Chatbots are becoming a must-have for websites. They’re able to easily answer all of the common questions customers usually ask, plus you can leverage artificial intelligence to extrapolate answers to others or at least have a polite conversation. Many large companies are implementing that, but even a small business can use chatbots. All you need is a chatbot plugin.
There are multiple benefits to having a chatbot. You save huge amounts of money because you no longer need to pay CSRs to answer the items in the FAQ. Instead, they can more productively spend their time helping customers with questions about existing orders or upselling orders. When you free a person’s time from mundane, small tasks, you enable their productivity to tackle huge tasks that move the business forward. You also eliminate wait time. Customers no longer need to wait 10 or 15 minutes for a CSR to be free to ask their questions. You can link shipment tracking software to the chatbot, so it can help customers find lost shipments or determine when one will arrive.
Caveats to Chatbots
Avoid the downfall of many businesses that implement chatbots solely to say they did. These bots can’t answer many questions and frustrate users with automated responses like, “I don’t know.” Or “I don’t understand that question.”
You need to program the bots to recognize several keyword phrases as well as common questions. This helps the chatbot recognize the user’s request. You can easily frustrate a user if the bot doesn’t understand them or refuses to follow instructions. If the user says goodbye, for instance, the chatbot should as well and should disengage. Nothing frustrates web users like a chatbot that just won’t close.
Ensure that once your chatbot gets closed, it stays that way. If the user has to refresh the page, the bot should not reengage. It should recognize a separate and distinctive visit two days or two weeks later though and re-engage.
People Love Well-behaved Chatbots
Chatbots have become the next wave in Internet technology. 56% of people would prefer to use the bot to answer questions than phone the call center to speak to a human. As long as the bot gets programmed to address problems helpfully and efficiently, humans like it.
A good chatbot helps you like Siri or The Google Assistant. It can tell a good joke, remember your shopping list, remind you of your appointment, etc.
You can also enable your bot to help users with essential tasks, such as reorders. This saves them time because when the bot does it for them, they do not have to fill out any forms.
What other items can you use a chatbot to provide? The common uses range from AI personal shoppers to bill payment. According to a recent Drift report, the top nine uses include:
- Addressing an emergency question (37%)
- Resolving a problem (35%)
- Providing detailed answers (35%)
- Directing the user to a human CSR (34%)
- Making a reservation (33%)
- Bill payment (29%)
- Purchasing a basic product (27%)
- Providing shopping inspiration (22%).
- Adding the user to the company/product mailing list (22%)
What Does Your Chatbot Provide You?
Besides the time and money savings, chatbots provide you with invaluable information and intangibles. That’s because every word a chatbot utters goes into your database, just as every word the user types does. While the customer text goes into your big data file, analysis of the bot side helps you improve your bot. By improving on both ends, you obtain improved outcomes overall.
Using bot-driven customer care lets you provide service 24 hours per day, seven days per week. This doesn’t cost you extra and you thrill your customers. Regardless of where they live and their time zone, you provide a method of them obtaining the answer they need around the clock.
You can build fun into your chatbot. Your customers can make friends with your robot. For example, The Google Assistant lets you choose from numerous voices for the robot. Actress Issa Rae even recorded voiceovers for the program, so you can have Issa answer all of your questions and seemingly set your appointments. She tells a good joke, too. Letting your customers customize their use of the robot makes it more fun for them to use. That can encourage more visits to your website and that raises your Search Engine Results Page (SERP) rank.
Chatbots provide a new friendly weapon in content marketing. You can become known as the online store with the coolest robot. The more helpful your bot, the better a marketing tool it becomes.
You can even get your robot to help you make sales. No, it isn’t going to take the place of your best sales representative. It can help them land more new leads through, as well as help them discern between a qualified lead and a long shot. By phrasing things the right way, in the text with which you program it, you can obtain your potential customers’ email addresses and find out in which products they show the most interest.
Pair chatbots with scripts to automatically email your sales reps the customer information and their questions to the bot. This enables the sales rep to provide a better pitch and know the angle to take when they phone or email the prospect later.
How Bake More Pies Can Help
Using ai chatbots can help you discover new leads and qualify those leads. It can help you build your big data by collecting customer interactions in their entirety in print, something a phone call to a CSR doesn’t do even when the CSR makes notes, or you have someone transcribe the phone calls. You don’t need to transcribe chatbot text. The program does it all for you, serving you better, just as it serves the customer better. Choose to implement this helpful communication device for your content marketing.
Let us help you implement a chatbot system on your website to serve your customers and potential customers with information, education, and entertainment. Contact us today!
