3 Ways ChatBots Can Make Doing Business More Personal

Working in an office can suck. Let’s be honest. Sartre’s observation that “Hell is other people” can seem much closer to the truth when Karen from accounting stops you for the third time to talk about her holiday to Thessaloniki.

But what happens when you make the leap to working from home? For many small business owners their home is their office.

And it has a population of one.

Isolation can be an unexpected part of being your own boss. A lot of your time is spent doing boring back office work, alone, inputting data into a screen and never getting anything back. Enough time by yourself and you might start to miss Karen from accounting.

But what if your could turn your solitary daily tasks into an interaction ? What if you could get that work done through a conversation?

Chatbots to the rescue. For those not in the loop, chatbots are computer programs designed to simulate an intelligent conversation with human users. In short, you talk to them and they talk back. Conversational interfaces might hold the key to combating feelings of isolation for small business owners, but how, and why, do they work?

1. They have character

Personality is programmable. Most people find the prospect of conversing with a computer program to be an impersonal experience because they feel like they are talking to a machine. And they are. There’s no point in trying to convince them they’re not talking to a machine, the point is to give that machine some attitude.

Back office tasks, like expense tracking, invoicing etc can be mind numbing. Assigning these tasks to a bot that can throw you a witty quip while they do it or ask how your day’s going can make the difference between soul crushing work and bearable work.

2. They are intuitive

Humans are built to converse. Face to face communication is what we do best. Obviously you can’t go face to face with a bot (unless you want to get up close and personal with a motherboard) but a conversational interface is infinitely closer to the preferred human mode of functioning than click-and-fill CRM systems.

Using chatBots is advantageous because you don’t need a handbook, or ~shudder~ a video tutorial. We all know how to talk, why not build a system that capitalises on that? In the end the grasp-ability and ease of use of chatBots reduces stress which equals a happier business owner.

3. They give you more time to talk to actual humans

So we’ve established you can, in a simple conversation, assign repetitive tasks to a loyal and engaging chatBot. So what next? What to do with this new-found free time? Well for a start it means you can spend more time developing meaningful relationships with your clients. You have more time to call them, catch up with them, even meet face to face with them. In your private life too less time spent doing paperwork means more time with family and friends (or, more realistically, more time in pyjamas binge watching Netflix).

All in all chatBots make doing business quicker and more pleasant. Now isn’t that something to talk about?