Benjamin.M.V.
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According to a study conducted by Accenture Digital, 57% of businesses that use chatbots can benefit from larger ROI with minimal effort. Moreover, according to Statista, in 2017, 34% of consumers preferred to communicate with artificial intelligence in an online retail situation. Also, customers outlined that 24-hour service is their favorite feature.
What are Chatbots?
Chatbots are software programs using artificial intelligence and natural language processing to comprehend human needs and guide them to their desired result with as little work for the end consumer as possible, just like a digital helper for your client experience touchpoints.
The adoption of chatbots was hastened in 2016 when Facebook opened its developer platform and demonstrated to the world what's possible with chatbots via their Messenger program. Google also entered in the game shortly afterwards with Google Assistant. Since that time, there have been enormous chatbot programs built on sites, in programs, on social networking, for customer service, and innumerable other cases.
What is the technology behind Chatbots?
Chatbots are a great way to offer valuable support to your customers. What makes it so interesting is the technology behind chatbots, Natural Language Processing, Deep Learning, and Artificial Intelligence.
What are the benefits of Chatbots?
Chatbots are more than just chat boxes. Chatbots can be a valuable tool that your business can benefit from. As stated before, chatbots can help you handle customer support, but if you think outside the box, you will find out that chatbots can do much more than that - helping people order pizza, or book a flight, and even guiding customers through a complex sales process.
Why are Chatbots important?
Depending on your needs chatbots can take any form you want - for example, if you are a beauty salon you can use a chatbot as a customer service tool, so it can make reservations without any human being involved in the process. If you are a big B2B company you can use more evolved chatbots, such as AI chatbots, to help you guide customers through the sales process.
Chatbots can add value to your business, helping you automate business processes, generate qualified leads and take your customer service to the next level.
PROs:
✔️ You will recover the initial investment, by reducing labour costs
✔️ Customer service 24/7
✔️ You will add massive value to your business
CONs:
❌ Depending on what you need, chatbots can be pretty expensive
❌ They can’t replace human interaction completely, as there are some situations when humans are needed
❌ It is not suitable for all business, as some businesses have special needs that can be too complex for a chatbot (not impossible, though, but the cost would be substantial)
What business can use Chatbots?
Any type of business can use chatbots as long as their needs are not too complex, as it wouldn’t be a practical choice for the business (especially, from a cost perspective).
Getting started with Chatbots:
- Creating chatbots is a complicated process and you should ask a specialised company to help you. But in the meantime, you can plan the strategy behind the chatbot.
- First things first, this is why the audience is the starting point. Therefore, you should picture your ideal customer. Get to know him/her better, their needs and their expectations.
- Now is the time to set a goal. What do you want to achieve by adding a chatbot to your website?
- Set some metrics and take all the necessary steps to achieve them. You can do this by creating the right conversational activities that will eventually meet your metrics.
- Think about the user journey - think about what the chatbot will be able to do and what it won’t do. Make sure you outline these key intents.
- Now think about all possible scenarios and take care of the storytelling process. Plan the whole communication process - how the chatbot will start the conversation, what information it needs from the user, etc.
- Try and keep it simple. As you might know, chatbots can’t perform complicated requests.
- When you have all the information you need, start the research and find the best company that can build the chatbot for your business.
5 Ways to Use Chatbots for Marketing and Sales
1. Larger participation capacity
Chatbots are exceptional since they not only interact with your customers they also keep them. For instance, let's say you capture your audience's attention with a video. Although this video might be highly engaging, it does not have much more to offer you even after it finishes. A chatbot can grab your audience's attention and learn from the discussion, enabling it to send pertinent information about your brand, products, and solutions. It is in a position to up-sell and cross-sell in a personalised, conversational, and engaging manner.
2. Reach a wider audience
Since chatbots are mostly found on societal networking messaging platforms, they can achieve a virtually infinite audience. They could reach a brand new client base for your brand by tapping into new demographics. They can be incorporated across multiple messaging programs, making you more easily accessible to assist your clients. This, then, opens new opportunities for one to boost earnings.
3. Collect and analyse customer feedback and data
Furthermore, your chatbot can examine opinions and other information it collects from users with the ideal machine learning instruments, providing you insight into exactly what your audience desires. From that point, you can redesign your promotion approach to be focused on your client's needs, thus generating more of an inbound advertising strategy.
Your chatbot delivers the ideal chance for you to collect feedback from the clients. Unless there is an incentive to do so, folks do not wish to devote their time to completing polls. A chatbot softens the method of collecting comments by naturally introducing questions to their discussions.
4. Move your customers seamlessly through the sales funnel
Lead nurturing is a fundamental part of every organisation's marketing plan; unfortunately, it is also highly time-consuming. Chatbots permit you to collect the information you want to produce then personalised messages that may help guide your customers through their purchaser's journey.
To make your chatbot lead-nurturing efforts as robust as possible, collect the information you want and run a few A/B tests with your own personalised messages. With this, you're going to have the ability to tailor your advertising efforts to every lead that visits your site or societal networking profiles.
5.Keep your social media active
Expecting your client support staff to have the ability to reply to every query in your social networking profiles isn't unrealistic but also incredibly time-consuming, and therefore, expensive. Having a chatbot makes yourself accessible to customers 24 hours a day, seven days per week. Besides saving you money, chatbots can allow you to maintain your social networking presence active and fresh.
