Why 80% Of Businesses Plan To Launch A Chatbot Next Year

It’s no secret that software is eating the world with the help of SaaS marketing tactics. The right digital solutions, like a business chatbot, will always outperform humans and save company’s money.

Take for example:

Online video games replacing in-person arcades
Digital photography is omnipresent replacing old-school film and Kodak
Artificial intelligence hedge funds are outperforming human stock pickers
The military uses drones and radar technology instead of sending human pilots
Self-driving cars will replace Uber drivers

Every day there is a new technological advance. Whether you like it or not, technology plays a huge role in the world of consumer habits, marketing, and running a successful business for the long term.

So you can either adapt to the new technology and grow, or be stubborn and eventually die.

We’d prefer that our customers and you adapt to make friends with technology instead of fear it.

Wouldn’t you like to take advantage of technology to help your company generate leads and increase sales?

You can run ads to funnels and webinars, which we love prescribing. Or you can install a chatbot on your business website to give customers something they love.

Speaking of a chatbot, it’s a fact customers love them.

Live chat not only has the highest satisfaction level compared to email and phone but 63% of consumers reported they are more likely to return to a site that has live chat.

The results are convincing business owners that chatbots are the way to go.

Not convinced a chatbot is for your website? Keep reading and maybe we can change your mind.

Why Add A Chatbot To Your Site

1. Huge Money Saver

The chatbot is a 24/7 automated customer service representative.

Meaning you don’t have to pay a virtual assistant, or even worse an in-house employee, to answer customer service questions by email or phone calls.

This leads to the biggest reason why business owners in the know are all about chatbots: A study by Juniper found that business chatbots will likely save $8 billion in costs by 2020.

When you hear cost-savings of $8 billion, it’s no wonder 80% of businesses plan to launch their own chatbots by 2020.

The math behind this is, according to Glassdoor, the average customer service rep makes about $35,000 a year.

The chatbot does the same job as a customer service rep and is available at all times of the day, including holidays. It performs better and never needs a break, health insurance, or a pay raise.

By enabling a chatbot, you save your business tens of thousands of dollars per year at the minimum per customer service rep you would have had to pay. If you’re a large corporation paying millions in customer service, you could now save millions.

The money you save with a business chatbot can go towards improving your business or go back to shareholders.

Taking an opportunity to leverage technology to improve your business and save you a boatload of money is a huge win to kickoff this list.

2. Supports The Customer Experience

Consumer expectations are changing as they get more options and become more educated. The result is it takes a lot more for businesses to stand out in the consumer service arena than before.

These are high-stakes games, as the consumer experience is what can make a world of difference for, or against, a brand.

With many businesses competing in the commodity business, the winners come out on top based on customer service and branding.

Really think about it. When was the last time you had a bad customer experience and decided to return to the business? Chances are, the good customer experiences you have are the ones that earned your business for decades to come.

And we all know customers respond well when they feel like they’re a priority.

By implementing a chatbot, you are ensuring that the customer is a priority every time it wants to be.

First impressions are pivotal, and having a representative of your brand there available to answer any questions makes all the difference in the world.

The typical customer journey has unnecessary friction, often times making it hard to find information or purchase what the consumer wants to. Throughout that process there are ample opportunities for the customer to decide it’s not worth the hassle and leave your site.

Chatbots are cutting out that unnecessary friction and guiding the customer to exactly where they need to be. Of course, website visitors love the more convenient path.

Customers take note of brands that go out of their way to make their experience the best it could possibly be. In fact, 9% of Americans said they would spend more time with brands that provide superior customer service.

3. Automates And Drives Lead Generation

Out of all the reasons listed above, the fact that chatbots generate leads is their best asset.

Here’s why they generate so many leads:

They’re instant. They offer assistance immediately and are always available for the consumer.
They answer consumer questions in real time. There’s no waiting for a phone call or an email.
They discuss only relevant content. It takes out the need for a customer to search through your website to find what they were looking for.
There is no need to fill out any forms. The bot gets the lead through a conversation. It doesn’t require the potential lead to fill out a bunch of forms about their information.

In fact, companies that use chatbots have found that it is their #1 lead generator.

Business chatbots deploy artificial intelligence, so they don’t require someone to manually control them.

You can also use your chatbot to push for sales.

Imagine you have a customer that keeps looking at the same product on your page but hasn’t bought it yet. You can give your chatbot the ability to message that customer some encouragement to buy that product via another customer’s review or a special promotion.

This can replace seemingly pesky Facebook ads. Instead your bot is reaching out to the customer with relevant content.

Once you set it up, the bot runs on its own to complete the job at hand.

You can choose from three different categories of bots:

Personal: This type of bot is designed for a one-on-one experience between a single user and the bot. This can be good for simple questions and basic information.
Team: This type of bot is designed for a one-to-many experience between multiple users and a single bot. This likely won’t be the option you choose to automate the lead gen process.
Domain/Brand Specific: This type of bot is designed to be used when a service needs to go into detail. This will likely be the option you choose to automate the lead gen process.

Once you decide on your type of bot and get it running on your platform of choice, it will start to generate highly-qualified leads.

Whether it be from a consumer clicking an ad or someone just visiting your website, you can decide when and where it should be activated. For example, you may decide it makes the most sense for the bot to pop up on the screen in 5 seconds. Or you may have it preloaded from the start of the visitors viewing experience.

Your chatbot can identify leads. Immediately it starts asking the customer basic questions (What type of room are you looking for?, How many people will be at your event?, etc). From there it’s just a matter of reaching your sales team.

Automating the lead gen process is great news for your business. While the business chatbot does the heavy lifting, you can focus on your sales team’s conversions with these leads or other aspects of your business.

Just like you’d get renters insurance to protect your things, a chatbot can act as insurance to protect your investment in lead gen.

4. Builds Brand Trust

When you are creating your chatbot, it is vital that you understand how your customers think and process information.

You don’t want to overwhelm them with a chatbot that asks a bunch of questions without giving them a chance to comprehend what it’s saying.

You also don’t want to give them too little information where the chatbot becomes a deterrent to their experience rather than adding value.

Lesson being your chatbot should never be an inconvenience to the consumer.

People already prefer messaging as a means to communicate with a business. According to a study done by Nielsen, people say messaging is the second best way to communicate with a business.

Every interaction adds to the idea that your brand will add value or take value from the customer. Having a chatbot to answer questions and support their browsing or buying experience is a nice value add that will pay dividends through the lifetime of the relationship. (And each positive experience will increase your customer lifetime value.)

Good interactions equals increased trust and high sales volumes. Bad interactions equals them spending their money with your competitors.

Chatbots will subconsciously give them the assurance that if you’re able to provide pre-sale support, you’ll also be there for post-sale questions and any customer support needs they may have.

5. Produces Quicker Response Times

Source

The internet has created a monster.

Because consumers can now receive videos from their friends, pay bills, watch movies, and order concert tickets all in seconds—they expect everything will happen immediately.

No we have a society where instant gratification runs rampant.

The problem for businesses is this need for speed has entered the marketplace as well.

If your business isn’t fast to respond, customers can feel like they’re not a priority and vow to never buy from you.

People expect to always get a response and to get what they need right away.

This can quickly cause problems, especially after operating hours.

Here’s the reality, you have about a 15 minute window to respond to a customer before you lose that sale and the lead turns cold.

That sounds crazy I know. What if you’re in a meeting and you can’t respond right away? What if they try to contact your company after you’ve already gone home for the day? You can’t always be expected to have your phone on you, right?

That’s the beauty of business chatbots. They offer assistance immediately.

People are more likely to ask a question and build a relationship with you if the chat box is right in front of them as opposed to them having to search for the contact page, submit an email, or other lesser solutions.

Constantly having a business chatbot that is available for questions and assistance at all times will resonate well with your customers. It makes them feel like your top priority, which they should be.

Your business will not run without your customers, that’s just a fact. Why would you risk losing business to your competitors because you weren’t available when they needed you? Set up the chatbot and rest easy.

6. Collects FAQ’s To Improve Your Website

Just like many other digital marketing techniques, chatbots allow you to collect data about your prospects and customers directly from the source.

If the majority of the messages you receive from your business chatbot show confusion about your pricing packages, or they can’t find the page, now you know that you need to make your pricing packages more clear and accessible on your website.

If 19 messages in a row are asking when you’ll be back in stock with the cheetah skirt, then you know that’s a hot seller and to order a shipment in bulk next time for that apparel design.

In these instances, your chatbot is pointing out the changes you need to make to your website. And often, saving you from what would have been missed sales opportunities.

Not only will the chatbot provide you with valuable information about what is confusing your website visitors, but it will also stop customers from leaving your site when they don’t see the information they were looking for.

7. Improves SEO

Source

Let’s say you plan for a short 30-minute lunch so you can get back to work to finish your to-do list. But then you meet an old friend in line ordering and talk for another hour longer. As you get back to work, you’re left wondering where the time went.

What happened? Conversations make people lose track of time and invest more energy than they consciously recognize.

Using a business chatbot has the same effect on a customer.

They may have the intention of visiting the site to briefly look around. Then they get wrapped up in the chatbot conversation and end up asking five more questions, explaining their wish list items, and buying three more items.

Answering questions allows you to keep people on your site longer and decreases bounce rate. A bounce is when a user clicks to your website and quickly clicks away after only viewing one page—a negative ranking factor for SEO.

So the more questions your chatbot can answer and the more pages it recommends the visitor clicks, it decreases your bounce rate and increases their on-site time.

Visitors spending more time on your site also increases the likelihood that they will come back to your site.

After those reasons, hopefully by now we’ve convinced you to set up a business chatbot.

How To Set Up A Business Chatbot

You’ll be happy to find out that building chatbots is a relatively easy process. It requires no programming experience.

Before we go through the steps of setting up a chatbot, let’s discuss the different types of bots.

There are two main types of chatbots:

Simple/Scripted: This bot has pre-programmed responses to questions it’s asked. This chatbot cannot deviate from the responses you program.
Intelligent: This type of bot provides flexible responses. It takes what it learns from each conversation to answer future questions with more accuracy. It can only give answers, however, it cannot lead the conversation.

What you decide to use depends on what your goal is for the chatbot with your business.

You should also know the elements of a great chatbot:

Persona: You want to create a personality for your chatbot based on what works well with your customer base. This is another reason it’s important to know how your customer thinks. You also want the persona to be warm and engaging.
Waiting time: This makes the experience more human. You want to give the customer time to process the information that has been given to them before you hit them with more information.
A/B testing: Like an advertisement, you should create multiple versions and test them to see what works best for users.
Avoid mass texts: Much like the content you created, you want to avoid sending paragraphs of text because that can be overwhelming for the customer.

You can choose between

Facebook Messenger
Slack
WhatsApp

The most common source companies will activate their chatbots on is Facebook Messenger.

Almost everyone nowadays at least has a Facebook account.

Setting up your chatbot on Facebook Messenger offers convenience for your customers because they don’t have to go to a separate site to talk with your bot. The downside to using your bot on Facebook is that not everyone is going to find your business through Facebook.

Unless the consumer is on your Facebook page, they’re not going to interact with your bot. This means you’d have to install the Facebook Messenger chat on your website using this guide. Slack and WhatsApp are similar in the sense that they are separate from your website or your Facebook.

Slack is great because it can help you create your chatbot and it also allows you to decide where you’re going to upload it. It lets you choose from Facebook to Slack to a chatbot on your actual website.

However it is a separate site that customers would have to go to reach your site and you don’t want to run the risk of losing a lead because you lengthened the customer journey.

Same goes for WhatsApp. WhatsApp is a messenger app that allows you to talk with people out of the country without having to pay extra fees. This is an ideal tool for speaking to a wider audience. You do however run the risk of losing leads because it is an extra app that your consumers would need to download to talk with your bot.

Now that we’ve discussed some aspects of the chatbot, let’s talk about how to create it.

1. Pick A Preferred Software

The first step is choosing a software to help build your chatbot.

The good news is that there are tons of websites that are free to use and walk you through the process.

Two popular softwares are Chatfuel and Manychat. Both are free and user friendly.

If you don’t like either of those just do a quick Google search for chatbot platforms to find yours.

2. Plan The Onboarding Experience

Your next step is to figure out what the consumer is going to see as soon as the chat box is opened.

There are two types of text you need to consider:

Greeting text: This is what will come up as soon as the chat box is opened and before any interaction has started. This could be an introduction of who the chatbot is and what your company provides.
Welcome text: This comes after the user has started a conversation. This could be what you’re offering with option buttons to continue the conversation.

Whatever you choose to say should resonate well with your users. You want to keep the user invested in the conversation.

3. Create The Main Menu

This is the most important element of the chatbot.

The main menu will guide the user in the right direction.

Each button that you choose to include should launch some form of action.

Whether it be the answer to a question or a new product you’re advertising, the button should lead the user to some type of direct action.

You’ll be successful when you put yourself in the shoes of the prospect and imagine what they’d want to know right away. Then, give them that information. You’ll immediately win over new fans.

4. Select Keywords

You may be wondering how the business chatbot knows what to say.

You can pick different keywords that prompt the chatbot to respond with the response you programmed into it.

Examples could be the user saying “more info” and the bot responding with all the information about a deal they were interested in.

This is what creates the conversation between the bot and the user.

5. Set A Default Reply

This is the final step before your bot is ready to go live.

Sometimes people like to test the capabilities of the bot.

There is a way to combat this. You can set default replies that the bot will send if they get a “text” that they don’t recognize.

This will avoid a period of silence for the lead to leave the page. This will also help to get the conversation back on track and make it clear its capabilities.

Conclusion

The tried-and-true way to scale a business is to automate and systemize your repeatable processes.

By setting up a business chatbot, you have an asset that automates lead generation, sales, and customer service. Those are three huge components of any thriving business.

We want to see your business succeed. That’s why we’re pushing you to build your own chatbot.

If you’re still not sure or if you’re wary about creating it yourself, consider working with us to get yours up and running. We’ll do all the set up and conversion optimizations for you.

Cheers to improving your business—one digital solution at a time.