Chatbot Is Crucial To Your Business. Learn Why!

Today the use of chatbots has greatly increased in the business world. They have changed the way businesses deal with customers. For any business, customers are the main element and it is important for them to respond back to customer queries quickly with precision. They need to get the right information for their queries and don’t entertain anything else apart from what they asked for. If you as a business fail to do so, you will end up losing your customers to competitors.

Your business will grow and the revenue will boost if you are able to easily capture the attention of the customers and take care of their requirements and needs through a minimum amount of communication effort over chat.

What are Chatbots?

Chatbots are software programs which can be used to have real conversations. For the purpose of a conversation with the user, chatbots come with a chat interface. You can make use of chatbots along with all the major messaging apps in the market. You can offer a different personality to your chatbot based on your vision. Chatbots are capable enough to understand the text and spoken words and can easily revert back with meaningful replies. Once it understands the user query, it looks for relevant answers or information. Today most of the messaging apps have this feature and more and more businesses are using it to improve customer service.

Kinds of Chatbots in use

How powerful your chatbot will be, is based on the technology that is used in it. You can have chatbots of two categories:

· AI-based chatbots

· Command based chatbots

AI-based chatbots are capable enough to answer any kind of questions. This means that you can be vague when you are asking questions to this chatbot. So based on the natural language processing, chatbots comes up with its own replies. With time the chatbots get smarter as it keeps on learning from the questions and answers registered in the past.

Command based chatbots are completely depended on heuristics and database of replies. The chatbot looks into the query and chooses an answer that it seems to be the best fitting in the context. Such kind of chatbots is not capable of creating new texts.

Some of the characteristics of such chatbots are:

· Such chatbots can only function within the limits of code

· The bot can only answer back for a set of questions. In order to offer a precise reply, it needs manual help.

· Proper understanding of the question is important for the chatbot to make a reply. For the same, it makes use of dynamic search or template search to know the question and offer a reply accordingly.

Both kinds of chatbots have their pros and cons. The AI-based chatbots need large volumes of data to work on and when it comes to longer sentences, they struggle. On the other hand, command-based chatbots are good to go as they offer you answers which are grammatically correct and more reliable but, they work within their limited scope.

Things to keep in mind when developing a chatbot for your business

There are a few things which you should keep in mind when you plan to develop a chatbot for your enterprise and they are:

· Personalization is the main reason to go for chatbot development. You should mention about the bot features on the welcome screen. If the bot uses the name of the user for greeting and during interactions, then the user will feel at home more.

· You can decrease grammatical errors in your chatbot by linking it with an NLP library.

· Makes use of high-quality links, proper text formatting and high-resolution pictures when replying through the bot.

· A well-designed bot is something everyone likes and trusts.

· The bot should ask all the questions in the first place rather than repeating them later.

Reasons to use chatbots for your business

There are a number of reasons to invest in chatbot development for your business. Chatbots are available to the users 24*7, round the year and this means that you can have chatbot working with your customers any time without excuses. There are a few more reasons to have chatbots and they are:

If you are getting a lot of customer queries

In case your business is receiving a lot of queries, then it will increase stress on your customer support team. Now chatbots simply take off the load. Chatbots work on the front line and take up the customer queries first. Once it is screened, it will move the query to the right customer support agent if needed.

If you want to scale up your operations

In case you have a limited number of human agents, then it is not going to affect your chatbots. When human agents are interacting with customers, they can only handle 2–3 users while with chatbots, you have no maximum number limit. When you go ahead with chatbot service for your business instead of investing in more human agents, you will be able to enter into new markets easily.

You are selling to millennials

When it comes to impulse buying, millennials are not the people. They take their time to inquire and compare products before actually spending money. Again, compared to phone calls, they go for live chat. This means if you are targeting millennials for your business growth, you should definitely think about having chatbots for the customer service section.

You have a large number of identical products or services

If you are selling a similar kind of products or services, then your customers are going to get confused for sure. This means you will need to help them in selecting the right product. If the product or service is quite expensive, then customers are definitely going to look for advice from you. In such a scenario, chatbots can help the customers make the right choice.

You want to have an interactive marketing platform

Chatbots offer active user experience, unlike websites and apps. If you want to have a highly interactive marketing campaign, then chatbots can be a good option. You can integrate chatbots with platforms like Facebook Messenger, which will increase your chances of reaching more number of people.

If you are using online channels to market content actively

Your business will be able to gain more if you have increased interaction with customers. If you are communicating with the customers through the online channels, then you can simplify tasks by opting for chatbots.

You need to increase efficiency at the organizational level

Chatbots can come to your rescue when you have more number of resources used up for the backend support. Instead of employing a team to take care of repetitive and mundane tasks, you can better have a chatbot solution build to get things done automatically.

How do chatbots help revolutionize your business?

The operational costs cut down

By opting for a chatbot for your business, you will be able to bring down the costs in customer service considerably. Any business that wants to be cost-effective; this is a big number. By using chatbots, it is possible to answer customer queries that come repetitively. They can work as the first point of contact for the customers, scrutinize the customers in order to decide whether to move then to the human agents or not. This greatly frees up the time of the agents who can then invest the time into more complex queries. Again, if you plan to hire human agents to offer round the clock service, it can turn out to be an expensive affair.

Sales increased by chatbots

Chatbots are focused on collecting important customer data, which includes name, contact information, product searches, interests, etc. Based on this knowledge, it becomes possible for the business to deliver complete and precise product information to the customers. This keeps the customers engaged with the brand leading to increased sales.

Increased user engagement

It is possible to offer an interactive experience to the customer using chatbots. Chatbots are good when it comes to building interaction with the customers and customers are excited too to know what’s new in the market for them. Chatbots work towards offering accurate and complete information to the customers that is bug-free and professional in nature. If you have effective bots put to work at your business site or application, it will work towards helping the customers find what they are looking for. This will increase the interaction of the customer with the brand leading to an increased purchase.

Brand building and customer expectations

Chatbots have a specific role to play and so it is designed in a manner that it adds value to the brand. It is developed keeping the complete knowledge of the products and services offered by the business in mind and includes every small detail. Now, this is something that humans can miss during the conversation. Chatbots offer every detail to the customers who are looking for simplified answers — making everything easy for them to find.

Availability from everywhere

If we look at the normal scenario, there might come a chance where the availability of human agents for having a conversation is nil. This means the customer will have to wait till someone comes at the other end. Now, the chatbots are always available, which means that the customer can get access to them whenever they want through any devices. So the only thing the business needs to do is to find the right chat support platform integrated into their business website. They just need to make sure that the service is available to the users when needed.

Understand big data trends

The AI-based chatbots come with the power of machine learning, which makes them capable enough to check the big data and process it. This helps the business to get valuable insights and patterns which are related to the buying behaviour of customers and the customer support history. This data helps the businesses to organize themselves in a way that they can reach customers in a way that will boost sales and add value to their processes.

Personalized marketing campaigns

Chatbots can easily carry out big data analysis and thus help businesses form customized marketing and sales campaigns. This will help them increase the number of quality leads coming to them as well as boost closing rates.

Wrapping it up

The role played by chatbots is increasing at extensive speed across businesses. If you are a business which is still not sure about having chatbots, then it is high time you include it in your yearly goals. For sure, you will be surprised by the benefits it will offer your business in the long run.