What are the benefits of chatbots?

It’s not a coincidence that chatbots are taking off so rapidly. They deliver all kinds of benefits, in multiple areas, to customers and businesses alike. Here are a few reasons why.

They Improve Customer Experience

We already looked at how customers are feeling increasingly positive about chatbots, and how this is part of a wider trend around a conversational approach to online sales and marketing.

Customers’ expectations and desires are changing to match this new environment:

• 79% of consumers are willing to use messaging apps to get customer service

• 82% of consumers rate an “immediate” response as very important when they have a question

36% of companies use live chat for marketing, sales or customer service inquiries

Conversational sales and marketing help deliver a better customer experience, and chatbots are the perfect way to achieve this. They help improve lead scoring, qualification, and distribution, helping customers find exactly what they need and guiding them through their buying journey.

Another one of the benefits of using chatbots and conversational marketing is increased personalization. Chatbots use machine learning to mimic human conversations, drawing on customer data to deliver a more personal touch.

They’re Available 24/7 

Unlike human sales staff, chatbots aren’t limited by the need to go home, have a life outside work, or even sleep. This means they’re available around the clock, allowing customers to get in touch with your brand whenever they want to.

Many chatbots harness social media networks and messaging platforms like Facebook Messenger, Telegram, Slack, and WhatsApp to maximize that availability, allowing customers to get instant responses straight from their smartphone.

This helps boost convenience and user experience for all customers by allowing them to contact you immediately, at any time of the day. This is useful because most of us work between the business hours of 9am and 6pm. That includes sales staff, so when customers are finished with work and doing their online shopping, the sales teams have also gone home.

Chatbots can help avoid this mismatch, dealing with customer queries and relaying any questions or information to human agents when they get back to work the following day. This way, customers can get in contact with your team more easily, and you avoid missing out on sales.

They Deal with Leads Better

Chatbots can also help with lead generation, turning a first-time visitor into a qualified lead without any help from a human team member. By asking the right questions, nudging the new customer in the right direction, and using persuasion, they can guide prospects through the first stages of their buying journey and even all the way to a sale.

Bots can also identify and filter out unqualified leads based on the information they share about things like their budget and what they’re looking for. This saves time and resources and increases conversion rates by avoiding customers who won’t become buyers.

With the sheer volume of internet traffic, it’s easy to let leads slip through the cracks and leave your website without ever interacting with your sales team. Chatbots can help plug those gaps and ensure no opportunities are missed, boosting conversion rates.

They Save Costs and Resources

According to Chatbots Magazine, bots can deliver customer service cost savings of 30%. They do this in a number of ways, such as:

Taking the load off call center staff and reducing the number of inbound calls by dealing with simple issues

• Saving time on calls with sales staff by gathering important information beforehand so the staff are prepared

• Cut labor costs by functioning as virtual assistants and reducing the need for human agents

They Help you Appear Modern and Forward-Thinking

We already looked at the increasing popularity of chatbots and how 80% of organizations are looking to implement them by the end of 2020. This means that investing in chatbots now will help your company appear forward-thinking, tech-savvy, and ahead of the curve.

Having a chatbot on your site shows visitors that your brand cares about technology and is serious about embracing new methods to deliver the best service to its customers.

They can answer FAQs quickly and easily

Now, with the benefits of chatbots and interactive marketing, FAQs can be packaged into a much more dynamic format. They can take the form of an actual conversation with a bot, and this comes with some serious benefits, such as:

• Users don’t have to waste time trawling through lists of questions and guessing which category their problem belongs to. They can just type it into a chatbot window.

• It’s easy to inject personality and entertainment into chatbots, making the FAQ process more enjoyable and strengthening your brand. It feels like a real chat with a person.

• You can take the benefits and features of your product and package them into a chatbot FAQ, combining problem-solving and marketing

They Improve Customer Engagement

Customer engagement is an important part of running a business. According to a report by Constellation Research, companies who improved engagement:

• Increased cross-sell by 22%

• Drove up-sell revenue from 13% to 51%

Increased order sizes from 5% to 85%

Chatbots help increase engagement by serving as an ever-present point of contact for customers. In fact, they’re even better at doing this than more traditional methods — delivering a typical outreach click-through-rate of 15-60% compared to just 5-10% with email marketing.

Chatbots are always available to assist with sales, provide customer support, and guide users in the right direction, offering helpful, quick answers in real-time to boost customer satisfaction.

They Gather Useful Customer Data

Chatbots ask a lot of questions. And through the questions they ask, chatbots naturally gather data about consumer behavior and demographics. This feedback is highly useful for e-commerce and all types of businesses, allowing them to optimize their product accordingly.

In addition to the insights bots gather through their everyday use, it’s also possible to have your bots ask specific questions to address certain issues. For example, they can ask users for their opinions on a product or service, or common problems they encountered, to collect direct, actionable feedback for sales staff.