So first: what is a chatbot? It’s software that sits on websites and sends users messages in a more casual way than ever before.
Ideally, you might want to have a human ready to respond to messages received through your website. The restriction you face, is of course, you need to have a human ready — and customers may have questions at any point, 24/7.
What a chat bot allows is a similar experience any time you need it.
No Humans Required
Once set up, a chatbot can be a fully automated, friendly experience for your customers to do anything from get a quick answer to an easy question, to order a product or learn more about your company.
This gives them substantial power in customer service and online ordering. Sometimes, they might be able to actually resolve the issue without involving a human at all — but at the very least, they can help a query get to the right place without a fuss.
Learn the dos and don'ts of building a chatbot
How Does Your Business Get a Chatbot?
So, are chatbots right for you? Well, stats show that by 2020, 80% of businesses will be using them in some form.
That doesn’t mean that all 80% will be using them well. There are certain things you’ll want to keep in mind.
First, have a clear objective for the chatbot before you start building it, and know how you intend for it to be beneficial for your business.
Some businesses may have a vast repository of frequently asked questions. When genuinely used by readers, this presents an excellent chatbot opportunity. You can simply adapt this existing content in this new, accessible form, and aid the reader in finding the answers to the right questions without having to go searching themselves.
When you have a simple online order process, you might be able to conduct entire transactions via a chat bot without the need for a salesperson.
That said, not all companies will be a good match. If a typical sale for you involves a lot of negotiation and human-to-human relation building, you’ll want to use your chatbot instead to simply help in the lead generation and nurturing process rather than in the closing deal phase.
The Future of Chatbots
If you resist using chatbots yourself and don’t see the value because they don’t feel natural enough? It’s only a matter of time. Chatbots are able to give more and more human-like chat experiences, and the development is only getting cheaper.
So if you want to be on the forefront of exceptional customer experience, get your chatbot online now!
We can help with that. At Flawless Inbound, we’ve worked with more than 80 companies to develop revenue-driven marketing and sales alignment campaigns — and among many other things in our toolset, we do indeed create helpful chatbots. Get in touch here to find out what we can do for you — or learn more about our methodology below.
