It certainly isn’t the first time you came across the term, “Chatbots,” right? Perhaps, most of us have already heard of it many times before.
In fact, app developers from all over the world have been persistently experimenting with Chatbots and trying to find many innovative ways to incorporate Chatbots in the business nowadays for bringing about a huge improvement in its growth.
In this post, we’ll try to understand what Chatbots really are and how they can help businesses achieve a massive amount of success.
Understanding a Chatbot
A Chatbot is a program with a set of rules to identify prompts from users’ text and respond in a way a real human would do. Of course, there’s no denying the fact that not all Chatbots are equally effective. However, with the extensive development in the field of Artificial intelligence, Chatbots have got extremely advanced and powerful over the years.
Nowadays, it’s hard to distinguish texts from some of the Chatbots and that of a human which clearly reflects their high effectiveness.
If you are wondering as to how a Chatbot can be deployed, it can be conveniently deployed using instant messaging applications such as Snapchat, Facebook Messenger, Slack, Telegram and more.
You can set customized AI rules to let the Chatbot behave in your desired way with the users. Supposing you set a rule wherein the Chatbot is supposed to show the price list if a user requests for it using the keyword, “price,” it will exactly do the same as programmed.
Benefits of Chatbots to Business
Chatbots have gone through massive advancements over the years and by now, they are capable of helping businesses in many unimaginable ways.
On the other hand, it has become extremely important for businesses over the years to impress customers in more and more innovative ways to acclimatize to the aggressive competition and make outstanding progress. Chatbots can be of great help in this regard.
Here are a few ways businesses can be helped by Chatbots:
- Compatibility With the Popular Instant Messaging Applications
The popularity of Instant Messaging apps has even surpassed that of the Social Media Networking and it’s certainly because these are easy to use without having to browse entire websites and social media profiles.
Also, it has been observed that most of the users aren't really fond of downloading a new app for chatting every time and they would rather stick to the core apps such as Twitter, Whatsapp, Messenger, etc.
Interestingly, most of the Chatbots are perfectly compatible with these core apps which means business could get the customers engaged from customers’ favourite messaging app itself without having to ask customers to switch to a new app in order to chat. This will eventually help business in engaging their customers to a very large extent.
- Instant Response to Users’ Queries
If we try to see things from the users’ or customers’ point of view, waiting for one’s queries to be answered for too long can get pretty irritating, right? In fact, many of us must have tried to contact the customer support from time to time for the various products we used and queries or issues related to them. It shouldn’t be any difficult to visualize how customers usually feel about the waiting time. It’s as simple as that; the longer the waiting time, the lesser is the customers’ satisfaction and vice versa. However, the waiting time can be greatly reduced, almost to zero percent using Chatbots.
For any business, it’s not hard to determine the possible queries or issues related to its products that customers may possibly have. Also, one may make a list of the possible queries and issues that customers may have with one’s products from the past records of the various customers and can accordingly, program the Chatbots to answer to such queries and issues in no time. This will largely help businesses in cutting down on the waiting time and hence, customers will have no longer reason to feel irritated since all of their queries and issues will be dealt with great accuracy.
- Repetitive Work 24×7 at a Great Efficiency
It has been seen that most often, people hate doing repetitive works as it tends to make things extremely boring. This holds true for the customer support executives of many businesses as well which may eventually lead to many errors as they have to do the same old thing over and over again and sometimes, quite reluctantly.
On the contrary, Chatbots can efficiently accomplish repetitive work using automation and without actually having to compromise with the quality of the work even to the slightest extent.
Furthermore, with Chatbots available 24×7, unlike regular employees, a business can efficiently address to the queries and issues of the customers all the time which in turn would actually accentuate the customers' experience to a major extent.
- High Scalability & Cost Reduction
Chatbots are highly adaptable to one's business growth and can be conveniently scaled up as one's business grow further without having to hire more employees which will subsequently cut down the cost to a massive extent.
Also, with wise and smart programming of the chatbots, the customer support can get even better than manual assistance with a high level of accuracy and zero percent errors.
Also, Chatbots can interact with multiple customers at a time which gives it a leading edge over manual employees.
- Better Market Research
The greatest advantage of using Chatbots to business is the huge amount of data that Chatbots can offer from its interaction with thousands of customers every day. The data could be used to useful insights to improve one's website's interactivity and of course, improve conversion rates.
Also, Chatbots can be greatly helpful in tracking the patterns and comprehending customers’ behaviour which will eventually help a business understand what its target customers are exactly looking for and determine the right mix of features in its products to have a leading edge over its competitors.
Conclusion
Chatbots have been used extensively over the years and in fact, a lot of businesses have found it to be unimaginably helpful in reducing costs as well as in improving conversion rates.
However, identifying the customer’s requirement in terms of queries or issues to the best and programming the Chatbots according to that is what can create the magic for your business every time.
Author Bio: James Grills is a technical writer with a passion for writing on emerging technologies in the areas of mobile application development and IoT technology. He is a marketing advisor – currently associated with Cumulations Technologies a mobile app development company in India.