Talking The Talk: How Chatbots Can Transform Your Business
The common wisdom is that the explosion around chatbots and artificial intelligence is only for larger businesses due to perceived high costs. This might have been true a few years ago but due to greater interest in chatbots access to these tools has increased.
A huge increase in chatbot enterprises that focus on giving the customer the best experience possible has seen small businesses take up chatbots to improve dialogue with customers, boost sales and help speed up business.
One of the big reasons for this is that Mark and his buds down at Facebook have allowed anyone to make a chatbot for their page meaning literally any business can start taking advantage of chatbots, and they have, since the Facebook bit launch 11,000 bots have been added.
What are chatbots?
In essence, chatbots are just pieces of software that can interact with customers in a human like way. You’ll have probably seen them when you go onto a website and the little box in the corner lights up seeing if you need any assistance with anything (think, 90’s Microsoft paperclip).
Chatbot stats
51% of people think a business needs to be available 24/7 – you can buy a new phone at 10 o’clock at night but you have to wait till the next day to ask a few simple questions, it makes sense that just over half think this is frustrating and should be changed.
46% would rather contact a business through messaging than email – this stat highlights the want for instantaneity but also personalisation, chatting over a messenger is a far nicer experience than cold emails
49% prefer messaging over direct phone calls – no one likes being put on hold listening to nondescript music or having to listen to the ancient answering machines.
Consumers are after a conversational interaction, free from lengthy calls and button pushing that alternative may very well be messaging apps.
How can I go about building a chat bot?
Any platform that allows the use of chat bots will help you build them, Facebook, Kik and Telegram (Twitter’s version) all have pretty helpful sites that make building your bot plain sailing *knocks wood a thousand times*.
Benefits
There are many ways SME businesses are using chatbots, one way is called Conversational Commerce a term coined by hashtag inventor, Chris Messina. CC is all about purchasing items within a conversational context, rather than the usual scroll for three hours until you find something you like, or before the monotony of scrolling crushes your spirit.
CC gets better the more your customers use it, too. Over time, the chatbot remembers information about the customer’s habits and their detail which speeds up the purchasing process, this benefits you because you are able to understand your customers better and tailor your product or service to them – chatbot creates a bespoke dynamic to your business. Word has it, that CC will ultimately replace conventional methods of shopping (thank heaven!)
Chatbots also help deal with customers who have questions that can be easily answered by a bot, as opposed to a person – all you need to do is build the algorithm to suit you (if you’re not a computer whizz there is plenty of platforms out there that do all that building malarky for you).
This can leave the employee to focus on bigger issues that another customer has, ensure that the customer gets their query answered in seconds and makes the business seem bigger than it actually is. SME businesses are streamlining the comms process with bots that are the first point of contact for customers.
Integrating chatbots into your business means you’ll be on the cutting edge of technology and be able to get to your customers before your competitors and build those essential relationships.
It’s down to you to decide if you think a chatbot is right for your business but as you’ve seen the benefits certainly outweigh any disadvantages.