying to connect with.

But is the opposite possible? Could we talk to a robot that could hold a human-like conversation? Absolutely possible! That’s the power of chatbots with conversational AI. They could make us feel like we are talking to another human being.

Small talk chat training might seem like a pointless exercise, but it’s essential for building strong relationships, decent feels-natural communication, and a Wow-experience.

As we move into an increasingly digital world, it’s more important than ever to find ways to replicate the warmth and connection of face-to-face conversation. A good practice is to train the AI chatbot to greet customers, tell funny jokes, say thank you and goodbye, to ask if it can help with something more or relevant to your business small talk topics (e.g. cooking recipes, good luck texts, witty comments or else). You can train your chatbot on how to answer topics such as compliments or existential questions. You can even teach your bot on how to handle rude and aggressive words from customers – it happens to the employees of all businesses occasionally to handle a conversation with such customers. Use the AI chatbot to deal with them in a polite and calm way to give them what they want right away around the clock.

The small talk answers are a must if you want to keep your customers satisfied and thank you for the assistance. The Umni platform provides a pretrained small talk set, feel free to ask our team to load it to your AI chatbot when you start training it on the Umni platform. Don’t forget to customize and personalize the answers in this or other pretrained sets to your business and customers’ needs. Umni also has a pretrained hotel AI module that instantly recognizes and answers 750+ hotel topics with 8000+ customer questions behind which means the AI chatbot starts working from day 1. Our clients, the 5-star hotel Casa di Fiore Medical & Spa and the hotel complex Izgreva, are already using it and achieving better results each month.

Here is an example of a real small-talk conversation between a potential client of hotel complex Izgreva and their AI chatbot Izgrevcho: A potential client asked about the prices for the pool visit and the bot answers the question right away. Next, the customer thanked the chatbot and the bot thanked him/her too. As the person answered once again with OK, the chatbot is taking the conversation further asking if there is something else that it could help with. Then, the customer wrote “goodbye” and the chatbot “waved” a goodbye with additional info that Izgrevcho was glad he helped. This chat could happen between the guest and the hotel employee. That’s why small talks are so important and a must to have in your chatbot. It means a satisfied customer and a satisfied business with the assistance of an AI chatbot made on the Umni platform. Do you want your customers to be so satisfied too? Contact us to start your AI chatbot journey!