If you’re looking for a way to bring your website into the 21st century, to potentially increase your sales, and to improve customer satisfaction, then you should consider getting a chatbot.
What is a Chatbot?
A chatbot is a little AI assistant that lives right on your website, or that users can contact through social chat apps such as Facebook Messenger. The idea is that your chatbot will be there to answer questions, give advice, and even suggest recommendations – all without you or your business having to raise a finger.
Users can speak to a chatbot through a chat window, as though it were a real person located in a call center. They can then ask questions using natural language, and the chatbot will respond.
Chatbots are often considered primarily for customer service. The idea here, is that a chatbot can help people with FAQs, or direct them to the page they need. A chatbot can provide advice on what to do if a product is damaged, and on how to contact the company.
All this can improve customer satisfaction, without requiring you to spend large amounts of money. Because while most companies would love to be able to answer every question, that would require a huge support team of staff, which might well be outside of the budget of many smaller companies. But with an automated chatbot, they can filter down the vast majority of issues so that only a few that can’t be answered from a flow chart need to be seen to in person.
Chatbots for Marketing
But where things get really interesting, is when you use chatbots for marketing.
How might this work? One example would be to try and increase conversion rates when a visitor lands on a website. Normally, you might use some sales text, and rely on users following the right links and buttons on your page in order to find the product listing for them. Often this would result in confusion and frustration, and many visitors would leave before having a look around.
Bounce rates are high across the internet.
But with a chatbot, this could be very different. Imagine if the very moment someone landed on your website, a chatbot asked them what they were looking for. When they answered, that chatbot could take them straight to the relevant page ready for them to buy. No searching through the site, no complication.
What’s also great about this, is that even if a visitor doesn’t buy anything, they will have shared their ‘intent’ simply by telling the chatbot what they were looking for. This kind of data can be hugely beneficial for marketers.
More Types of Chatbot
Chatbots can also take many other forms. For example, it is increasingly common for chatbots to be used over Facebook messenger. Several restaurants and fast food joints now allow customers to order their food simply by messaging the resident chatbot this way!