Top 7 Benefits of Chatbots for Your Business
More and more businesses today are using chatbots on their websites and social media. There’s so much buzz about chatbots these days, but why are they getting so popular? Why are businesses using bots?
The short answer is that chatbots can bring numerous benefits to your business in many aspects, including customer support, sales, and marketing.
Wondering what the benefits are? There are a lot of them! Let’s take a look at the most important chatbot benefits for your business.
Customer demands are constantly growing, and now 24/7 availability is something they expect from your business as a matter of course.
According to Forrester, the age of information is over, as now we have entered a new era which is called the age of the customer. Customer-centricity is the key to success in the modern business world. Competition is becoming fiercer, and the main competitive advantage is customer knowledge and relationships.
“Customer-centricity is the key to success in the modern business world.”
One of the things that can improve customer experience is to offer them an easy way to reach you whenever they want. The most effective tools to provide round-the-clock service in real time are live chat and chatbots.
If you receive hundreds of customer queries every day, it could be quite a hurdle to handle all of them manually. And here’s where chatbots can be put to good use.
You never know when your customer will decide to contact you: it can be early in the morning or late at night. Plus, your customers might be from a different time zone, and they would hardly want to change their schedule to match your working hours. One of the main benefits of chatbots is that they help keep your business open even outside your working hours.
Yes, chatbots can’t answer all customer questions: they’re not a cure-all solution. Let your chatbot handle frequently asked questions, and if the customer asks about something more difficult, your chatbot can transfer the chat to a human operator.
Even if your operators are offline and chatbots can’t answer the question, they can still be helpful. For example, bots can collect information about the customer’s problem or inform the customer that their request has been accepted and the operator will contact them soon.
Immediate answers are another significant benefit of chatbots for any business. Response time can greatly impact customer experience, both positively and negatively.
A study by Jeff Toister revealed that waiting for a response is the number one reason for customer complaints on Twitter. Even if your product is perfect, you can spoil your reputation by making your customer wait.
Response time is particularly important on the first contact with a potential customer. If your prospect tries to contact you but doesn’t receive a reply, they are more likely to go to your competitor. The faster you respond, the more customers you win.
By implementing chatbots in your business, you will be able to reduce your customer response time. Once a customer asks a question, a chatbot immediately sends them a reply.
Source: toistersolutions.com
According to Juniper Research, chatbots can reduce average response time by 4 minutes per inquiry, resulting in cost savings of up to $0.70 per interaction. Moreover, chatbots can carry on multiple conversations at once. Live chat operators can also juggle several conversations at the same time, but with a significant delay in response. So why burden support agents with extra work when chatbots are coping just fine?
Chatbots can bring great benefits to your marketing and sales. A chatbot is an effective engagement tool that can increase brand awareness, generate leads, and funnel them to your sales team.
Many businesses today have included chatbots in their marketing strategy: 80% of marketers already use or plan to use them in some way or another. Let’s check out why marketers are betting on bots:
Chatbot triggers in Chaport
What’s more, chatbots can be integrated with other apps and services. When your chatbot gets new lead information, it can be automatically sent to your CRM or email marketing system.
Apart from customer service and marketing, chatbots can be handy for gathering valuable insights. Customer feedback can bring benefits for both your company and your customers.
First of all, feedback is something that encourages businesses to move forward and continue to grow. If you know your customers’ needs and wants, it will be easier to build your product development roadmap and improve customer experience.
Yes, your current customers might be happy with your product, but there is always something to add or improve. In the modern competitive world, it’s never enough. If you stop developing, you fail. Let chatbots help you evolve your brand. You can use them to ask your customers about their experience, wishes, and features they require.
Surprisingly enough, satisfaction surveys can influence not only your business development strategy but even your customers’ opinions about your company.
To find out how surveys influence customers, Harvard Business Review decided to conduct a field experiment with over 2,000 customers of a large financial services company. They divided customers into two groups: the first group participated in a 10-minute satisfaction survey, and the second didn’t.
A year after the survey, researchers compared the purchasing behavior and defection rate. The result was interesting: customers who were surveyed a year before were more likely to have opened new accounts and less likely to have defected than the second group.
The reason is that customers that participate in surveys feel that their opinion is important to you. Customers want to be listened to and heard. Chatbots are a great way to give them this opportunity.
The main benefit of using chatbots is automation, which can help your company cut down costs and optimize spending.
According to Chatbots Magazine, chatbots can automate over 30% of the tasks done by customer support staff. With chatbots, support agents no longer need to handle tons of repetitive queries.
Source: Chatbots Magazine
While chatbots manage low-level tasks, your support agents will be able to pay more attention to customers with more serious questions. This will reduce the average response time, speed up the resolution of customer issues, and, therefore, increase customer satisfaction.
Another aspect that makes chatbots cost-efficient is their 24/7 availability. To provide round-the-clock service, businesses need to employ enough operators, which means they need to spend a significant amount of money on salaries, insurance, and annual leave. Of course, chatbots won’t replace your entire customer service team, but you can reduce the number of people on staff and save money on labor costs.
Plus, as we’ve already seen, customer service is not the only application area of chatbots: they can also automate tasks for your marketing and sales teams. Lead generation, customer engagement, surveys — all this takes time and resources. Try automating these tasks with chatbots, and you will see the difference.
Any customer service team has to deal with many repetitive and routine tasks. Although all your customers are different and unique, they often face the same problems and ask the same questions. These queries can be very simple, but when they come in large batches, they can be demanding and time-consuming.
Chatbots can help reduce the volume of routine work for your customer support and even sales teams. With chatbots, your support and sales reps won’t have to handle the same queries over and over again. This will allow them to stay focused and not get distracted by low-level tasks.
Notably, your support agents will be able to pay more attention to customers with more complex queries, solve their issues faster, and therefore improve customer satisfaction.
Have you heard of the service recovery paradox? It states that customers who experience problems and then get them resolved tend to be more loyal than those who never had a problem at all.
However, simply solving customer problems is not enough. You should do it quickly and efficiently. And chatbots are a great tool to speed up the resolution process and increase the efficiency of your customer service.
“Customers who experience problems and then get them resolved tend to be more loyal than ones who never had a problem at all.”
Moreover, chatbots can improve not only customer satisfaction but employee satisfaction as well. No one enjoys doing boring low-level work. Leave it to a chatbot, and let your employees do more relevant tasks that will make them feel important and valuable.
Another way chatbots can benefit your productivity is by automating the workflow between teams. Chatbots can automatically transfer customer data to your sales or marketing teams so that they always have consistent and relevant information. Data accuracy will help your employees get a clear picture of what’s happening and make decisions more effectively.
Chatbots are a great way to get in touch with your customers when they need you the most. You can create different chatbot scenarios and specify conditions under which a certain message will be sent.
For example, a chatbot can contact your customers at the moment when they potentially need support. This will help you prevent and resolve customer issues before they turn into actual problems.
Another option is to use chatbots to help your customers complete their purchases. Chatbots can reach your customers on the checkout page and help them choose the product or clear their doubts. 83% of online shoppers need support to complete a purchase; otherwise, they can give up entirely. Use chatbots to help them.
As you can see, chatbots offer many advantages for businesses: improving customer satisfaction, saving money, and even increasing sales. Do you want to enjoy the benefits of chatbots yourself? If so, make your own chatbot! Feel free to try Chaport’s bot editor and test your chatbot on your website. No coding skills needed!
Industries
