Chatbots Are Becoming the Key to Retaining Customers for Digital SMEs
Part 1 of this Series can be read here.
In the previous blog, we briefly discussed the history and conception of chatbots. Being familiar with the concept now, let’s move forward and explore the reasons and viability of chatbots in business development especially.
In the past decade, the idea of business has completely revolutionized. In the conventional mode of businesses, online working of business was not an option to think about. But the increasing usage of technology changed the game completely. Ever since humans are working on the comfortability area of users, it is being tried to apply more technology for more comfort and less hassle.
With the revolution in business mode and advancement in technology, the need for an automated system was felt badly. The typical conventional system didn’t work for the online mode of business especially in the case of customer management services. In this article we will be discussing the benefits and reasons of chatbot usage.
Problems in conventional customer services
While the whole idea of business changed and selling opportunities for businesses were no longer limited to the local markets only, the competition drastically increased. In the increasing competition situation, better customer service can get more customers to a specific business. On the other hand, a business with a low level of customer service was likely to get out of the competition completely. Following were some of the basic issues faced in this regard:
1. Time consuming
As with the increasing number of potential customers, it was impossible for human representatives to timely respond to every customer’s query. Customers had to wait for a long time to talk to any customer service agent for even a simplest query. Most of the time it causes loss of interest of customers, leading to a lesser number of customers.
2. More human resources
To timely respond to a large number of customers at any time, many businesses needed to hire more customer service representatives causing an increase in the total cost. Hiring and training a large number of human resources was also a big issue.
3. Customer targeting
Manually targeting new customers was a big deal. With the approach to the international market and millions and billions of customers it was impossible to target manually as many customers as needed.
4. Unavailability of human resources all the time
When targeting international customers or even dealing locally, it was impossible to be available for customers for 24 hours and it was a biggest hurdle for customers to approach businesses.
5. Addressing similar queries
Most people ask general and specific questions about a specific business that, most of the time, caused frustration for human representatives.
To address the above-mentioned issues and some other reasons, chatbots were first designed to answer simple questions. But with the advancement of artificial intelligence, chatbots were also revolutionized as explained in the previous blog.
Benefits of having a chatbot for your business
Some of the issues were mentioned in the previous section to highlight the need of chatbots in the past. But in today’s world chatbots are much more than just solving those problems. With innovation of technology almost every business even the SMEs prefer to have chatbot services on their website. Let’s have a look at how chatbots help businesses in growing and solving their problems.
- Automated responses for FAQs
A simple chatbot can be fed with frequently asked questions (FAQs) or general and specific questions regarding a specific business. Such questions usually have some typical and specific answers that do not need to change for every customer. It will save the time of customers as well as customer service representatives. In such cases chatbots can be really very helpful in engaging customers without even bothering any human involvement.
2. Lead generation
A chatbot talks in a natural human-like manner and gathers information from the customers. Based on this collected information, a bot can categorize and suggest suitable products to customers and can generate more leads. Moreover, it can offer discount coupons, sale options and much more at different stages of purchasing a product. It can understand the needs of customers and can drive the conversation accordingly to change a customer into a lead.
3. 24/7 Availability
Unlike human customer service representatives, a chatbot can be available for customers around the clock. A customer does not need to wait for only business hours to talk to a live agent to assist him and can quickly have answers to his queries. This feature helps businesses grow very effectively as a chatbot can also process further for the customer according to the needs and requirements. Chatbot can make reservations, take orders, and give different details and options about your business.
4. Cost efficient
Unlike human resource hiring for customer services, a chatbot is a way cheaper solution to this problem. Instead of hiring many human representatives, you can build only a single chatbot to handle multiple chats at a time. There is no limit to the number of customers a chatbot can handle as humans can handle only a specific number of conversations in a limited quantity.
5. Make things work faster
As there is no constraint on the number of conversations that a bot can handle so it can work in a faster way to accomplish the tasks quickly. It can handle multiple tasks for different customers at the same time.
6. Targeted marketing
Chatbots can be automated to send multiple messages to multiple platforms i.e., SMS, Email, social media etc. It can help in targeting more customers in less time with less effort. AI chatbots can perform such tasks on their own by using customer information. They can send different offers and marketing messages to as many customers as required on the basis of their provided information even in the future. This can help attract more customers towards the company without even having any extra advertisement cost.
7. Better ad management
If a business runs an ad and directs the user towards the chatbot, the user will have personalized experience and can help customers purchase more products from that business by suggesting and recommending users more products according to their taste and choice.
8. Avoid Negative conversations
Chatbots can handle customer complaints and angry customers without responding in a negative way as chatbots do not get frustrated or bored over a huge volume of conversation. This helps handling customers more effectively and can attract more customers.
9. Chatbot improves with time
AI chatbots learn with every conversation and provide better assistance every single time. They learn new ways of greeting customers and responding to queries differently every time in a better way.
10. Serving multi purpose role
Chatbots these days can cover a wide range of services as mentioned above from answering FAQ to guiding customers buy products they would like, from helping customers fill a form to providing useful insights to admins. You can also have many bots being supervised under a super bot. This ability of chatbots can help you handle all your different business’s customer service at one point.
Summary:
Benefits of having chatbot service has not only become integral but its benefits are exceeding every day. Almost all major web and mobile applications platforms provide their builtin bots with their services. Although bots haven’t reached the level of human intellect yet, but no one can deny the things computers do better than humans, take math for example-speed and cost are the winning features. Other than built in chatbots, building one from scratch using open source or free tools is easy, keep following my articles to learn more on this topic.
