Here are ten ways chatbots are revolutionizing the consumer experience and lead conversion rates:
Most customer support facilities operate standard office hours between 8am and 5pm Monday to Friday. But what happens if a customer has an issue at 9pm or at 12pm on a Saturday afternoon? Hmmm hardly the most satisfying customer experience on the planet right? Enter the never-sleeping chatbot an effective way to provide basic 24/7 customer support (without ever needing a break!).
On average consumers spend 7 minutes waiting to be assigned a customer support agent. This is because us humans can only con concentrate on 3-4 things at the same time and are bound to make errors if we try to do any more. Chatbots on the other hand can simultaneously have conversations with thousands of people - no matter what time of the day or night it is. With chatbots gone are the days of waiting for the next available operative - every single customer is answered instantly.
Customer service chatbots like Winnie are designed to help consumers choose the best products and services for their needs by pointing them in the right direction based on their needs and wants. By personalizing the shopping experience Winnie (which sits on Facebook Messenger) has achieved an incredible 72% CTR of users clicking through to an affiliate hosting provider.
Chatbots can be placed in a variety of places including Facebook Messenger Viber Slack SMS or on your own website. By giving your customers more options by which to contact support you are opening yourself to a bigger audience who may not feel comfortable interacting with more traditional telephone support services.
Uber have also found that deploying a chatbot on a popular messaging platform has enabled and encouraged more people to use its services. According to the company's blog Powered by Uber's API Facebook Messenger now enables its millions of users to sign up for Uber with one tap and request a ride all without having to leave Messenger or downloading the Uber app.
Rude and aggressive customers can be the bane of a support agent's working life and maintaining an agreeable tone throughout the interaction can be tough. Chatbots on the other hand will never fail to be anything but pleasant and helpful towards even the most awkward of customers. Adam Devine CMO of WorkFusion summed this up perfectly when he said This may sound counterintuitive but the most sophisticated chatbots can provide a more human experience than an actual human. They don't have bad days and they don't get frustrated by typical customers.
Great content had successfully driven lots of traffic to RewardStream's website however readers still weren't converting. So the company decided to invest in a chatbot that would encourage website visitors at the most opportune moment. The result: 30% of their converted leads in the first 45 days were linked directly to the implementation of the chatbot!
Similarly RapidMiner use the very friendly MarlaBot to greet consumers when they land on the company's website. By asking a few simple questions MarlaBot gets the conversation rolling before sales staff jump in to take over at the right moment. Tom Wentworth CMO at RapidMiner says The bot isn't about replacing a human. The bot for us is about augmenting and taking a user down a journey so then we can jump in at the right moment.
While repetitive tasks (like resetting customer passwords) are taxing for even the most dedicated of employees they are a chatbot's best friend. In fact they specialize in catering to simple queries. By integrating a customer service chatbot into your support service to deal with common more easily solved queries your support agents are left free to handle more complex queries.
As Aj Agrawal of Forbes explains Chatbots can be programmed to track purchasing patterns and monitor data from consumers. This tells a company which products to market differently which to market more and which to redevelop for relaunch. Unlike most digital marketing platforms chatbots can sift through data at lightning speed picking out only the most relevant information to help you optimize things like sales scripts and ultimately push more engaged consumers down the sales funnel.
Customer service chatbots have the capability to speak whatever languages you need them to. Therefore they can cater to customers worldwide saving you the need to hire customer service specialists with different language skills or opening support canters in numerous countries.
Over 2 billion consumers used a mobile device to make some form of commerce transaction in 2017. In fact mobile devices now account for 19% of US retail eCommerce sales - a figure that is estimated to reach 27% by the end of 2018. And with more mobile shopping comes more demand for mobile support.
