Recently, Chatbots are becoming more and more popular and important because of their efficiency and convenience. They are transforming the way businesses interact with their customers. Consumers also like them. A recent study states that nearly 74% of customers prefer chatbots for their prompt response. About 87.2% of customers say that they had neutral or positive experiences with chatbots.

Chatbots have the capacity to boost and grow a business. Let us see how they can be implemented to grow any business.

24/7/365 Real-time Customers Service

Good customer service is one of the most important aspects of a business. It helps in increasing revenue, improving reputation, retaining customers, decreasing customer churn, and enhancing brand awareness.

AI-based chatbots carry on real-time conversations with customers, help them with their inquiries, and resolve product/service-related issues. Humans have limitations but chatbots provide service round the clock and attend to multiple inquiries simultaneously in an engaging and personalized way.

Today, generally people prefer chatting online over calling customer support because they want fast service. Also, they do not have the patience to fill up a form and wait for someone to get back to them. They demand quick reach and immediate reply. If a business does not keep up with such demands, then it may lose its customers.

Catering to the customers 24/7, with instant replies can dramatically boost sales. Chatbots being very responsive are immensely helpful in satisfying customers, boosting sales, and growth of the business.

Example:

Amtrak, the American national passenger rail company was losing its potential customers because it could not keep up with the massive number of inquiries. So, it employed an AI-based chatbot that competently responds to five million inquiries on average a year.

It provides relevant information to inquiries of the website visitors just as human customer support would do. Apart from that, it promptly books tickets for them by asking them the place, date, and time they would like to travel and also offers them a route map for their destination.

It offers other information such as what items the passengers are allowed to take with them. It is capable of making hotel, and rental car reservations as well.

Consequently, the company could boost its booking rate by 25% as well as it experienced a 50% upsurge in user engagement and customer service.

Sales and Marketing

Contrary to common belief, the usage of chatbots is not limited to customer support. They can be used to promote and sell products/services as well. They also increase brand visibility and optimize the sales funnel with message applications in a sophisticated and handy manner.

Marketing is a complex part of business and has several tasks to take care of to convey the message to the end customers. Chatbots come in handy as they can be used to automate some marketing processes. Because they handle large volumes of conversations at a time, there are more possibilities of closing more sales calls. 

Using chatbots for sales and marketing is not just time-saving but also very cost-effective. They provide data for analysis which can be used to formulate effective marketing strategies and expand the reach.

They can deliver a personalized experience to the customers and create a great impression with the customers. This results in a better relationship with the customers and improved sales and conversion rates. 

Potential customers who inquire online or on social media are most often on the verge of making a purchase decision at that instant. Human customer support is not feasible round the clock. On the other hand, Chatbots are and they engage well with the customers and prevent potential customers from leaving the website with disinterest. A chatbot is capable of generating an 80-90% response rate.  They also reduce cart abandonment rates.

Chatbot automation can be used to schedule meetings with customers. They make scheduling, modifying, and canceling meetings easy-breezy and quick. Thus, they increase the chances of gaining leads and closing sales than the manual effort.

Lead Generation

Adopting AI-based lead generation chatbots is extremely valuable in growing a business. Such chatbots assist in knowing the prospects better by asking the visitors questions and identifying their preferences and interests, likes and dislikes. It not only grows the lead database but also segments the potential customers, which helps the marketers present the relevant and useful content at the right time so as to move the leads into the sales funnel. It also helps in lead nurturing which consequently enhances brand image and trustworthiness.

When conventional forms are replaced with lead generation chatbots, they collect the information about the leads by asking qualifying questions as well as carrying out further questioning formed on the answers to the previous questions. Also, such chatbots get more qualified leads too, so there are more possibilities for making new sales. As they are mostly found on social media messaging platforms, it is very convenient to reach wider audiences.

These chatbots are valuable in providing complete and convincing information about the products/services to the visitors who show an interest. This ensures an effective conversational lead generation.

Up-Selling And Cross-Selling

Chatbots can be used to gather customer data such as their previous searches, preferences, and purchase history and they can be leveraged to offer personalized product recommendations, by tracking the user behavior. They allow any business to promote to its clients through an interface as they are designed to provide answers towards a purchase and can be programmed with a flow chart to assist the users in their purchase with the information they desire.

When a visitor is unable to decide which product/service to choose, the chatbot can recommend suitable options for them to select in a non-salesy way. When a chatbot assists in shopping and retrieving the products, the shoppers need not waste their time browsing the website.

When customers navigate through the chatbot to look for a product, it recommends similar products based on what they were initially looking for, and for the undecided customers, the chatbot provides the most applicable option that suits them. Thus, a chatbot can help businesses to up-sell and cross-sell.

By incorporating up-selling and cross-selling techniques (to sell higher-end versions and complimentary items of any product, respectively) into the chatbot’s configuration, sales and profits can be boosted incredibly.

Cutting Down The Operational Costs

When a business grows, it needs to hire more employees for executing the business operations efficiently. This means the cost also increases as they have to be paid with remunerations and need to be trained too.

However, chatbots have no such drawbacks as they have the ability to scale with the business growth without added expenses. Yes, they need initial investment which may seem pricey in the beginning but as the business grows, the investment is worth it.

Because chatbots are designed to replace humans for certain tasks, the companies can save their substantial employee costs with the advantage of carrying out their operations 24/7.

Chatbot technology is evolving rapidly day by day. It is absolutely possible that in the very near future, new integrations would be incorporated into the chatbot technology which can bring more value to business growth.

Businesses must understand their shortcomings and needs and figure out which hitches can be resolved by utilizing chatbot so that they can apply its features innovatively and make the most of it for boosting profits and accelerating business growth.