Why you should use a Chatbot in 2023
Your enterprise should use chatbots in 2023 to improve the customer journey, reduce customer service costs, and satisfy high customer expectations.
If you want to build good relationships with customers, you need to chat with them promptly, whenever they communicate with you online, day or night.
Unfortunately, it’s not always economical to pay a human being to perform that role, leading to disgruntled customers who go elsewhere.
Chatbots are a solution to this problem. They can keep customer conversations going even when you’re not there, improving service quality and maintaining brand reputation.
Currently, 51 percent of companies don’t use chatbots. At Click4Assistance, we think that’s a missed opportunity. Here are some of the reasons you should add a chatbot to your website in 2023.
Improve The Customer Journey
Customers don’t always know everything they need to know about products and services before they start using them. More often than not, they have questions.
Chatbots are the perfect tool for this situation. They can provide answers to the most common queries and then forward more advanced questions to human reps. This way, they reduce churn and improve conversion rates.
Use chatbots to improve the customer journey effectively by:
- Offering promotions or special offers on products and services
- Answering questions proactively
- Providing real-time assistance, based on what the customer is doing on your site
- Building trust with new website visitors
Make Your Customer Onboarding Process Easy
Customers want you to hold their hand through the ordering and purchasing process. They love companies that direct them to the products and services that benefit them the most. 83 percent of shoppers say that they want firms to provide them with support during theur journey.
Doing that manually with people requires a lot of work, but with chatbots, it’s all automatic.
They can offer:
- Content guides on your products and services
- Tutorials and instructional videos on how to derive maximum value from what you sell
- Questionnaires to orientate prospects towards the right products for them
Scale Your Support With Ease
Chatbots also make it easier to scale your support without having to grow your staff roster. They can speak to an infinite number of users concurrently, providing them with answers to basic queries.
Chatbots can also help to take some of the load off your reps during peak hours. While humans deal with the most challenging issues, chatbots provide instant service to your other users.
Satisfy High Expectations
Modern customers expect a lot from the businesses they interact with. They want responses immediately, regardless of whether you’re in a meeting or dealing with another customer.
Chatbots, though, solve this problem. Website users don’t have to wait for a human customer to respond to their query. They can get answers from the software immediately. There are no annoying queues or the prospect of spending hours on hold
To get the most out of your chatbot in 2023, you should:
- Proactively ask customers questions and deliver quick responses
- Use live chat software to communicate valuable information to customers, such as discounts or product information
- Personalise the experience or make it more seasonal
Improve Your Brand Experience
Chatbots may also improve the brand experience for customers. Integrating live chat with chatbots adds a human touch to your business, giving website visitors peace of mind that they can get in touch with a human agent if they wish.
To combine human live chat with chatbots effectively, you should:
- Use smart routing tools to ensure that chatbots hand off to the right member of staff when they can’t answer a customer’s question
- Transition immediately to a human operator for a more seamless experience
- Ensure that human reps can easily catch up with the conversation so far to avoid customers having to repeat themselves
Turn Chatbots Into Sales Funnels
Chatbots are there to help answer customer questions. But from your business’s perspective, they’re also important for making sales.
This concept is called conversational marketing. The idea here is to use chatbots to deepen your relationship with customers so they are more likely to buy from you. Chatbots achieve astonishingly high click-through rates of between 15 and 60 percent.
Some tips for using your chatbots as effective sales funnels include
- Identifying how far along the buying cycle the user is
- Allowing customers to convert inside the chat window itself
- Helping users identify the right products and services for them
- Engaging in probing questions that direct users to suitable products
Monitor Customer Data
Chatbots are an excellent way to monitor customer data to gain insights. That’s because every time a user communicates with you, they provide you with some kind of information you can then use for marketing purposes.
Bots, for instance, can help you optimise your content. If you’ve written a tutorial but customers keep asking you questions related to it, it’s a sign it’s incomplete or needs improving.
Similarly, you can use bots to collect feedback from customers directly. They can ask them things like how they’d rate your website’s user experience or whether they enjoyed speaking to your reps.
Here are some tips for monitoring and collecting user data using chatbots:
- Use push notifications to get their attention and provide them with multiple-choice answers
- Get chatbots to collect basic customer information, such as their name, email address and so on so you can remarket to them later on
- Collect their usage data and use it to make product and service recommendations
Cut Customer Service Costs
Using human agents to answer customer questions isn’t cheap. You have to pay for training and equipment, plus wages.
But with AI-driven chatbots, you can answer most customer queries without any need to forward website visitors to human agents. Therefore, you can run a considerably smaller team.
Grab Leads
Lastly, you can use chatbots to grab leads. Bots can engage with customers and approach them with personalised messaging. They can also guide them to making quick decisions, avoiding them clicking back to the browser before converting.
To use bots to grab leads effectively, be sure to:
- Qualify leads by asking them the right questions. Make sure that they have sufficient income to buy whatever you sell
- Nurture them by offering personalised recommendations or special discounts