8 Reasons Why Your Business Needs Chatbots in 2021

Business owners are accustomed to providing what’s best for their customers. Aside from offering high-quality products and services, establishing customer rapport is crucial. But, how can you establish a good relationship with your customers?

Through a communication medium.

Businesses must answer queries from potential and loyal customers. Before, businesses set up customer service managed by their staff. However, humans have limitations. Thus, the customer service industry has been innovated.

The innovation that’s responsible for this is AI Chatbot. AI chatbots are the future of customer service and management.

Let’s Take A Look at AI Chatbots

AI chatbots are the advanced type of command-based chatbots. These chatbots are machine-learning that can answer vague questions from customers. You do not have to ask specific questions to these chatbots. It can create a reply from scratch using the natural language process.

Chatbots can do several tasks more efficiently and quicker than their human counterparts.  As they are machine-learning bots, it gets smarter with time. It learns from past questions and answers. The only drawback with AI chatbots is their struggle to form long sentences.

Now, why do businesses need chatbots?

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8 Reasons Why Businesses Need Chatbots

Before, business owners were hesitant to use chatbots. They were curious and anxious about how it will influence customer service management.

Today, the brands that invested early in chatbots now have the edge over their competition. You can say they are reaping the benefits of it now. If you continue to disregard its benefits, it will leave your business behind the competition.

Chatbots are not only limited to answering queries. Ponder on these reasons why you have to catch up with AI chatbots.

1. 24/7 Interactive Platform

Today, customers appreciate businesses and websites with an interactive platform. Most customers want a quick response to their basic questions. Although companies want to accommodate their customers 24/7, they can’t. It’s either they lack personnel or resources.

Gladly, with chatbots, customers do not have to wait for a response. It is always available any time of the day. It can cater to your customers whether it is midnight or early morning.

What if the chatbot can’t answer your customer’s query? You can configure your bot to save the customer’s details and link them to a customer service team via phone or email.

That’s better than leaving your customer confused and frustrated. The more you interact with potential customers, the more you’ll do business with them.

Source: Pixabay

2. Cutting Down on Human Errors

It is inevitable for humans to make mistakes. When we do manual and routine work, it involves the risk of errors. Errors may happen when discussing prices, product information, or collecting customer information. These mistakes may sound small and easy to correct, but these might lead to bigger problems.

The use of chatbots does not replace human agents. Instead, they do the manual and routine work for them. It is no joke to accommodate hundreds of customers daily with almost the same questions. Thus, the best way to deliver error-free service is chatbots. You can program your chatbot with all the essential information needed to avoid complications.

3. Enhances Productivity Among Customer Service Agents

Chatbots are the substitute for humans– this is actually a misconception. Chatbots are the alternative. They do not take over the task and automate, giving humans no work at all.

The truth is chatbots only deal with queries that are familiar to them. Chatbots help customer service agents answer similar queries and common questions. It allows the agents to cater to complex queries that need human agents.

Thus, instead of replacing them, chatbots help agents have more productive business tasks.

4. Collects Data for Marketing Approach

Chatbots are not only an alternative for customer service agents but it is also a great help in building your marketing list. Whenever a customer chats with a bot, they either sign in with their Facebook profile, or you can request their name and contact information.

There are a lot of marketing apps available. This has also increased the potential number of people visiting your offerings.

As several potential customers visit your website and talk with your chatbot, the list grows. With the collected data, you can create a strategic marketing approach. That’s the real power of today’s chatbots.

5. Progressive Approach for Marketing and Sales

Chatbots are useful for broadcasting updates and pushing notifications based on customer’s interests. It helps you reach a potentially massive audience.

A well-developed AI chatbot can close sales through a solid marketing solution. You are completely mistaken if you think chatbots are only for answering queries. They can also help you achieve these:

• Guides customers through their purchasing journey. Chatbots help your customers through the marketing funnel. They guide them through every aspect of the sale and address each query that they encounter.
• Improves customer engagement. As they can guide the customer in every step of the market funnel, they establish a credible interaction. They base their advice on the customer’s preference based on their actions or purchase history.
• Relevant push notifications. Chatbots are not only limited to customer interaction. They also reach out by sending push notifications. Chatbots are knowledgeable about your customer’s behavior and preferences. Thus, they know which updates are relevant to your customers.
• They improve brand reputation. Chatbots can identify their customer through their previous interactions. They gather customer feedback and analyze them. It gives them the knowledge on how to communicate with customers effectively.

Source: Pixabay

6. Boost Brand Reputation and Meet Customer Expectations

Today, businesses are all about reaching the right and relevant audiences. Managing a company with a conventional approach will make it difficult for you. It becomes hard to analyze and predict customer preferences and interests.

The market competition today is relatively high and is inclined to a solution. Customers want solutions that are easy to understand and follow.

Chatbots help you build a good customer relationship. As far as business owners are concerned, bots are the best tool to keep users engaged. They initiate and maintain the conversation, enhancing the customer’s trust.

They can provide potential customers with the solution they need at any time of the day. Chatbots are less prone to errors, giving customers a satisfying experience.

Moreover, they monitor consumer behavior and track their interests. Thus, it can persuade your consumers by suggesting only their preferred items.

7. Reminds Customers About Abandoned Cart

It’s common to experience abandoned shopping carts. The average abandonment rate for e-Commerce hovers between 60% to 80%.

There are a lot of influences that push customers to abandon items in their shopping cart. It could be the expensive shipping fee or long checkout process. Experts say that an optimized checkout process reduces the abandonment rate to 20%.

However, some shoppers are just distracted that they sometimes forget they meant to buy something online. Fortunately, chatbots can help you with abandoned carts. It sends are a reminder to your customers about the items they have left in the cart. You can also configure your chatbot to send invitations or discount offers of the items in their cart.

8. Cost-Effective, Time-Efficient, Requires Less Time to Develop

Lastly, developing a chatbot for business is cost-effective and timely. You do not have to wait longer to have a fully functional smart AI chatbot. Time is an important factor in improving your business services. The earlier, the better.

A user-friendly chatbot interacts easily and quickly with your visitors. If you have large website traffic, it will help convert them into customers. Thus, use your chatbot properly to justify the effort and cost made to develop them.

Are There Drawbacks with Using Chatbots?

Drawbacks are inevitable. For chatbots, it’s either there’s something wrong with the program or it needs an update.

Chatbots are not perfect yet. There are some drawbacks that are recognizable in chatbots like their dependence and conversational capability to name a few.

The conversational capability of chatbots is dependent on the information they learn and their configuration. Although chatbots can answer in a natural tone, their intelligence is limited as of now.

Chatbots cannot match human intelligence. Thus, it needs the help of its developer to answer queries.

They are quite dependent on their developer. Whatever you feed them, they digest. But that’s it. If you do not give chatbots adequate information, they cannot answer your customer’s queries. It needs to learn for it to respond better in future conversations.

As you can see, this drawback is preventable. You have to create well-optimized chatbots to prevent errors and deliver a better user experience.

Final Thoughts

Today, the market is in its fast-paced and highly competitive state. Customers appreciate businesses that are quick to respond with a more customized solution. In this scenario, chatbots became the first line of contact between customers.

However, chatbots are not only assistants for support. You can tell that they are more than that with the given reasons. If you utilize the functions of your chatbot, it will provide you with countless benefits. If you do not have an AI chatbot on your business website, now is the best time.

Do not let your guard down! Adopt this technology and keep up with the competitive world!

Start winning your customers.

Read more: Top 10 Benefits of Chatbot Marketing to Boost Customer Care