How Chatbots are transforming businesses — and why your business need one
Snippet: in this post we look at the world of Chatbots. We begin with understanding what Chatbots are and how it benefits your bottom-line. And finally, we give you some live examples of Chatbots used by businesses. And help you with Chatbot development for your business. Sounds good? Let’s begin!
Chatbot is a program (or a set of programs) which help you automate a certain business task. Like, chatting with your website visitor. Developers program a Chatbot with scenarios and queries your prospects might ask. And the answers are fed into the program.
A Chatbot analyzes the query and offers the right response very quickly. In the truest sense, Chatbots become more powerful and smart when you feed more scenarios, questions, and solutions to them. Like a smart child.
Developers infuse Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) in Chatbots where thousands of gigabytes of data need to be crunched. More data crunching leads to the possibility of effective analysis.
If a business website and mobile app services millions of prospects (who want to buy from you) and customers (servicing existing consumers), AI and ML can help boost the performance through Chatbots. Simply by feeding them information and solutions in real-time. This has massive consequences on any businesses bottom line.
Why should I use Chatbots?
Today’s businesses are conducted on-the-go and with incredible immediacy. Consumers want solutions and deliveries immediately. In a cut throat world like ours, time management and fast delivery means survival.
Businesses need to equip their workforce and technology platforms with all the information necessary — not only to serve customers — but also to predict what they want or need.
Predictions are based on analyzing a ton of data. This is where AI and ML can change the game instantly. Obviously robots aren’t going to take over business delivery and customer service. At the end of the day, we need analysts to interpret the analyzed data and come to conclusions to boost business.
Any business function, which works and collects large amounts of data, and is reliant on making quick, real-time decisions — needs intelligent BOTS (fused with AI).
What are the benefits of implementing Chatbots in my business?
At the very top, Chatbots can change the way you spend money and resources to run your business — meaning, you will save a lot of resources. Let us look at the benefits:
- Availability: Chatbots — are non-people beings — apologies for the lack of a better definition. Yes, Chatbots don’t sleep or take breaks. They just live on all your platforms (Website, Social Media, Mobile Apps etc.) and service queries even when your business personnel are away.
- Process large volumes of requests: You need not to hire more staff to address a growing list of consumer queries. Chatbots (when fed with the right information) can replace your staff to address benign, day-to-day queries. This allows you to address more prospects and convert more of them into customers.
- Understanding your users: Wouldn’t it be terrific to just know what your prospects want even before they interact with your website or team? Chatbots make it possible. When prospects visit your website, app or your social media channels, Chatbots quickly drive engagement via instant messaging. You can design the bot to ask basic questions to create a customer profile. Once you have a decent idea, then the bot can suggest the best possible product or lead the visitor to the right team.
- Drive your maintenance costs down: Besides the initial cost of developing Chatbots (in-house) or buying a ready-made solution, there won’t be swelling expenses every month — unlike paying salaries for resources. The adoption curve is literally very short and helps your business drive down costs.
- Boost customer service performance: Like website cookies, Chatbots can remember visitor conversations and preferences. So, the next time the same website visitor pops up, on — say your Facebook page — the Chatbot can continue the conversation. This is called customer service continuity, and your prospects and customers will love you for it. Nobody wants to repeat what they want, right?
- Chatbots are platform agnostic: Chatbots are versatile, and can be used on any platform. The fundamental design of a Chatbot remains the same — feeding it info and answers for many possible scenarios. However, the same Chatbot can be deployed on your website, mobile app, and even social media sites such as Facebook to address queries. Chatbots — with the use of APIs — adopt to native platforms incredibly quickly.
- Save your time and especially your prospect’s time: when a well-fed Chatbot is deployed across all digital touchpoints, it can serve consumers with ready-made — contextual — answers very quickly. Thereby making your prospects happy by saving them time to find a solution. And in turn save you a lot of time (resources) to serve hundreds and thousands of queries every day.
Okay, so, give me some examples of business cases of using Chatbots
Hipmunk
Hipmunk is a platform that allows people to search for travel deals and many of its users turn to it to book flights, hotels, rental cars, or packages.
To help people search and reserve more easily, Hipmunk created its “Hello chatbots” that you can easily integrate with Facebook, Slack, or Skype.
Mastercard
No more interacting with a boring IVR or waiting on call for an executive to find answers to your finance related queries. Mastercard has built a Chatbot to address pretty much anything you want to know, and do with your account. Even securely making a money transfer through a conversational interface.
Booking.com Assistant
Booking.com receives a ton of travel queries every hour. How do they manage it? Booking.com has built an Assistant Chatbot which says hello to visitors on its website, mobile app and Facebook page. It allows users to select a predefined set of questions and follows it up with relevant solutions. Booking.com claims that a third of the total queries they get are answered within 5 minutes. That’s a great way to drive consumer engagement.
Oscar Health — Insurance
Getting an insurance quote is a laborious task — what with filling lengthy forms and answering a ton of questions. Oscar Health have built a bot on their Facebook page which allows users to answer a few questions and receive an insurance quote in an instant. Saving time and making prospects happy.
LIDL — Wine Shopping
A UK based supermarket chain LIDL has launched a Chatbot called Margot. Margot is a wine bot and helps users view, shop and pay for wine bottles — all through the Chatbot on it’s Facebook page.
I get it. Chatbots are good. So, who will build one for my business?
We — at Codegama — are experienced in building cutting edge software applications and bots. Instead of hiring an expensive team to develop a BOT fit for your business, let us talk to you, understand your business and what you want to achieve with a conversational interface. Once we get on the same page, we shall build the bot your customers truly deserve. Talk to us today at contact@codegama.com. Let’s build you a great bot!
Originally published at Codegama.com on March 8, 2019.
