Over the years, we have certainly witnessed the rise of chatbots with their widespread adoption and development by chatbot development services. Essentially, they have brought a certainly new method for the businesses to easily communicate with the entire world and most vitally with their own customers with the assistance of expanding popularity of messaging applications along with accelerated development of different kinds of sensors as well as wearables and even with the stupendous ruse of latest technologies as well as artificial intelligence.
What are Chatbots?
Essentially a chatbot is a certain program that is powered by rules as well as AI that simulates a particular real interaction with the users through a chat interface. Also, it is actually a service which can have a certain conversation with the customer just like a real person.
They are essentially based on machine learning to easily gather and collate conversational cadences which allow them to copy human conversations easily and even react to written as well as spoken human requests to deliver a particular service. Also, they can comprehend language, not only commands, as they utilize AI. Hence, the more conversation they have with the users, the much more intelligent they actually become.
Listed below are the benefits of utilizing chatbots in your own business for customer service.
1. Extended Customer Assistance and Service
According to a survey, most of the online shoppers required support during the entire shopping journey. Hence, the customers of your business may require certain help actually trying to understand which particular products fit their needs or their budgets at any particular time of the day. Also, shoppers may not even find what they are actually looking for owing to the various navigation issues whenever they are on your website. They may even have a registration, as well as payment, and even checkout along with delivery questions or simply a lack of information regarding a product.
Hence, in all such cases, chatbots can easily provide necessary assistance in real-time similar to a sales-person in an actual store. Also, chatbots can even offer interactive and intuitive communication where they can even ask questions to the customers to understand the exact real problem. Even more so, along with voice and text, they can offer customers with rich content with product images, content, pages, blog entries, tutorial videos etc. based on their own responses which can assist them right through their own journey. Hence, a chatbot development company should inculcate this feature into the website.
2. 24/7 Customer Support
Customer service remains to be a vital factor in the success of a business. Hence, whether you are a local business or an international brand, having customer service available 24/7 certainly has a positive impact on customer satisfaction.
Also, the entire process of customer support can be vastly improved with the assistance of chatbots. These bots can easily be programmed to provide automated answers to various repetitive questions almost immediately and even forward requests to real customer service representative whenever a more complicated action is required. It enabled these representatives to save a significant amount of time and assist much more important cases instead of time-consuming simpler tasks.
Also, with the assistance of chatbots, businesses can easily handle much more tasks simultaneously such that no customer needs to wait. It allows businesses to scale up their entire operations to new markets at a global level without even multiplying incoming service requests to be actually handled. Custom software development can also assist in this regard with chatbot integration to scale up a larger scale.
3. Active Customer Interaction
Mostly, businesses resort to “passive customer interaction” that signifies that they only provide a response to customers whenever they are contacted and never initiate the communication. However, in the competitive business landscape, with a high percentage of millennials as the customers, the brands can’t afford to be passive anymore.
As most of the businesses don’t have enough human resources to initiate communication with all of the customers on a regular basis, here, chatbots allow them to start a conversation with each of their customers, regarding any particular issue, at any moment of the day. It makes the customers feel that your brand is ahead of the competition and as a concerned friend available 24/7, along with improving your entire brand perception in the longer run.
4. Improved Customer Engagement
It is quite essential to keep your customers engaged with the brand. Companies that actually engage with their customers on different social media are able to increase their entire customer spend by a significant margin. Even though social media does its job, chatbots can also contribute through making the overall engagement much more interactive, certainly through utilizing a great sense of humor.
Often, a convention customer service interface offers more information than it actually receives from the customers. However, chatbots, provide only a sliver of information at the moment and can lead to an interaction based on the entire input the customer offers at every specific moment. Hence, chatbots don’t actually bore customers with irrelevant, boring, and unnecessary information and even keep the customers on the business platform much longer and also keep the entire content flowing by means of maintaining the entire conversation.
5. Consumer Data Monitoring and Insights Gathering
As discussed earlier, chatbots are certainly great tools to communicate with customers. Also, with the feedback they actually collect via simple questions, the businesses can easily make improvements and adjustments on their products and services and can even optimize the website by simply adjusting low converting pages. For instance, in case your landing page generates an enormous amount of organic traffic but doesn’t actually convert well, then your chatbot can easily reach out to the customers visiting that page with a particular survey in order to collect more information on why they are actually leaving the page without even purchasing and much more.
Chatbots can easily be utilized to track various purchasing patterns as well as consumer behaviors by observing and monitoring user data. Businesses can track the commands as well as responses given by their customers to the chatbots, even predict the responses based on the customer language as well as direct the bot to actually suggest a separate or a much more convenient product or even a service to the customers along with to notifying sales as well as marketing departments for the purpose of personalized services.
Conclusion
As observed above, chatbots can certainly be a great backup for employees and an ally for the customer service team. It can assist the customer service department with its great speed, cost-effectiveness, easier to implement, maintenance and usage. However, the biggest challenge that you need to pay attention is the conversation capability or what you can call is, “personality”, of the chatbot, to increase or just retain the brand perception of your business and customers. Mobile app development services have to look at this aspect for the future development of chatbots and serving the needs of businesses looking for chatbots for their mobile apps.