Business owners around the globe face common challenges, such as providing a good customer experience, increasing sales, and retaining customers. One solution many turn to is the use of a chatbot on their website.
As explored in our comprehensive guide, "Chatbots 101: Understanding the what, how and why", a chatbot can be an intelligent solution to help many businesses address the challenges they face.
Here we delve into the key benefits that a chatbot can bring.
1. 24/7 Availability
Implementing chatbot technology on your website ensures uninterrupted customer support, as chatbots can operate and assist customers 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. With their tireless presence, your business never goes offline, resulting in immediate and real-time resolution of customer queries. This undoubtedly enhances customer satisfaction and loyalty.
2. Efficient Handling of High Chat Volumes
Chatbots excel at multitasking, allowing them to handle multiple customer queries simultaneously without any issues. This becomes particularly valuable during peak seasons when seamless customer interactions are crucial in avoiding negative experiences.
3. Cost Reduction
Once a chatbot is deployed, the costs associated with maintaining and operating the technology are relatively low. Moreover, chatbots help businesses save on overhead costs, such as hiring and managing a team of customer service representatives.
Chatbots eliminate these expenditures while providing continuous service, ensuring smooth business operations.
4. Analytics and Data Collection
Chatbots enable businesses to gather valuable data and metrics, which can be instrumental in improving future processes and responses. By tracking customer behaviour and buying patterns, chatbots can offer personalised product or service recommendations based on individual preferences. This data-driven approach positively impacts long-term conversions.
5. Engaging with Global Markets
Chatbots not only handle multiple customers simultaneously but can also be configured to interact with customers across the globe.
This flexibility enables a business to serve its international customer base, engaging them in different languages. For businesses expanding operations into new markets, this is incredibly valuable.
6. Time Savings
Chatbots are a remarkable time-saving solution for businesses. They provide quick and automated responses to customer queries, eliminating the need for customers to wait for a company representative's reply. This, in turn, reduces customer frustration and enables businesses to efficiently serve more people.
Considerations
Key in any customer-facing technology is ensuring it meets the objective in which it was deployed. While chatbots can offer tremendous value to businesses, they do bring their own set of challenges and disadvantages, and won’t be the ideal solution for every business case. There are a wide range of considerations when comparing using human-led or bot-led live chat. These include:
- Complexity of enquiry: can a chatbot handle the types of questions likely to be asked?
- Personal/account Information: will visitors be asking questions about their account?
- Human intervention: is human intervention likely to be needed?
For some businesses, a chatbot simply won’t work. When this is the case, the consideration then moves to whether to man live chat in-house or outsource this to a third party.
Learn more about our chat solution, SmartChat.
We find that if the decision has been made to use a chatbot, that this works best in conjunction with a solution that allows for human interaction when needed. This means that when a question or concern is too complex, it can be seamlessly transferred to a human operator who can provide further assistance. This helps in creating a good customer experience, increasing sales, and retaining customers.
With a clear objective to meet and when deployed correctly, chatbots can add tremendous value in meeting the challenges faced by a modern business.
