How Chatbots Can Improve Your Business

The usage of artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming more common as an increasing amount of business owners have begun using it to help them to improve their businesses. Chatbots are a form of artificial intelligence technology that is becoming popular in recent times to help entrepreneurs increase their conversion rates while reducing operational costs.

What Are Chatbots?

Chatbots are interactive applications created to communicate with people like a human being. They can imitate human conversations and prepare immediate responses to people as well as re-direct the conversation to a real person when needed. Bots are used a lot in messaging services such as WeChat, WhatsApp as well as Facebook Messenger. They’re also used in many eCommerce websites.

With the ever-growing number of online businesses out there, customers are getting more demanding in the way they choose what to buy, the type of user experience that a business provides to them and the level of efficiency that a business can deliver so that they can get the products and services the way fast and with less effort.

When a customer goes to a website that is unfamiliar to him or her and finds trouble navigating the website and finding answers to his or her questions, then that customer will usually exit the website without purchasing anything or leaving an inquiry and contact detail.

This is why they are becoming really popular especially in assisting eCommerce and service industries because customers might be confused with the many choices they offer!

Benefits of Chatbots

By having them, your business will have a human-like device that can handle multiple inquiries at the same time that will interact directly with your customers and provide them with the answers they need to help them make a purchasing decision fast without having the hassle of waiting a long time for a reply through a customer support team.

The best part is that they can work for you 24/7!

You can program your chatbots to provide answers and do certain tasks based on the responses of your customers, triggers or predefined conditions. Your bots will answer your customers promptly and provide consistent answers to your customers. And over time, you can adjust and improve their responses when you learn more about the language of your customers and their frequently asked questions.

Using bots will reduce your operational costs while increasing your customer satisfaction – which will bring you more leads and sales!

You can also use them to improve your customer service by using it to answer onboarding and frequently asked questions.

What Are The Popular Types Of Chatbots?

There are many types of chatbots available. So choose your bots wisely according to their functions so that they will suit your business best. You can search for the different types of bots available through websites like Botlist, Chatbottle and Thereisabotforthat.

Here are some chatbot examples:-

Personal Bots

These applications offer communication with a single user only. An example of this type of bot is Poncho the weather bot.

Poncho-The-Weather-Bot_image — Photo credit: Messengerchatbots.com

Team Bots

These applications are involved in interacting with multiple users. An example is Donut by Slack.

Donut-bot_image — Photo credit: Chatbotslife.com

Website Bots

A really popular chatbot is website bots. These bots are used to increase customer satisfaction by providing the ability for customers to have live chats to answer frequently asked questions about products and services, book appointments, recommend products and services to buy as well as pointing them to the right direction on the next steps to take to complete their purchases.

They can also notify customers about specific discounts that are currently being offered.

An example of a website chatbot is the AirBnb bot.

AirBnb-chatbot_image — Photo credit: Medium.com

In general, there two main groups of bots – simple and smart chatbots. Simple bots are programmed based on pre-determined keywords and provide answers to those keywords. On the other hand, smart bots rely on artificial intelligence. They will provide multiple answers based on a particular topic that is of interest to the person it is communicating with.

What Are The Limitations of Chatbots?

It is of course practically impossible to be able to gauge every question and topic that will be asked by a customer. So this limits the ability of chatbots to respond to customers in some situations. Of course, you can improve the performance of your bots over time. But when they are not able to answer the questions of your customers, you will still need to direct them to either you or your customer support team.

How To Build A Chatbot For Your Business

If you’re ready to build your chatbot for your business, then it is important to take these matters into consideration first:

Determine the goals for your bot. Decide on how would you want it to benefit your business and customers?

Be clear about the platforms that you are using to host your bot? Is it through Facebook Messenger or any other type of platforms?

Decide how you would like to create your bot. Would you want to hire someone to customise it for you or do you want to use software to do it?

Make sure to test your bot before launching it to the public!

Chatbot Builder Platforms

If you’ve decided to create your own chatbot, below are some builder platforms that you might find useful:

I hope my article for you on How Chatbots Can Improve Your Business was helpful in making you understand more about artificial intelligence and the usage of these bots in helping business growth. Do you currently use chatbots in your business and have benefited from them? Or are you planning to use them in the future? I’d love to hear from you in the comment section below.