Today companies are leaning more and more towards technology solutions that reduce their dependence on humans. We are on the verge of an era where AI is slowly becoming mainstream for most development companies, and person-to-person conversations with customer support will soon be obsolete.
Within a few years, chatbots will be capable enough that you won’t know the difference whether you are talking to an actual person or a virtual assistant. Automation using chatbots can make your business simpler and more accessible than before. Let’s take a look at what benefits are of using chatbots on your business website.
Benefits of chatbots
Reduces the time it takes to get a reply
Several studies have shown that even a 10-second delay in playing a video online makes 50% of the viewers abandon the site. This is not an easy thing to digest; imagine losing 50% of your customers just because you could not respond to their queries on time. Therefore the damage caused is irreversible because customers who face bad experiences while interacting with any of the products on your website hardly return.
Helps improve user engagement
It is essential to keep the customers engaged with your brand, and this is why companies are starting to use a chatbot for social media marketing. Engaging customers through chatbots could increase sales by up to 40%. Facebook has the highest success rate for asking present customers to share their positive experiences.
Chatbots can easily be integrated into all your web pages which significantly improves engagement. A simple example can be of a customer who is making an online reservation. The bot can lead the customer to the right page, and once the customer has completed the purchase, a bot can give a satisfactory reply to the customer. You can even program chatbots with natural humor, which can make them seem more human-like. This makes the customer comfortable and makes their experience with your website more pleasurable.
There are no issues like fake email, fake names, or phony contact information when interacting through chatbot messenger. Email marketing has just a 3% message open rate, while on the other hand, chatbots can score more than 80%. Therefore companies use chatbots to gain customer insights and proactively engage with them. They also keep existing customers engaged with exciting new brands and products via push notifications.
Chatbots helps cut down on operational costs
As per a study done by IBM, around 265 billion customer support requests are made every year, costing businesses around $1.3 trillion to service. This cost can be significantly reduced with the help of AI chatbots, and companies can save up to 30% of their cost.
Keeping the current scenario in mind chatbots makes perfect business sense because hiring agents with a 24/7 presence and adding resources to provide support to the customers around the clock can prove too costly for many companies. But chatbots can help avoid these costs.
Many companies like AutoDesk receive general inquiries on calls, and the chatbots handle them quickly. Virtual agents of chatbots are the first point of contact for all queries. Suppose the inquiries turn out to be complex; in that case, they can easily be transferred to human agents, thus improving customer service at a low cost. As per industry research, around 90% of all customer inquiries will be taken by chatbots within 5 years. This means by 2022, businesses will be able to save costs by $8 billion.
Improves mobile engagement
Another important thing is thinking about mobile phones, particularly. Shifting the focus of marketing towards smartphone users can change the game entirely for you. This is extremely important as more and more people engage with brands using their smartphones rather than desktop.
The Messenger bot experience that Facebook provides is completely mobile optimized. Prime users are given essential information before they will visit the mobile website. You can even take all your website experience which is not so mobile friendly and design it for the Facebook messenger platform, which will work so much better.
You can gain a deeper understanding of customers
Customers may talk to your business directly; chatbots provide your business with detailed, actionable records of what your customer’s most significant ailments are. The chance of selling is proportional to consumers’ engagement, and chatbots can provide the rate of engagement required. Through chatbots, the customer can provide feedback and improvements so that you can make some changes in your products.
How can you integrate chatbots into your website?
There are thousands of processes in which chatbots can automate your everyday tasks. Here are some cases that will impact your company
Connecting chatbots with your CRM and focusing on customers
Intelligent chatbots bring customers closer to the company by providing them high-quality service in real-time with a personal touch. They are the perfect tool for all your customer service strategies, and they are even better when you connect them with your other business tools.
Integrating virtual assistants with your CRM, most of the information present in your CRM can be managed from a single place. For example, in HubSpot, you can create a workflow that transfers contacts and other details from the virtual assistant to the account without manually copying and pasting it.
Chatbots can not only save time but also gather essential information that is relative to your CRM.
Improve and enhance your email strategy
Chatbots can prove to be an excellent tool for lead generation and nurturing. When someone gets in touch with your chatbot to learn more about your product and service deals, you can program the chatbot to request contact details through a form.
But later on, you have to transfer that information to an email marketing platform manually. You don’t have to do this if your chatbot is connected to an email marketing platform like MailChimp. You just have to configure it once, and the process is done automatically without you lifting a finger.
Recruit and coordinate your dream team
Chatbots can also be useful for the HR department to integrate with tools like Typeform or slack. Chatbots can be used to post job vacancies, and interested candidates can send their CVs through the chatbot on the company’s website.
Like the email, you can integrate forms to fill out with their data and set an automatic action when integrating HR apps or calendars. The chatbot transfers these details to create an applicant list and send interview notifications. There are more pros of AI solutions for recruiters like machine learning hints about the quality of the offer and collecting information effortlessly thanks to the initial phone job interview with the candidate was run by an AI bot.
Conclusion
Chatbots offer many benefits to businesses, it saves money while also increasing sales and customer engagement. Also, the way AI and Machine Learning are becoming more advanced the chatbots also are set to fully replace humans as the first line of customer service support. So integrating chatbots into your business website may take your business towards a bright future.
