Do you know that a majority of customers, i.e., 66% try to use self-service in the first place? However, chatbot works as an efficient self-service customer support tool.
So, there’s no denying the fact that chatbots are the future. Basically, they are AI-based systems that enable customer engagement via messaging, text, or speech. Chatbots continue to reduce costs for businesses. As per the report from Insider Intelligence, by 2024, consumer retail spending via chatbots globally is expected to reach $142 billion. Undeniably, they are on the rise. The credit goes to the consumers who want a 24×7 digital experience.
With AI, your website can get several benefits such as:
- They continue to enhance the hyper-personalized messaging experience to blur the line between humans and bots.
- It also helps visitors find what they are exactly looking for and provides them with more information in a frictionless way.
- It enables users to achieve nearly everything they need to navigate a website or an app.
- With a personalized chatbot, your customers can quickly get what they want.
In this article, let’s explore the key benefits of integrating chatbots with your business website. And, how can you improve user experience and supplement your customer service experience?
Let’s get started with the #1 benefit
Personalization
Chatbots provide personalization, which works as a catalyst that transforms a visitor into a customer and returning customer. Conversational chatbots depend upon AI and make the customers feel like they are conversing with a human being, not a robot. The best thing about chatbots is that users feel at home by having information or service conversational and friendly. For example, a retail business website, a chatbot is different from a salesperson, which is always available to help the visitors with product information, payment, and order tracking.
“By 2022, 70% of white-collar staff will interact with digital conversational platforms on a daily basis”, as per the report. It results in more organizations investing in chatbots and deployment. Chatbots are the main AI-based app used in their enterprises.
In addition, the chatbot collects information about the website visitors and provides them shopping information based on their purchase history. As a result, users can interact with chatbots and get information about the products they want to purchase. This way, it offers logical and benefit-driven assistance to help businesses more broadly.
Increased Lead Generation
Chatbots are best known for their benefits, such as increased sales, customer support, marketing, and customer experience. In actuality, the most challenging part is to convert visitors into customers. This is where chatbot comes into play. However, decorating a lead generation website or landing page with loads of walls is not the right way to achieve lead generation. People get overwhelmed with this kind of website. So, no matter how well-written and helpful these web pages might be, making them interesting for visitors is tough.
Chatbots have transformed this experience. Chatbots deliver the relevant data and a simple conversational interchange rather than expecting visitors to read paragraph after paragraph of text, skimming to find the relevant information.
All you need to know about lead generation chatbots in the following ways:
Simple Chatbot
It improves lead capture quality that helps segments gather more information on leads before sending them to the sales team.
FAQs Chatbot
This kind of chatbot has multiple purposes. It does not only help your users to guide you to the right content on the website but is also used to generate more leads. In addition, FAQ chatbots collect frequently asked questions into one place and provide visitors the option of self-service.
Chatbots for Booking Appointments
Such chatbots provide real-time visibility into calendar availability. Both customers and prospects schedule a demo or book an appointment in the chatbot.
Newsletter Chatbots
In this kind of chatbot, you can turn a simple pop-up window into a conversational bot, allowing businesses to collect feedback on communication and let the audience know what the content is all about.
Quick & Multilingual Support
A multilingual chatbot is an AI-powered intelligent virtual assistant (IVA) that allows businesses to communicate with users from different countries and regions. The benefit of a multilingual chatbot is that it seamlessly switches between languages, enhancing and personalizing the customer service experience. Apart from this, there are several benefits of multilingual support from chatbots:
- Saving huge costs
- Converting leads globally
- Developing a local customer base
- Providing solutions in users’ native language
Easier Payments & Checkouts
Introducing chatbots is all about making payments easier. For eCommerce vendors, checkout is usually a major challenge. Generally, it is not the complexity of the process alone, which is responsible, but there could be reasons for such unresolved queries. Fortunately, it has become a blessing for businesses, especially online ones. A chatbot developer needs to integrate the API of a payment system such as PayPal, Stripe, EasyPay, etc. It helps shoppers seek answers to queries, which stops them from completing the checkout process.
Scalability of Support
Here’re a few stats which are worth looking upon:
- As per IBM data, companies globally spend 1.3 trillion dollars annually on customer service.
- According to Chatbot Magazine, implementing a chatbot system helps companies reduce costs on customer service by 30% on average.
Useful virtual assistance, chatbot brings important business opportunities in the digital era. It does reduce not only the costs but also improves customer service. Moreover, it provides the benefit of scalability of support that can handle any traffic surge, for example, during festive seasons or peak hours. Chatbots successfully handle the traffic surge without much investment. They also ensure businesses manage conversation during peak hours without adding more experts.
The other example of business is restaurants, which benefit when the demands rise, customer orders, etc. For example, big brands like Dominos & Taco Bello are using chatbots to arrange the delivery of parcels. Here’s how chatbots help businesses to scale their support:
- The customer support chatbot templates help businesses improve business productivity with additional costs and resources.
- AI-powered bots can manage thousands of conversations and answer every question immediately regardless of how many customers are reaching at the same time.
- With chatbots, you can handle a large volume of chats without affecting the costs of businesses.
Push Notifications
Chatbots and push notifications are meant to go together. Both technologies are essential. Businesses have realized the importance of notifications when customers are bombarded with irrelevant information.
A chatbot seeks information about users to convey the right updates to customers regarding your business.
Push notifications are more effective than email notifications. However, most notifications fail to seek the attention of the audience. This is because irrelevant messages cause a distraction to users. Fortunately, AI-based chatbots and integrated solutions can make a difference in the situation.
Reduced Customer Service Costs
It is essential to invest to optimize customer service to reduce costs. By investing in chatbots, businesses can save extra expenses. Otherwise, they need to hire and invest in more support and resources. By investing in chatbots, companies can reduce costs on different levels, such as training salaries and infrastructure. In addition, AI-based customer services can benefit in several ways:
- Automate routine business processes
- Scale business’ chat supports during busy hours
- Enable new customer service models
The benefit of implementing AI-bots is that they can be scaled during peak hours of businesses without any further costs. Apart from this, it also ensures a brand experience that is simpler and seamless for customers. Bots also reduce significant money and create value for businesses.
Streamlined Customers’ Onboarding Process
Customers love to be assisted. No matter how many guides or tutorials are there, they will still be reluctant to find the correct information on their own. Customers like those brands that could show them the way. Therefore, this is where chatbots come into existence. AI-driven chatbots can prove handy as businesses can educate customers and ease the onboarding process. Onboarding lets customers discover and evaluate products and services through a sales process. An effective onboarding process can be done by chatbots, which guides them on the setup and usage, and provides ongoing support.
The benefits of integrating chatbots during the onboarding process are that it provides speed, accessibility, accuracy, and freedom of endless paper trails. Here’s how you can use chatbots for onboarding customers:
- Chatbots help brands route customers to the best place to find out the information as they search to make informed decisions.
- They can help understand what a customer has found or not the correct information about products and services. Thus, they can smartly push customers along the conversion funnel by implementing this.
- It is also possible to personalize a chatbot’s questions and create a better user experience during the purchase journey.
Balanced Automation with Human Touch
Fusing AI technology with human touch helps businesses to deliver seamless customer support. Similarly, integration of chatbot and live chat software means empowering customers to self-serve and connect with a human agent whenever and wherever required.
With AI-driven chatbots as the primary way, businesses can deliver real-time support, promote answer queries, and boost customer satisfaction. However, there can be chances when the chatbots cannot identify the user intent in the request; therefore, it needs to make a human touch. Due to this reason, it’s essential to understand the difference between a chatbot and a live chat. If you want better customer service, then try to integrate them.
A good example is a Slack bot, which comes under this category. Slack bots notify in time to correct bugs. It can also answer questions about business processes. This way, it takes away the monotonous tasks of employees and leaves them with challenging tasks that make them more productive.
So, this is how you can balance automation with the human touch:
- The seamless transition between chatbot to live chat provides real-time response to the customers and offers them the best hybrid experience.
- Integrating live chat and chatbots can help brands engage with customers intelligently and all day.
- It can also handle complex queries, which require comprehensive discussion without leaving the customers unanswered questions.
Seamless Customer Journey
No business would like to lose prospects halfway through a sales funnel. Unfortunately, several reasons could stop customers from purchasing, such as cumbersome checkout processes or hidden costs. Bots can help brands reduce customer churn and make the customers’ journey seamless. Businesses can create their right bot scripts to engage customers effectively and answer all their queries at different stages of the journey.
Check out some tips to use chatbots to improve the buying process:
- Bots are always a great help in providing discount codes and offers. This way, customers can find value in the marketing funnel.
- Use interactive content—for example, videos, which provide more insights and build trust with prospects and customers.
- Provide additional information on products, services, and shipping to eliminate doubts and make customer journeys smoother.
No matter your business, you need to be updated and make your customers’ journey seamless by providing them great services ahead of time.
Wrapping up
It’s important to understand that using chatbot services in your customer experience strategy depends on your business needs. Understanding your customers’ problems and what works best can create a better prospect and customer experience. Your metrics will also improve when your brand or business starts working for your customers. Here’s how you can create a more contextual bot experience for your business:
- Determine the people who can best answer questions to help them find what they are looking for faster with less effort.
- Create a list of different types of audiences your business is targeting. For each audience type, describe the types of questions they might have.
Once you’re done with it, it is high time to implement it. Bots can work shoulder-to-shoulder alongside your sales team to provide them with an excellent and customized purchase experience. It also helps to identify visitors who are possible goof fit customers. In short, bots can serve both your business and customers simultaneously.
