Chatbots is the most tools for Marketing, Sales and Customer service. One of the main reason of its huge popularity is that it is powered with artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP). As AI and NLP-powered computer programs, chatbots are capable of conducting human-like conversations via text and audio platforms.

In addition to customer care queries, AI-powered chatbots can be part of your marketing initiatives and help push your customers seamlessly through your sales funnel. Here are some powerful ways chatbots can fit into your marketing strategy:

According to a research, the global chatbot market is expected to reach
$1.23 billion by 2025.

According to a survey by Oracle, 80 percent of brands plan to use chatbots by 2020, while Ubisend found that 35 percent of consumers want to see more companies using chatbots, which is interesting considering the practice is still new.

From those above research and study it is very clear that the future of chatbots is knows no bound. You should add Chatbot to your website to increase sales as well as customer support.

What is a Chatbot?

A chatbot is a software that can act like humans via a live chat interface. It can happen on a brand’s website or app, or through platforms like Slack, Skype, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and even Alexa.

Chatbot Features

• Bot Stories
• Interactions
• Rich Messages
• 3rd Party integration
• Conversation archives
• Collect Users
• Live testing
• Reports
• Robust API

Powerful Ways to Use Chatbots

While the benefits for the company or business that uses chatbots include reducing costs, the real winner will be your customers. Here’s how a chatbot enhances customer experiences and increase sales.

1. Real-Time Support, 24/7 Customer Service

‘Instant’ has become the go-to word for customers around the world for eCommerce. Now a days every customer expects an instant response to their query.

According to a research, 64% of customers feel that businesses should be able to address concerns 24/7.

With well-designed chatbots, you can easily offer the illusion of constant contact to your customers, for less than the cost of 24/7 human support staff. Use your marketing automation tools to collect data about high-traffic periods when you experience higher support call volume, and lay out a plan that leverages human presence and chatbots to create a helpful customer service experience.

2. Online Conversation with Live Customer Support

Chatbots can reduce customer support costs and speed up response-time tremendously. Customers can engage with a chatbot in much the same way they would do with live customer support employees.

Chatbots can address the basic, more common queries, thus making more time for the support team. The team can divert its resources and energies towards more complex, problem-solving queries that require a more creative, analytical, and intelligent approach.

From the user’s perspective, the ability to get instant reply to every query gives chatbot edge over manual support. In an eCommerce business, it instantly increases the conversion rate.

Since many chatbots use natural language processing methods, they can analyze the customer’s question and deliver a response that meets the customer’s requirements.

Most chatbots can be seamlessly integrated into the company’s website or smartphone apps, which saves the customer’s time and trouble of searching the company’s online resources for the answers they need. Or, customers can directly talk to your brand at any time without leaving their favorite messaging apps like Facebook Messenger, IMO or WhatsApp.

3. Endless Queries, Lower Chances of Error

Getting maximum outcomes with minimum effort is every eCommerce’s ideal scenario. Chatbots can fulfill this scenario.

Nowadays companies are moving towards AI-powered chatbots, which use machine learning and natural language processing to grasp the new issues not in the knowledge base. AI-powered chatbots help solve the new queries generated by customers.

Chatbots aren’t born perfect, they continuously adapt and learn, much like humans on that front, with every conversation. In cases where they cannot offer a logical solution, they redirect conversations to a team member.

4. A Smooth Customer Journey

To ease the purchasing process, your chatbot can pop up on any product page to offer additional information, video content or even a discount or promo code. Chatbots can also help customers with the process of gathering information, such as the product they want to purchase, the method they want to use for purchasing the product, and how they want it shipped.

5. Collect Data to Generates New Leads

Chatbots collect personal data from customers by asking initial questions like Name, Email address, Reason to contact, Interested Product etc. This data adds to the knowledge base and helps generate new leads. When old customers come back on the website they can send personalized messages, and an agent can also find previous chat correspondence of customers, to convert even more. This also generates new leads and help to find new potential customers.

Some chatbots come with a Lead Routing option. It can become very helpful to generate new leads in eCommerce businesses. It actually directs users to specific destinations regarding said product/service. The magic lies in the fact that the redirection is completely in sync with the customer’s demands, needs & wants aspirations, and even motivations.

6. Less Use of Interactive Voice Response (IVR) Systems

The biggest complaints that customers have about the customer service is the use of Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems during phone calls to customer support. This system ask customer different questions and route the customer’s call based on their voice responses. IVR systems are highly structured, routing the customer through each response until it reaches the pre-programmed destination.

Chatbot can be used in a similar way, but with less use of IVR. The customer feels like their voice is being heard and understood, while the chatbot can lead them towards either an answer based on previous situations or to a human representative.

7. Simplified Split Testing

E-commerce business owners periodically upgrade the website to enhance user experience. Split testing helps to try different upgrades and compare results to choose the design that resulted best. It can be a difficult and time consuming task if you are updating the entire website for each trial. In this case, chatbots help to save time, money, and energy.

E-commerce websites can create a chat scripts and get instant results. Updating a chatbot is simpler than updating the entire eCommerce website. Once you update the chatbot, it can start interacting with visitors and customers.

8. Gather and Analyze Customer Feedback and Data

Chatbot offers the perfect opportunity to gather feedback from your customers. Unless there’s an incentive, people don’t want to spend their time completing any surveys. A chatbot softens the approach to gather feedback by naturally introducing questions to their conversations.

Additionally, with the right machine learning tools, chatbot can analyze feedback and other information it gathers from users, giving you more insight into what your audience truly wants. From there, you can re-build your marketing strategy to become more focused on your customer’s requirements, thus creating more of an inbound marketing approach.

Chatbots Examples

Duolingo

Duolingo is a popular language-learning platform that consists of a website and an app, and most recently, a chatbot.

As anyone who’s studied another language will tell you, one of the biggest challenges is speaking loud.

According to Duolingo’s co-founder and CEO Luis van Ahn, there’s a big fear of embarrassment when it comes to conversing with native speakers of a language you’re just starting to learn.

The success of the chatbot is based on the premise that when learning a new language and one of the best ways to master it is through conversation. With over 150 million users, the Duolingo chatbot helps people practice speaking in a conversational way without fear of embarrassment or judgment.

Using a playful and cheerful design, the chatbots allow users to converse and practice their language skills without the pressure of talking to a live person. Due to the automation of the software, the chatbot can respond to new dialog quickly. It also rolls out conversations that are topical and seasonal to help the chatbot become more responsive and human-like. 

MongoDB

MongoDB is an open-sourced and cloud-hosted database program.

To increase the lead generation, the company installed the messaging tool, Placed on its site. The chatbot answers all questions and drives the most qualified visitors to a sales call.

The bot starts by asking visitors if they have any questions about pricing or sales and some few questions.

How to Start your Own Chatbot

There has been heavy investment in chatbot services, in practice there is much more work to be done. The best way to avoid a failed chatbot is to have clear aim and objectives in mind before you begin programming.

According to Chatbot magazine, identifying the opportunities for a chatbot and understanding the aims of the program are essential first steps. However, once these goals are set and laid out, you will still need the right tools to take your chatbot from an idea into a reality.

Powerful Ways to Use Chatbots: Bottom Line

Chatbots are more than the “wave of the future” in customer service, marketing and sales. They are in the “here and now,” allowing vendors more opportunities to engage with customers in new and different ways, and more importantly, to fulfill their goals more efficiently.