In recent years, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has had a transformative impact on the way we live our lives and conduct our businesses. Chatbots are an excellent example of how AI is being applied successfully by so many businesses to improve their customer experience.
It is estimated that by the end of 2020, up to 80% of companies will incorporate chatbots to improve their product experience. The chatbot market is estimated to reach a value of $1.25 billion by 2025.
What are Chatbots?
A chatbot is a software application that is used to conduct an online conversation with people who are using your product. This interaction with users can be used to leverage engagement, improve product experience, or encourage them to buy your products.
Chatbots have helped many businesses across the world in successfully streamlining customer care, marketing, HR, and many other core departments.
In this article, we will look at five important ways in which chatbots can benefit businesses and help in their significant growth.
1) 24/7 Seamless Support
Most businesses are ambitious and want to attract customers from across the globe. To make this possible, it is important to provide them with support around the clock. Over 50% of customers expect businesses to remain functional 24/7.
However, practically it is not feasible to allocate human resources in such a consistent manner. A chatbot is, thus, an excellent alternative that can help your business in providing consistent, around the clock support.
It is estimated that around 256 billion customer support requests are made each year which requires companies to shell around $1.3 trillion into service.
According to a survey conducted in 2017, chatbots can help businesses save almost up to 30% of this gigantic operating cost.
2) Higher Productivity in the Workplace
When using your product, most customers often face similar challenges or have the same questions. Allocating your employees to answer the same questions repeatedly can be highly unproductive and unenjoyable.
Chatbots can be programmed easily to answer these frequently asked questions. In this way, you can free your employees and allow them more productive work that involves creative and innovative thinking.
Meanwhile, a chatbot will solve most of the basic customer problems and only redirect challenging issues that require human attention. Thus, you need to hire a company with professional chatbot developers.
3) Personalized Experience
One of the biggest misconceptions about chatbots is that they can only be used as a support tool to answer frequently asked questions. It is important to understand as a business owner that chatbots are a product of artificial intelligence. Thus, chatbots can provide value-driven and personalized support for your customers.
Chatbots collect data from your customers, based on factors like what they click on, what interests them, how long they spend on your platform, and how long they take to make a purchase decision.
These factors enable the chatbots to understand each customer and create their separate digital profiles. Using this digital profile, chatbots can then provide a tailored experience, showing a customer only those products that they are interested in and hence, driving them towards a potential purchase.
4) Uninterrupted Real-Time Sales
When a customer visits your business platform, they typically spend a few minutes before making a purchase decision. In this small timeframe, the customer needs:
- Quick answers to their purchase queries
- A guided experience
- Personalized attention
- Encouragement towards making a purchase decision
If the above needs are not met, it is highly likely that your customer will switch to a competitor’s product.
That's where chatbots come to the rescue! They help engage every customer visiting your platform and drive them towards making a purchase with consistent support and guidance.
5) Driving the Nature of Marketing
Traditional routes of marketing your products and services are now taking a back seat in this age of data-driven decision making. Chatbots powered by AI are now becoming key marketing tools in exposing your business to a much wider audience.
We've already seen that chatbots possess the ability to build good customer relationships by understanding their interests. Due to digital profiling, chatbots can suggest preferred items and persuade customers towards making a purchase decision. This automation tool can boost your business greatly!
Statistics show that customers prefer buying from businesses that have a chatbot integration to guide them with their purchase. Almost 47% of customers are willing to buy products via chatbot support.
What makes a Successful Chatbot?
Now that we have seen how integrating chatbots can help your business grow, it is important to keep in mind some pointers while building a successful chatbot.
Your chatbot should:
- Make good use of linguistics
- Have specific well-defined tasks
- Work seamlessly on a variety of devices
- Identify variations in natural language used by customers
- Interpret customer queries and drive them to take an action
- Build a customer footprint and refer to it in the future Be aligned to the brand
According to a survey held in 2018, the top three uses of chatbots were:
- Getting a quick response during an emergency (37%)
- Providing resolution for complaints (35%)
- Supplying detailed insight (35%)
The Road Ahead
Chatbots require time to gather data and find patterns. Over the last decade, our understanding of artificial intelligence has grown exponentially. With time, chatbots will become intelligent enough to adequately replicate a human response.
With chatbots becoming an indispensable part of businesses, the way we work and sell is going to change radically.
Keeping up to date with the latest technological developments and machine learning abilities will help you build a strong chatbot service for your business to stay ahead of the curve.
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