Reasons Why Companies Desperately Need A Chatbot

Chatbot technology is steadily creeping into the mainstream businesses but most of the brands are still not fully aware of it. Though many of them may have read about it and might have interacted with these small conversational programs at some point of time, but still they are out of sight, especially from the small and medium businesses.

And this is not an empty hype, the chatbots are playing unimaginable role in boosting brand exposure and scaling businesses. These subsets of artificial intelligence can reduce business cost and skyrocket sales. Businesses that are able to catch this growing trend early enough will be among the most beneficiaries.

So is this just a hype or chatbots are really changing the way people do business? Let’s find out in the below story.

Does your business really need a chatbot?

Many businesses would see this technology like posing a dent in the pocket and a lot of plug-in efforts before they start on this. But the question arises how do you know if the dent in the pocket will bring long-term profitable outcome? What characteristics make the businesses the eligible candidate for chatbot technology? Does your business need to take the jump to gain more?

Yes, if you have a large customer support team

According to McKinsey, 75 percent of customers online expect help within 5 minutes. Secondly, data and studies show that customer support centers across the world devote their time answering repetitive, straightforward and redundant queries. And combine it with the time spend by human support agents to reach the solution of a particular query as well as drop in efficiency at the end of 8-hour shift, does not seem worth.

Chatbots are 24×7 workhorse, they have no working hours and they are designed in such a way that they are able to answer queries of thousands of users simultaneously and within a few seconds. So, even if the queries are redundant, rest assure chatbots will not suffer from fatigue whatsoever. Onboarding something which instantly provides answers is the dream of any consumer in this digital age.

We ourselves realised the potential of chatbots through an experiment.

We partnered with an automobile website prior to launch of a popular bike to check the number of customer inquiries and the results were astonishing. In just 48 hours of launch, our chatbot handled more than 40,000 interactions. Was this manually possible for a dedicated human customer team? Judge yourself.

In similar cases where users want to be notified for a particular product at the time of launch, these chatbots can do that automatically (without the need of customer support team) to extract customer details such as name and email. All you have to do is to set the correct conversational flow in the chatbot and the customer will be notified through email as soon as the product launches.

Yes, because people are accustomed to messaging platforms

Over 2.5 billion people use messaging apps for their basic day to day communication. Out of these hefty numbers, 30–40 percent says that chat interface is their primary mode of engaging with a business.

Isn’t it a great deal of people wants to connect with the business? So why not take a pie of share from this? Sound obvious.

Platforms like Frontman offer an opportunity to create a chatbot which works on the same principles of natural interaction just like we do in messaging apps. It let the visitors, especially the mobile users to connect with the businesses easily through natural conversation.

Yes, if you are selling stuff online

Today, thousands of companies are selling their products online, if your business is one of those then you should ace up your sleeves. A research firm e-consultancy conducted a study on the online shoppers in which it was found that 83 percent of the respondents were of the opinion that they would have likely completed the purchase if there was some sort of chat service to assist them.

So, it seems the online community is enthusiastic for this specific business application. Selling a product is not the only challenge here, there is more to the picture. Beyond sale, the customers will be bombarding your support team with a lot of questions regarding your product. It might be reviews or feedbacks which you would want to see in the form of analytics. But most websites either don’t come with analytical tools or uses third party tools to assess these feedbacks.

But the in-built Business Intelligence that comes with Frontman gives you deep insights about each conversation so that you can review your strategies. 

Yes, if you want to scale up business without increasing expenditure

From expenditure angle also, the above automobile example can make things clear how much would it have cost to the company if there was huge customer support team. This means scaling up operation without increasing the cost. These customer support chatbots comes at a fraction of the cost you would spend on recruiting and training customer support executives.

That means just a small addition to your overall expenditure, you are actually handling gigantic amount of customer queries without even adding 2 times of the cost.

Yes, if you want your user to go through smoother journey

Whether it comes to purchasing a product and getting needed information, the chatbot can ease the process for customer. They can pop up on any product page or during browsing for a particular product to offer additional assistance to the customer.

Again we did similar kind of experiment with a healthcare website. Like for example whenever a customer browsed for protein supplements, the chatbot appeared automatically and offered additional information about the product, its health benefits with popular customer reviews. It also offered videos and even discount for that protein supplement. The versatility of the chatbot can be seen with the fact that they not only provide relevant information about the product acting as your sales agent on the frontline, but also easing the purchase journey for the customer.

Yes, if you want to reinvent your forms

Most businesses extract information from the customer by placing on that old and long boring forms which most customer stay away from filling it, or if they fill it they will do it reluctantly. Staring down at a form with 8–10 required fields does put some friction and cognitive load on the mind.

Chatbot like Frontman can change the situation into a fun and engaging way. Remember our experiment we mentioned in the very first heading of this story? The visitors are actually filling the form conversationally as well as getting the information they want. This exchange of information is what makes a chatbot worth.

The Crux

So, the above discussion should give you an idea how chatbots can be extremely helpful especially for the small medium enterprises. Ask yourself, are you willing to make user experience better, engaging and smoother? Are you willing to increase work efficiency without putting extra load on expenditure? If you are falling under one of these above mentioned criteria, then the tools for building a cool and engaging chatbot are now better than ever.

Take Frontman for a fast spin on your website without any coding (seriously, no kidding!) Don’t believe us Let’s do it.