What is a Chatbot?
A chatbot is an artificial intelligence induced software program designed to engage with your prospective clients or prospects via chat platform mimicking human interactions 24/7/365 days.
When you design chatbots in a way that your clients forget that they are speaking to a bot, then your chat automation is a success. No, we don’t mean you should mislead your clients. On the other hand, you have to mention that they are speaking with a bot explicitly.
A chatbot can be set up within Facebook messenger, Slack, WhatsApp, even on LinkedIn. However, the most popular is Facebook messenger because Facebook Messenger introduced the user-friendly architecture on their Facebook Page. On your facebook page, you can add a “Send Message” button which triggers your chatbot when your visitor clicks it.
You can set up a default basic bot with the page so that it gives information to your visitors. There are many non-coding platforms such as ManyChat, ChatFuel and MobileMonkey which allows you to create chatbots for free.
Why chatbots are gaining popularity?
- over 2 billion messages are exchanged between businesses and their customers every month.
- 56% of people prefer to chat instead of calling the data centre
- 53% of people prefer shopping through messenger.
Above statistics are the reason, Google, Facebook, Microsoft along with many software giants are investing revenue on growing their platform to accept the design of bots ethically so that it provides value to the clients rather than being a pain.
5 ways you can use your chatbots in your business
- FAQ – Frequently Asked Questions – In many businesses, the clients or customers ask the specific question repeatedly. Let us suppose, you have a team to support your clients or as a solopreneur, it is very time-consuming to answer basic questions frequently. It is a waste of your team’s time or yours. Let’s say for example, “how can I reset the password”, “where are you based”, “what are your opening times” and so on. In these instances, you could use a chatbot to answer the questions. So, your time or your team’s time could be used efficiently to answer revenue-generating queries.
- Newsletter Distribution – Many businesses collect name and email addresses on their websites to distribute their newsletter. Some are inconsistent, so the clients don’t read them when they need to. If your clients are on Facebook, then you can send reminders on the messenger that your newsletter has been published. This use case where chatbots could be used effectively along with your other marketing initiatives which can increase your return on the spend. Using chatbot, you can target your offers to your clients and facilitate them to make a decision by cutting down the decision-making processes thru nurturing and education about your product and how it can solve their problems.
- Building engaged list – Money is in the list. You will know how difficult it is to get a lead. Many business owners, don’t have a follow-up process when a new lead is added to their list. It is been said that you need 7-10 touch points with your prospective clients before you can initiate the Know-Like-Trust process. When you set up a Chatbot to automate the touchpoints in a friendly and non-intrusive way, you will be able to increase your sales conversion.
So, as a business start small and build big. Chatbots are here to stay if you want to innovate a way to help your clients build trust and loyalty start now.
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