In business, it’s crucial to use every tool at your disposal. One rapidly evolving technology that’s changing the face of marketing is AI, and chatbots in particular. Chatbots can help with engaging customers, boosting sales, and providing service, while not overly burdening your human support teams. We’ll talk about what chatbots can do for you, and how you can best put them to work in your organisation.
What is an AI Chatbot?
First, let’s take a moment to define an AI chatbot and what it does. At the most basic level, an AI chatbot is a piece of automated software that can simulate human conversation with users. Chatbots use machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) to understand user input and provide helpful information in return.
Some key features of an AI chatbot include:
- Instant communication with any number of users, providing high-speed responses to queries and support requests.
- Availability 24/7, 365 days a year. Unlike human support teams, chatbots don’t require sleep, holidays, or time off, so customers can always get the assistance they need.
- Customisation to the needs of your specific business and clientele, with personalised responses based on input, customer preferences, purchase history, and more.
- Multichannel support, from the company website to social media to messaging apps such as WhatsApp, giving your customers many options to choose from when it comes to getting in touch with you.
- Data collection, metrics, and tracking so you can collect, analyse, and act on customer data that’s automatically collected for you.
Six Ways to Use Chatbots in Digital Marketing
While it might be tempting to write chatbots off as a fad or a gimmick, they actually have a great deal to offer from a digital marketing perspective. Here’s a short list of ai chatbot features you can benefit from:
Lead Generation and Boosting Conversion
Converting website visitors into leads can be a major challenge. How can you engage with your customers right away and give them a reason to buy from you? AI chatbots help address this challenge by engaging with visitors the moment they arrive. A chatbot can ask questions, direct visitors to the appropriate parts of your website, and capture contact details. Even better, if your customers have an account and return often, the chatbot can learn from this and follow up with personalised offers.
Another way chatbots can help with conversion is automated upselling. If a customer is looking at a particular product, the chatbot might suggest promotions or deals, suggest similar or complementary products, and more. An advanced chatbot can hand-hold your customer through the entire shopping journey, leaving customers encouraged to return again soon.
Automated Information
Some of the most common questions about operating hours, store locations, product and delivery options, menus, or anything else you might have to offer need not involve a human agent. Chatbots can respond to these sorts of queries quickly and easily, reducing customer frustration, improving efficiency, and reducing the burden on your human staff.
Customer Service
Speaking of customer service, chatbots should also be part of your overall plan when it comes to providing support. Not only can customers get answers to their most frequently asked questions through a chatbot, but they can often answer simple and common concerns almost immediately, which means more customer satisfaction and loyalty — which in turn means more money in your pocket.
Membership Management
A lesser-known but useful feature chatbots offer is the ability to manage subscriber and membership sign-ups. Chatbots can make it easier for users to sign up for newsletters, memberships, premium subscriptions, loyalty programmes, or anything else requiring a sign-up process. This kind of engagement helps keep customers interested in your products and services, and can use data collection to send tailored and personalised messages to those customers who buy from you frequently.
Surveys and Reviews
Another way chatbots can help keep your customers engaged: offering up surveys and review requests once a product or service has been purchased. For example, a chatbot might ask the user to fill out a satisfaction survey after a purchase is completed, or request a review of a purchased product when the user returns to your app or website. This not only engages with customers and makes their opinion feel valued, but you can also use that data to hone in on and address any issues or shortcomings.
Is a chatbot a proper substitution for human interaction? At the moment, probably not. Some issues are still too sophisticated or tricky for a chatbot to reliably navigate, and it’s smart to continue to have human agents on hand for those customers who either have more complex problems, or would simply rather interact with a human than a machine. But for simple tasks and common queries, or younger customers who don’t care so much about speaking to a human, an AI chatbot can be a powerful and useful tool in your customer service arsenal.
