7 Reasons Why Your Business Needs a Chatbot
In the year 2020, nearly 80% of businesses will use a chatbot in one form or another. Chatbots have become an important part of business growth and the need for these AI-powered bots is only going to increase in the future.
If you are still wondering why you should get a chatbot for your business then we are going to give you seven different reasons why your business needs a chatbot right now.
#1 You Want Your Business to Always be Open
Keeping business open around the clock is difficult, especially for small and medium-sized businesses. This means when a customer reaches out to your business, they won’t get a response from you till business hours resume. There are various tech blogs like Techradar and Techigem. that mention why your business needs a chatbot.
They can email you or leave a voicemail on your phone, but most of their queries will go unanswered until you reopen the next morning. This is where chatbots are very useful.
A chatbot can ensure that your business remains open all the time in one form or another. In fact, it can do more than just answer your customer’s questions. It can make reservations, ask about the menu, and give a plethora of different details about your business. For example, Pizza Hut launched their chatbot that takes personalized pizza orders and lets users rely on their virtual accounts.
#2 You Can Build Trust by Answering Questions
Most small businesses get started in sectors that already have established businesses. This means that the competition is always fierce and you need all the help you can get to stand out in the crowd.
When a customer has a query regarding your brand, they often want instant answers. However, providing instant replies to all the questions can be outright impossible, especially for human agents. Chatbots, on the other hand, provide you with the ability to answer queries round the clock.
By adding frequently asked questions to the chatbot, your customers can search for the right answers anytime. This will build trust among your current and potential customers.
#3 You Want to Scale Your Business
Chatbots are an automated solution that allows your business to handle more customer queries than before. If your current customer solution is being powered completely by human force, then you are definitely limited to handling only a number of customers because a human agent can only attend two or three customers at the same time.
However, if you use chatbots in addition to your human agents then your business can easily scale its operations without having to worry about the increasing number of customer chats and calls. Simply put, if you are looking forward to scaling your business then look into chatbots because chatbots helped scale India’s largest sports game by 30 times. Dream11 – India’s most popular fantasy cricket site saw their user base grow from 40,000 to 40 million in 6 years which led to a soaring number of queries. Dream11 took the right approach and utilized chatbots to help answer the growing number of queries.
#4 You Want Your Customers to Find the Right Products and Services
There will be times when your customers will need help figuring out the right product or service that fits their budget and requirements. This mostly happens when your customers are looking for something expensive to purchase or when they don’t have enough exposure to a particular product or domain. This is where review websites and techs like TheWireCutter and ConsumersBase provide great value as they help customers choose the right product.
Chatbots come in real handy when the customers aren’t sure what they are getting. They also know when customers need help with their purchase decisions. The bots not only give an explanation regarding a particular product but also give recommendations based on prior queries from the user.
#5 You Want to Target Millennials
Millennials love chat channels more than any other form of customer contact services. They text their friends, family, and colleagues on a regular basis. This is one of the reasons why live chat support has become so popular over the past few years.
However, a survey suggests that millennials prefer to solve their issues by themselves without having to contact or talk to any customer service agent, and this is exactly what they can achieve by interacting with a chatbot as opposed to a human agent.
#6 You Want Better User Interaction
Chatbots are capable of having conversations with customers like a human agent would. They can keep your customers engaged in a specific platform by maintaining a conversation. When a web application is opened, the user is greeted by the chatbot in a non-intrusive manner. The user can then ask the chatbot specific questions regarding a product or a service. Most of the time, the user is provided with answers from the database, but in a structured manner that mimics human interaction. With each question, the bot also provides a list of options making it easy for the user to input the necessary query. Emirates increased their engagement rates by 87% after deploying chatbots.
#7 More Affordable Than Building an App
Most businesses release an app for their products which the customers can download on their phones. However, apps are expensive and require a lot of time for development. Also, a user may not be interested in downloading an extra app on their device.
Here’s where you can implement chatbots on messengers, which is where most people spend their time. They are a better alternative to having an app. Take the example of the Food Network chatbot implemented on the company’s Facebook page. Just send a message to the page with your question, and the chatbot will reply immediately. Not only will it reply to your questions, but it will also come up with its own suggestions of dishes that you may want to try out. The chatbots are designed in a way that it engages the customers who come in and makes them try the company’s products and services.
In today’s competitive industry, customers are always looking for customized solutions. You need to satisfy your customer’s requirements and do it in a way that makes you stand out from the crowd. Among the various ways you can improve customer satisfaction, chatbots are a powerful solution to help the customer base. Chatbots are affordable, help scale your business, fully customizable, help your customers find the right products/services, and help build trust for your business. All of these reasons are why you should deploy a chatbot for your business and not get left behind!
Source:
1 – https://www.inc.com/rebecca-hinds/by-2020-youre-more-likely-to-have-a-conversation-with-this-than-with-your-spouse.html
2 – https://www.techradar.com/in
3 – https://techigem.com/
4 – https://venturebeat.com/2016/07/12/pizza-hut-launches-chatbot-for-ordering-pizzas-asking-about-anchovies/
5 – https://bit.ly/2MVjRjQ
6 – https://chatbotslife.com/how-a-chatbot-handled-30x-scale-for-indias-largest-sports-game-c30e8cafbcf9
7 – https://thewirecutter.com/
8 – https://www.consumersbase.com/
9 – https://www.aspect.com/in/company/news/press-releases/customer-serve-thy-self-new-study-reveals-millennials-desire-for-self-service-digital-interaction-to-change-customer-service-forever
10 – https://digiday.com/marketing/emirates-brings-chatbot-banner-ads/
11 – https://www.forbes.com/sites/kathleenchaykowski/2017/04/12/facebook-messenger-passes-1-2-billion-users/#45c86ac21330
