The Power of Chatbots: A Competitive Edge for Small Businesses
Nowadays there is a common buzzword in IT industry and you must be hearing too “Chatbots”. Brands have recently realized how effectively Chatbots can be used for their businesses. Bots are now undertaking much of the human load from busy work life such as compiling data, answering customer queries, form filling, etc. Hence the staff can work on more engaging and creative work meanwhile, the bot will take care of this kind of mundane tasks.
In business – if a task is done repeatedly then shouldn’t we automate it? With the growing availability of automated and intelligent bots incorporating automation is very easy for businesses.
For small businesses, it’s the right time to jump into “Chatbots”. They can be the early movers of this trend and hence can have a bundle of benefits. Let’s see how chatbots can be a profitable step for small and mid-sized businesses.
CUSTOMER SERVICE
Customer service is an important business operation which keeps your company closer to your customers by getting in touch with them. Small sized businesses can take advantage of chatbots in serving their customers by giving them replies and resolving their queries quickly. The chatbot can automate low-value tasks focusing on those that really add value to the company. Chatbots can provide rich contents like images and videos helping the customers better. In any case, if the bot is not able to resolve the issues entirely, then they should hand over to a human advisor in a seamless way. However, where a bot is able to understand natural language, then maybe more customer service problems be solved entirely by the Chatbot itself. Even Customer service Chatbots can reduce human error and customer’s issues can be resolved quickly compare to traditional customer service systems. Organizations like Call Centres can benefit by integrating Chatbots. Bots can help them save money and time, where chatbots can maintain multiple simultaneous conversations- far more than any human can.
COST REDUCTION
As explained in the earlier blog “Here’s all that you need to know about Chatbots”, that the chatbots are intelligent software that works on predefined rules or another that does machine learning and perform multiple tasks. Small businesses can develop predefined scripts for different functions such as replying to issues, giving suggestions etc. All these can reduce your cost of personnel who will do this service by reaching out to prospects just to deliver the same message. Chatbots can be fast enough to this kind of predefined service with less error compared to a human. Also, Personal finance chatbot like Trim assists you to organize your finances. It raised $2.2 million in seed funding for startups and also Trim has saved its users more than $6 million by canceling unwanted subscriptions.
BOTS ARE PREDICTIVE
Chatbot can remember the earlier conversation with the customers which can help predict the targeted customer base and respond to them better. As more we would know about our targeted audience, better will be our service for them. Chatbots are designed to interact with the customers and ask predefined questions that will be then analyzed to understand their preferences, likes, and dislikes. On that basis, organizations can plan their personalized services and products specifications for targeted audience.
CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT AND BRANDING
Chatbots boosts customer engagement with brands as they offer customers a convenient way (compare to Apps installing) to get the required information. They offer a conversational element that helps in building the relationship via bots. Companies like Sephora have developed their own Chatbot on Kik for driving more engagement with their brand. Sephora has done very good as a personal cosmetics shopping assistant. It understands what customer needs and then provides relevant information. It also uses a short quiz to better understand their customers and to create an experience that is at once personal, automated and authentic. Chatbots can easily gather, monitor and track consumer’s data for smarter marketing strategies. Whereas it can be difficult for humans to concentrate on providing good customer service with collecting a trove of data from a single conversation with the customers. Do our customers really bother to whom they are chatting with a Bot or a person? Not really!! As long as they get quick and authenticate responds and services.
Automating repetitive and mundane work will definitely increase the productivity, creativity, and efficiency of the organization. Bots have an edge over apps. As they don’t need to be downloaded as they reside within the messaging apps. So they can be used instantly. They are even easy to build and upgrade, faster compared to apps and websites and also cost effective. Chatbots won’t clog your phones by taking a lot of memory space like apps do.
Chatbots are going to evolve with time and create more opportunities for new companies to explode from scratch to prominence. They will create many business opportunities. Chatbots will help small businesses overcome the workload of customers or seller support division of the organization, resulting in more customer satisfaction if the Chatbot is customized and used rightly.
