Enhancing the Customer Experience
Artificial intelligence has transformed the digital landscape considerably, especially regarding the expansion of chatbots in the online realm. A chatbot is a computer program powered by rules and artificial intelligence that can simulate human dialogues with users via a chat interface.
Chatbots have already become extremely popular. Websites have integrated chatbots to interact with visitors immediately. Estimates suggest that 80% of all businesses will be using chatbots by the year 2020. When you consider all of the advantages of chatbots, it's clear why chatbots will become an indispensable part of all businesses.
In this article, we discuss some of the top reasons why chatbots are dramatically enhancing the customer experience.
1. 24/7 Availability
There are very few businesses that remain open 24/7. However, with chatbots, your business can remain active for your customers in some form or another all the time. Furthermore, your customers can engage with your business without you having to hire 24/7 customer support staff. Customers today want to interact with your business on their schedules - not yours.
Chatbots allow even small businesses to remain operational 24/7/365 at a relatively low cost of a simple chatbot. Your customers will be able to ask questions, make bookings, make purchases, and do so much more any time of the day or night.
2. Providing Accurate Information
Customers often have particular questions about a business, and it's products or services. For example, when it comes to booking a table at a restaurant, a customer may have questions regarding specific dietary considerations.
Customers often prefer the live chat option in this case. However, the cost of hiring actual human resources to offer customer support can be extremely expensive and relatively slow. That's where chatbots come in.
You can program a chatbot with a complete inventory of possible questions and answers. Whenever a customer has a problem, they can ask the chatbot and receive detailed answers immediately. This will allow you to provide accurate information to all of your customers at a rate that's a lot more efficient and cheaper than a human team. By incorporating AI, the chatbots become even smarter as their interactions grow.
3. Smoother Shopping Experience
Chatbots can considerably improve the online shopping experience. Users can ask the chatbot for specific recommendations on products. Furthermore, the chatbot also remembers the customer's preference to recommend other products that might interest them. This can drastically increase your sales as your customers buy products they had no previous visibility to or for uses they had not even contemplated.
4. 100% Response Rate
Your business' conversion rate is directly related to your response rate. Your viewers are far more likely to turn into buyers if they have their questions answered soon. Without chatbots, you'll need to hire human resources to answer all your customer's inquiries, which can be a slow process. However, with chatbots, you can maintain a 100% response rate, which can drastically increase your sales as well. Studies have shown, even this early into the insertion of chatbots into the business model, that a large percentage of consumers also prefer or are more comfortable dealing with an intelligent bot versus human interactions.
5. Automating Repetitive Tasks
Most customers ask the same set of questions, even if the answers may be available in your FAQ section. As such, your customer support team has the demanding task of answering the same questions over and over. This is a redundant and wasteful process. However, with chatbots, you can automate this task so your human resources can focus on more remunerative jobs, which can increase your business' efficiency and also cut costs.
Conclusion
Chatbots are so valuable that one can easily compile a list of 20+ reasons why businesses should integrate chatbots. However, in this article, we've focused on some of the most important ways chatbots are dramatically enhancing the customer experience— they can enhance customer engagement, improve sales, and help you increase your efficiency and availability while simultaneously cutting down human labor costs. So if you haven't integrated a chatbot into your business functionality yet, it's time you do so.
