What Are Chatbots, Benefits And The Right Steps to Set Them Up?
What Are CHATBOTS?
Chatbot, short for chatterbot, is an artificial intelligence (AI) feature that can be embedded and used through any major messaging application.
Thanks to AI-powered chatbot technology, you can utilise robots to assist with some of your customer support operations, delivering better customer experiences, and cutting back on your operational costs in the process.
Chatbots are a new and exciting way to interact with customers.
These chatbots can be used to create conversations that feel more personal than traditional forms of communication and they’re also an affordable way to reach customers without having to invest in a call center or have employees manning the phones all day long.
When a visitor lands on your website or social media platforms, our chatbot interacts with them through automated conversations. Using a chatbot can help convert your website visitors into qualified leads or customers.
Based on recent studies, chatbots are able to handle 68.9% of chats from start to finish, and 68% of consumers like chatbots because they provide quick answers.
What Are Chatbots, Benefits And The Right Steps to Set Them Up?
Benefits of Chatbots
When it comes to your business, there are many benefits to developing a chatbot, although they may not seem obvious at first.
Here are some reasons why your company should consider developing a chatbot:
Reason 1-You’re already using digital technology
Before you start looking into how to create a chatbot for your business, you should first consider whether you already have a digital presence.
More and more people are turning to digital channels for their day-to-day needs.
Whether it’s booking a flight online, ordering groceries through your favorite app, or even finding a new supplier for your business, people are becoming more and more accustomed to using digital channels.
With this shift in customer behavior, it’s no surprise that businesses are developing more and more digital channels to reach their customers.
One of the best ways to get started with the development of a chatbot is to check the current state of your digital technology.
Why Use a Chatbot for Ecommerce?
Chatbots are becoming increasingly popular for e-commerce purposes because of a number of advantages they offer businesses. For example, chatbots can help to reduce customer service costs by handling basic customer queries, and freeing up staff to deal with more complex issues.
Additionally, chatbots can help promote and sell products/services on your behalf by gathering customer feedback and data in a conversational format.
One of the main benefits of using a chatbot for e-commerce is that it can help to improve customer engagement in a conversational format. They can also understand human emotions and sentiments better than traditional customer service channels, leading to more effective resolutions of customer issues.
Additionally, chatbots can help you to develop deeper relationships with your customers by understanding their needs better than traditional marketing methods. Ultimately, this will lead to higher conversion rates and longer-term loyalty from your customers.
Chatbots don’t need to sleep, and therefore they can answer queries 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Chatbot Benefits:-
24/7 Availability – Customers needn’t wait for the next available operator when chatbots are part of the communication strategy on a round-the-clock basis.
Instant Response – Chatbots can handle the queries of thousands of customers instantly as well as simultaneously and improve the average response time.
Consistency in Answers – The use of chatbots can help businesses maintain a great level of consistency in answers and improve customer experience with the brand.
Omni-channel – AI-powered bots come with omni-channel messaging support features which help customers communicate with businesses through various channels such as websites, Facebook, etc.
Personalization – Bots can ensure a touch of personalization by engaging customers with one-on-one conversations, maintaining a natural-sounding tone, and by being good at interactive communication.
Multilingual – Your business can program the sales bot to answer queries in the language of customers and expand the reach to new markets or territories.
Order without human help – Thanks to bots-driven automation, customers can book orders or do transactions without any human help.
Do you enjoy interacting with chatbots?
What Are Chatbots, Benefits And The Right Steps to Set Them Up?
The major mistake that Chatbot Builders make when it comes to offering their services and or products to new clients is…….
They are preaching the product… not the SOLUTION.
The word chatbots give most businesses already a bad taste because of the bad reputation it gathered over the last few years.
People got spammed with way too messages and only got one promotional message after another.
But since chatbots also known as conversational marketing have been evolving especially these last few years it is time to re-introduce them to businesses again.
And there is a right way to do so….. let me explain as I hope it will help you out.
Instead of pitching chatbots directly pitch the idea of what it can solve for the business. It can do so much more than a few years ago.
STEP 1. Before going to a prospect really dive into their business and niche. Figure out what issues they are currently having. Check if they already have some sort of automation running on their social media. If so think of ways you could improve that
STEP 2. The next step is to come up with how a chatbot can help resolve those issues.
STEP 3. Make a demo and build it as a use case for that prospect. Showing how easy it can be to solve the issues they are having, or at least help them manage them better. Be sure to capture their email inside as well as most often they give their personal emails which is even better than that of the company itself.
STEP 4. If it is a local business and you are able to walk in the doors and see if you can get in touch with the management. Mention you are really liking the business and would like to help them out. Let them scan a simple QR code which will lead to the demo inside your chatbot.
If you are trying to reach businesses not local to you try to see if you can get in touch through LinkedIn or their Facebook page if they have one, reaching out through Messenger to get in touch personally.
The last resort is of course sending an email
STEP 5. Follow-ups. One of the most important steps you can take in securing yourself that new client. Whereas most people try to do a phone call you can follow up from the chatbot!
You have collected their email and soon as they finished the demo you can subscribe them to your follow-up messages inside the chatbot itself.
Be relevant though. First follow-up can be to check how they felt about the demo, what they like or did not like and then base your other follow up messages accordingly.
SEE ALSO : How To Choose The Right Artificial Intelligence for Your Marketing Campaign
It is all about the journey and experience you can provide your prospects that will make them convert into your clients.