How to Choose the Best Chatbot Partner
Choosing the optimal bot partner is a crucial decision for your brand. Here’s how to ensure you’re entrusting your most important conversations — and data — to the right platform.
There’s no way around it: 2018 is the year of the chatbot. While chatbots are still in their (relative) infancy, it’s nearly impossible to escape the feverish buzz surrounding bots and how they’re helping companies revolutionize their sales, marketing, customer service, and branding efforts. Given that 1 billion people exchange chat messages with businesses and organizations each month, it’s clear that chatbots are shaping the future of how brands communicate with people.
But brands need to be wary of jumping on the bandwagon without properly evaluating what bot platform they’re using and why. Considering this is where your most critical first-party data will live — and considering the effort you’ll put into building a strategy — you’ll want to pick a bot partner you can stick with long term.
Here’s how you can ensure your bot platform is the ideal partner for your brand:
It’s a fully integrated marketing platform, not just a bot.
There are a lot of chatbot platforms out there, and they’re definitely not all created equal. As bots have become hotter, more companies have tried to cash in by developing bots that simply let brands build conversations with no larger strategy or purpose. These companies roll out an impersonal, one-size-fits-all campaign for every client.
The effects of this free-for-all can be dire. Say a company’s chatbot is simply talking at people instead of with them, or say people aren’t aware they’re even talking to a bot. This could seriously injure a company’s brand image, as well as its bottom line.
What brands need instead is a flexible bot partner who will work with them to identify and execute a comprehensive marketing plan. Is your goal to create brand awareness? To generate leads? To enhance customer loyalty?
It’s not enough just to create a bot: you need to be creating impactful, two-way conversations that resonate with your audience. That means your chatbot partner should work with your marketing team to create and implement a targeted, bespoke Chat Marketing strategy that meets your brand’s goals.
They help you own and understand your data.
One of the biggest advantages of chatbots is their ability to procure first-party data on a large scale. Unlike email or direct mail, you have the opportunity to see exactly who your data’s coming from and what those people want. But it’s not enough just to provide data haphazardly: your chatbot partner should provide a flexible, tailored approach to tracking and understanding data. That means the platform should render your data easy to understand and segmented according to your needs.
It also means your bot partner should enable you to employ analytics that create better, more personalized customer interactions. For example, if you are a shoe company, you know exactly who to message about black pumps and who to message about high-performance sneakers, as well as the hours people are most likely to respond. That way, your data is constantly making your bot smarter, more intuitive, and better able to deliver an excellent customer experience.
You also want to consider the security of your data. Your bot partner should have a security infrastructure that protects you and protects your customers’ private information. That means your bot partner should have two-way encryption that keeps your data — and your people — as safe as possible.
They’re integrated with your other platforms.
As we mentioned, a chatbot alone is not a marketing strategy; it is simply a tool in your larger Chat Marketing plan. But integrating your bot with your other marketing and sales platforms is an excellent way to create a seamless and cohesive funnel.
For example, if you’re a Shopify store, or if you use another e-commerce platform, you’re going to want a bot that’s integrated with your platform’s ordering, payment, and tracking system, so customers can place and pay for orders with the bot, or they can ask the bot when their orders will arrive.
We’d love to hear more about what you look for in a bot partner. Let us know in the comments!
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