7 Ways Chatbots Are Taking Your Business To New Heights
Updated on: 4 August 2021
Nowadays, consumers are becoming savvier, which means that they have more demands from the brands that they associate themselves with. This is especially true when it comes to the way brands interact with them.
Consumers nowadays want to interact with anyone in real-time. A report published by Ubisend entitled “Chatbot Statistics Cheatsheet” says that “35% of consumers want to see more companies using chatbots.” MIT Technology Review and Genesys also released a report showing that “90% of firms already using AI to boost customer service experience and increase revenue.” More and more businesses are leveraging these AI-powered programs to improve the way they communicate with their audience and deliver the best experience to their customers.
How chatbots impact business growth
Integrating chatbots into your marketing strategy has numerous benefits. They are incredibly helpful in helping businesses establish lasting relationships with customers.
Here are the compelling benefits of using chatbots in your marketing strategy.
1. Gives your company a face
It’s important for a consumer to be able to associate a brand with a face. It gives them a sense of security knowing that they are dealing with real people. Chatbots can help give your company a face, making your brand seem more personable, more customer-friendly. With AI technologies, like Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, and Microsoft’s Cortana, conversational interfaces have been made simpler. Because of that, customers are more inclined to spend more time engaging with a company.
Chatbots are the first touchpoint for your business. This is why they need fantastic personalities that make people feel at ease the minute an AI-powered messaging program answers their queries. It’s also a huge factor that will influence a buyer’s decision.
To determine the right personality for your company’s chatbots, you will need to consider several factors, like your brand identity, the target audience’s preferences, and the tasks that the bots need to perform. Also, the choice of the name and profile picture of the chatbots define their personalities, representing your company’s brand identity in a creative way.
Nowadays, AI and chatbots are being used by more than 1,000 global companies to harmonize brand experiences across various business processes, including customer service, marketing, and sales, as well as the management of noncustomer external relationships where brand power is crucial.
2. Makes you available to your customers 24/7
Unlike traditional customer service, chatbots can be available around the clock to answer customer queries even late at night and on weekends. Even when there is a surge of requests, chatbots can easily process them all at once without you worrying about overworking it. In the event that messaging bots are not able to answer a question or solve a problem, the query can be escalated to a human employee through live chat during office hours or email the next business day.
By integrating chatbots in your customer service process, you are balancing automation with a human touch, which should help you deliver seamless customer support. Leveraging the use of live chat software and chatbots allows customers to solve common issues on their own, helping your business save money on overhead costs when hiring in-house employees. On top of that, it can help you deliver real-time support, which means that you are able to answer queries promptly, boosting customer satisfaction. To simply put it, integrating live chat and chatbot can improve customer engagement and increase your sales.
3. Lessens customer service costs
Using chatbots is an investment that helps your business save a lot of money on your customer service strategy. It can save you the added costs of hiring more agents, including salaries, training, and infrastructure, to provide customer support. In other words, chatbots can help you optimize your capital without compromising the quality of your customer service.
Integrating chatbots into your customer service strategy can also help you scale your chat support during peak times without the added costs. You’ll be able to increase your revenues without incurring additional expenses when hiring more people during holidays and weekends to cater to customers. Aside from that, you can ensure a much simpler and more seamless brand experience for your customers with AI-powered chatbots without spending more.
4. Lays the foundation for conversational marketing strategy
Chatbots start a dialogue with prospective customers by responding to questions and solving problems instead of using a fixed lead funnel that’s filled with marketing pitches that force people to buy something. Chatbots can be great channels for your conversational marketing strategy, which takes the idea of dialogue-based marketing up a notch.
Chatbots are designed to take the communication from the corporate website to an AI-powered assistant, making communication between a business and its audience closer to everyday conversations that can help buyers move through the sales funnel. This is because these bots engage people through targeted messaging, increasing the conversion rate.
But why do businesses need a conversational marketing strategy? For one, it generates more leads since companies do not seem like they’re forcing people to fill out forms to gather data. For another, bots can be programmed to respond to customers with personalized messages. On top of that, this AI-powered software is proven to improve customer experience since you can cut back on unpleasant experiences that put off customers.
5. Makes monitoring consumer data easier
As already mentioned, chatbots are excellent tools to help your business communicate better with customers. Through the interactions between your chatbots and your target market, you will be able to collect important data that can be used to improve your products/services, customer service, and even your website. Chatbots can reach out to visitors and collect information through a survey to understand why a lot of people leave your page without purchasing anything.
To track purchasing patterns, chatbots can monitor data and observe customer behaviors. This will help your company decide which products to market more and which to redevelop and relaunch. Chatbots can also track and predict commands and responses from customers to allow businesses to suggest a more appropriate solution to the users. Additionally, bots can help companies direct sales and marketing personnel on how best to provide personalized services.
6. Meets customer expectations
Every customer expects to have smooth interactions and fast transactions all the time. Moreover, they want to receive quick responses to complaints. Thankfully, chatbots are increasingly becoming smarter, ensuring companies that they will be able to meet customer expectations through these AI-powered bots.
One of the advantages of integrating chatbots into your digital marketing strategy is that customers can easily engage with your company anytime they want. This ensures customer retention and helps boost your brand identity. Through chatbots, you’ll also be able to provide a personalized experience to every customer, which is what everyone expects from all brands. In addition, chatbots allow for effective targeting and boosting of customer engagement through product information, discounts, offers, and the like.
7. Makes the customer journey a more pleasant one
One of the situations that businesses want to avoid is losing prospects halfway through the sales process. There are several reasons why a potential buyer would not push through with the purchase. It can be a long and cumbersome checkout process or the presence of hidden costs. Using chatbots can help your company effectively prevent customers from dropping out of the sales funnel and more importantly, ensure a more pleasant buying experience.
Chatbots can be programmed to offer additional information on your products or services, eliminating any doubts first-time buyers may have. To add more value to your marketing funnel, chatbots can also provide discount codes and special offers that a lot of customers really appreciate. This can also help foster trust between you and new visitors, which should provide you more insights on how you can better serve them in the future.
Preparing for the future with chatbots
Overall, chatbots are transforming the customer communication landscape. They are integrated into various digital marketing strategies to improve customer service, engagement, sales, and marketing. By leveraging chatbot advantages, your company can improve lead generation, customer insights, and customer support.
To ensure that you’ll be able to maximize the use of chatbots in your business, you need to first identify the areas where you can make the most of such technology. Only then can you start using chatbots to achieve your goals.