With the rapid adoption of advanced technology all over the world, tools like Chatbots are experiencing a boom like never before. AI-powered chatbots are now widely available across the internet. They let you help your customers 24/7, provide support to multiple customers at once, and above all, they don't even need human intervention to do all of it.
64% of internet users say 24-hour service is the best feature of chatbots.
Chatbots today are definitely upgrading the quality of customer support, but this is not it to applications of chatbots. Chatbots have also become an integral part of various business segments like marketing, sales, lead generation, etc.
In this blog about benefits and applications of chatbots, you’ll have a glance at the following:
As per experts, The global Chatbot market is expected to grow exponentially between 2016-2023.
But what are chatbots practically used for?
- customer support
- weather
- personal finance assistance
- scheduling meetings
- news
- finding restaurants
- product suggestions
- business queries
- online ordering
In industries where there is high-volume customer interaction, chatbots have been a true game-changer. Chatbots have helped customers save up to 4 minutes on average per inquiry.
Research suggests that the yearly spending of businesses on customer service is nearly $1.3 trillion with almost 265 billion customer requests. It also states that Chatbots can help businesses save as much as 30% of customer support costs.
The chatbot does need a certain amount of investment for proper implementation but that cost is still much lower than what the customer service model costs.
Here are a few things chatbots help with :
- Enhances customer satisfaction by systematically scaling their chat support during peak hours.
- Automates daily business processes and allows the support team to focus on complex queries.
Chatbot Analytics helps you gain detailed insights on how people are engaging with business and what their needs are. Businesses can also analyze how well the bot performs in terms of successful business outcomes and fetch data on total sales generated. The flexible approach of chatbots allows businesses to serve their clients on all platforms.
In order to boost your sales, it's very important to pay attention to customer engagement. Chatbots have proven to be an amazing tool for the same. As many as 64% of internet users see round-the-clock support as the biggest benefit.
Chatbots are now offering value-driven, contextual support that helps businesses significantly and its uses are not limited to just answering customers queries.
AI-Chatbots use data to provide personalised experience to users. They go beyond pre-programmed questions and ensure that each user is being delivered with unique experience that helps them solve their queries or perform a particular function.
One of the top benefits of using chatbots is that they help businesses save a lot of time by solving basic queries. This also saves a lot of time for customers which in turn proves to be good for customer satisfaction.
Chatbots are prone to resolve user queries faster than humans as they fetch data much quicker. They automate information based queries which helps staff in spending more time on crucial issues.
Chatbots do not restrict their use to a particular industry, instead they are beneficial to every type of business out there. Here are a few industries and brief about how chatbots help them :
Chatbots are prone to resolve user queries faster than humans as they fetch data much quicker. They automate information based queries which helps staff in spending more time on crucial issues.
Chatbots are a great way to transform the heavy transactions of banks and other financial institutions. One of the major help of chatbots in this sector is answering customer questions about online banking and account related information.
Intelligent tutoring system and personalised learning environments for students stands to be the most important benefit of Chatbots is Education sector.
This is one of the crucial industries for chatbot application. Chatbots helps E-commerce by providing customers with information about products, ordering, payment, and delivery.
Chatbots help the healthcare industry by handling booking of appointments, refilling prescriptions and sending medical details. They can also provide medical assistance and reminders to users.
After reading about the benefits of chatbots for businesses. Let us also understand their Applications in different segments of business like sales, marketing etc.
Every industry needs robust customer support to compliment their services, resolve customer problems and to keep them engaged. Today, Chatbots are helping in creating better conversational relationships with customers which also enhances customer experience leading to helping businesses in maintaining great customer support.
Customer service chatbots specifically used for customer support works on Artificial Intelligence and machine learning to answer questions via business messenger. They grasp information from FAQs and Knowledge based articles. Taking it one step ahead, they proactively suggest relevant answers before the customer has even completed their question. And the best part is they support customers 24/7 and save time for the support team. They also help in boosting productivity of the support team by keeping them off the hook from simple tasks. As per a report, Companies will save 2.5 billion customer service hours using chatbots by the end of 2023. Although we need to keep in mind that chatbots help customer support but don't replace human agents. Agents are still needed to resolve complex queries.
Businesses today are leveraging chatbots benefits to improve their lead generation and sales. Bots' power of boosting operational efficiency and saving cost while also serving high customer satisfaction is really commendable.
For lead generation and sales automation, businesses can use standalone chatbot which will generate and qualify leads, give personalised recommendations, schedule sales and meeting calls, add data to CRM and more. Chatbots are a great way to scale up the sales without the burden of increasing overhead.
Chatbots today are helping the customers by walking them through the stages of buying a product and they are loving it.
As per Facebook's latest data, 53% of people reported, they are more likely to shop with businesses they can message.
By eliminating unqualified leads and connecting sales representatives with qualified ones, chatbots are also proving to be of great help to the Sales Team. This way it's helping sales reps to spend more time building relationships with prospects.
Conversational or chatbots marketing comes into action because of consumer demands. More and more customers are preferring businesses they can message and connect with. Hence the key elements of chatbot marketing are :
- understanding context of every conversation
- personalizing every conversation to make consumers feel connected
- engaging with customer using either a bot or a human
As brands have come to a realisation that a well-written chatbot can work as a great lead-generation tool, they also acknowledge that chatbots can collect data better than humans ans help them scale their sales by enhancing marketing tactics.
Customer engagement has become a daunting task as everything today depends on the customer's interest. AI-powered chatbots by providing unparalleled services, 24/7 support, instant replies, and carrying out engaging useful conversations is helping a lot in maintaining customer engagement.
Chatbots have become the fastest response channel while communicating with customers leading them to appreciate the services. This also enhances the customer experience which makes them come back again.
With the evolving technology, chatbots will also keep revolutionalising with their vast list of benefits and applications in businesses. They are offering multiple opportunities to brands for marketing, selling, maintaining customer relationships and offering customers robust support. Chatbots have proved to be one of the most prominent technological advancement businesses have come across.
What makes chatbots stand out is their compatibility with every business type and individual segments of each business too. From helping in qualifying leads to offering 24/7 support to converted leads, chatbots are helping businesses in and out.
Apart from sales, marketing, customer experience and customer support, Chatbots can also be useful for market research, ordering food, booking flights and companionship.
If you are not using Chatbots to scale your business, this is a reminder to start doing it now.