It’s almost certain that this isn’t the first time you are coming across the word ‘chatbot’, today in 2019, especially if you are an e-commerce retailer. No one can know the pure benefits these bots come with better than its potential users.
In the trending era of artificial intelligence, chatbot marketing is witnessing an extraordinary boom owing to the prevalence of messaging platforms, virtual assistants, and the efforts of various businesses to deliver prompt customer service.
So What Does ‘Chatbot’ Mean Today and Is It Really a Big Deal?
Understanding bots are absolutely not complicated. The most advanced bots are powered by AI, helping it to understand complex requests, personalize responses and simultaneously improve interactions over time. Most bots follow a set of rules programmed by a human via bot-building platform, often without having to know a line of code.
Simple chatbots are designed to scan the keywords in a customer’s inquiry and deliver pre-packaged answers. While more sophisticated bots that are powered by AI and Machine Learning can use natural language processing to create responses and chats that are more complex.
These bots are brilliantly dynamic—they comprehend not just commands but also language. Therefore, they actively learn from the conversations they have to help customers reach their goals.
The chatbot market size is estimated to hit $1.25 Billion by 2025, according to Grand View Research, at a CAGR of 24.3%. That’s boosted by growth in the use of artificial intelligence, IoT, and APIs, among others that are evolving at a rapid speed.
That’s how big a deal it is!
How a Chatbot Enhances the Customer Experience
While chatbots are of utmost benefit for businesses, the real winners are going to be customers. Here’s how chatbots can improve your customer experience.
Seamless Live Chat
Chatbots, being able to be seamlessly integrated into the business’s website or app, saves customers the time and trouble of searching for online resources for the answers they need.
Or customers can indulge in a chat with your brand at any given time without having to exit their loved messaging apps—making the experience seamless. By giving your bot a personality humanize chat experiences.
24X7 Customer Support
Chatbots can be made operational and ready to engage with their definite target groups—24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Your live-chat staff members sure need sleep, but your chatbot doesn’t.
Offering an opportunity to the customers of getting answers to their questions at any time, without having to wait for a voicemail or an email, it is the benefit most enjoyed by people standing as a favorite for 64%. Additionally, businesses can handle more tasks at the same time, making no customer ever wait.
Extensive Customer Assistance
A survey showed that about 83% of online shoppers need support during shopping. Any problem with registration issues, payment, checkout, delivery queries, and lack of information of a product. Chatbots can provide real-time assistance in every sort of situation.
Furthermore, along with text and voice, they can also present the customers with product pages, images, blogs, tutorial videos as customers’ need be.
Goodbye IVR
Customers have time and again shown their dislike towards Interactive Voice Response being part of the customer service process while making a phone call to customer support. IVR systems are highly structured, routing customers through each response until it reaches the pre-programmed destination.
While a chatbot can be used in a similar way sans IVR-induced frustration. Bots can provide that edge so that customers feel like their voice is being heard and understood.
Re-Invent Your Forms
You need to get customer information. You give them form to fill. Generally speaking, these tend to be utterly lengthy and quite boring. Most people who decide to go through it, do so reluctantly. Chatbot can spruce up such a situation.
In the words of David Cancel, CEO, Drift;
“ Chatbots can get the same information that any form can — but without the friction and cognitive load that you get when you’re staring down a form with 11 required fields, which, if you can believe it, is the industry average.”
How Chatbots Benefit Your Business
So customers seem happy with the coming of chatbot marketing but they aren’t the sole party getting to enjoy its benefits. Here are the perks businesses and brands can enjoy using chatbots.
Improved Customer Satisfaction
We have already discussed how your customers are going to enjoy several benefits. These are sure to bring customers to go gaga over it resulting in immense customer satisfaction. This is sure to lead to customer advocacy and sales. Want to retain customers by triggering personalized messages at the right time? These bots will do that for you too.
Low Maintenance Cost
Data shows that each year around 265 billion customer support requests are made which costs a mind-blowing $1.3 trillion to provide service to them. But as per the Chatbots Magazine, Implementing virtual agents can help marketers save up to 30% of the cost incurred.
It is also predicted that by the year 2022 chatbots will be cutting business costs by $8 billion. Brands’ need for growing the customer service department can be managed by rolling out increasingly capable bots adept at handling more complex issues and queries.
Keeping Up With the Trends—Social Media Presence
More and more smartphone users are leaning towards not downloading numerous apps. Since they almost always have their core apps such as Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp etc.
Therefore, it becomes imperative for businesses to integrate their own chatbot into one of the popular apps that customers tend to use every day. Marketing strategy without social media is deemed to be incomplete. Stay up-to-date and trendy, going hand-in-hand with the customers with chatbots.
Improvement Through Analytics and Data Collection
Chatbots can record data, trends, and metrics to subsequently monitor interactions and adjust their processes and respond accordingly. Their virtual agents are designed to acquire customer insights such as location, type of device used, browser etc.
This provides businesses with an opportunity to go deeper into data analytics. Therefore, giving you the freedom to strategic as well as tactical decisions accordingly. Chatbots interact with customers in real-time. Not via a 3rd party collecting and extracting data becomes very simple without having to collect it from scattered sources.
Being Able to Deliver Personalized Experience
Customers absolutely love and appreciate personalized experiences by brands and those who deliver it make huge profits out of it. Bots can be programmed with different types of conversational styles, from technical to friendly and helpful to snarky and humorous. Set the tone as per your brand personality.
These bots can retrieve and analyze precious conversations and deliver a more personalized experience to each and every user. This personalized experience translated into better customer engagement that further leads to customer acquisition and satisfaction.
Though Not Human—But Helpful!
The significance that chatbot has in marketing leads on to show that it is more than being just ‘a wave of the future’ in customer service. Giving businesses with the opportunities to engage with customers on newly different levels makes chatbots to be in the ‘here and now’.
Fulfill your goals more efficiently by implementing chatbot that is good at what it needs to do. So that your customers walk away with an experience like never before.