Life is constantly becoming faster, making it harder to manage all the business tasks simultaneously. You either need to boost your staff or approach new tactics to fulfill the need for constant growth. One of them could be the use of chatbots in business to speed up the interaction with clients making it easier for them to deal with your company online.
What Is An AI Chatbot?
Artificial intelligence has hugely impacted business processes over the past few years. It lets business owners automate a number of processes, helping reduce the overall costs of certain operations, one of them being client communication. This is done with the help of conversational AI and chatbots – programs that simulate human conversation providing the answers to lots of questions or support to online users that utilize the service or buy products on the internet. Chatbots work through messaging applications or are presented on the site as a chat window visitors may use to get fast feedback to their queries. The program learns the patterns of human communication and provides better results with time. The well-made chatbot is able to replace human workers performing perfectly on the level of a simple question where no profound explanations are involved. Nevertheless, with the repetitive questions, a chatbot could be as effective as a human no matter the complexity of the question.
This technology is widely used by prominent companies, such as Apple, Whole Foods, Duolingo, and many more. However, with the level of development chatbots are at now, every business online may opt for making business operations easier using them.
In 2020 the chatbot industry has made a breakthrough as more and more users prefer self-service while purchasing online. According to the latest study, users prefer to quickly solve simple inquiries through chatbots rather than contact the human support service. The tendency is likely to remain strong, so the impact of chatbots on business will only grow, expectedly improving their performance.
How Does Chatbot Technology Work?
The benefits of AI chatbots are multiple, the main of them being the ability to work without human operation. Chatbots are programmed to provide relevant answers to questions users may have using the given database and machine learning. A chatbot can work as instant messaging or through a voice command managing human-like interaction. While dealing with a quality chatbot, it may be hard to tell you’re not speaking with a person.
Using predefined scripts and a knowledge database, the program provides answers imitating human speech correctly. If the inquiry is unable to address the given knowledge base, the bot will pass the conversation to the human operator. As bots are self-educated, the amount of questions they are not capable of answering constantly reduces, making human participation less needed. By using a chatbot on your website, you’re able to save significantly on the support department.
Benefits and Importance of AI Chatbots for Businesses
Chatbots can help reduce costs, bring more leads to the business, successfully replace human workers on certain operations, and increase sales. To understand how one leads to another, let’s see what business problems can be solved with the chatbot.
The main problems you may solve using AI chatbots for business are as follows:
- Troubles with detecting further strategy
- Users’ failing to make it to the purchase
- Troubles with sales boosting
- Gaps in customer support
- High operational cost
The top benefits of using a chatbot in business include relatively cheap solutions to these problems.
Helping With The Strategy: Gathering Information
During its work, a chatbot collects the information about the potential customers and makes it easier for a business owner to understand what potential buyers need through analyzing their interaction with the chatbot. The data collected provides important insights that could be used to improve the service where it seems to have gaps. Using the data, it is possible to offer better solutions to customers’ problems, thus having more clients satisfied with the product. With the increased popularity of chatbots, the amount of data users provide voluntarily using bots can work magic for any business.
Retain The Customer: Improved User Experience
What problem does chatbot solve considering user experience? The answer is obvious: it makes it much easier for the site’s visitors to get what they want, providing fast and relevant answers and support. The simplified user journey leads to more purchasing and helps businesses retain the customers’ base. The more convenient the process of buying or using the service is, the higher is the possibility a happy client will stick to it. Seamless user experience is crucial and speaks a lot about your business.
Boosting Revenues: Rising In Sales
As evident from the above, chatbot benefits to customers’ experience on the site, helping them choose and buy exactly what suits their needs. Being able to analyze collected data and provide customized offers quickly, a chatbot can boost sales significantly.
As known, a lot of sellers and retailers use up-sell and cross-sell strategies to boost sales. A chatbot can recommend buying a more upscale product or an extended warranty for the chosen one, increasing the sum of the purchase. It can also quickly select and show some related products users may want to check on. Both the approaches work well, as offers come in context, thus are reasonable and relative enough to make the buyer spend more on items they didn’t know they really needed. Not just that, your income, in general, will rise as AI is helping you to save on human consultants.
Relevant Help: Optimized Support
Why are chatbots important these days? While increased sales are enough reason to agree on bots’ undoubtful benefits; there is more to it. A chatbot, being a program that works independently from a human operator, lets businesses provide user support 24/7. This option is crucial for any business online, be it selling goods or providing services. Around-the-clock active support helps keep the potential customer on the site, which they would have left without proper help.
Reduce Operational Cost
While it is still hard to imagine human resources won’t be needed at all soon, chatbots do a lot to bring this future closer. The importance of AI chatbots is hard to underestimate considering the matter, as they may help the business owner to significantly reduce human staff rechanneling the money into business development and innovations. Human involvement is no longer required on an initial level of the customer journey, and the support departments are able to work efficiently with less staff as they only need to deal with complex issues their chatbot has not learned to solve yet. With the speed of modern technological progress, the number of such issues is constantly decreasing as the chatbot business model proves to be highly effective these days. By saving on human resources, businesses are able to invest in rescaling and further improvements.
How to Make Money with Conversational Chatbots
While benefiting a great number of businesses, chatbots are lucrative business models themselves. As the solving of problems mentioned above correlates with the quality of a chatbot, it stimulates the developers to try harder to build bots that are hardly different from a human professional by the impression its smooth operation provides. The market of chatbots is growing and is supposed to reach $6 billion by 2023, according to the latest researches. It is possible to make money developing chatbots as well as using them as selling means.
Chatbot development
Developing and selling chatbots seems to be a highly profitable business idea. While more and more companies prefer to automatize all possible processes, software that allows them to do it efficiently is in high demand. The price of a well-performing chatbot varies in $300-$1000 brackets, and for a customized bot, you can charge the monthly maintenance fee, providing updates according to the client’s needs. No matter how companies are using chatbots, every software needs improvement from time to time to perform well. Providing such services can be a stable source of income.
Assistance In eCommerce
Bots can quickly help users purchase online, thus helping businesses gain more customers from platforms other than their main site. For example, embedding a chatbot into Facebook messenger on the company’s page in this social media allows users to complete purchasing without leaving the platform, saving their time significantly. Used in blogs, chatbots can help you earn more on affiliate purchases, suggesting relevant links according to the user’s behavior on the site. Understanding how do AI chatbots work can help blog owners to define the requirements for its customization to increase sales.
Native Advertising
Native advertising proved to be highly efficient, as it is less annoying and more relevant to users’ interests. This type of ad considers context and shows only those ads the user might be interested in at the moment. Chatbot offers sponsored links organically, making the site less cluttered as it allows decreasing banner ads on the landing page. A chatbot can provide info on certain discounts applicable to the category of products the site’s visitor is checking out, and offer affiliate links to the products related to the one visitor intends to buy.
Conducting Surveys To Gather Information
Information is currency nowadays, and it is possible to earn through collecting data for business needs. While it might be hard to lure users into answering questions, with chatbots, you can make the process highly engaging. You may even offer some rewards in the form of promo codes and discounts to convince users to participate.
There are certainly more options to monetize chatbots, and the number of them will only grow. Chatbots have huge potential for business use, though to use them effectively, it’s necessary to know the benefits and risks of chatbots. While benefits are rather obvious from the said above, some downsides also should be considered. The main problem businesses using chatbots may encounter is data safety. This kind of software is considered prone to hackers’ attacks, though the risk is constant for every online interaction.
The other problem discussed lately is that chatbots should be used carefully in some areas, namely, healthcare. While they are able to help with simple tasks, such as making appointments or providing needed specialist details, they can pose a danger for patients tending to self-diagnose online.
Final Thoughts
Chatbots are widely used these days by businesses of any size and specialization. Being able to perform various tasks, chatbots are benefiting not just business owners but the customers as well, making the process of purchasing online easy and smooth. Most people use chatbots daily, be it a voice assistant or a support window on a random website. The market of chatbots development grows exponentially, offering a great variety of developers to choose from. Opt for the expertise of the Binerals professionals to receive relevant analytics and proper solutions to your business needs. A well-designed and customized chatbot can put your business to the upper level, allowing saving time and effort on a significant number of tasks. With growing digitizing in most areas of human interaction, involving chatbots in your daily operations seems just a matter of time.
