In an effort to maintain a positive and consistent customer experience, scalable businesses are increasingly adopting the use of chatbots in their strategy/business models. Today’s chatbots are smarter, more responsive, and more useful and we’re likely to see even more of them in the coming years. This is largely due to dramatic advancements in machine learning and other underlying technologies such as natural language processing.
In this post, we’ll be taking a look at 10 major reasons you need a conversational bot in your business.
24/7 Availability
Your customer support team may not be available all day every day, but bots are! With the help of a chatbot you can be available to all of your customers or potential customers all day long. Even outside your business hours, your chatbot can still provide instant responses to common queries and complaints and resolve non-complex issues. According to chatbot.com, 64% of internet users say that 24-hour service is the best feature offered by chatbots and 82% of consumers claim that instant responses to their questions are very important when contacting brands. As customers hate being kept waiting, having immediate responses helps with customer retention, conversion and the overall relationship that your customers have with your business.
Automated support and FAQs
Chatbots allow you to automate routine processes and transactions such as answering FAQs, making reservations and/or appointments and generating quotes. What’s great is that Chatbots can do all of that much faster than human agents. With most of the tedious customer engagements handled by a bot, your employees free up time for more complex tasks and issues. These accelerated operations thus lead to a boost in the efficiency of your business at a reduced effort and cost. Having a bot that does automated support also helps businesses save on costs of customer support training. According to chatbots magazine, a chatbot can help reduce customer service costs by 30%.
Scalability of support
Chatbots make scaling easier for businesses. Human employees cannot engage with a hundred customers simultaneously but a chatbot can. With a chatbot, your business can serve many customers all over the world all at once, with every one of these customers getting immediate responses to their queries. Chatbots help you cut costs on the infrastructure, salaries and training that would otherwise be required when scaling your business.
Chatbots can collect data and help you engage customers
Through their interactions with customers, chatbots can collect data and build customer profiles. These profiles can enable your bot to understand your customers’ preferences better and anticipate their next request. The bot is then able to recommend services that are more relevant to each customer and avoid irrelevant and unnecessary suggestions, thus improving the overall customer experience. For example, a restaurant chatbot may recommend the restaurant’s new vegan smoothie but not the new beef burger to a customer that has only ever ordered vegan food.
Analytics provide insights into your customer interactions
Unlike with human agents, you have access to all of the conversations that the chatbot has had with your customers. Using chatbot analytics, this information along with your customer profiles can be leveraged to get to know your customers better. You can find out what most of your customers need help with, what their questions are, which of your products or services they prefer or use the most. The best part is that these insights come from real customer conversations. All this information is useful when developing other products and designing marketing strategies and would not be as accurate coming from human agents.
Chatbots help you showcase new products and services (marketing)
Most customers no longer open promotional emails, there are just too many in their mailbox. According to mailchimp.com, the average email open rate across all industries is 20.81%. This means that your emails do not reach as many of your customers as you would like. Chatbots enable you to communicate to all the customers that are subscribed to your bots. You can use them as a marketing tool to notify your subscribers of new products or services or to communicate important changes in your business operations. For example, the restaurant mentioned above could use their bot to announce or recommend new additions to their menu, or communicate changes to their operating hours.
Human Handoff
As useful and efficient as they are, there are always some situations or tasks that chatbots just can’t handle as well as humans can. Some bot builders such as Botlhale AI’s bot builder offer a human handoff feature. With this feature, a live human agent can seamlessly take control of the chat, resolve these complex issues and then leave the chat back in the bot’s hands. This feature ensures a smooth service for your customers and saves them the effort of having to make a call or to visit one of your branches when the bot is not being helpful. In this survey conducted by userlike.com on user perceptions of chatbots, 77% of the respondents rated being given the option to escalate to a human agent as the most important things companies get right when using a chatbot.
Accessibility without an app
Most businesses choose to develop an app in order to offer more services to their customers. However, the cost of developing an app is very high, and some of your customers won’t appreciate having to download yet another app onto their smartphones. Chatbots don’t cost as much as apps and they make up for their cost many times over in the costs saved from automating services, customer retention and 24/7 availability. Moreover, chatbots can be deployed on messaging platforms such as WhatsApp, Telegram and Facebook Messenger that your customers are already familiar with and engage with everyday. According to this article by smallbizgenius.net, 63% of consumers think businesses should be on Messenger.These platforms make your business more accessible to your customers than an app.
Quick development and deployment
Not only are chatbots cheaper to develop than apps, they also require less time to develop. With no code platforms like Botlhale AI’s bot builder, an FAQ bot can be developed in a couple of minutes without writing a single line of code. All you need is examples (which you probably already have on your website). With the one-click deployments that the bot builder offers, you can have your chatbot up and running on popular messaging platforms such as WhatsApp, Telegram and Facebook Messenger in no time!
Bonus: Multilingual Functionality
According to StatsSA only 24.7% of South Africans comprehend English and are comfortable with expressing themselves in English. A Common Sense Advisory study also reported that 75% of consumers want to do purchases in their own languages. There are 11 official languages in South Africa but most businesses only offer their services in English and Afrikaans. Businesses struggle to offer digital services and support in African languages because they would need to build teams to support each language. According to a survey by intercom.com, 70% of customers say they feel more loyal to companies that provide support in their native language. This means that a lot of businesses are missing out on the opportunities to build strong relationships with their customers. Botlhale AI not only offers a speech enabled no code bot builder, our bots are also multilingual, supporting all of South Africa’s official languages and other African languages. We enable businesses to automate customer engagements in languages their customers understand and trust.
At Botlhale AI, we advise companies to make chatbots a part of their strategy before the number of clients/interactions with clients makes a chatbot absolutely necessary. Small businesses and even freelancers can benefit from chatbots as well. After all, who doesn’t want to offer their customers the best possible user experience?
Are you interested in finding out how a chatbot can improve your business? Head over to www.botlhale.ai to book a free consultation and demo.
