Remember Isaac Asimov, the celebrated science fiction writer?
It’s true that his robots haven’t taken over the world, but one of their distant relatives has already brought a topsy-turvy change in the world of digital marketing.
Yep, I’m talking about chatbots.
Chatbots: What are they?
As consumers are bombarded with more and more advertisements online, the challenge of appealing directly to the customers is becoming tougher by the minute.
Combining the power of AI and machine learning, chatbots have recently become the best way for businesses to reach out directly to their customers.
A chatbot, AKA an interactive agent, chatterbot, or a talkbot, is a computer program designed for conducting a conversation via textual and auditory methods. Most chatbots are often designed to convincingly simulate the way a human would behave as a conversational partner.
They are undoubtedly unique but what makes them unique? What makes them so special that most marketing professionals are crazy about them? Why are they changing the world? Here, have a look.
- Your customer support gets fully “automated”
Honestly, this is the best benefit of chatbots – A fully automated customer support system.
Automated customer support is more than capable of sorting out your headaches that usually crop up when there’s an increase in customer load over time. So how does this work?
When any customer of yours contact you through an online customer service portal, e.g. an online chat platform, your chatbots can act as your first line of assistance. All of these bots are more than capable of handling all basic queries related to your services/products.
By deploying chatbots as your first line of assistance, you are saving your human resources for more complex problems. You don’t have to face a string of repetitive questions because your chatbots can handle them all on your behalf.
Thus, your customer service management becomes easier, convenient and more effective.
- Chatbots help you track user data
A 1-on-1 customer interaction gives you enough opportunity to gather several data about that particular customer which can benefit you a lot in setting up your marketing campaigns and strategies.
But to be honest, this task’s too difficult for a human being to perform especially when s/he is trying his/her best to give the customer a decent customer service.
Chatbots, on the other hand, can do this task effortlessly. They can provide effective customer support on one hand and collect several important user data on the other, including the likes of buying patterns, buying preferences etc. for your marketing strategies.
Such user data can benefit your tremendously in developing smart marketing strategies for your customers both collectively and individually.
- Chatbots can improve your availability and efficiency
Want a 24/7 workforce? Chatbots can serve that purpose.
Want a workforce where customer load’s not going to be a problem at any instant? Again, chatbots come up as your viable solution.
Every customer who logs on to your platform is guaranteed of a response. The number of customers doesn’t matter to a chatbot. It can be 10 or 10000; yet, each and every one of them is sure to get a response.
- Chatbots are cheaper and faster
This one’s pretty obvious; isn’t it? After all, they’re bots; they are machines, not humans. That’s one of the primary reasons due to which they don’t get tired as we do. They don’t need sleep like we do.
If you are concerned with the price, I will say that they are inexpensive; TOO inexpensive in comparison to a live human agent. But that’s not the point. Human touches are always required in any kind of job because no machine can match their intellect.
But chabots can be easily deployed for handling simple customer queries. I can guarantee that they’ll tick all the basic categories that you require in that aspect.
- With chatbots, you are going to solve your customer issues on the messenger apps itself
Chabots are considered very versatile. You have full liberty to deploy them anywhere on the internet, especially in those locations where the majority of your customers are.
You can implement chatbots in external outlets that require text-based communication such as Skype, Facebook messenger etc. The bots will be able to handle all those channels effectively and efficiently.
FIVE Best Uses of Chatbots Around The Globe
- Personal Concierge
You may say it’s nothing new; we already have “Siri,” don’t we?
But then, with the introduction of the easily-affordable chatbot technology, we now have different options to personalize our concierge as per our requirements.
As personal concierge, chatbots are capable of organizing your mails, diary, appointments, etc. at just the stroke of a button.
- Ordering food from restaurants
In this process, the customer doesn’t even have to fill up an online order form. S/He can just place an order by talking to the bot.
TacoBell, an American food chain, has already implemented TacoBot that lets customers order food through the Slack messaging platform.
- Medical Bots
Obviously, chatbots won’t be able to fix a broken leg but it may definitely be able to give you a few bits of advice depending on your requirements.
- Finance Advisor
We are seeing a lot of intelligent finance advisor bots emerging from finance and pension sectors that are designed primarily for answering basic queries related to budgets, finance, and other similar things.
- Personal stylist
Imagine having a bot with the ability to inform you what dresses suit you the best depending on the occasion.
In fact, such bots do exist. Sephora, a renowned beauty product company, has developed a chatbot based on the same concept that can be interacted with on the messaging platform KiK.
Final Word
Chatbots are only going to get smarter with time. With rapid developments occurring in the field of artificial intelligence, it’s only a matter of time before we get complete automated customer support in businesses starting from the smallest to the giants in the market.
Hence, it’s better to get on the bandwagon ASAP.
