You’re not using a Chatbot yet? Here’s what you are missing
Bots are all over the web, helping e-commerce companies provide tailor-made customer service whilst increasing customer satisfaction.
An opportunity for all businesses
“A chatbot is a computer program that simulates and processes a human conversation (written or spoken), allowing humans to interact with digital terminals as if they were communicating with a real person.” — Oracle
Chatbots can perform simple tasks that respond to a simple query, or represent a digital assistant that learns and evolves to provide sophisticated levels of personalisation as they collect and process insights from users.
According to a Grand View Research report, the chatbot market, which is growing exponentially will reach $1.23 billion by 2025, with a compound annual growth rate of 24.3%.
Chatbots are changing the game in the customer service landscape of all industries. With the use of instant messaging apps and the increasing expectations of customers, businesses are seeing the potential of AI bots.
53% of service organisations expect to use chatbots within 18 months.
The power of chatbots
Depending on your needs, chatbots can be used for different purposes. You need to assess the areas that are worth investing in and set up your chatbot to level up your user experience.
1- Lead Generation
You can design a chatbot to start engaging with your audience and collect all potential leads at scale, allowing you to focus on a strategy and tactics that will keep them down the sales funnel. That will help you focus on visitors who intend to start that business relationship you are waiting for.
The chatbot will ask the users relevant questions about what they are looking for and how they (the chatbot) can be useful. Based on the user’s insight, you’ll get an overview of where that customer is positioned in the sales funnel which makes it easier and faster for your sales team to close up deals.
2- A new way of engaging and satisfying your customers
With a chatbot, you can finally automate your customer service at scale. Gone will be the days when your customers had to wait way too long to get an answer before completing an order.
Shopify reports that 75% of customers expect help within 5 minutes. That’s how demanding shoppers are! But, how can you do that without automation? Or even better, how can you automate and personalise interactions with your customers at scale? Well, a chatbot can help you do that and even more.
When powered by FAQs or knowledge bases, chatbots can take over repetitive tasks currently handled by your customer service team, allowing them to focus on more complex situations or provide valuable experiences with your top customers.
By maintaining a 24/7 customer support service, you can expect good customer satisfaction and start thinking about upselling or cross-selling your product or services. A study from McKinsey reveals that the probability of selling your products to an existing customer is 60 to 70%, but it drops down to 5 to 20% if it is a new prospect.
3- Manage order-tracking like a pro
You can consider implementing a smart agent to monitor order tracking information. By providing a simple and easy way to get information related to shipping issues, you’ll be able to keep your customer satisfied and engaged even after they made a purchase. This is a perfect solution for eCommerce websites.
According to a study from MobileMarketer, millennials feel more comfortable speaking with a chatbot rather than a human employee for matters such as order status. They are looking for fast and specific answers.
The chatbot is keeping the conversation with your customer by providing timely responses, helping you simultaneously improve your user experience and your branding.
4- Collect valuable feedback
Trustpilot stated that nearly nine out of ten consumers worldwide read reviews before buying products. Reviews are therefore considered to be part of the customer’s buying process and e-commerce websites should leverage them to get more sales.
Your current feedback collection strategy can be strengthened using a chatbot. By implementing this new touchpoint, you will be able to reach customers using a new channel and collect valuable reviews that can convince people coming to your website to buy your products or services.
This works by providing a superior customer experience, and helps collect valuable reviews by sharing your companies Trustpilot link during the interaction, for example.
What chatbot features should you look for?
Natural Language Processing
High-performing chatbots use a combination of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning to understand users’ inputs and perform complex tasks.
Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a type of AI system that focuses on the interactions between humans and computers. It enables computers to read and understand human language. Thanks to machine learning, communication is continuously improved based on the insights and outcomes of the communication.
NLP powered chatbots become more reliable each day as they communicate information. They are that powerful because they learn and adapt continuously. Autonomous chatbots with interesting features are obviously more interesting for businesses.
Chatbots such as the Zaion Chatbot present innovative features since they are able to detect and understand spelling mistakes and SMS language. It can even adapt its answers based on the users’ way of speaking. Using such a chatbot will enable you to “hyper-personalise” your customer service to the point where the customer can relate to the brand.
Multichannel Communication
You should consider using an efficient chatbot that can be used in multiple channels and speak different languages.
Messaging apps are broadly used by your customers to communicate. The top 3 messaging apps — WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and WeChat — have a total of 4 billion active monthly users. This is a huge opportunity for e-commerce companies, which are using chatbots since instant messaging is highly appreciated by customers.
Instant messaging bots are instantaneous and asynchronous, allowing you to communicate with your customers directly, around their availabilities. Features such as voice recording are also trending and inclusive, allowing you to reach different types of customers.
Ready to use a chatbot ?
Chatbots have a wide range of functions that can enable you to provide consistent customer support and help you tackle your business needs, may it be lead generation, customer service, after-sales service, reviews collection and much more.
Whether your company sells to consumers (B2C) or other businesses (B2B), the right type of chatbot can help with your overall customer strategy.
As you can see, while most chatbots focus on providing customer support, there are now specific types of chatbots available for various business needs, all related to the different ways a business interacts with its customers.
Chatbots will help you reach the next level of your customer service. Automation, personalisation, customer proximity, customer satisfaction … they are all possible with conversational AI.
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About this article
This article has been written by a student on the Grenoble Ecole de Management’s Advanced Masters in Digital Strategy Management. As part of a content creation assignment, students are given the task of writing articles based on their digital interests and disseminate the articles online. Articles are marked but we make minimal changes to the content. Thanks for reading! James Barisic, Programme Director, MS DSM.
