Top 7 Chatbot Benefits Your Business Can’t Afford To Miss
Did you know that 2020 is becoming the year of the chatbot?
Chatbots have grown and improved their features. A chatbot is just like how a real person has a personalized conversation with you. Most businesses have started to utilize them to provide proactive support and supercharge their customer service experience to the next level. They have been on the rise and help explode the popularity of messaging apps, the accelerated development of all kinds of sensors and wearables with the rise of emerging technologies and Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Let’s dive into the top 7 chatbot benefits and how they can contribute to your business.
1) Keeping up with the trends and being present on messaging platforms
Most customers these days prefer to interact with brands via chat as it’s easier and faster to use. Now, businesses have the opportunity to reach more customers via chatbots while staying trendy for their customers. Furthermore, 65% of smartphone users don’t download any new apps in a month. Since users have their core apps such as Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp, they don’t look for new ones! Therefore, integrating your own chatbot into one of the popular platforms that your customers use daily, can be better than building a new app by saving money and time.
2) Improved Customer Service: Extensive Customer Assistance
A recent survey shows that 83% of online shoppers need proactive support during shopping. So, your customers may require help trying to understand which products fit their needs at any time of the day. In fact, shoppers may not find what they’re looking for due to navigation issues.
A) Provide assistance in real-time
In all these situations, chatbots can provide assistance in real-time like a salesperson in a real store. Moreover, chatbots can offer interactive communication where they also ask questions to understand the real issue. What’s more riveting? Along with text and voice, they can present customers rich content with product pages, images, blog entries, tutorial videos based on their responses that can help them through their journey.
B) Always-Available Customer Support
According to research by Gartner, customer service is the most important factor in success. So, whether you are an international or a local business, having good customer service 24/7 has a positive impact on your customer satisfaction. The customer support process can be improved with the help of chatbots. Bots can be programmed to give automated answers to repetitive questions immediately and forward the request to a real person when a more complicated action is needed. This enables human customer service representatives to save time and assist more important cases rather than time-consuming simple tasks. Additionally, with the help of chatbots, organizations can handle more tasks at the same time so that no customer has to wait.
C) Proactive Customer Interaction
In general, companies apply a “Passive Customer Interaction”, which means that they only respond to customers when they are contacted and not initiate the communication. In competitive businesses – especially with a remarkable percentage of millennials as customers, none of the brands have the luxury to act passive anymore. Most organizations do not have enough manpower to initiate a communication with all of their customers constantly, chatbots allow you to start a conversation with each customer, regarding any issue, any time of the day. This will make your customers feel that your brand is one step ahead, like a friend who is available 24/7 and obviously improves your brand awareness.
3) Increased customer engagement
Chatbots can make the engagement more personalized and interactive especially with a great sense of humor! Needless to say, it’s important to keep your customers engaged with your brand. According to research, companies that engage with their customers on social media were able to increase the customer spend by 20% to 40%. A conventional customer service interface usually provides more information than it receives from the users.
However, Chatbots, in contrast, give only a slice of information at a time and can lead the interaction based on the input the user provides at each specific time. Therefore, chatbots don’t bore customers with irrelevant and unnecessary information and keep your customers on your platform longer and keep the content flowing by maintaining the conversation.
4) Monitoring Customer Data and Gaining Insights
As mentioned above, chatbots are great tools to communicate with customers. With the feedback they collect through simple questions, you can make improvements on your services/products and even optimize your website by adjusting low converting pages. For example, if your landing page generates a good amount of organic traffic but doesn’t convert well, your chatbot can reach out to customers visiting this page with a survey to collect more information on why they are leaving the page without purchasing.
Chatbots can be also used to track purchasing patterns and consumer behaviors by monitoring user data. According to Forbes , this helps a company to decide “Which products to market differently, which to market more and which to redevelop for relaunch”. In other words, companies can track the commands and responses given by their users to the chatbot, predict the responses based on consumer language and direct the bot to suggest a different or a more convenient product or service to the users.
5) Better Lead Generation, Qualification and Nurturing
Personalized messaging that assists consumers along the “Buyer’s journey” is possible with the consumer information that chatbots receive. A bot can ask the necessary and related questions, persuade the user and generate a lead for you. Chatbots ensure the flow is in the right direction to get higher conversion rates.
In addition to generating potential customers and notifying the sales teams, a chatbot can also help you to determine the unqualified leads through identified KPIs (budget, relevancy, timeline, resources, etc and prevent you from dealing with time-consuming leads.
6) An easier approach to global markets
Whether you are already an international brand with customers all over the world or a local brand who is ready for global business, chatbots can solve your customer care problems in multiple languages and 24/7, 365 days a year. This allows your business to scale up its operations to new markets without having to worry about multiplying incoming requests to be handled.
7) Cost Savings
First of all, implementing a full functioning chatbot is much cheaper and faster than creating a cross-platform app. Businesses have a variety of options from ready-made software developed by Facebook, Microsoft and other big IT companies to choose. Since chatbots are automated solutions, they allow organizations to handle many customers at once, and simultaneously. By “Hiring” chatbots that complement human agents, you will not only save on employee costs but you will also avoid the problems caused by human errors.
Lastly, because customers can easily access chatbots within seconds and start interaction immediately. As we can witness, chatbots can be a great yet comprehensive tool for employees for relatively basic and repetitive tasks with enormous speed, easy to implement, maintain and use.
Source:
https://www.digitaldoughnut.com/articles/2017/october/top-7-benefits-of-chatbots-for-your-business
