10 Reasons why small Businesses need a Chat Bot

Earlier, Chat Bots were constantly seen as a highly sophisticated piece of tech, limited to the big brands. Yet the last couple of years have ushered in, a new wave of adoption that opened its doors to all kind of businesses, big and small and create a new benchmark in customer service and engagement.

What is a chat bot?

A Chat Bot is a computer program designed to mimic conversation with human users. Chat Bots are governed by rules and artificial intelligence, that aims to provide a realistic chat experience in real time over existing messaging platforms.

Chat Bots provide an appealing alternative to the native phone/email-based customer support workflows as they can automate 70-80 percent of the common support queries. This automation can help businesses cut on the expenses to maintain a customer support and provide a faster resolution of queries.

Chat Bots have surged in popularity so much in the last few years. Gartner predicts that

"25% of customer service operations will use virtual customer assistants (aka chat bots) by 2020. "

Thanks to Facebook that last year it enabled its Facebook Messenger Platform to integrate chat bots and since then, more than 300,000 chat bots have been added.

Additionally, according to an Oracle survey,

“80% of businesses said they currently use or are planning to use chat bots by 2020.”

So, if you are a business owner it is crucial for you to pace up to this unique trend to be early enough to grab its immense profit.

Let’s look closely what chat bots can do to your business.

1. Scale your Customer support and operations:

Customer support by humans comes at a price and has limitations. Support agents can handle only 1-2 conversations at a time, and it is tiresome for customers at times to wait for the agent to join the call or respond to an email. On the other hand, chat bots operate without an upper limit, 24x7 and can act as a first point of contact for customers, thus screening the most common queries and redirecting to a human agent only when required. This way human hours can be saved for more value-added tasks.

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2. Suggest customers with the right product:

Many a times a customer visits a page only to get overwhelmed by hundreds of options and categories to navigate. Going through the entire catalog, list of products or services should be a discretion on customers part and not a coercion. In such cases, it makes perfect sense to have a chat bot talk through the customer requirements and suggest the right products. This is how Rihanna’s cosmetics line - Fenty Beauty helps customers find a shade with a simple chat bot.

3. Link E commerce pages in the chat interface:

Along with the product suggestions wouldn’t it be a treat for the customer to get a direct link of the product on Amazon or Shopify in the chat window itself? Always remember, it’s all about making things simple and seamless for that distinguishable customer experience.

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4. Simplicity:

Have you ever interacted with a telecom provider? For every interaction, the customer must pull out an unreasonable amount of time in the day. And the interaction involves a frustrating multi step IVR only to connect to a real executive, from where the actual act of customer support starts.Whereas, chat bots provide a very simple, error free and engaging conversation flow, that too on an interface where the users are already very familiar. This ease of access to customer support help businesses create that lasting brand image.

5. Improving Branding at the cheapest price:

Online presence accounts for a huge proportion of the overall branding depending upon the business. Just like a floor assistant in a physical store, it is always good to have someone guide your page visitors about your business and offerings in the least intrusive way. With Chat Bots targeting those potential customers by offering the required information, irrespective of the time of the day, leads to a better experience and helps establish a better brand at the cheapest price possible.

6. Cost Effective:

Chat Bots incur incredibly less development cost in comparison to application development and takes hardly an hour to plug and play. It is an investment of high quality and tangibility with visible results in weeks of deployment.

7. Time Efficiency:

The development of a chat bot requires far less time compared to application development, and even lesser time to close the customer queries thereby converting your page visitor to happy customer. Not to mention the expenses you end up saving on customer support which can be further used to promote your page and generate more traffic.

8. Generate Leads:

Chat Bots are the ultimate weapon for lead generation. It fetches premium quality leads from your visitor traffic and saves a ton of cash rather used on expensive marketing campaigns. Additionally, it can understand and segment your audience effectively for further targeted marketing, thus completing the perfect sales funnel.

9. Close a sale:

A walk in sale is everyone’s delight. Businesses can improve those walk-in numbers with a chat bot to serve the customer on your page. Bots can quickly close those sale opportunities where the customer has already made up his mind to leave with a purchase.

Additionally, the chat bots can pitch the interested customers with special offers and discounts and boost those conversions.

10. Gather business intelligence:

Chat Bots can be equipped with AI and NLP to collect valuable insights from the customer interactions. These actionable insights can help businesses understand more about your audience and your products.