Do we live in the era of bots?

Do you remember ELIZA? Ideally speaking, this concept of chatbots isn’t new to us. Off late people have begun to tap the hidden potential of chatbots. It’s not a surprise, that Artificial Intelligence (AI) – Machine Learning to be specific & chatbots are here to change the entire digital stream and the way businesses are managed.

How exactly can chatbots help in your business?

1. Ditch the mundane FAQ section:

In most instances generally, users either mail or call the customer care team with certain queries pertaining to some features of the site, placing an order etc. Answers to these can be found from the FAQ section, present in most of the websites. However, the problem is the availability of plethora of info, which in turn is time consuming for the customer as it might take some time and effort for the customer to read through and find their answers.
What if you had a chatbot to talk to your customers? Load all the basic FAQs and any additional information that might be needed into your chatbots. So when the customer keys in the query, it answers the customer much similar fashion as a customer service personnel would have responded. This makes the work easy for the customer and saves the time and effort of your customer care team.

2. Quicker customer response:

There might be several customers trying to get in touch with your team at the same time. So it might be necessary to have a reasonably larger team to handle queries. But, this wouldn’t be possible in the case of a smaller business.

If you have a chatbot interface, then instead of waiting in a queue, the customer’s questions can be answered immediately. Whenever there is a real need to redirect someone to a customer service personnel, the chatbot could then relay the conversation or handle the situation if it calls for a straightforward solution.

3. Collect and analyze customer information:

Customer information comes in handy for the businesses to understand their target customer groups. Chatbots can instantly gather and process all required customer related information. This information can be used to direct focused marketing campaigns as well as give the businesses a feedback about which segment of users to concentrate on.

4. Channelize sales:

The collected user information as well as the purchase history could immediately be linked and analysed to interact with the customer and suggest suitable recommendations. This can channelize the sales & get the business going. Again, in the case of smaller businesses, having a team to talk to the customers about the products or services and encourage them to do business might take some time and resources and of course, the accompanying costs. A chatbot, comes as a saviour here. One can have an interface to ask the customers, asking few basic questions and then come up with suggestions. Thus it can promote sales for the business and offer a more personalized shopping experience for the user as the chatbot would function more like a virtual personal sales assistant.

Why should you consider to getting your chatbot live soon?

• Any technology is attractive especially in the introductory stages. It might sooner or later get saturated or probably become very common, if everyone starts using it. Chatbots, still are not widely implemented by several businesses. So when you get one, you might be among the first few who have it. This would keep you ahead in the market and give you an edge over your competitors.
• Chatbots are currently much economical to build and launch. This can save a lot of costs that you might have to spend on larger resources for customer care.
• Machine learning based chatbots can take things a step further and can even take care of payments and other transactions thus automating your entire sales process.
• Chatbots make the interaction more human like. Users would find it more convenient to interact with a chatbot and proceed with their order than to navigate through several stages of your website and gather information. This can simplify and make the user interface more interactive and thus cause productive results.

The era of bots has begun. With that in mind, it’s imperative to get in the race and get ahead before the others do so that you don’t get left behind.