How Custom Chatbots Can Help You Improve Customer Satisfaction
Research by Hubspot suggests that almost 90% of customers consider immediate response extremely important in case of a customer service query, whereas 82% of them expect the same when they have a sales/marketing question.
This clearly indicates that irrespective of the type of business, customer service and sales remain integral parts in defining the success of any business. With evolving technology and increased use of digital channels, consumers today expect businesses to act on their concerns fast and offer instant support while they make a buying decision.
Custom Chatbots and Live Chats
Custom chatbots and live chats are the latest trends that every business wants to leverage in order to boost sales and better understand visitor behaviour on their website.
Live chat is a tool that businesses can use on their website to support customers looking for answers. As is apparent in the name, live chat requires humans to individually respond to every chat.
Custom bots, on the other hand, allow businesses to automate customer queries. Custom bots engage with thousands of customers at the same time, in a personalized and optimized manner.
A lot of businesses today struggle with conventional phone support and the challenges that come with it, such as hundreds of queued calls, inability to manage volumes effectively and more.
This is where Custom Chatbots for your business come in the picture!
Benefits of Custom Chatbot for Your Business
Here is the list of benefits custom bots can offer to your business –
Proactively engage every qualified lead
Custom chatbots start conversations with clients by using advanced targeting and enrichment techniques, only engaging the leads you actually want.
Make sales cycle short
With custom chatbots, you give faster and direct answers to your customers instead of making them wait in queues or asking them to fill out multiple forms. This results in a more efficient sales cycle and faster conversions.
Route conversations automatically
With custom bots for your business, you can collect information upfront, prioritize the urgent issues, and route conversations to the right people in the organization.
Cost-efficient
You need to invest just once in your custom chatbot and it is there to stay! Also, by adding chatbots into your business, you’ll be increasing your revenue, as your current employees will be given time to focus on nurturing leads and closing sales, while chatbots perform the day-to-day activities.
This reduces the overall helpdesk centre costs and reduces customer wait time to zero.
Replace web forms
A customised chatbot can help you engage your high-intent leads, followed by moving qualified leads directly to a conversation to convert them faster.
Allow businesses to book demos and meetings quickly
There are high chances that with traditional phone/email support, you have often struggled to fix meetings and demo timings with customers due to constant back-and-forth of emails and texts with no success.
Custom chatbot is a smart answer to this ongoing problem as it allows you to integrate your calendar with chat option so that your customer can easily book free slots in the chat window directly.
No human supervision
Once trained, chatbots cater to each and every chat smoothly without any human supervision required. Does this mean chatbot replaces the employees? Absolutely not! Chatbots simply automate the routine tasks so that your team can focus on more complex tasks.
Enhance customer satisfaction
For businesses struggling to improve their customer satisfaction, custom chatbot is a great solution. It allows your prospective lead to get instant answers to their queries, thereby enhancing customer engagement and satisfaction.
Round-the-clock availability
If your customers are made to wait (for hours / days) for the answers they seek, they are most likely to choose someone else offering the same solutions as you.
This is where custom chatbot comes to your rescue. With chatbots in place, your business can address your customers’ queries outside operational hours. This will make your business accessible to the people at their ease.
Custom Chatbots And Live Chat – Best Practices
Whether you opt for custom chatbot or live chat, the purpose is to put customer satisfaction at the center of your business.
To make custom chatbots and live chat work for your business, here are some of the best practices you need to follow-
Don’t wait for the customer to start the conversation
Instead of waiting for prospects to come and start the conversation, you reach out to them proactively. Even better, personalise your greeting using a custom chatbot if you already have the basic details such as name, location and more, and use it when you’re offline.
Keep the conversation simple
Instead of long, unclear sentences, opt for short and crisp ones. Write exactly what you want to convey, in a crisp way. It is also important to guide the user through the conversation with one topic at a given time. Offer help with one thing before attempting to help with another.
Always have fallback answers
There are always going to be questions from users which your bot is not trained for. In such cases, a fallback response will guide the user as to what the next step might be. Never leave the customer clueless about what to do next.
Set clear expectations
It is best to set clear expectations and let your visitors know explicitly what type of queries the custom chatbot or the live chat query can address. In case of a live chat, you need to clearly mention the offline hours.
In such a scenario when a customer starts a conversation during offline hours, make sure that they are greeted with a message that either directs them to search the query themselves on the website or asks for their time to answer the query when the staff gets online.
Target key action pages
While you might think that the homepage of the website is the best place to put a custom chat feature as it gets the highest traffic, the truth can be very different. To gain maximum advantage, consider adding live chat feature on key action pages such as contact/pricing page as these are the pages where visitors generally have most queries after they have expressed initial interest in your company.
Top 3 Live Chat Use Cases
Here are some of the great examples highlighting some creative ways that businesses are leveraging custom chatbots and live chat in their respective business environments.
1. Lead Qualification Tool
An increasing number of marketing and sales firms are leveraging custom chatbots and live chat software as a robust front-line lead qualification tool. To make it work for them, the organisations prepare a list of contact details and other data variables collected during the chat with the client. All the information collected then passes on to the CRM so that leads can be allocated, and follow-up tasks can be taken up by the sales team once the chat session is completed.
Example: This strategy of using live chat as a lead qualification tool has been brilliantly used by Mavenlink, a project management software platform built for project-based service organisations.
2. Multilingual Chat Support
Custom chatbots and live chat software can be of great use to companies with a diverse set of customers, speaking multiple languages. Using this intelligent chat software, they can instantly connect customers to the best-suited representative from the support teams to answer their queries in their preferred choice of language.
Example: An example of this is Canyon Bicycle, a renowned name with a global client base. Since the company has a diverse set of customers with varied language preferences, they used intelligent chat routing using the live chat software to instantly connect customers to a support person who could assist them in their own preferred language.
3. New customer onboarding assistance
Sending targeted proactive chat invitations to new clients with the aim of offering onboarding assistance to them is another creative way to leverage live chat and custom chatbots. It allows you to offer prompt and personalised support to new customers so they can engage with your products and services with confidence.
Example– The strategy has been used by Betterment, a leading online investment advisory by sending chat invitations to their clients with the aim of better engaging them and answering their questions before they conduct business with them.
Top 3 Custom Chatbot Use Cases
1. Lead qualification and driving more engagement
Snapt, a B2B SaaS startup, uses custom chatbot for lead qualification, to increase user engagement, and create a more consistent customer experience using custom bots. The strategy used by the team was to ensure that each prospect is directed to the best path for their desired outcome.
For instance, in case of customers looking for sales, the custom bot asks them quick qualification questions to capture the relevant details to determine the right people they should get connected with.
2. Video Bots to greet website visitors at scale
The strategy has been excellently used by Apply Pixels to capture visitors’ attention on their website. They used video bots to personally greet website visitors and guide them towards the best resources for them, routing them to the right page to pay and sign-up for subscription templates, to add a personal touch and enhance every customer’s experience on their website.
3. Enhancing customer engagement during onboarding
OutSystems is using custom bots to greet customers during the initial user experience so that they can help themselves and get the resources they need to get started.
Bottom Line
The end goal of every business is to enhance customer engagement and boost sales. A seemingly difficult feat to achieve, it requires thoughtful efforts to capture leads effectively and nurture them well. And what better way to do so than to appoint custom chatbots to automatically answer customer queries in contextual manner.
Most businesses today have some sort of online presence in the form of a website or social media channels, and it is crucial for them to leverage these using custom chatbots that allow them to interact easily with their target set of audience.
Custom chatbots have emerged as the next step in the way businesses interact with their customers and prospective leads. A chatbot saves businesses time and money while getting more done in less time. We, at Maruti Techlabs, offer customized chatbot solutions to suit your business needs and goals. Simply drop us a note at hello@marutitech.com and we’ll take it from there.
