Keeping up with the latest technology is a matter of life and death for your business. It’s not just about making sure you are on board with the latest trends or looking “cool” compared to your competitors, but it’s about adapting to the changing habits of your customers, as they adapt to new technology, their behavior will also change.
One of the trends that have been creating a lot of buzzes is chatbots. According to a survey by Oracle -the survey included responses from 800 decision-makers including chief marketing officers, chief strategy officers, senior marketers, and senior sales executives- they predicted that by 2020 about 80% of all businesses will use chatbots to increase their revenue. In this article, we will talk about why chatbots matter for business.
First of all, what is a chatbot?
Simply put, it’s a computer program that can fulfill a function or give information through chats/text messaging. A “robot” that can answer your chat and understand your questions/request, this is made possible by Artificial Intelligence.
So, how can chatbots be useful for business?
First, chatbots can easily help you interact with a lot of customers without having a lot of customer service agents that have to manually answer questions or requests from your customers through various messaging apps or platforms, because the chatbot can respond to them instantly, 24/7.
This capability of chatbot is really relevant if you realize that the number of messaging apps users is skyrocketing. People love to chat on messaging apps, and now we don’t only use messaging to interact with our loved ones, but also to interact with brands, looking for information about products and services, even shopping. This habit of messaging means chatbot is the right technology to reach your potential customer in the right channel.
For example, a customer may want additional information on a product that they are looking at on the website. The bot would be able to chat with the customer about the product at hand and later on be able to inform them if there was ever a special offer on that product.
With the development of artificial intelligence technology, it is now possible for companies to get rid of mundane tasks for their employees such as answering repetitive questions, making information collection from users easier, and ultimately reducing overhead costs.
Now, let's go through some of the benefits that chatbots provide for your business:
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Available 24/7
Whether you are an international or a local business, having good customer service 24/7 has a positive impact on your customer satisfaction. And since chatbots are basically virtual robots, they never get tired and continue to obey your command; it also can be programmed to give automated answers to repetitive questions immediately and forward the request to a real person when a more complicated action is needed.
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Proactive Customer Interaction
There are no brands that have the manpower to initiate 1-on-1 communication with all of their customers periodically, but chatbots could allow you to start a conversation with each customer, regarding any issue, any time of the day.
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Save More Costs
The investment to develop chatbots is efficient since you can develop one chatbot that can be deployed to several different messaging apps. It is cheaper than developing and maintaining your own apps or hiring thousands of employees to manually answer your customer.
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More pleasant interaction with customers
You can program your chatbot to always treat customers in the most polite and perfect way no matter how annoying or rude the customer is. It could also be designed to be a smart shop assistant and give out personal recommendations to the potential customer. In the travel and hospitality industry, bots can be trained to communicate in the language of the traveler.
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Effective Market Research Tool
Due to their exceptional advantages of wide access, large scale, and unique customer interactions, chatbots can present a business with invaluable data, providing insight into the market and its users. It can be particularly useful when tracking patterns and understanding consumer behavior. With even further statistical and regression analysis of this data, the business can predict what customers are likely to do in the future.
With all of these benefits, it is clear that investment in chatbots is one of the strategic steps to propel your business growth. There was never before a technology that can offer a way for you to build a deeply personal interaction with your customers at scale. Now that the technology exists, what’s keeping you from adopting chatbots?
