Why Chatbots Should Be Used In Your Business
It doesn’t matter what industry you work in: proactively leveraging new technology is key to the success of any business. For example, major brands such as Lyft, Whole Foods, Mastercard, and numerous others have recently begun using chatbots for various purposes.
All sorts of brands, including those advertising on Facebook, are using chatbots to increase engagement. Chatbots are effective because they can address customer service requests, make personalized product recommendations, help website guests find relevant information, and much more. Pay attention to these developments.
To better understand why you should consider using chatbots to support your business, keep the following points in mind:
Boost Engagement
You shouldn’t expect customers to linger on your website or social media pages for very long. Research indicates more than half of guests actually spend fewer than 15 seconds on most websites.
This isn’t very surprising. The internet is a distracting place. You need to capture and keep a guest’s attention quickly to prevent them from leaving your site before they have a chance to genuinely engage with your brand.
Chatbots help in this capacity. Instead of forcing a potential customer to passively read your site, you can engage with them directly, offering a more interactive and dynamic experience. This may boost their odds of sticking around long enough to learn about your products and services.
Offering Mobile Support
An app makes it possible to address customer service issues and answer user questions via their mobile devices. With mobile device ownership on the rise, this is becoming increasingly clear. However, helping a customer find your app, and convincing them to download it, isn’t always easy.
They may be more inclined to simply visit your site when they have questions or need information. Luckily, a mobile-friendly chatbot offers many of the same benefits as an app, allowing you to deliver a consistent experience to all your customers.
Boosting Sales
Chatbots are capable of “learning.” When combined with artificial intelligence, a chatbot may learn from each interaction with a customer. This helps you make more sales. For instance, perhaps you run an apparel company, and you’ve released a new jacket that’s designed to match a line of jeans you previously released.
When that jacket is available, a chatbot can identify customers who previously bought those jeans, and reach out to them, letting them know about a new product in which they may be interested. That means chatbots are arguably more valuable than human sales personnel in some capacities. For example, traditionally, if a customer walks into a store, a member of the sales team may approach them to suggest products or ask if they can help.
A chatbot can already do this in the digital world. However, unlike a typical sales team member, a chatbot can actually already have some “understanding” of what a customer may be interested in based on past behavior. That makes it easier for a chatbot to suggest products a customer is genuinely likely to purchase.
Reaching Many Customers
A chatbot’s presence doesn’t need to be limited to your site and app. You can also integrate your chatbot with popular messaging apps, such as Kik and Facebook Messenger, to reach customers who don’t often visit your site or haven’t downloaded your app. This makes it easy to cast as wide a net as possible.
Although this is valuable for anyone, it’s particularly helpful when your customers belong to a number of different demographic groups. Research simply indicates that different messaging apps and social media platforms are more popular with certain demographics than with others.
Thus, when your chatbot can integrate with these various apps and services, you can reach all your potential customers far more easily than ever before. Additionally, using chatbots simply gives your customers one more way to engage with your brand.
Some customers may still prefer to engage with your brand via social media or email, but others may prefer the immediacy of chatbot engagement. You don’t want to lose their interest by not giving them that option.
Saving Money
It’s worth noting that chatbots are relatively affordable. If you’re looking for a cost-effective way to deliver marketing content, improve customer acquisition, and handle customer service needs, a chatbot represents the ideal solution. It can serve all those purposes without requiring a major financial investment.
For instance, maybe yours is the type of business that frequently receives numerous questions from customers on a daily basis. Maybe these questions also tend to be relatively basic, and don’t necessarily require lengthy and detailed responses from a human customer service representative. With a chatbot, you could continue to satisfy your customers when they have questions, without having to spend money maintaining a large customer service department.
This allows you to devote your money to other priorities. Remember, your competitors may already be using this technology to their own advantage. You don’t want to fall behind. As these points illustrate, there are many ways you can use chatbots to better serve your customers. You should begin doing so sooner rather than later.
