Chatbots have been on the rise since a couple of years and have already gained popularity. Chatbots can help businesses interact with their customers and prospects in a new way using messaging apps, the latest technology, and Artificial Intelligence.
What is a Chatbot?
A chatbot is a service that can interact with you just like a real person. Powered by rules and Artificial Intelligence, chatbots are programmed to simulate a real conversation with users through a chat interface. They are based on machine learning to imitate human conversation and react to service requests.
AI helps them learn the language, human tone, and behavior with every interaction, which in turn helps them to be more intelligent and serve the users better.
For a better understanding of how chatbots can contribute to your business, let us find the top 7 benefits of chatbots:
1. Being Present on Messaging Platforms
Today messaging applications have more users than social media networks. As customers today think that chat is a convenient and faster way to interact with a business, businesses today have the chance to reach more audiences via chatbots while staying trendy.
The Majority of smartphone users today do not want to download new apps. So, businesses can integrate their chatbot in one of the popular platforms that customers use daily such as – Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc. It will also save you time and money.
2. Improved Customer Service
A. Extensive Customer Assistance
According to a survey, 83% of online shoppers want assistance during shopping. So, your customers may need assistance at any time. Additionally, shoppers may also face navigation issues, or have queries about registration, payment, checkout, and delivery or about the product itself.
In such situations, chatbots can provide real-time assistance through interactive communication over text and voice. They can also provide customers with important relevant information from the knowledge base, blogs, tutorial videos, and so on.
B. Always-Available Customer Support
A great 24/7 customer service has a positive impact on customer satisfaction. Chatbots can help you improve the customer support process by quickly giving automated answers to repetitive questions immediately and forwarding the complex ones to a human agent.
Apart from that, chatbots allow businesses to attend to more queries at the same time, allowing companies to scale up their operation to new markets globally.
C. Proactive Customer Interaction
Companies can also use chatbots to start proactive customer interactions regarding any issue, at any time of the day. This will make your customers feel that your brand cares for them on a 24/7 basis. This can help improve your brand perception in the long run.
3. Increased Customer Engagement
Chatbots can be a great tool for customer engagement. Chatbots can provide customers with a specific slice of information and lead the interaction based on the user input at that time. This way, chatbots never provide a dull interaction with irrelevant and useless information resulting in better engagement.
4. Monitoring Consumer Data and Gaining Insights
Businesses can make changes in their service/products based on the feedback chatbots collect through simple questions. As chatbots are also capable of tracking purchasing patterns and consumer behavior by monitoring user data, they can also help a company decide marketing strategies.
Companies can use chatbots to track consumer requests and responses, predict responses based on the language, and direct the chatbot to suggest an alternative product or service.
5. Cost Savings
Implementing a full-functioning chatbot is cheaper and faster than creating a cross-platform app or hiring chat support agents for each task. Businesses today can choose from ready-made applications developed by Facebook, Microsoft, and other IT giants.
Being automated solutions, chatbots can handle many customers at once, saving employee costs and eliminating the scope for human errors. Finally, as customers can access chatbots easily within seconds and interact immediately, the cost of user acquisition also comes down.
These are some of the major benefits chatbots bring to your business. with technological advancements, chatbots will become smarter, better, and more effective. As chatbots gradually gain maturity, this is the right time to adopt this new technology and give your business an edge.
