12 Incredible Benefits of Chatbots and How to Get Them All

It doesn’t seem long ago that the idea of robots taking over the world was merely the plot of a movie. Now, chatbot marketing is a common expression in global business, and the benefits of chatbots are rapidly enticing more companies to begin experimenting with the capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI).

The chatbot market size is expected to grow from $2.6 billion in 2019 to $9.4 billion by 2024 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 29.7%.

Wondering why companies are investing so heavily in chatbots?

Because your marketing, sales, and customer service operations can all benefit from AI-powered chatbots.

In this article, we’ll discuss:

• How chatbots work
• The types of chatbots
• The top 12 benefits of chatbots for your business
• How to set up chatbots for your business

Let’s dive right in!

The 3 Types of Chatbots

There are three different types of chatbots:

Rule-based Chatbots

You can interact with rule-based chatbots by clicking on buttons and using predefined options. However, you can only make limited selections, which makes these chatbots the slowest to help your customers find their answers.

Intellectually Independent Chatbots

These chatbots use ML to learn from users’ inputs and requests. You can train these bots to understand particular keywords and phrases that trigger their replies. Over time, these bots can train themselves to understand more and more queries.

AI-powered Chatbots

AI-powered chatbots are a combination of the other two kinds of bots. These bots use ML, AI, and NLP to understand and remember the context of the conversation and the user’s preferences.

So, now that you understand the fundamentals of how chatbots work and the three types of bots your business can use, it’s time to look at the benefits of chatbots.

Also read: 14 Creative Customer Engagement Strategies for Small Businesses

12 Incredible Benefits of Chatbots for Companies and Customers

Forbes reports that chatbots are killing customer service as we know it. While there may be some credence to the claims that the rise of robots inevitably spells disaster for some human jobs, the revolution is ultimately a good thing from a business perspective.

More importantly, the benefits of chatbots bring good news for consumers. In a customer-centric world, anything that helps you improve the customer experience and foster greater brand trust and loyalty is a good thing.

Here is a video that explains the benefits of chatbots:

Let’s look at the main benefits of chatbots for business in detail.

Facilitate Seamless Live Communication

Nobody likes to wait around for a solution. When a customer has an issue with your products or services, they’ll quickly lose patience if your brand can’t rectify the problem promptly.

Reports that humans have an attention span akin to a goldfish are widespread, and while it may not be conclusive, the fact remains how people interact with brands is changing.

If you have a chatbot integrated into your customer support software, people can engage easily without any learning curve or prior training. Through NLP, chatbots can analyze queries and answer customer questions.

As many companies now use this in smartphone apps and on their websites, customers don’t have to waste time trying to get in touch.

Live chat functions seamlessly on all devices, and even on popular messaging apps like auto reply on Facebook Messenger.

WhatsApp chatbot is the best way to communicate with your customers through the messaging platform. It is easy to install and can be integrated with existing enterprise IT systems. The chatbot will help you automate a lot of mundane tasks such as responding to questions, fixing bugs in a product, or giving recommendations based on customers’ preferences.

Make Customer Service Available 24/7

Unlike your support team, chatbots don’t need any sleep. When a customer needs assistance, your company can be there, even outside of normal business hours.

This facilitates greater customer satisfaction as people can get help without waiting around for a reply to an email or voicemail.

Image Credit: Webio

Save Time and Money

You may think it’s an expensive venture for a small business to use this technology. However, when we consider this study by Retail Dive, the return on investment (ROI) is worth the investment:

• Chatbots will save a combined total of $11 billion for the banking, retail, and healthcare business sectors by 2023. This is almost double the $6 billion savings in 2018.
• By 2023, the companies and consumers in these three industries will save a combined total of over 2.5 billion hours.
• At the same time, e-commerce is expected to grow to more than $112 billion because of chatbots.

You’re probably wondering how it will save so much time and money.

Keep reading to find out!

Also read: Live Chat Support Can Make a Huge Difference in Your Business

Reduce People-to-People Interactions with Customers

The massive savings come from slashing the time your staff normally spend dealing with customer queries.

By phasing out customer support staff to bring in chatbots, you can dramatically cut interaction times on all channels, including phone calls, social media, and messaging apps. This is one of the most prominent chatbot benefits.

Eliminate Tedious Time-Consuming Tasks

One of the benefits of chatbots is that they can take over a lot of tedious, repetitive tasks that are currently performed by customer support staff.

These jobs can be dull and draining for people, but a bot will never complain, not even when a customer gets frustrated or belligerent.

David Cancel is the CEO of the leading chatbot development company, Drift. He asserts that people should not look to view chatbots like a human simulator, but instead see them as a better way of satisfying customer needs.

Also read: 6 Ways AI is Changing Self Customer Service For Good

Offer a Smoother Customer Journey

One of the best benefits of chatbots is the ability to make the customer journey smoother. Anyone in e-commerce will know the pain of losing prospects halfway through a marketing funnel. It doesn’t take much to deter people from completing a purchase online, whether it’s a confusing check-out system or hidden costs.

Businesses can use bots to streamline the buying process, popping up on any page to do things like:

• Offer additional information on products or shipping.
• Give customers more insights from related video content.
• Provide discount codes.

Measures like these can help reduce cart abandonment rates, which are a problem for practically every online store.

Image Credit: MyClever

Reduce Stress for Consumers

“Reducing Stress” is one of the greatest advantages of chatbots.

Research by Helpshift revealed that most consumers “dread” contacting the customer support team of a company. For some people, these phone calls are inconvenient, while others find them frustrating, time-consuming, and socially challenging.

The same survey also discovered that 79% of people prefer live chat over other channels, and 55% would choose to use chatbots if it was available. This is widely considered to be a quicker, more efficient, and tailored road to resolution.

Also read: 6 Ways AI is Changing Self Customer Service For Good

Eliminate Interactive Voice Response (IVR) Systems

Have you ever called a customer support line and were greeted by an IVR system that attempts to route your call depending on specific voice responses? It usually goes a bit like this:

IVR: “Please tell us how we can help you.”

You: “Lost bank card.”

IVR: “Did you say, ‘post bank card?’ Press 1 if that is correct.”

You: “No. I lost my bank card.”

IVR:  “Okay, lost bank card. Is this your credit or debit card?”

You: “Debit.”

IVR: “Did you say ‘credit’? Press 1 if that is correct.”

You: “NO! Debit! C’mon…”

IVR: “I’m sorry, I didn’t catch that. Is this your credit or debit card?”

You: “DEBIT!”

It’s a frustrating experience almost all of us have encountered at some time. Thankfully, these structured systems are on the brink of extinction.

Why?

Because of chatbots, of course!

Thanks to machine learning, chatbots have much greater flexibility and capability, allowing customers to feel their voice is actually being understood. This makes effective problem-solving one of the greatest benefits of chatbots.

Humanize Your Brand

That flexibility has another advantage – it makes it possible for chatbots to engage customers on a whole host of different levels. This means businesses can use it to help people with technical support, sales information, or account management.

You can program chatbots to have a “personality” that suits their role, such as an affable tech helper or quirky sales associate.

Domino’s Pizza gave their customer service chatbot, “Dom”, a friendly personality that interacts with customers, making the order process easy and enjoyable.

This personification of chatbots is a great way of building good customer relationships, as it helps display your brand voice, and also dispels people’s concerns about interacting with chatbots.

Read also: eCommerce AI Chatbots: Important Use Cases And Popular Tools

Make Marketing More Targeted

Brand awareness is a top priority for virtually every company nowadays. You should always be looking for more customers for your existing products. In fact, marketing guru Seth Godin believes it’s the other way around:

“Don’t find customers for your products, find products for your customers.”

Chatbots can help you here as they make it easier to broadcast your brand message. By eliminating dreary tasks and excess cold call issues, you can use chatbots to streamline customer communication and build greater brand trust. Throughout all of this, you are collecting valuable customer data on consumer behaviors, interests, and purchasing habits.

By using chatbots for marketing, it’s easier to promote new products and services, as they can help you target the right people, with the right offer, at the right time.

Image Credit: Medium

Help Grow Your Business

One of the biggest benefits of using chatbots is that they help you grow your business by reaching more people and increasing your customer base. From marketing to sales to customer services, chatbots can help you improve and expand nearly every operation of your company.

Chatbots improve customer engagement by establishing personalized interactions with consumers, offering reliable shopping recommendations based on their buying history and preferences. Plus, they help quickly push your prospects further down the marketing funnel by seamlessly guiding them through every aspect of the transaction and answering each question as it arises.

As chatbots are able to predict customer behavior, you can use them to send the right notifications to the right people, every single time.

You can also broaden your reach by interacting with a large number of prospects via social media bots than humanly possible. For example, Uber is leveraging social media bots, allowing its customers to place their orders through Facebook Messenger. This can also help in lead generation, and offers a personalized experience for the customer.

Chatbots also empower you to elevate your brand value by capturing customer attention through past interactions. You can easily collect and analyze customer feedback, and then use it to effectively communicate to the right people in the right manner.

Also read: What Is a Chatbot and How to Use One for Sales and Marketing

Get Constant Improvement Over Time With Machine Learning

Over time, chatbots need constant evaluation and optimization. You must track its performance depending on relevant areas such as user experience, linguistic capabilities, and usability. This will help you improve your chatbot experience and devise changes necessary to attain definitive business goals.

To optimize your chatbot, consider:

• Changing invites and welcome messages.
• Setting appropriate goals.
• Including extra info about your business.
• Including new products.
• Varying prices.
• Communicating new and more enticing offers.

Chatbots are making huge advances, and you have to be ready to migrate with the times. Think about collecting data and building the training sets of the future. You can’t always rely on the chatbot services you’re using today.

Why? Because though their preliminary offerings may be inexpensive or even free, their price steeps upwards once you need to support real traffic coming to your chatbot.

This particular niche in ML is about to change hugely, and you must remain as flexible as you can to roll with the wave. Don’t be too tightly coupled to a service that’ll ultimately charge you a lot more for a generic (non-personalized) solution.

How to Get Started With Chatbots

Okay, now that you can see the undeniable benefits of chatbots, it’s time to take the next step. Let’s show you how to use chatbots for your own business.

Define Your Goals

Chatbot marketing isn’t as alien as you may think. As with other sales and marketing tactics, goal-setting is an important step at the beginning. What do you want to achieve?

• Improve customer service.
• Promote new products.
• Generate more leads.

Speak to your team and define clear goals before proceeding.

Consider Your Audience and Channels

You could use it only on your website, or also on social media pages and instant messaging apps. The important thing to realize is that chatbots conversations vary from one platform to the next. For instance, website visitors may know more about your products than someone who visits your social media for the first time.

Your chatbots must be programmed to suit the needs of different visitors. Facebook users may ask different questions compared to those on Twitter. Ultimately, you must understand your audience’s personas before moving forward.

Devise Your Content Strategy

How will your customers engage with your chatbots?

Start by building up an FAQ section. This will help you devise a flow system that guides users to the quick answers they need.

Bring your key departments together to get a holistic view of the organization:

• Customer Service – The main point of contact for customers. Ask them about common issues they normally deal with when people get in touch.
• Sales – Get insights about conversations with prospects. What is stopping people from completing the customer journey?
• Marketing – Think about your social channels and brand voice on here. What queries does your social media marketing team handle?

Once again, remember your goals here to guide your content. Think about how the content will support your goal and help customers at the same time.

Image Credit: Messenger People

Create Your Chatbot’s Personality

Now it gets interesting. Your chatbot must have a likable personality that customers will enjoy communicating with. Give it a friendly voice and a memorable name, and ultimately, encourage your copywriting team to let their creative juices flow.

This will pave the way for a friendly, helpful chatbot that can bond with prospects and customers over time. Thus, one of the benefits of chatbots is that they help you humanize your brand by humanizing your customers’ experience with a bot.

Offer a Welcoming Experience

Remember that many people are still unsure about chatbots, both as business owners and customers. Therefore, your chatbot must make a great first impression.

Consider the following when you are writing your welcome message:

• Compelling – It may be an automated robot, but it doesn’t have to be stiff and boring. Let that personality shine through by having some fun with the brand voice. You aim to make people want to engage in conversations with your bot.
• Set customer Expectations – Don’t try to trick people into believing this is a human. Let customers know it’s a bot early on, so there’s no confusion about the limits of the conversation. Also, make a point of letting people know they can also contact a real human if needed.
• Ask Questions – Questions fuel conversation, and they help your bot get valuable information. The more information it gets, the more effective it can be for customer service and marketing.

Image Credit: Monetate

Conclusion: Chatbots Can Bring Customers and Companies Together

The potential for AI-powered chatbots is almost limitless, which makes them an incredible addition to any business.

Chatbots don’t just offer seamless customer support and product recommendations, they also help you sell more, and faster. They have improved so much that they can now even facilitate payments. Around 37% of customers and 48% of millennials are eager to purchase via chatbots.

Today, chatbots combined with cloud-based operations are a winning formula for small businesses. From customer relationships and data management to internal communication and business agility, you can improve everything without worrying about the exorbitant costs of additional infrastructure and security threats.

For small businesses, chatbots are crucial as it saves time and resources, offers a better return on investments, and helps you offer exceptional customer service — the benefits of chatbots are clearly visible here.

But why have dozens of applications when you can have it all in one powerful, affordable package?

Yes, EngageBay does exactly that. You get marketing, sales, and customer service tools at a highly affordable price. EngageBay’s integrated and free live chat tool helps you embed the widget on all your website pages for continuous and interactive communication. It offers personalized messaging, and reduces the need for your customers to interact with your support staff.

Plus, all the tools are connected with the CRM, so the live chat tool has access to vital customer information — thus ensuring better customer service.