Chatbot for business is to gain a competitive differentiator that is customer service in the market.
As per a study conducted by Harris Interactive, 88% of customers are more inclined to businesses with good customer service than the type of product or service they provide.
Chatbot builds your customer service strong enough to satisfy your customers and make you available when they are in need.
A chatbot is no longer a value-added service to customers by brands. Even SMEs are going for the chatbot to improve their customer service and take a step towards building efficiency in their business operations.
The chatbot adoption in the market is expected to increase from $2.6 billion in 2019 to $9.4 billion by 2024 at an average annual rate (CAGR) of 29.7%. (Source: Marketsandmarkets)
When we discuss the chatbot benefits to business, it’s a never-ending list.
Here in this article, we are covering a list of the most commonly noticed chatbots benefits.
Before going further know chatbot benefits, let’s first get a clear idea about –
What are Chatbots?
To explain, a chatbot is a program that holds the ability to interact automatically with users and sounds like humans without any delay and round the clock.
The chatbot works on the AI principles (Natural language processing and Machine Learning) to learn from data insights and regular interaction with humans and provides the most probable and intelligent solution as time passes.
NLP is the system’s ability to grasp and process human speech and answer in a clear language for humans. This way, it makes the interaction sound like a human with customers.
Chatbots for Businesses are Classified into Three Types.
Let’s discuss them out here for better understanding:
Rule-based chatbots
You can interact with rule-based chatbots by clicking on buttons and using predefined options. However, you can only make limited selections, making these chatbots the slowest to help your customers find their answers.
Intellectually Independent Chatbots
It uses machine learning to learn from the user’s inputs and requests. Here you can train bots to perceive specific keywords and phrases that activate their responses. In the long run, this chatbot for businesses can practice themselves to perceive more and more queries.
AI-powered Chatbots
It’s a combination of the above-discussed chatbots. It uses AI, ML, and NLP to perceive and remember the conversation’s context and the user’s conduct.
Now you might have an idea of how chatbots for businesses can help you gain your end goals.
Let’s Put Light on Some Top 10 Chatbot Benefits for your Businesses:
Here we go!
1. Boost Lead Generation and Nurturing
Customers are dynamic when they use channels. It leads businesses to shift from targeting customers from a single channel to an omnichannel or multichannel approach.
For example
Instead of targeting customers only in a particular channel like SMS or email, they take an omnichannel approach to target customers where they are active in the digital ecosystem such as social media, SMS, Mail, websites, and any other channels.
Chatbots have provided a platform where you can interact and resolve their queries on their chosen platform. It automatically leads more audience converted into leads.
It also helps you offer personalized and customized solutions to your customer at every stage of their customer journey by guiding them according to your business.
Chatbots are loaded with predefined questions with the answers prepared by sales professionals. Questions in the bot must be designed in a flow that leads the customer to provide the right solution for their queries and get good conversions.
Here is how chatbots for business can help in increasing their overall revenue:
Improve Lead Qualification
Bots can qualify leads by asking questions and redirect them to the relevant department for quick actions such as providing specific details or booking an appointment if the CX team is busy.
Improve Lead Nurturing
Leads are supported subsequently dependent on their customer life cycle.
E.g., every customer lies in a different stage of their customer lifecycle; some are-
- Taking a glance at a product,
- Comparing with others,
- Added the product in the cart,
- Billing stage,
- Purchased the product,
- And it needs customer support.
In all these stages, chatbot flows are explicitly designed to offer discounts, coupon codes, discounts, combo offers, or other trending offers.
Consider an example-
A well-known HR services company, Husys, is now using a chatbot on their website to provide initial assistance to their audience by giving their services options and taking initial details to assist further.
2. Available to your Customer 24/7
People with advancements in technologies are becoming busier, and they want everything instantly.
No customers want to wait to get answers to their raised queries. Customer support Bot possibly the only solution to respond to customers in no time and all along.
When they need it, being at the side of customers is probably the magical mantra that can boost customer satisfaction and retention rate.
69% of customers go for the chat process because of the ease of getting prompt responses to their queries. (Source: Salesforce)
AI Chatbots can learn from the regular interactions, and with time it improves in delivering their service to the customers. Moreover, chatbots use a very pleasant tone with customers who convince them to go for a high engagement level for the product or services.
3. Save Cost and Get Quick ROI
As per Chatbot Magazine, using a chatbot and AI agents, companies can reduce their overall customer support cost by up to 30%.
A chatbot is an advanced way to tackle the customer’s issues more realistically at less cost. Chatbots will not replace humans, but it can help companies reduce the number of customer executives needed.
A chatbot can solve all the basic queries and beyond that and leave only complex issues transferred to the customer executives.
Humans are more expensive than chatbots; also, they can be available 24/7 to the customers. It also helps you maintain your customer retention rate, the satisfaction that, in turn, enables you to improve your ROI.
4. Chatbot Collected Data Help You Engage with Customers
A chatbot can help you in gaining your customer intent. Want to know how?
Chatbot collects the necessary information from the customers like their name, purpose of visiting the bot, and similar others. That information can help the CX team understand the user’s issue or intent and get ready with the probable solution for it.
“The initial step in surpassing your customer expects to get insights of those expectations.” – Roy H. Williams.
Even chatbots can analyze the collected data from themselves and provide the necessary answers to the users that can engage users.
Consider an example of Sephora; it’s a cosmetic brand that provides chat support to its users and suggests to them the product or services based on their requirements on its own, even in the form of videos. Users ask for product reviews, trending products, recommendations, and many more.
5. Better Team Productivity
Chatbots will not completely replace humans, but it’s add-on support to the sales or marketing team in boosting their operations.
It handles primary support and leaves only complex issues to the customer support(CX) team. For example, the common queries such as- order status, delivery boy contact number, return policy, delivery time, balance, account statement, and similar others.
For every business, it became an integral part of deploying chatbots and automating their customer service. The time the CX team used to take will get reduced to a maximum extent and, in turn, doubles team productivity.
47% of users are comfortable purchasing products through a bot. Also, people consider chatting with a chatbot is the best way to interact with businesses. (Source: Hubspot)
Let’s throw light on some team productivity metrics that depicts the effectiveness of chatbot.
Average Resolution Time
Chatbots are designed with a predefined response time to the customer raised queries to sound like a human response.
First Response Time
Chatbots can handle all general queries that customers generally ask when they first interact with a brand that saves time and cost for the CX team.
Scale Query Answered
Chatbots are active round the clock that will not miss any queries from customers. It in-turn scale query answered.
Scale Issues Resolved
Most of the general queries get resolved by the chatbot itself before it directs to the CX team. That reduces the number of tickets received by the CX team.
6. Build Up Customer Satisfaction
Most probably, businesses go for email and call support to their team. The people in a tricky situation often use this facility, and remaining individuals switch to your competitors if they initially encounter any issues.
A chatbot can answer all such basic queries in no time, which satisfies customers, and they tend to engage with your brand further and improve sales.
In this competitive world, we can’t risk losing customers or fail to convert prospects. A minute delay from your end in responding to your customer can advantage your competitor.
Deploying a chatbot for business will make your customer feel privileged, improving your brand image and customer loyalty in the long run.
Generally, in the hospital and travel industry, people communicate in multiple languages. For them, a multi-language programmed chatbot can work like a wonder because finding a CX executive knowing different languages will be difficult.
As per B2B stats, live chat has a 73% customer satisfaction rate when used for customer interactions with brands.
According to Helpshift research, 79% of users go for a live chat over other channels. And it’s extensively considered as a quick, more efficient, and convenient way to solve issues.
A chatbot can help you achieve your end goal of being a happy customer. If customers are satisfied, they become more loyal towards your brand, increase customer retention rate, engagement rate, and even do mouth marketing in their network.
7. Chatbot + Live Chat = Hybrid Customer Experience
Generally, when we talk about the chatbot, we think it’s only the bot that answers the queries. But it’s not; the chatbot also comes with Live Chat support from humans.
A chatbot can answer general questions and complex issues, or where the bot can’t understand the user intent, humans take the chat control and resolve the problems.
Chatbot + Live chat can make the smooth flow of the process provide real-time response to the customers.
8. Chatbots Improve with Time
Chatbots need ongoing evaluation and optimization. Chatbot performance must be evaluated based on customer experience, usability, time spent by users, and others. Chatbots can learn from the user’s input and provide improved solutions continuously.
The steps you can take for Chatbot optimization includes:
- An improved form of greetings
- Pricing changes.
- Including new products
- Offering more relevant product or services
- Providing further details
9. Base for Conversational Marketing Strategy
Isn’t something useful for customers to interact with brands just like they do on messaging platforms with friends?
Customers don’t want to read lengthy materials to know about the product or services. Instead, they want an alternate way. Voice bots can serve the purpose of your conversational marketing strategy. A chatbot can be configured with voice, text, or image assistance.
According to the study of Deloitte, individuals practicing smart speakers will grow by 30 percent every year, starting from 33.3 million in 2017 to 2022.
Voice assistance is already receiving two billion requests every week. Companies are also moving towards it to leverage it.
10. Removes Laborious Tasks
Most of the queries that come to the customers are repetitive. A chatbot can answer all such works that don’t need human intervention. Also, chatbots won’t get frustrated with the customers’ repetitive queries and can reply appropriately with the right message at any time at any number of times.
64% of customers expect round the clock service from chatbots, and 55% for instant response. (Source: Financesonline)
Conclusion :
Chatbot adoption is proliferating in the market as it helps the brands to meet the dynamic customer demands at no time and reduce the cost spent on your CX team.
Chatbots benefits are enormous to the businesses. We need the right chatbot platform that can help you build your customized chatbot with features that satisfy your business needs. Also, boost your customer satisfaction rate.
We can suggest you one of such chatbot platform SmatBot. It’s a one-stop solution for all your chatbot needs for your business and beyond that.
SmatBot even has a free version to try. What are you waiting for? Try it Now!