10 Awesome Chatbot Benefits for Your Business

Customer communication has to be prompt whether for sales, marketing, or support.

And if your business is not delivering smooth engagement, customers would definitely never stick with it. 

This is where AI-powered chatbots can make their presence felt as they can automate customer communication and augment the support in a big way.

In fact, 35% of consumers want more companies to use chatbots to improve their communication strategy and deliver a better experience.

With so many chatbot business benefits to achieve, you should immediately plan to automate customer communication and ensure a hassle-free customer journey at every step of the way.    

Chatbot Benefits for Customers 

The need to stay available all the time is at the center of the ever-growing popularity of chatbots across industries. And if your business wants to engage customers round the clock and improve their experience, it must use a bot at some point in the time. This will help manage customer requests with instant responses and boost satisfaction levels. 

Chatbots are quite advanced and they ensure many advantages for customers.  

• 24/7 Availability

  – Customers needn’t wait for the next available operator when chatbots are part of the communication strategy on a round-the-clock basis. 

• Instant Response

  – Chatbots can handle the queries of thousands of customers instantly as well as simultaneously and improve the

  average response time

  . 

• Consistency in Answers

  – The use of chatbots can help businesses maintain a great level of consistency in answers and improve customer experience with the brand.    

• Omni-channel

  – AI-powered bots come with omni-channel messaging support features which help customers communicate with businesses through various channels such as websites, Facebook, etc.  

• Personalization

  – Bots can ensure a touch of personalization by engaging customers with one-on-one conversations, maintaining a natural-sounding tone, and by being good at interactive communication.   

• Multilingual

  – Your business can program the sales bot to answer queries in the language of customers and expand the reach to new markets or territories.

• Order without human help

  – Thanks to bots-driven automation, customers can book orders or do transactions without any human help.  

Chatbots with AI and machine learning capabilities can help you redefine customer service in a big way. Start a free trial of the AI-powered chatbot and deliver a slew of benefits to your customers. 

Chatbot Benefits for Businesses 

Chatbots can be an incredibly useful tool when it comes to forging good customer relationships. Your business can leverage it to build strong connections by engaging, and interacting with, users coming to the website. By integrating chatbots, you not only achieve marketing goals but also drive sales and improve customer service. Plus, chatbot maintenance is so affordable that it can add to the benefits for your business. 

There are many different ways a chatbot can positively impact customer communication and drive business growth.

Let us discuss the chatbot benefits in detail. 

1. Increase Customer Engagement

Chatbots can help businesses take customer engagement to the next level. 

By using conversational AI chatbots, engagement can be driven based on the user data and made more interactive.   

What’s more, bots can deliver consistent answers and this helps you avoid dishing out irrelevant information to customers.

And when relevant and quick responses are delivered, customers can stay longer on your website and maintain the conversation.  

Tips to boost customer engagement using chatbots

• Personal touch to conversations-

  Chatbots are smart enough to analyze responses based on the customer details and history and thus, can give engage at a personal level and drive conversations. 

• Real-time response

  – Your business can use bots to deliver fast, real-time responses to customers and avoid losing them to competitors. 

• One-on-one responses

  – Customers expect immediate one-on-one responses and you can use a chatbot to meet that goal and enhance their experience with your brand.  

   

2. Improve Lead Generation   

Bots are quite advanced and also very effective at engaging customers with personalized messaging throughout their journey. 

In fact, your business can use chatbots for lead generation to guide customers in making quick decisions.

AI bots can use a preset questionnaire to persuade the visitors for lead generation and ensure higher conversion rates.  

Source

A Finnish housing investment company, Asuntoyhtymä, is a good example of how to use chatbots for lead generation. It implemented a going chatbot onto property portals to help its customers with an easy way to reach out. 

The company created two different contact forms, one each for rental requests and arranging a viewing, and went on to generate 300 new leads in just three months.  

How to use chatbots for lead generation? 

• Better lead qualification

  – Bots qualify leads by asking relevant questions and directing them to the sales team for immediate sales conversion. A

  chatbot template for appointment booking

  can help schedule an appointment if the team is busy/unavailable. 

• Better lead nurturing

  – The qualified leads are nurtured thereafter based on their customer journey. For e.g. in an e-commerce business, a chatbot engages the customers by giving personalized recommendations, combo offers, or discount coupons to improve sales conversions.

3. Reduce Customer Service Costs

Implementing chatbots is an investment to optimize customer service costs. 

By investing in chatbots, you can save extra costs that otherwise go into hiring more support resources. 

With chatbots, a business can reduce costs on different levels: 

• Salaries
• Training
• Infrastructure

Similarly, customer service with AI chatbots can benefit in many ways;

• Scale their chat support during busy hours

• Automate routine business processes

• Enable new customer service models

In addition, AI bots can be scaled during the peak hours of business without any further costs.  

Besides, by ensuring a brand experience that is simpler and more seamless for customers, bots also reduce a significant amount of money and add value to the bottom line.  

4. Monitor Consumer Data to Gain Insights 

Chatbots are an excellent tool to track purchasing patterns and analyze consumer behaviors by monitoring user data. 

This data can help companies market the products differently and expand their reach. 

Similarly, bots can be used to collect feedback through simple questions and improve products or optimize the website. 

Sephora, the globally acclaimed cosmetic brand implemented a chatbot in partnership with Kik messaging application. It gives customers an opportunity to use the chatbot to ask for makeup recommendations or request product reviews and get relevant products or videos.   

Best practices in using chatbots for consumer data

• Create customer profiles

  – Your company can use chatbots to collect customer information like name, contact details, etc., and create a customer profile. 

• Send push notifications

  – The use of bots can prove helpful in keeping existing customers engaged through regular and timely push notifications.  

• Suggest relevant content

  – Brands that use AI-powered bots are able to provide customers with product details and also suggest relevant content. 

5. Devise a Conversational Marketing Strategy 

Conversational marketing is all about using the power of real-time customer interactions to help move buyers through the sales funnel. 

It can help your business create authentic experiences and build relationships with customers. 

When brands use chatbots for marketing, they easily engage with people through targeted messaging and smart chatbots, therefore, driving the conversion rate. 

Domino’s AnyWare takes the concept of conversational marketing to the next level by allowing customers a chance to order their favorite items through a number of available menu options.  

Benefits of conversational marketing strategy 

• Engage more leads

  – Your business can engage with more leads when it allows visitors to start conversations on the website compared to when it asks them to first fill out the forms. 

• Respond to customers individually

  –  Bots may not be among the top examples of guerrilla marketing but they can nonetheless make it easier to respond to customer questions individually and avoid the usual fixed lead funnel crammed with marketing activities.

• Improve customer experience

  – The purpose of conversational marketing is to cut back on frustrating experiences that customers encounter with the customer support line or IVR system.    

6. Balance Automation with Human Touch

Combining AI technology with a human touch can help brands deliver seamless customer support. 

Likewise, the integration of chatbot and live chat software together means you empower customers to self-serve and connect with a human agent when needed.   

By using AI-enabled chatbots as the primary channel, your business can deliver real-time support, promptly answers queries, and boosts customer satisfaction.

However, there might be instances when the bot is not able to identify the user intent in the request and so it needs to make a human handover. 

For that reason, you need to understand the difference between chatbot vs live chat and try to integrate them together for better customer service.  

Source

American Well, a telemedicine company, is a good example of how websites can use chatbots and live chat intelligently to determine user intent quickly and enhance customer experience.  

How to balance automation with the human touch?

• Live chat agents can handle complex queries

  that require comprehensive discussion without leaving the customers unanswered. 

• The smooth

  transition between chatbot to live chat provides real-time responses

  to the customers, giving them the best hybrid experience.

• The integration of live chat and chatbot together can help brands

  engage with customers intelligently and all day

  , every day. 

7. Meet Customer Expectations  

Customers expect quick responses to complaints or queries. 

Since chatbots are increasingly getting smart, brands can use them to automate some of the routine interactions and meet customer expectations. Whether you use an Android chatbot or WhatsApp, the purpose is always the same: to ensure value to customers via automation.   

With automation as one of the chatbot use cases, customers won’t have to wait for human agents for engagement and this can definitely their experience with the brand and contribute to retention as well. 

Tips to use chatbots to meet customer expectations 

• Proactive interactions

  – Bots can help businesses proactively interact with customers,  deliver them quick responses and get higher open rates than email. 

• Personalized experience

  – The use of a chatbot can prove very handy when it comes to delivering a personal experience to customers across multiple touchpoints as this can also impact sales and conversion rates.  

• Effective targeting

  – Using chatbots for sending visual content and giving information about product information, offers, discounts, etc can ensure effective targeting and boost customer engagement.    

   

8. Achieve Scalability of Support

For any customer-centric business, having an option to scale the support should always be among the first of priorities.  

And by achieving the scalability of support, it can have the ability to successfully handle any traffic surge — like the festive seasons or peak hours — without much of investment. 

This is where chatbots can help — they ensure your business is able to manage conversations during peak hours without adding more support experts or without providing training, etc.  

A lot of restaurant businesses deploy chatbots to effectively handle the situation when the demand rises, the customer orders go high but a small staff is not able to handle it. Big brands like Taco Bell and Dominos are using chatbots to arrange the delivery of parcels. 

How can chatbots help scale your support? 

• The use of

  customer support chatbot templates

  can help you improve your business productivity without any extra costs and resources. 

• AI-powered bots are able to

  manage thousands of conversations and answer each question immediately

  , no matter what time it is or how many customers are reaching you.  

• You can

  scale the support with bots and handle a large volume of chats

  without affecting the business costs. 

9. Streamline Your Customer Onboarding Process  

Customers love being guided and pampered. 

No matter how many tutorials or content guides you provide, they will still show some reluctance to find the information on their own.

After all, customers prefer brands that show them the way.  

This is where a website chatbot can prove handy as your business can use them to educate customers and ease the onboarding process. 

Source

The example of Wishberry, a popular crowdfunding platform for creative artists, shows how chatbots can help get your onboarding exercise right.  

How to use chatbots for onboarding customers? 

• Chatbots can ask questions and collect answers

  and based on that can show the route to whatever customer is looking for. 

• The use of bots can help brands

  route customers to the best place to find the information

  they search to make informed decisions. 

• Chatbot implementation can help understand what a customer has or hasn’t found in order and this information can be used to

  smartly push customers along the conversion funnel

  .

• It’s possible to personalize the questions a chatbot asks and then

  create a better user experience during the purchase journey

  . 

10. Make the Customer Journey Smoother 

Losing prospects halfway through a sales funnel is a never-ideal situation and no business would like that to happen. 

There are many reasons that could stop customers from purchasing, like a cumbersome check-out process or hidden costs.  

Chatbots can prove effective in helping brands reduce customer churn and make the customer journey smoother. 

You can create the right bot scripts and effectively engage customers and answer their queries at different stages of the journey.  

Tips to use chatbots to improve the buying process 

• You can

  offer additional information on products, services

  , or shipping which can remove doubts and make the customer journey smoother. 

• Use interactive content such as videos to

  provide more insights and build trust with prospects

  and customers.  

• Chatbots are always a great help in providing discount codes and offer so that

  customers can find value in the marketing funnel

  .       

Prepare Your Business for the Future with Chatbots Benefits 

Chatbots are gradually transforming the contours of customer communication. They are adding a new dimension to different aspects of the industry be it customer service, sales, marketing, and engagement.

So, your business needs the plan to get the most out of bots in terms of lead generation, customer insights, onboarding, and customer support scalability. Sign up to get a powerful bot for your support team and start delivering value to customers. 

However, t is equally essential to first identify the areas of concern and then start deploying chatbots to achieve the desired business advantages. With so many benefits for businesses, it would be a mistake if your business bucked the trend and did not integrate a bot sooner rather than later.