If you’re unfamiliar, AI-enabled chatbots may sound like a wacky plot point in a science fiction story. The truth is, they’re already here, and you’ve probably already interacted with them. Don’t believe us? Here are a few examples:
Since 2008, Buoy Health and CVS MinuteClinics have teamed up to use AI-enabled chatbots to help patients. Buoy Health’s AI-enabled chatbot program serves to help people understand potential health problems, and if it determines they need to be seen by a doctor, it uses GPS to locate the nearest MinuteClinic, and it offers to keep a spot in the clinic line for the patient.
Makeup giant Sephora uses Kik, Facebook messenger, and its website to provide personalized recommendations to customers. They come from AI-enabled chatbots.
And Dominos lets you order pizza from Facebook messenger using you guessed it – AI- enabled chatbots.
These technological assistants allow companies to provide customer service to more clients across more channels at any time of day or night. They are a powerful tool in a company’s effort to meet customers along all of the steps of their customer journey. They help clients answer their own questions, something data shows they’re happy to do. Let’s get into the details of how AI-enabled chatbots can make life easier for your business and your customers.
Key Terminology
Before we get into the minute details of the topic at hand, let’s have a glance at the most important terms you need to know. This is a tech-heavy topic, but AI-enabled chatbots are a great way to meet your clients where they are in their customer journey.
- Chatbot
A chatbot, at its most basic, is computer software that replicates and processes human interaction (either written or spoken), allowing humans to communicate with digital devices as if they were speaking with a real person.
- AI-Enabled Chatbot:
An AI-enabled chatbot is one that has been provided with artificial intelligence technology to predict what customers might say. AI technology also helps brands understand customers’ buying behavior and preferences.
- Natural Language Processing
NLP is a subfield of informatics that includes mathematical linguistics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. NLP assists your chatbot in analyzing human language and generating text.
- Conversational Marketing/ Conversational Commerce
Conversational marketing is a consumer-centric and discussion-driven marketing technique. It has emerged as a preferred technique for increasing consumer involvement, enhancing customer experience, and increasing revenue.
Where Can Chatbots be Used?
Chatbots can be tailored to your brand or business strategy. You can develop a chatbot that represents the tone of your business and makes customers feel like they’re talking to real people with a little ingenuity and inspiration. They may be imbued with a brand’s distinct personality and taught to do certain activities based on its business requirements. They can even learn from prior client encounters to improve their efficiency over time.
Furthermore, chatbots are available any time, so there’s no need to miss out on possible sales chances because you can’t answer inquiries at specific times of the day. You can be confident that your consumers will always receive timely replies from a chatbot that is well-versed in your products and services.
AI-enabled chatbots are used by many e-commerce businesses to handle anything from intelligent product searches to product suggestions, in-stock notifications, post-purchase inquiries, and much more. According to an MIT survey, 90% of organizations reported measurable gains in resolution speed, and more than 80% witnessed improved call traffic handling after implementing AI chatbots.
Here’s five different ways you might put AI-enabled chatbots into place around the internet.
Facebook Messenger provides a great option for businesses to meet their customers’ requests at any time. Chatbots on Messenger can help answer questions, provide further information, or even help customers make a purchase, like in the example of Dominos.
Customers often take their questions – and their criticisms – to Twitter. Chatbots can be implemented on Twitter both on the timeline and in direct messages, to respond to tweets and messages with urgency.
Instagram
Instagram is a perfect place for brands to showcase their products with dazzling photography. AI-enabled chatbots can help answer questions in the comments and in messages whenever they come in.
Web
It’s growing more common for companies to include a helpful chatbot on their home pages. It pops up after a few moments and asks the visitor if they need any help. This bot can be programmed with AI technology to anticipate customers’ needs based on the industry.
Text Automation
There is a myriad of apps that allow businesses to text message or send SMS to customers based on various prompts, including dates, marketing lists, or purchases. These messages are likely to be seen and serve as a great reminder for appointments or an abandoned cart.
How is this different from inbound marketing?
Conversational marketing is frequently seen as a component of an inbound marketing approach. Inbound marketing is a "pull" strategy for gaining consumers through the channels they prefer. Conversational marketing, on the other hand, is the practice of interacting with clients through various channels.
It is how you engage with your consumers by giving them control over when, how, and where they communicate with your company. Both are customer-centric by nature and complement the other. They are both important parts of the customer journey.
How Can My Company Use AI-Enabled Chatbots?
The adoption of AI-enabled bots can help you automate monotonous operations and market your organization more effectively.
With dynamic conversational capabilities, chatbots for marketing are becoming an exceptionally useful marketing tool for firms to boost customer engagement and qualify leads.
There are many ways your business can use AI-enabled chatbots. Some of them include:
● Automate Some Marketing Strategies: simplify and streamline marketing by automating some procedures, particularly those in the early phases
● Increase Marketing Discussions: conversational bots will enable you to reach out to more clients, start more discussions, and increase engagement.
● Certify Your Leads: conversational bots can ask qualifying questions for you and filter out junk leads.
● Nurture the Leads You’ve Captured: the information conversational chatbots capture can help you know your leads better and make more conversions.
● Schedule Meetings Automatically: chatbot marketing makes it simple to arrange, change, and cancel meetings without needing any human assistance.
● Customize the User Experience: set up your bot to begin interactions with website visitors so you can gather information to personalize their experience with your business.
● Provide Order Tracking & Shipping Info: Programming bots to automatically provide tracking and shipping for purchases makes customers happy and frees up more time for other tasks.
● Increase Brand Visibility: reach out to more people quickly, easily, and inexpensively.
Why Do Customers Like AI-Enabled Chatbots?
People are messaging chatbots for a variety of reasons. However, the most important things your clients expect from chatbots are:
● To get rapid responses to questions
● To put an end to a complaint or problem
● To obtain a more thorough response to a question
● Finding a human customer service representative
According to the statistics, you should begin utilizing chatbots to streamline client communications, success, and sales. Chatbots, on the other hand, are not only handy for your customers; they are also beneficial to your business.
The AI-Enabled Chatbot Advantage
Intercom, a customer communications platform, recently released a trends report regarding the rise of the use of chatbots. Its report showed chatbots contributed to a 67% rise in sales among businesses using them.
Justin Rudwell, the general manager for Red E App, wrote in an article on Spiceworks that chatbots saved business executives an average of $300,000 in 2019, with the largest benefit occurring in service and sales teams.
“We fundamentally believe chatbots have the potential to transform businesses in two ways: by delivering radical efficiencies, and by helping businesses meet ever-increasing consumer demands,” he wrote.
Let’s break down some of the many ways chatbots can help customers and businesses alike.
Save Time and Money
Organizations save time and money by automating discussions that would otherwise need an individual to respond. This time and money can then be directed to other endeavors.
Instead of spending all of your reps’ time responding to inbound inquiries, have them use their time using social listening technologies to uncover relevant discussions to join.
As the volume of inbound messages rises, so does the amount of time you save. And, according to Sprout Social data, the volume of social messages requiring a response from a business rose by 18% between 2015 and 2016, automating answers with a chatbot saves you precious hours.
Generate Leads & Revenue
Chatbots collect information through direct messaging in order to give efficient help. For example, one question that is likely to be posed in every encounter is why visitors are visiting your page.
By automating this initial encounter, consumers may give the information required for the agent to better serve them without having to ask a human for it. This helps to streamline the beginning of the customer journey.
Assist Users in Achieving Better Results
Customers don’t always know where to go for the information they seek. In fact, your consumers may not even know what they’re looking for. Maybe they just happened to hear your brand name and chose to look into it. You direct users to the ideal spot for them to get the information they want by asking a series of qualifying questions.
Consider some questions to ask that will lead your guest to the best potential answer. These questions differ depending on the sort of business, but some examples are:
● What issue are you attempting to resolve?
● What are your objectives?
● What city are you in?
● What department do you work in?
● What industry do you work in?
Provide Support at Any Time
The most common application of chatbots is to deliver timely responses in an emergency. Organizations that do not provide 24-hour help, on the other hand, obviously can’t respond when the office is closed.
Customers can still get the information they need by employing a robust chatbot when your business is closed.
This is especially critical since customers want businesses to respond faster than they can.
Customers expect a response time of 0-4 hours, according to Sprout Social’s Q2 2016 Index. Brands, on the other hand, often take 10 hours to respond.
Chatbots can help you considerably reduce your average response time, bringing you closer to your consumers’ expectations.
Do customers like talking to chatbots?
Believe it or not, they do, especially when they’re indistinguishable from a human representative.
According to data released by Facebook, more than half of customers would rather write a message to customer service than make a phone call. Similarly, 53% of customers would rather shop with businesses that provide a messaging option. People feel more confident about a company and its brand when they have the opportunity to send a message, according to Facebook’s report.
Every month, 2 billion messages are transmitted between people and corporations.
Chatbots are being used by businesses to bring customer happiness and interaction to the core of their business strategies. Because chatbots employ artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) to answer common inquiries and impersonate human agents, each interaction and each piece of consumer data acquired increases their capacity to grasp a user’s
purpose.
As a consequence, chatbots can improve operational efficiency by freeing up workers to focus on less minor, repetitive duties and more revenue-generating ones, such as client acquisition.
Chatbots may help organizations communicate with customers, qualify leads, distribute bulk messages, and execute drip campaigns more simply. Chatbots can help customers and businesses with every step of the customer journey.
AI-Enabled Chatbots Are Part of an Omnichannel Marketing
Experience
Omnichannel marketing establishes your brand’s presence across numerous online and offline channels while guaranteeing a good and smooth consumer journey. 67% of consumers cite poor customer service as a factor for turnover. Obviously, you want to gain and keep your consumers. In that case, you have to take your omnichannel business strategy seriously and continuously enhance it in order to provide a great experience to your customers across their whole experience with your business. (backlink to Omnichannel Marketing blog)
Brands have to optimize their omnichannel marketing journeys with their customers. Businesses should constantly improve the conversational skills of their omnichannel chatbots.
Conversational skills and the chatbot’s capacity to conduct multi-turn discussions with all the depth and empathy that a human agent delivers are critical to turning visitors into paying clients. A strong combination of data management and ongoing natural language processing (NLP) training is required for AI chatbots to provide accurate and fast answers. They must also understand client demands and collect greater information from every conversation. Chatbots may be programmed to identify hidden demand signals, evaluate them, and offer relevant actions, assisting companies in driving improved engagement and proactive communication.
TL;DR
● A chatbot is a software program that simulates and processes human conversation, giving customers the impression that they are speaking with a real person. Artificial intelligence enables chatbots to learn and reply effectively, as well as collect relevant
information for businesses.
● With a little creativity and imagination, you can create a chatbot that embodies the tone of your company and makes consumers feel like they’re speaking to real people.
● The use of AI-enabled bots can help you automate routine tasks and promote your company more efficiently.
● More than half of consumers prefer to send a message to customer support rather than call. Businesses are using chatbots to put consumer pleasure and interactivity at the forefront of their business plans.
● Conversational abilities, as well as the chatbot’s ability to conduct multi-turn talks with the depth and empathy of a human agent, are important for converting visitors into paying customers.
Is your business ready to put AI-enabled chatbots into place and reduce repetitive tasks for marketing staff, increase good leads, and increase revenue? Contact Business Pro today to get started!
In conclusion, AI-enabled chatbots are one fantastic way to increase your brand awareness, meet more leads and make more conversions. They can assist clients and businesses at every step of the customer journey and make the whole process more streamlined for everyone.