- Nov 27, 2018
- Category: Livechat
It’s time companies’ shift to chatbots to provide better customer service. It could save around $174 billion amount across different industries and departments like insurance, financial service, customer service, and sales.
A chatbot is a messenger bot or software linked to the Facebook page that intercepts the message which is sent to the page through messenger. The message is interpreted using NLP (Natural Language Processing).
How is it providing customer satisfaction and helping the marketers?
The unreasonable demand for 24/7 customer service without any interruption is provided by chatbot which it does without any errors. The rise of conversational marketing to outreach an extensive audience has made way for chatbot integration in the customer service department of many big and small companies worldwide. This process has made marketing a seamless and productive one to fetch more leads and increase prospect engagements.
Some of the crucial needs of the customers which are satisfied by chatbots are:
Immediate Response: Chatbot possesses the most necessary feature of paying attention and immediately responding to customer queries. This makes the customer feel positive about the brand as his needs are given high priority and fulfilled by customer service.
It has been found that 50% of the consumers want their queries to be immediately answered which is instantly provided by a chatbot. It mitigates the effects of inconvenience caused to the customer by balancing with the act of answering customer queries on a priority basis.
Upselling: Chatbots act as a perfect assistant in upselling of any product or service to the customer. They are the perfect tools for customer acquisition, which one can find from the example where it works with Facebook messenger by creating predesigned scripts for motivating the customer to purchase more. According to David Marcus, vice president and head of Messenger at Facebook, there are 300,000 monthly active bots on Messenger.
Messaging Contact: 50% of the consumers reported that they will contact any brand through messaging than by call which makes an amalgamation of messaging and chatbot popular in the customer service department.
Around 1.4 billion people use messaging apps and by 2019 more than 25% of the population will be using messaging apps. It was also found that 30% of US citizens are willing to make purchase with the help of chatbot.
Messaging Apps & Chatbots in E-Commerce
The 21st century has been the century of many disruptive technological changes. With this, there has been an enormous increase in social e-commerce which is changing the way an ordinary man shop for necessary commodities and goods. The global messaging app users, who constitute the majority of e-commerce leads, is expected to reach 2.1 billion by 2020.
Boundaries between the fun, work and business are becoming vague as customers move from personal conversations to ads driven by chatbots. E-commerce brands are pushed to embrace different social media channels for leads, sales and customer support. Chatbots have become the perfect apotheosis of shopping and are acting as the kick point of conversation between the brand and customer.
As per an article by Forrester published in Forbes:
“Messaging apps will introduce a paradigm shift for marketers where interactive and contextual conversations will replace ad broadcasting. New conversational interfaces will drive deeper relationships between consumers and brands.”
Messaging apps makes the users more engaged with the help of AI tools and changes the way how one interacts with each other. Text interactions on bots and voice interactions with the agents make one of the powerful customer conversations.
An engaging conversation with a prospect makes him feel important and increase the chances of conversion.
How can chatbots be used to increase leads?
The goal of any marketing campaign is to increase relevant leads for conversion. So while the chatbots help in intercepting and interpreting the messages sent by the customers it also gives information about the users with whom the chatbots have chatted. These systems can be used in a complete way to acquire information about potential customers.
For example, while reserving a marriage party hall, the chatbot can be easily programmed to let customers schedule a reservation giving them an easy way for interaction and the owners to collect more information about the customers.
The bot can ask the customer some sample questions like presenting choices of hall size, the day they want to book for, hours they need for. This makes the process more natural like a phone conversation on the messenger system. Any notification or alert sent to the customer can be immediately checked on his phone.
Some of the other areas where chatbot can help are :
What time is the next bus to Chicago?
Are there any Adidas shoes in stock online/near me?
I want to submit an insurance claim, tell me the procedures?
Where is the veg restaurant near me?
Conclusion: The chatbots perfectly handle the repetitive tasks of handling the same query by different customers. It does not get carried away by the negative emotions which happen in case of a human being. A stable and fruitful conversation with the prospect boosts the engagement level with them and increases the chances of converting them into a customer.
An engineer at Google predicted that chatbots would have the language of the human level by the year 2029 which will make the conversation experience more satisfying with the chatbot.