Majority of people today have access to smartphones and the Internet, which allows them to easily query about your brand. Customers want to ask questions and get answers in real-time, making it harder for business owners to respond immediately. Since human interaction is not possible at all times of the day, a need for automated messaging processes emerged. A rapid growth in the use of messaging as a primary form of communication with their customers gave rise to on-demand messaging processes such as chatbots.
Whether you run a small business or a large one, the use of chatbots is a must if you wish to improve customer interaction. This automated system is designed so that customers can learn more about your brand and services even in your absence.
Automated systems not only help build brand awareness but improves communication patterns and internal processes as well. Every business's primary motive is to get more and more customer’s attention. Advancement in the machine learning process and artificial intelligence emerged as a factor that solved businesses' concerns by giving rise to chatbots.
What is Chatbot and how can businesses profit from it?
A chatbot is basically a computer program or software application that allows users to communicate with the brand using text or text-to-speech, instead of providing direct contact with a human agent.
Ever since chatbots have been integrated into social media such as Facebook and in the website of many companies, its benefits are creating a lot of buzz everywhere. This implies the software application has already set its prints in the world of social media and search engines. By 2024, the market size for chatbots is expected to be at $9.4 billion.
Advantages of integrating chatbots to your social media and/or website
The main advantage of integrating chatbots from the perspective of customer service is automation. It allows you to optimize human resources and manage conversations with users in an efficient manner.
For instance, your potential customer sends a message to your Facebook page but there is no one to respond to their queries. At that time artificially intelligent chatbot works amazingly to provide important information regarding the prices or schedule, opening hours, etc.
Additionally, this tool helps to close sales. Even in the absence of the person, a potential customer will be able to clear all the queries, decide to purchase or subscribe in the very time.
Some advantages of Chatbots that improved customer service include:
- 24/7 availability
- Increases sales
- Increases customer satisfaction
- Cost savings
- Better lead generation
- Monitor and gain insights
- 24/7 availability:
The most important advantage of integrating Chatbots into your Facebook or website is that you are available for your customers round the clock. Similarly, customers will get the answers to all of their queries promptly. This means customers will get an immediate response and solutions to their queries at any time.
Providing 24/7 human customer support can be hectic as customers want to solve their problems as fast as possible. But when you fail to do so, they are more likely to switch to other brands for products and services.
- Increases sales:
Chatbots work amazingly when you are trying to provide customer support for potential customers. Resolving customers' queries instantly leaves a positive impact on them. This eventually helps increase sales.
Moreover, you can also use chatbots to promote your new product by sending updates to your customers. This process includes a personalized form of marketing. as the customer receives the products or services directly. It also helps generate more sales.
- Increases customer satisfaction:
The conversation between customers and the business also helps understand where your business stands. Humans are bound by emotions and sometimes emotions they may respond in ways that are far from ideal.
Chatbots, on the other hand, stick to the rules set on the system. It responds to the customer in an exact manner irrespective of the time and situation. Moreover, you can also set up different languages in chatbots. This will resolve customer’s problems and handle them without any problem.
- Cost savings:
As your business grows, you’ll need a bigger customer support team to handle all of your customer’s queries and needs. As the team size increases, the amount spent on their wages also grows. Integrating chatbots into your business might seem expensive at first, but in the long run, it will save you a lot of money.
Chatbots can be used to solve simple customer queries, and only the more complex ones could be handled by a smaller customer support team. This will help the human agents to devote more time to more serious issues and leave the trivial stuff to the chatbots.
- Better lead generation:
Traditionally, lead generation was done using forms. However, the conversion rate for forms is pretty low at 2.5% to 5%. Chatbots provide a better engagement to the customers while learning about their intent. Using questionnaires, the sales funnel can be automated and the leads can be followed up with appropriate actions.
Chatbots can help to direct the leads to the right team, schedule appointments, or send them reminders. All of this assists in closing the leads faster than when everything was to be done manually.
- Monitor and gain customer insights:
Chatbots help you gain all the necessary information from customers just by interacting with them. It helps you identify their problems, preferences, activities, and so on. The data provided by customers provide valuable insights into what is going well and what should be improved regarding the product and services. Using this data, businesses can be scaled accordingly.
Sharda IT’s opinion about chatbots:
Chatbots are not perfect; they cannot solve all of the customer issues just yet. But they are evolving. With AI-powered chatbots, it is becoming more and more difficult for the customer to determine whether they are talking to a bot or an actual human agent. With automated responses, customers feel that there’s always someone they can talk to whenever they have any problems. Shorter response times mean they are more likely to communicate and more likely to stay with your brand. And this could be a huge difference in the overall growth of your business.
