Chatbots have revolutionized business operations in many ways. It’s a digital assistant supported by AI that has the direction of various commands which can quickly solve customer queries.
Chatbots help customers to seek out information about the services, enquire about product availability, store locations, online reservations or bookings, examine the customer’s experience with the service, and far more different commands.
According to Global Web Index statistics, nearly 75% of internet users are using one or more messenger platforms. However, research shows that every user is using an average of 24 apps in a month, where 80% of the time would be in only 5–6 apps.
What is a Chatbot?
A chatbot is a program powered by rules and AI, which simulates a real interaction with users via a talking interface. In other words, a chatbot may be a service that will have a conversation with you, only sort of a real person.
Chatbots are supported by Machine Learning to collect conversational cadences and allow them to repeat human conversations and react to written or spoken requests to deliver a service. Therefore, the more conversation chatbots have with users, the more intelligent they become.
Why is Chatbots Crucial for Businesses?
Chatbots strengthen business operations to establish effective customer relations. There are many benefits of chatbots, let’s have a look at some of them.
Reduce Operational Cost
Around 265 billion customer support requests are submitted every year, which costs businesses a total of $1.3 trillion to accomplish. These costs can be significantly reduced with the assistance of AI chatbots. Consistent with Chatbots Magazine, implementing virtual agents or chatbots can help businesses to save lots of up to 30%.
Chatbots offer support and solve repetitive customer queries while freeing up service agents to handle more complex tasks and supply better service to the purchasers. Therefore, chatbots help in increasing the productivity of agents.
Companies like Autodesk, receive general inquiry calls which are quickly handled by chatbots. Virtual agents or chatbots are the primary points of contact for more complex queries.
Chatbots are predicted to affect 90% of all customer inquiries within five years. The stats suggest that by 2022, it’s expected to cut business costs by $8 billion using chatbots.
Offer Progressive Ways for Marketing and Sales
Sales are the result of serving customers in the right way with the required services. By offering better customer services, chatbots improve sales and marketing as well.
Better customer engagement – chatbots can establish personalized connections with customers, providing credible shopping advice, responding to their queries related to purchase history, and more.
Marketing funnel guidance – Chatbots offer instant replies so that the customers do not need to wait for long. They guide customers through everything related to the sale while addressing each query.
Relevant notifications – chatbots can quickly predict customer behavior. Hence, they will push the acceptable notifications to the proper people.
Increased brand value – Chatbots gather customer feedback and data and analyze it for further interactions. Hence, chatbots can effectively communicate with the proper people in the right way.
Improving sales and customer services
Chatbots are responsible for collecting customer information like name, profession, and get in touch with details to make customer profiles. Therefore, chatbots are used for sales and marketing purposes.
They seamlessly try to keep existing customers engaged with brands and products through push notifications. Chatbots act sort of a bridge between brands and customers, providing 24/7 interaction.
Improve evaluation and optimization
Chatbots need continuous evaluation and optimization for better performance. Chatbot performance must be tracked based on aspects like user experience, linguistic capabilities, and usefulness.
Chatbot optimization includes:
- Varying invites and welcome messages
- Incorporate additional information about the brand
- Adding new products
- Pricing changes
- Broadcasting new and more attractive offers
Meet customer expectations
Chatbots are well-designed to market brand values to a good range of prospects, providing friendly interactions, and creating an honest image among customers.
Customers always seek for smooth interactions and require favorable responses to their complaints or queries. Chatbots are ready to meet these expectations by instantly delivering possible solutions.
Checkout how chatbots work to meet customer expectations and improve brand value:
- Better Open Rates – Chatbots proactively interact with the clients, delivering them quick responses. They achieve higher open rates than email with this.
- Better Engagement – Chatbots send visual content and provide information regarding discount offers or product information to keep customers interested in the brand.
- Personalized User Experience – Any business needs to deliver a private experience to the customers to achieve better sales and customer satisfaction.
These factors together, secure customer retention, gain positive feedback and promote the brand.
Feature New Products and Services
Chatbots offer a useful platform for broadcasting and reaching potential audiences for the products. They keep consistent and effective customer interaction by avoiding customer frustration caused by cold calling.
It sends push notifications and features new products and services. The information is only sent to acceptable people, based on their interests so that customers feel appreciated instead of irritated. Chatbots are the most straightforward platform for explaining a business’s new products and services to consumers.
Chatbots can transform the way of selling
Business is all about reaching relevant audiences. But conventional routes make it difficult to research and predict customer interests and preferences. Chatbots have the means to vary the character of selling efforts and prepare strategies for customer service.
Offer Recommendations to Customers
It is often difficult for purchasers to decide what to shop among many products, and that is why they seek advice. Many consumers have an interest in getting recommendations from a chatbot. Chatbots can recommend similar products that customers are looking for.
Conclusion
Chatbots offer many advantages for businesses by saving finances and increasing sales and conversions. With the invention of advanced tools like AI, NLP, and machine learning, chatbots are set to become more and more intelligent, leaving the longer-term of chatbots looking very bright.