How Chatbots Are Revolutionizing The Way Businesses Interact With Customers
What Is A Chatbot?
Before we delve into the ways that chatbots are revolutionizing business, it's important to make sure you understand what a chatbot is.
A chatbot is a piece of software that is capable of having a conversation with humans in a way that simulates human interaction. Chatbots are able to understand what a person is saying to them and can respond using pre-programmed responses. These interactions between businesses and customers through a chatbot are known as "conversational commerce."
Bots are everywhere, and their influence will only continue to grow.
Did you know that there are two main types of chatbots? The first is the kind you can use on your own website, which can be as simple or as sophisticated as you want. The other kind is called a "conversational assistant," like the ones used by Amazon, Google, and Apple (Siri). These conversational assistants are embedded in certain devices but can also be accessed via other platforms such as Facebook Messenger.
Where Are Chatbots Used?
Chatbots are all around you. You might not even realize it, but we're willing to guess that at least one of your friends has chatted with a bot in the last two weeks. Chatbots are used for customer service, e-commerce, healthcare, travel, recruitment, and entertainment.
They’re being used by banks to speed up financial transactions and by retailers to make shopping experiences more personalized. And people everywhere are using them for food and beverage purchases—like when you quickly order a coffee from Starbucks without ever leaving the Messenger app on your phone.
How Do Chatbots Work?
Chatbots are actually powered by Artificial Intelligence. They use two forms of AI: machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP). Machine learning is the process by which a computer learns from experience, just like humans do. With machine learning, a chatbot can become smarter over time as it receives more input from users. Natural language processing teaches computers how to understand and respond to questions that were posed in human language.
Chatbots are trained to understand the intent behind a user's question or request—meaning they can understand and respond to queries in natural language rather than just pre-programmed commands. The system trains the bot using a series of sample interactions between human users and bots. This will help the system to improve its understanding of those conservations and better serve your customers.
Also, chatbots give organizations the ability to deploy them on multiple channels without having to redesign them based on each platform’s different rules and specifications. They're also able to integrate with other systems so they can pass information back and forth between your business's various databases.
Role of a Chatbot in Enhancing Customer Experience?
Personalized experience
A chatbot allows you to personalize your customer experience. You can customize it to access the customer's name and greet them by name, making them feel like a valued customer. You can also use information that you know from previous interactions with that customer to provide more personalized experiences, such as knowledge of the bestseller products for that particular customer or their preferred language. A good chatbot will even allow you to set up special messages and experiences based on where the customer is in their journey through your website.
Chatbot data can be used to personalize the experience for each customer. For example, if customers are searching for a particular product, you could use their purchase history to recommend similar products they might like based on what they’ve bought in the past. You could also send customized messages and offers based on personal details such as their birthday or location. This helps create a better experience for customers by showing that you care about them as individuals rather than just targeting them with generic information and offers.
Support customers 24 hours a day
There's also a solid business case for having a chatbot handle some customer service functions. With a chatbot handling certain customer inquiries, there’s no need to hire expensive customer support staff. Instead of worrying about staffing call centers and phone banks round the clock (or even in different countries), you can have your chatbots work 24/7 to provide support and answer questions for your customers.
Handle multiple customers simultaneously
Chatbots are able to handle multiple customers at once, allowing you to serve customers effectively and efficiently. If a customer is willing to wait for a reply, it can be helpful in some situations, but this is not always the case. In fact, if your business is seeing high volumes of incoming requests and no one is available to answer them all, it could cause users to have a bad experience with your company.
Imagine a standard contact center where only five agents are available to take calls from 1000 different customers simultaneously. This would not be an efficient way for the agents or customers to spend their time. However, by improving efficiency with technology like chatbots that work around the clock without needing any assistance or breaks, you can serve hundreds or thousands of people at once instead of only five callers per agent per hour!
Schedule appointment reminders and follow-ups
The chatbot can aid you in regular tasks such as reminders and follow-ups, tasks that could be eating into your time. It is a lot more efficient to have an automated system send reminders rather than you having to sit down and write them out yourself. You can't forget to do it either, and the chatbot will do it daily or weekly, depending on your preferences.
Follow-ups are just as easy. Let's say you've seen a customer before, and they call up again. Rather than leaving it up to memory, a chatbot can instantly provide you with this information by simply asking for their name! It saves everyone time and helps make sure that no one is forgotten about.
Provides convenience and saves time for you and your customers
Chatbots can answer a variety of customer questions, including basic troubleshooting, shipping info, and product details. This means that customers will receive answers more quickly than they would through traditional channels. If a customer has questions about your organization or its products and services, he/she can easily find answers from multiple sources—without any wait time.
Conclusion
Chatbots have helped businesses from all industries interact with customers efficiently. The benefits of using this communication channel can transform the customer experience for any organization. It can help enhance customer engagement and also makes them feel empowered. It also allows businesses to be where the customers are. So, why wait? Grab the opportunity of integrating a chatbot to speed up your business process.