10 Excellent Benefits of Using Chatbots in Your Business

What are the benefits and advantages of using chatbots for customers?

AI Chatbots are virtual assistants that can engage customers 24×7 as well as improve customer experience. Chatbots are easily scalable to manage customer requests with instant responses and boost customer satisfaction. 

The main advantages of chatbots for customers are as follows:

• 24*7 support – You can not rely on support agents for 24×7 support. Anytime response is important even after business hours when the team is not available. Chatbots can manage such customer queries with automated responses.
• Instant answers – Customers simply do not like to wait for assistance — any wait time can lead to frustration and potential churn. Chatbots are a smarter way to ensure that customers receive the instant response that they demand.
• Order without human help – Businesses can leverage chatbots to automate bookings of orders and appointments so that customers can instantly book from the website or Facebook page. 47% of consumers would buy items from a chatbot.

Chatbots for businesses: Benefits & advantages 

According to the Aspect Consumer Experience Index, 61% of consumers feel that having chatbots in customer service is the way of the future and 70% of millennials report positive experiences with chatbots. 

The main chatbot benefits for business include reducing the costs of your live chat support agents at the same time winning your customers.

Here is a list of 10 ways of how a chatbot impact business growth.

1. Better lead generation and nurturing

Most of the businesses operate in an omnichannel model. They sell across the website, Facebook, and other channels. AI chatbots create an effortless way for customers to communicate with your business via existing messaging platforms such as Facebook Messenger, which recently passed 1.3 billion users.

By deploying chatbots, you can engage your customers with personalized messaging throughout their journey by guiding and recommending them in making quick decisions.

Chatbots use a preset questionnaire to persuade the visitors for lead generation, which is prepared by sales experts. Bots ensure the flow is in the right direction to get higher conversion rates.

2. Deliver 24×7 automated customer support 

Nobody likes to wait and so do customers. 62% of companies view customer experience delivered by a brand as a competitive differentiator. Bots can engage with the customers 24×7 by promptly responding to their common queries.

Having good customer service available round the clock has a positive impact on your customer satisfaction and reduce customer churn. 

What else can chatbots do?

• Chatbots can direct customers to answers that will genuinely help them, which leads to support ticket deflection and increased customer satisfaction.
• You can train your bot for customer chats by adding general FAQs and answers. Bots will learn the questions asked by the customers to answer similar queries in the future. 
  

   

  3. Save customer service costs

  Reports say every year there are 265 billion customer requests. Businesses spent nearly $1.3 trillion to service these requests. Chatbots can help you save up to 30%.

  Implementing chatbots is an investment, which helps businesses to optimize customer service costs. Investing in chatbots saves extra costs of adding more agents. Hiring more number of support agents means additional costs and time. The costs may be in terms of 

  • Salaries
  • Training
  • Infrastructure

  These expenses cannot be overlooked as it is never a cheap affair. It becomes expensive if your business revenue is not high or sales targets are not met and it would create havoc in the business. Chatbots help to overcome all these costs.

  4. Increased customer engagement

  Needless to say, how vital it is to keep your customers engaged with your brand. Bain & Company research says, “Businesses that successfully engage with their customers were able to increase the customer spend by 20% to 40%.” 

  5. Bots save an ample amount of time

  Time is money in business.  Here is how chatbots help to make the most of yours.

  Chatbots empower your business and save time by providing the first level support that filters a customer request before it is directed to the team. Studies estimate that chatbots will help businesses save more than $8 billion per year by 2022. 

  AI enabled chatbots to benefit your business to improve the efficacy and productivity by providing quick answers and solutions to customers for simple queries. Thus, bots significantly reduce operational costs, manpower, and time.

  6. Easy scalability of support

  Businesses that offer support with live agents might not know when they need to add more agents or not. Also hiring more agents means infrastructure costs, training costs, and loss of time. In such a scenario, chatbots can be the best way to handle conversations.

  Unlike live support agents who can handle 2 to 3 conversations, chatbots can simultaneously manage thousands of conversations. No matter what time it is or how many customers are reaching you, every chat will be answered immediately.

  7. Better team productivity 

  Chatbots are integral to the shift from human to automated customer services for every business. By 2021, 85% of customer interactions will be handled without a human agent. Bots will not replace human agents completely instead they will allow delivering primary support that filters customer requests before it is directed to the support agents.

  You can automate your sales and customer service tasks and improve your team productivity. 

  8. Chatbot + Live chat = Complete hybrid customer experience

  The amalgamation of chatbot and live chat can enable your support agents to deliver a hybrid experience. How?

  Businesses using AI enabled chatbots as the primary channel helps to deliver 24×7 real time support. The bot promptly answers to the information-based queries and boost customer satisfaction. But there might be instances when the bot is not able to identify the user intent in the request and make a human handover. 

  The complex queries that require comprehensive discussion can be handled by the live chat agents without leaving the customers unanswered. The smooth transition between chatbot to live chat provides real-time response to the customers, giving them the best hybrid experience.

  9. Higher customer satisfaction 

  Generally, businesses tend to provide reactive customer support like phone and email. It means when customers report their problem, only then they respond without initiating communication from their side.

  In competitive businesses especially with a remarkable percentage of millennials as customers, now the brands can’t afford the luxury to act passive anymore.

  As businesses are limited with manpower to initiate a communication with all their customers periodically. With the help of chatbots, you can start proactive chat through personalized messages at scale, product recommendation that boosts customer satisfaction and retention.

  Chatbots also make your customers feel that you care for them by having proactive conversations and this improves your brand perception in the long run. They become your loyal customers and stay associated with your brand for a long time.

  In the travel and hospitality industry where travelers speak multiple languages, a multilingual bot can be programmed to communicate in the language of the traveler and deliver 100% customer satisfaction.

  10. Cut down on human errors 

  It’s a universal fact that human errors are inevitable. Manual work has a risk of errors that can eventually create big problems. Mistakes might happen while collecting customer information or sharing product pricing information. 

  Chatbots are the best way to deliver error-free service and avoid complications. As chatbots are programmed with all the information there is no chance of errors. Accuracy is guaranteed with chatbots.