How chatbots can help you increase sales and customer service?
Due to ever-increasing technological advances in every aspect, it has been necessary to keep up with the pace of these advances.
Especially for small businesses and organizations, this has become a quintessential part of their business as the market, and the industry has been steadily evolving. If they don’t keep up, they’re simply out of the race for success.
So, how does a business cope with the advent of technology? Well, there are many ways to do it, and deploying a ‘Chatbot‘ is one of them.
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What exactly is a 'Chatbot'?
A chatbot is a software application used by a business or an organisation to facilitate communication with clients, potential customers, or even a third party seeking to interact with a particular business.
It initiates a conversation with the client informally as if it’s having a “chat” with them. The chatbot will provide any kind of information based on the queries of the client or customer, and its whole purpose is to resolve whatever they want to seek out of that interaction.
A chatbot is entirely automated, which means that it does not require any human supervision and functions on its own most of the time. The chatbot has automated answers based on the client’s query type, and it generates the response aptly.
A chatbot is based on the basic principle of automated responses, and such open-ended software provides a bunch of unique ways for organisations to deploy it. But the primary purpose of the chatbot remains the same, to provide information to the consumer based on their response.
Chatbots are pretty nifty, but how can a glorified answering software aid a company in increasing sales and enhance customer service?
6 Ways how chatbots improve sales and customer service
It's online 24/7
It’s an extremely difficult task for a business to maintain and sustain its presence in the online marketplace all the time, especially for those international companies that cover many time zones at once.
So, these chatbots help provide the customer with automated purchase and payment gateway options at any time of the day. The business doesn’t miss out on any potential sale opportunity.
Tending to every visitor
You simply cannot interact with every single visitor to your website every day. Or can you?
A chatbot can provide an easy way to help visitors become potential leads and encourage their buying behaviour by pointing them in the direction of information they’re looking for.
While this is a handy way to lure in visitors, explicit chatbot pop-ups can be a hindrance in making the website appealing or even end up pushing them away rather than luring them in.
Enhanced lead generation
While chatbots can be used for interaction with website visitors, they can also generate potential sales leads. While interacting with a potential customer, a bot can ask for contact information that can be coded to be taken and stored as a potential lead in the company database.
However, the increasing awareness of online netizens handing out their information could be a potential deterrent to a sales lead. So, a careful balance needs to be established of how much information is necessary for further contact with the potential lead.
It delivers a personalized touch to the consumers
Chatbots often serve as an intermediary between procuring services or information, and there are many downtimes associated with it. So, why not make it more fun!
Many companies give their chatbot an animated icon or a face for it to have more personality. It subconsciously reassures the consumer that they are not talking to a static and lifeless robot.
Some companies take this a step further. Some add-in small minigames or some form of entertainment for the consumer to not feel bored in the waiting time of their issue to be resolved.
The Domino’s Pizza App used the famous Hatsune Miku, A Japanese digital icon, as an intermediary chatbot to provide consumers with information about their pizza order status, exclusively in Japan.
Consumer redressal
Over time, many tools have been used for addressing post-purchase grievances of customers, but none of them has matched the excellence of chatbots in this category.
Chatbots have become the mainstay for customer redressal through an online medium.
Many retail websites and applications like Amazon and Swiggy have simply integrated the chatbot as the chief in charge to interact with customers for any assistance they require. While it may not be able to solve or understand everything, it helps connect the customer to a support executive in no time.
Most convenient
While the original purpose of the chatbot was to be ever-present and provide a quick resolution, its role has gradually become to provide a more convenient method of interacting or purchasing through an online medium. Many customers would prefer chatbots rather than human interaction to address their issues or seek information.
Gone are the days of customers waiting for online vendors to gain direct contact and continue purchasing. Nowadays, it is also a given that the product displayed online would be more or less the same in physical form. The company wouldn’t risk tarnishing their reputation on social media because of an aggravated customer who wasn’t happy with what he received.
Conclusion
The usage of chatbots has become widespread in every field now, from banking to Pharma; everyone uses a chatbot on their app to address and interact with the consumer.
It does not alienate the consumer from human interaction online; it strengthens the consumer’s autonomy to find the solution to their problem using the chatbot as a tool rather than the guidance of a support executive.
How chatbots can be used are up to the imagination of the person developing them, so the possibilities are virtually endless. However it may be used, the Chatbot has had an undeniable impact on the forefront of online business.
The advent of chatbots was also a golden opportunity to provide essential tools to lay down the foundation of effective CRM. Many companies have successfully deployed it.
A great example of this is the Locobuzz chatbot which provides real-time omnichannel customer support with powerful AI and ML capabilities, resolving nearly 80% of customer queries on its own and is supported in multiple languages. .
It’s an excellent precedent set by the folks at Locobuzz for the implementation of easy-to-build chatbots that can be trained once and applied to all social channels across sectors and industries on a single dashboard.
