Why everyone is using Chat and Chatbots? What are the benefits of Chatbots?
Chatbots have been the buzz these days. They are everywhere! Chatbots can be used for either Marketing, Sales or Customer Support. Here is the most complete list of all the benefits of using chat/chatbots.
1. Be Where Users Are
Your users are already using messaging apps. The great advantage of chat compared to other means, such as social network, is that the users are spending most of their time online on messenger applications. They spend 91% of their online time on messaging. Below are some proofs.
Business Insider showed us (on the chart above) that messaging applications has reached more users than social media networks in the first quarter of 2015. Since customers’ preferences verge to interact with brands via chat -as it’s easier and faster to use- businesses have now the opportunity to reach more customers via Chatbots while staying trendy for their customers.Furthermore, 65% of smartphone users don’t download any new apps in a month. Since users have their core apps such as Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp etc., they don’t look for new ones. Therefore, integrating your own chatbot into one of the popular platforms that your customers use daily, can be better than building a new app by saving money and time.
Here are some more graphs proving the same thing.
2. Accessible Anytime: 24X7 Available
51 percent of people say a business should be available 24/7.
As we all know, customer service is the most important factor in success. Whether you are already an international brand with customers all over the world or a local brand who is ready for global business, chatbots can solve your customer care problems in multiple languages and 24/7, 365 days a year. This feature helps organizations to handle more task and save time to answer FAQ’s about product and service and no customer has to wait.
Instant answers have a tremendous impact on your client’s satisfaction and willingness to buy.
3. Out Of The World Open Rates & CTR
Chatbots results in upto 70–98% open rates and 30–55% CTR.
This is huge compared to other marketing channels. According to the 2016 E-mail Marketing Metrics Benchmark Study, the world average open rate of emails was 21.8%. This means that almost 78% of users are not interested in opening emails sent by brands. The 2016 E-mail Marketing Benchmark Study shows how 49% of the mail is read via mobile, which may indicate the users’ tendency to read communications whilst on the move. It looks like brands are failing to attract the attention of most of their users through this medium.
In simpler terms, even a poorly made Chatbot can give 2x — 5x benefits compared to other channels like Emails.
4. Personalized Experience
Personalization has been always been one of the top needs of marketers. However, they have never been able to do scalable personalization in a lead generation funnel.
State of Personalization Report — 2017 states that just 78% of shoppers are not satisfied with the level of personalization they currently receive. And more interestingly, 52% of users are willing to share personal data to get product recommendations — as a Salesforce report suggests.
Chatbots are the most effective way of personalized marketing.
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Chatbots are designed to provide customers with a conversational environment, the same way they would feel conversing with a fellow human. This means chatbots can make your marketing as personalized as one-to-one sales. Chatbot gathers information about your website visitors adapts according to their preferences.
Across 8 markets surveyed globally, 91% of consumers say they’re more likely to shop with brands who recognize, remember and provide them with relevant offers and recommendations.
5. Solution To Top Inefficiencies Of Marketing
The top 3 reasons limiting marketers to get more & more ROI are:
- Drop-Offs: Leads dropping off in-between the marketing-sales funnel. Approx. 96% is the market average for drop-offs.
- Lead Quality: Low-quality leads can really affect your ROI. Market average for this is only 11% of the total leads are of good quality.
- Engagement Rate: Keeping customer interaction active is another goal. About 25% of the leads stay engaged.
Chatbots can help solve these:
- Chatbots always has higher Lead Contact-ability (up to 130–600% higher) than other communication channels. Mostly because of two-way conversations and benefit of social profiles. This results in reducing the Drop-offs drastically.
- Chatbots improves Lead Authenticity by 120–300%. Which in-turn improves Lead Quality.
- Chatbots are proactive and dynamic. They can keep the conversation interesting and relevant for the customers. This results in up to 150–800% higher engagement rates.
6. Cost Effective / Saves Money
Hiring a human for a job is never a cheap affair, and it will be expensive if your revenues are not high or sales targets are not met and would create havoc in the business. Companies’ need for growing the customer service department can be managed by rolling out increasingly capable bots handling more and more complex queries.
As one chatbot is equal to loads of employees, it can easily communicate with thousands of customers at the same time. We would only need a handful of people to jump into conversations sometimes when necessary. Implementing a full functioning chatbot is way cheaper and faster than creating a cross-platform app or hiring employees for each task.
Moreover, because customers can easily access chatbots within seconds and start interaction immediately, user acquisition is also associated with lower cost.
According to industry research, Chatbots are predicted to deal with 90% of all clients inquiries within 5 years. This means that by 2022, it’s expected that they will cut business costs by $8 billion.
7. Less Noise — Early Opportunities
- Currently, it’s really easy to get good results on new chat platforms like Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, Line, Telegram etc.
- Up to 85% of all customer-business interactions will take place without a human intermediary by 2020.
- Facebook Messenger already has more than 300,000 bots until Mid 2018. While 300,000 chatbots sound like a lot, it actually equates to less than 1 percent of businesses on Facebook taking advantage of the technology
This creates a unique opportunity for brands to leverage chat during early stages. Over time chat will also get somewhat noisy like Emails & SMS.
8. Handling Scale/Capacity
Unlike humans who can only communicate with one human at a time, chat bots can simultaneously have conversations with thousands of people. No matter what time of the day it is or how many people are contacting you, every single one of them will be answered immediately.
For eg. — imagine you own a restaurant, and you have a good reputation for your food and most of your revenues come from delivery. As the demand keeps rising, there will be more & more customers to take orders from but very few staff to attend them all. A chatbot can serve each and every person to ensure that no order is missed. Taco Bell and Dominos are already using chatbots to arrange delivery of parcels.
9. Better Lead Generation, Qualification, Nurturing
Personalized messaging that assists consumers along “buyer’s journey” is possible with the consumer information that chatbots receive. A bot can ask the necessary and related questions, persuade the user and generate a lead for you. Chatbots ensure the flow is in the right direction to get higher conversion rates.
In addition to generating potential customers and notifying the sales teams, a chatbot can also help you to determine the unqualified leads through identified KPIs (budget, relevancy, timeline, resources, etc.) and prevent you to deal with time-consuming leads.
Chatbots are the best thing happened to Marketing
10. Increased Customer Interaction & Sales
Needless to say, it’s important to keep your customers engaged with your brand. According to research, companies that engage with their customers on social media were able to increase the customer spend by 20% to 40%. While social media is doing its job, chatbots can contribute by making the engagement more interactive.
The flexible structure of chatbots means that it’s really simple to integrate them with other channels to improve engagement. A simple example of this would be a conversation with a customer who’s made an online reservation. The bot can lead the customer to an online purchasing page and close the sale with a satisfied customer.
Chatbots puts customers at comfort and makes their experience with your business more pleasant.
11. Keeping Up With The Trends
- According to 2017 worldwide Statista questioning, 34% of respondents declared they would prefer to answer the questions from AI by means of a chatbot or a virtual assistant in regards to e-commerce.
- By 2020, over 80% of businesses are expected to have some sort of chatbot automation implemented” (Business Insider, 2016)
- Between 2016 and 2021, we expect Chatbot Marketing to grow at a compound rate of 35.2%. (Marketsandmarkets, 2017)
12. Gaining Deeper Insights & Understanding Of Customers
Chatbots are great tools to communicate with customers. With the feedback they collect through simple questions, you can make improvements on your services/products and even optimize your website by adjusting low converting pages.
Chatbots can be also used to track consumer behaviors and purchasing patterns by monitoring user data. According to Forbes, this helps a company to decide “which products to market differently, which to market more and which to redevelop for relaunch”.
At Morph.ai we have created our machine learning engine MARK — the chat marketing assistant which automatically tracks customer behavior and help you optimize the funnel. Learn more about how MARK can help you optimize your chat funnel here.
13. Reaching New Customers
Bots provide another channel to reach out to your customers. Users are continuously active on chat platforms. This helps companies reach new customers who may otherwise not want to reach out to the company with an email or call.
On Facebook Messenger each month, people and businesses exchange 8 billion messages, representing 4X growth, year over year.
14. Reinvent Your Forms
If you want your customer’s information, you give them a form to fill in. Visitors find them annoying to complete, requiring all the patience in the world. As a result, most users quit the process before finishing. The forms are inefficient, which is obvious to all.
Chatbots create interest and minimize bounce rates by utilizing acclaimed conversational powers. They blend user input fields with affable questions based on intelligent, natural conversations. Users no longer need to deal with text boxes and scroll-down menus. Instead, they have a guide assisting them throughout the process.
“Chatbots can get the same information that any form can — but without the friction and cognitive load that you get when you’re staring down a form with 11 required fields, which, if you can believe it, is the industry average” — David Cancel
15. Instant Answers / Saves Time
Research shows that responding to a new lead within five minutes of when they first reach out is crucial. Respond any later than that, and there’s a 10x decrease in your odds of actually getting in touch with that lead. After 10 minutes, there’s a 400% decrease in your odds of qualifying that lead.
Chatbot by default completely eliminates this problem. They provide instant response to customer queries which results in the customer not leaving your website, hence increasing conversions.
16. Flexible Attribute
Chatbots have the benefit that it can quite easily be used in any industry. Unlike other products where you have to do a lot of development and testing to change platforms, chatbots are relatively easy to switch. One has to just train the bot by giving the right conversation structure and flow to switch its current field or industry.
You can find some examples of different experiences of chatbots here or read more about them in the original blog
17. Customer Satisfaction
Another benefit of using chatbots in your business is that they give greater customer satisfaction. Chatbots provide two-way instant communication to users and also proactively help them guide through the doubts your users are having. 69% of consumers prefer chatbots for quick communication with brands according to this. Users don’t have to wait for humans to reply and can get answers instantly.
Chatbots will remember a customer’s answers and tailor their responses. In doing so they create a personal level of service that closely mirrors human interaction. This improves the overall customer experience and makes them more satisfied with your brand experience.
18. Consistent Answers
Talking to a customer service rep, a customer has no assurance that other reps are also providing similar, consistent responses. If a customer service rep is not helpful, a customer could be tempted to try calling again to see if the next rep is better.
Humans are bound to change of emotions. Chatbots, on the other hand, are bound by some rules and obey them as long as they’re programmed to. They will always treat a customer in the perfect way no matter how rough the person is or how foul language the person uses.
19. Goodbye, IVR
One of the biggest complaints that customers have about the customer service process is the use of interactive voice response (IVR) systems during phone calls to customer support. These systems ask the customer questions and route the customer’s call based on their voice responses. IVR systems are highly structured, routing the customer through each response until it reaches the pre-programmed destination.
A chatbot, on the other hand, can be used in a similar way, but with less IVR-induced frustration. The customer feels like their voice is being heard and understood, while the chatbot can try to lead them towards either an answer based on previous situations or to a human representative.
20. Automation Of Repetitive Work
People tend to be less productive when given a recurring job or work. We humans usually get bored doing the same thing over and over again. Chatbots can now automate tasks which are to be done frequently and at the right time. And now there are already numerous slack bots which automate repetitive tasks. This helps people save time and be more productive.
21. Cut Down On Errors
Unfortunately, humans handling customer service questions and other issues can make errors. They can forget things, transpose numbers, and make other types of mistakes.
Not so with chatbots. Based on the questions asked they will always give the right answers. This makes them a huge asset when used in your business.
Conclusions
It’s pretty simple:
- Chat is the new Social. Obviously, people love to chat. No need to prove it.
- According to “Be where users are” philosophy, brands also have to be available on chat.
- As chat is a real-time and two-way communication channel, to scale brands need automation.
- Voila! A 🤖 to the rescue.
Messaging is one of the few things that people do more than social networking. — Mark Zuckerberg
Chatbots are here for good! It’s up to you whether you want to leverage this opportunity right now or in the next 2–4 years.
Thinking of building your own chatbot?
➡Book a Demo with Morph.ai or visit us at Morph.ai to know more.
Morph.ai allows businesses to have personalized conversations with their customers. Generate more leads with Morph.ai’s chat solutions by increasing Lead Quality & reducing Drop-Offs. Morph.ai provides ready-to-use chatbots for Marketing, Sales & Support departments. Request a demo with us today to try out the magic.
Originally published at blog.morph.ai on March 27, 2019.
