A chatbot is more than just an automated responder. It can actually act as a customer engagement platform that can help you bolster your customer engagement strategy. However, the technology does intimidate small businesses with smaller budgets and limited resources.
Business chatbots have presented themselves as an effective solution for marketers working on improving their customer engagement strategy. In fact, 90% of businesses today create chatbots to respond to requests. Are you ready to join them?
customer engagement
Conversations are key when you are working on user engagement, and conversational chatbots are getting pretty good at it. Agreed, chatbots can’t replace humans, but they can act like one!
With technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), chatbots can make sense of a user query and retrieve the most appropriate response to engage customers. In fact, machines learn from this regular interaction with customers and get better at handling more complex queries from users. This is exactly what humans do as well. And, this is how more engaging conversations are ensuing between chatbots and customers.
How A business chatbot can increase customer engagement
As chatbot development processes are evolving, conversational chatbots are becoming better at customer engagement. It is for this reason that customer service chatbots have gained massive popularity among businesses of all niches.
Here are a few advantages of chatbots for customer engagement:
Round-the-clock availability
Once you integrate a chatbot on your website, you have made it possible to extend expert customer service 24/7. Irrespective of the time of the day, your customers can go to your website, enter their queries and get instant response. They don’t need to wait till the following day for your work hours to begin or wait for a reply to the email they wrote hours ago.
Personalized customer service
A chatbot has at least one distinct advantage over humans – its ability to sort through massive amounts of data and come up with the required information in a fraction of a second. This ability lets a chatbot come up with all relevant information for a customer the moment they start a conversation. It could be anything from purchase history, saved cards, order status, and more. The conversation that follows will be highly personalized and thus score high on customer engagement.
Tireless query resolutions
Repetitive queries from a customer can tire or annoy your agents, but not a chatbot. While a human may get bored repeating the answers to the same queries from the same or multiple customers and react in an unprofessional manner, a chatbot will not. It is built to do repetitive tasks as many times as need be. The chatbot will never offend a customer with a flippant remark or evident frustration. Naturally, the customer engagement levels will go higher with a chatbot as opposed to a human agent.
Instant resolution for high priority tasks
Instant gratification is the name of the game today. Your customers are not inclined to be put on hold for even a few minutes, let alone hours, for a reply to their email. Chatbots for businesses have emerged as the perfect solution for enhanced customer engagement. It is because of their instant resolutions. 90% of the customers are looking for instant responses when looking for queries related to customer service. Customer service chatbots can offer this, thus boosting user engagement manifold.
Cross-promotion of products/services
Chatbots are quite effective in the cross-promotion of products. They can be trained to do this in a non-pushy way (unlike humans). For example, if a customer has a query about a specific product, the chatbot can direct them to an informational article. While doing so, if it is appropriate, the chatbot can suggest a relevant product to the customer to go along with the product they have bought already.
Low learning curve
Customers are already familiar with chatting with customer support executives online. Hence, the learning curve for customers to engage with a chatbot is practically flat. Chatbots sit conveniently on the corner of every page of your website so that customers can get instant replies to any query they may have at any moment. It eliminates the need for them to look through the entire website for a single piece of information.
Better analytics, deeper insights
You can add chatbot analytics to record the reactions of your customers to a product or experience. This gives you a detailed database of insights that will help you gauge customer behavior and expectations. These analytics will also give you deep insights into what you can do to improve overall customer engagement.
Tips for using a chatbot to improve customer engagement
Over 90% of companies use chatbots for their business. How many of these businesses do you think leverage chatbots to engage their customers better?
I have compiled some actionable tips for you to use chatbots and improve customer engagement.
Use chatbot data
The conversations you have with your customers are a treasure trove of information. They are literally telling you what they are looking for. The trick here is to simply listen to them. At the most rudimentary level, you can gather information about the customers, like where they come from, how they came to know of you, and what more they expect to find among your offerings. Not only does this give you a fair understanding of your popularity, your audience demographics, but also what more you can do to make your customers happy.
Personalize conversations
A chatbot has copious amounts of information at hand always. Train your chatbot to leverage this information and personalize conversations. Personalization is not limited to salutations with name, but every action they have taken on your website and past purchases and cancellations as well. You can use this information to recommend popular blogs related to their interests and products that they may be interested in. Personalized recommendations have a higher chance of converting into a purchase and engaging the customers better.
Manage online bookings and appointments
Online bookings are quickly becoming the norm, and chatbots are playing a critical role here. Calling up to make a booking is cumbersome and prone to human errors. In the case of IVRs, it can get even more annoying as it never gets your name and other details right. Online booking or appointment chatbots eliminate all the hassle and make the entire process seamless!
Enhance omnichannel experience
Chatbots are great when it comes to improving your omnichannel experience. When it comes to customer engagement, consistency is paramount. By integrating a chatbot on every channel, you offer great consistency to all your customers. Different customers prefer different media to get in touch with you. On the other hand, some customers go to all your channels looking for as much information as possible. It is your responsibility to offer a consistent experience on all the channels and thus improve overall customer engagement.
Assert stronger brand presence
Customize your chatbot in a way that it becomes an extension of your brand. Include your logo, use the brand colors, and most importantly, maintain the language and tone of your business language. If you have a playful brand, the chatbot has to follow suit, and if yours is a more serious product, your chatbot must reflect the same.
Next Steps:
Customer engagement – a metric that is way too important to be ignored at any phase of the customer journey. The world is full of distractions. There are thousands of visual and other forms of content being bombarded at consumers. How do you engage customers amid this time and age? You could start by adding a chatbot to either your App or Website to increase your customer conversion rate.
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