Chatbot popularity rises every day, and they are becoming more and more important for marketing, sales and customer service departments. On the other hand, you might hesitate to automate interactions with your customers and assume that overall chatbots will not bring your company any benefits. Read on to find out if chatbots are profitable.
Benefits of using chatbots for business
Check out what are the most significant advantages of implementing bots for business.
Chatbots are time-saving
Think about every repetitive question and simple tasks that your team faces. You could automate such conversations to save your employees' time and enable them to focus on more complex and important tasks. Moreover, bots respond immediately and can handle an endless number of conversations at the same time, so that your customers can get help faster and at any time (chatbots are available 24/7). That way, you can optimize your teams and improve productivity, as employees can be more efficient once they get more meaningful and challenging responsibilities than responding to repetitive questions.
Chatbots enhance marketing campaigns
Nowadays, brands need to be creative in their social media campaigns, and conversational marketing can be a game-changing solution. To keep up with trends and reach your customers where they are actually active, use messaging apps like Troop Messenger, WhatsApp, Slack etc. That way, with a customized and engaging conversation, you can get your customers’ attention, provide them with a personalized offer and simply build a relationship. You can use bots for running social media contests, distributing promo codes, gathering customer feedback and much more.
Chatbots can help your sales team
Do chatbots increase sales? They surely can! A great idea is to design a bot that helps with the sales funnel. During each interaction, take the customer through every stage of your sales funnel. That is how you can turn Messenger users, for example, into your customers and even brand ambassadors. Via bots, you can even sell your products and propose an upselling based on the data you have. Later on, you can also use email segmentation to create different email marketing campaigns and target multiple customers across the sales funnel.
To make sure you always have the latest data available, use change data capture (CDC) to move your data in real-time between your database and your tools and keep everything in sync.
You can use a Messenger bot instead of an e-mail to send your newsletters and nurture leads. The sky's the limit!
Chatbots are easy-to-implement
It may seem that implementing a bot in a live chat on your website or in Messenger requires advanced programming skills. This would be true if there weren't many chatbot platforms available on the market. With such solutions, you can take advantage of ready-to-use, fully customizable plugins and scenarios that you only need to fill out with your own content. That way, with no fuss, you can start using bots for your brand and engage your customers.
Chatbots are cost-saving
As mentioned before, thanks to using bots on your website and in Messenger, you can save your employees' time. And, as we all know, time is money. Once you optimize your team's workflow, you can boost productivity and manage your team more efficiently. If you choose a chatbot provider that enables integrating your customer service channels, you can have one inbox for all contact channels and provide truly omnichannel customer support.
The negative side of chatbots
As with every business solution, chatbots have some weak point, too. Keep on reading to learn about them.
Chatbots can be annoying
For some customers, a conversation with a chatbot can be annoying or frustrating, because the bot asks many questions, pops up too often or is not helpful and does not understand what they mean. On the other hand, Uberall statistics show that 80% of consumers who have engaged with a chatbot report it as an overall positive customer experience. Do not blame the bots for unpleasant conversations, blame the people who programmed them to be annoying.
Introducing a fully functional chatbot takes time
AI-powered chatbots that use machine learning require time and effort to gather data and learn about your customers and their preferences. Smart chatbots and AI writing generators are all the rage these days because they can improve your response time and reduce staffing costs. It can be challenging, but it is definitely worth investing in these resources and benefiting from intuitive and smart chatbots in the future.
Chatbots have limitations
Even in today's world with constantly improving technology, an AI-powered chatbot cannot fully replace human interaction (yet). Some tasks can be done better and faster by a bot, but very complex issues may need an agent. Fortunately, in such situations, chatbots can handover an inquiry to your team so that your customers receive accurate and excellent help.
What about the cost of chatbots?
You may also ask yourself a question: are chatbots expensive? The pricings vary between different chatbot platforms. Such an investment for your business can be profitable and necessary in an era of increased competition and higher customer expectations.
Key takeaways
- If you are deciding on chatbots, you need to put some time and effort into setting them up properly and constantly improving them.
- Chatbots can be annoying for customers if programmed badly, so you should pay attention to accurate implementation.
- Chatbots can help your brand engage customers and make your marketing campaigns conversational.
- You do not need coding skills; you can simply take advantage of ready-to-use plugins and set up your chatbots in minutes.
As you can see, there are plenty of benefits and few disadvantages of using chatbots for business. The most crucial thing to know is that you can try chatbots out and see how they are converting for your company. You can start with a bot in a live chat that will answer simple questions and once you feel more confident with this solution, implement other functions of chatbots. To sum up, are chatbots successful? There is no simple answer to this question. As is it with every business strategy and technique, it all depends on your skills and knowledge about your customers. We believe that conversational marketing can revolutionize every company, and we are here to help you.
