As more businesses realize the advantages of an online presence, new technologies have risen to meet these needs. One area that has been receiving a lot of attention is chatbots. While sales, data analytics, and customer service remain jobs in and of themselves, artificial intelligence chatbots are changing the way we do business.
What Is a Chatbot?
Before getting into how AI is changing the game for many businesses, let’s establish the meaning of “chatbot”. If you’ve spent a fair amount of time online, chances are you’ve already interacted with chatbots, even though you may not know it yet. Simply put, chatbots are robotic software designed to imitate human interaction.
Chatbots can be controlled using voice and text commands and use AI to provide relevant responses. Voice technologies such as Siri, Google Assistant, Cortana and Alexa are examples of sophisticated chatbots designed to give intelligent answers to customer queries.
While chatbots typically found on websites may not be as sophisticated as the likes of Siri, they have an advantage in that they’re tailored to the company’s needs. This ultimately leads to less work for marketing and customer service teams while saving money and adding convenience.
How Chatbots Can Help Your Business
There are several ways chatbots can be integrated into your business’s online presence to provide better customer service and ultimately increase revenue. Having access to chatbots allows you to stay competitive while enabling you to provide personalized customer service and sales- with little to no input on your end.
Cost Effective Customer Service
While sales maximization is one of the ways to improve your company’s bottom line, cost minimization is also an effective strategy. Research shows that an investment in chatbots can significantly cut down costs over time.
Chatbots have been shown to result in significant cost savings per customer interaction, especially considering the large number of customer support requests these artificial intelligence can handle in, say, a year. Chatbot technology is still at its infancy, but pundits have it that by 2022, about 80 percent of customer queries will be handled without any human intervention.
Chatbot technology continues to grow and flourish, and integrating it into your business gets your company ahead of the curve and on its way to significant cost savings.
Almost Human Experience
While natural language processing (NLP) and recognition is anything but perfect, machine learning algorithms are getting better at giving an almost human experience.
Businesses are capitalizing on this, by increasing the number of chatbots deployed in customer service as well as to assist in training and internal processes. An automated chatbot can take information, queries or complaints from customers and analyze the data using complex algorithms and machine learning to provide much-needed assistance.
The most advanced chatbots make it harder to tell whether you’re talking to a computer of a human being. By providing customers with 24/7 availability visitors to your site will benefit from instant service that’s intelligent enough to respond to common questions and complaints.
Personalized Sales
Integrating an automated chatbot into your websites give you an opportunity to leverage artificial intelligence to keep track of customer interactions with various pages. The chatbot can then figure out what best suits which customers and approach them with personalized recommendations. As a result, chatbots can contribute to a significant amount of sales to prospective customers that would have been nearly impossible to cater to with a traditional sales and marketing team.
Data Analytics
While most people associate chatbots with customer interaction, they can also provide a substantial amount of data on how your site visitors interact with your site. By keeping statistics such as the time users spend on various pages, how long users stay engaged with a chatbot, the most common questions asked, and the products users are most interested in, these AI chatbots can give your business valuable information.
Data derived from chatbots can help you to work on other aspects of growing your business, such as improving less practical aspects of your website and adjusting your marketing plan.
Final Thoughts
Chatbots are already here. As with most innovative technologies, there’s no doubt that investing in chatbots can result in significant returns on investment (ROI), improved efficiency and customer satisfaction. Stay ahead of the curve and keep your business moving forward into a future powered by AI.
