12 Reasons Why Chatbot Works For Businesses
Programmed to interact with your customers and provide answers to the questions they are looking for without needing any kind of human help are called chatbots.
Chatbots are artificially intelligent and can process natural language to respond to users in a more humane way. This has been one of the primary reasons why most businesses across the globe are implementing chatbots.
By giving a great customer experience chatbots are slowly replacing the human force behind customer support and success and as time proceeds they will become better.
Gartner predicted in 2011 that “By 2020 customers will manage 85% of their relationship with the enterprise without interacting with a human”, the year 2020 has also been called the year of chatbots.
Check out these chatbot statistics to make it more believable why chatbots will soon rule the world and why businesses will need them.
Still not convinced? Check out these top 12 reasons why your business needs a chatbot.
- Chatbots are available 24/7, 365 days a year
As humans we need breaks and it is difficult to be present 24/7 and 365 days a year to support your customers. Even if a company is able to employ more people and make them work in rotational shifts they still can’t be available every single second.
This can lead to a bad customer experience and customers hate to wait and keeping them waiting may also lead to a lost customer. Plus more resources amount to higher business costs and still the results won’t be as better as implementing a chatbot.
A chatbot unlike humans can be present any time of the day throughout the year. They don’t need to take vacations or breaks while working.
Chatbots work for your business tirelessly, without any demands and complaints. Plus, they are far less capital intensive, and once implemented, they keep doing their job of delivering great timely customer experiences.
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2. Chatbots automate the customer support process
Automation is what businesses are chasing in today’s fast-moving world as it reduces the turnaround time and saves operational costs.
80% of businesses are already eyeing chatbot automation by 2020. And, when it comes to customer support chatbots, the benefits far outweigh those of having support agents because of process automation.
Once programmed AI chatbots are able to use the existing resources like knowledge base articles and FAQs to answer all the queries of your customers.
They are also able to recognize multiple forms of the same question and can be trained to give instant responses which can result in more consistent support with fewer repetitive transactional questions for the support agents like “How do I add new users” or “What is the pricing”.
3. Chatbots help target users of popular social media platforms
This is the age of social media and people are more glued to their mobile screens than ever before. And, during the harsh times of the COVID-19 pandemic, social media has been the force keeping people connected even while being in lockdown.
Data says that 63% of consumers think businesses should be on messenger and there are 1.3 billion people who use Facebook Messenger. In 2018 alone there were around 300,000 chatbots on Facebook.
Hence, it is more necessary for businesses to be on social media to interact with their target users, and with the increase in messenger platforms for businesses the need for chatbots has become inevitable.
And, if your target audience is the millennials you have to have a chatbot on your social media pages.
4. Chatbots can help in collecting data from your customers
We all know that data is the new fuel of the 21st century and the businesses that leverage data and to be precise the correct data in the right manner are able to rule their domain and their industry.
Chatbots can help you in collecting data of your customers like their name, contact information, profession, interests, etc. and through these details, chatbots can suggest to them the right products and information that they are looking for.
This helps to keep a customer engaged. Because of the data, the chatbot is able to meet the customers’ expectations. Research also shows that 37% of consumers are open to receiving recommendations from chatbots.
5. Chatbots help answer questions and build trust
The most important thing in making and retaining customers is answering their questions promptly and at the same time, they ask. The attention span of the online consumer is about 8 seconds according to a study by Microsoft.
If a business is able to answer a customer’s questions before its competitors, it is the winner. This can happen by having a chatbot that is fed with answers to the most common questions your customer can have about your business or product.
And, with artificial intelligence and machine learning, chatbots of today have become sharper and smarter to answer questions that are not pre-programmed in them.
With a smart chatbot, you can rest assured that your business is in safe hands and ready to answer any questions your customers may have.
6. Chatbots help with product marketing
One of the important parts of growing your business is to market your products to the right customers and the correct buyer personas.
Chatbots know and understand your buyers very well because of the data about them they have and so they truly understand what your customers want. This helps them to market your product in the correct way, to the correct customer.
They are able to provide product updates and are able to showcase new products and services through push notifications. These notifications are not sent out randomly but to the right audience based on their interests.
Hence, there’s a good reason why your business needs a chatbot to market your products.
7. Chatbots can help in scaling your business
A gaming business from India scaled its user base from a mere 40,000 to about 40 Million in 2018 which led to a 30x rise in queries on their app. And how did they handle it?
Dream11 took the correct approach of implementing a chatbot to answer all their customer queries without affecting their primary business. The results were that the chatbot answered around 80% of their customer queries received during IPL 2018 with an average resolution time of just 32 seconds.
A chatbot reduces the cost of having human agents for customer support and helps in scaling the operations quickly through automation as it can solve customer queries much quicker, attend to an unlimited number of customers at the same time and be present for your customer any time of the day.
8. Chatbots help convert your website visitors into customers
Visitors visit your website, they browse through the pages and most of the time they get overwhelmed due to loads of information on the site.
A visitor is a lukewarm lead but can be turned to a warm lead if they are taken through the correct path of the sales funnel once they are on your website. This can be done by meeting your prospects where they are and guiding them through conversion.
A chatbot can help achieve this goal as it can direct your overwhelmed lead to what he is searching for on your site by initiating a conversation and guiding him to the right resources.
Not just on the website but a chatbot can integrate with multiple platforms like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, WordPress, and more to convert followers to customers.
9. Chatbots can help in closing deals
Though businesses still believe that a human can close deals better than bots but slowly and gradually the scenario is changing.
With chatbots becoming smarter due to artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing, closing deals is becoming easier for them as they share the similar capabilities of selling directly and placing orders much like a salesperson.
Nowadays more and more people are preferring chatbots to make a purchase and companies are implementing specific types of bots called sales bots to improve their sales funnel. Such bots are also able to follow up the customers who showed interest but did not make a purchase.
10. Chatbots can speak many languages
As humans, we are restricted to the number of languages we can communicate in. On average, most of the customer service agents across the globe know two languages.
But, in today’s world if your business is having an online presence in the form of an app or a website your customers can come from any part of the world and speak a language your support agents may not know.
In that scenario, a multilingual chatbot like WotNot can come in handy and speak to the visitors or customers in their preferred language of communication. This totally improves the customer experience and enhances their engagement with the business.
11. Chatbots can remember your customers
We are delighted when someone remembers us and about us the next time we meet them. This human behavior is also extended to the world wide web surfers.
It can happen that a person visits a business’s website, interacts with a live chat agent, leaves, and then visits back some other day. The next time there might be some other agent attending the chat and might not know the previous conversation the customer had.
This could lead to the visitor getting frustrated as he would have to explain the previous conversation all over again but had there been a chatbot this situation would not arise as chatbots remember previous conversations to personalize and customize the future messages.
Thus, creating a great personalized user experience and customer delight as 80% of customers love personalized buying experiences.
12. Chatbots can be fun for your customers
Just like a live chat agent, chatbots interact with your customers and answer their questions but they can do just more than that in a way that is more fun.
Your human agent would for sure talk like a human and in a more personalized way but he cannot make the conversation funny and interactive like a chatbot.
A chatbot can be programmed to instantly make the conversations funny, witty, and at times gamify the whole conversation. This can give a different mood to your customer and delight them.
Even getting feedback from your customers via chatbots can be made a whole lot of fun with emojis and stickers. The Whole Foods chatbot is doing exactly that by allowing the customers to search for recipes using emojis on Facebook Messenger.
Conclusion
We have seen the best 12 reasons for why your business needs a chatbot and what are the benefits to a business of using a chatbot.
The world is changing rapidly and so are the various modes of communication for a business with their customers, and chatbots are one of them. If we go by the trends they are truly the future of conversational experiences.
Any business that has adopted a chatbot has only seen their business grow due to which chatbots have become so popular and have become one of the likely solutions for brands to reach or support their consumers.
Not implementing a chatbot in your business strategy may not be a great idea but one has to ought to try it out to see if it makes a difference.
But just to remind you a chatbot will help you to create wonderful customer experiences, be present 24/7, make conversations more fun, generate leads, market your product, boost sales, and whatnot.
The future is of chatbots. Where are you?
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12 reasons why chatbot works for businesses was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.