5 ways chatbots can help your business

This article was made possible thanks to the generosity of our sponsor, ExpressVPN.

Chatbots have been an integral part of online business strategies for a while now, as companies use them as a valuable tool to engage customers and enhance user experience. With the advent of artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT, however, organizations have found a whole new way to leverage chatbots to not only enhance customer support but to help grow business as well. With that in mind, we discuss five ways chatbots and AI can help your business and the benefits of adding them to your platform.

Benefits of chatbots for business

According to ExpressVPN, generative AI and gen AI providers like ChatGPT play a vital role in our everyday lives, with ChatGPT alone servicing 180 million monthly active users. A large part of the way we interact with AI is through chatbots, which use tools like conversational AI to communicate with consumers and answer questions or address concerns, much the same as a human being would in traditional customer service.

However, that is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the benefits chatbots offer to companies. Other advantages of AI-powered chatbots include:

• 24/7 Customer Service
• Reduction in customer requests
• Provide more customer data
• Enhance customer engagement
• Increase lead generation and sales

Chatbots help provide 24/7 customer support

One of the simplest uses of chatbots and conversational AI software is to help provide support to customers and website visitors without the need to hire an army of real-life support staff or customer service agents. Using rule-based chatbots – which are also known as script-based chatbots – corporations can create a basic chatbot designed to respond to basic prompts to provide answers based on a predefined question-and-answer routine. For instance, a user might provide a prompt such as “What hours are you open?” or “How do I return an item?”. The chatbot would then respond with the requested information, or provide additional information if the user needs something else.

This type of chatbot benefits both the customer and the business owner. For the customer, they do not need to wait in a phone queue until a human answers, and can, instead, find an answer to basic questions relatively easily. The benefit for the business owner is that they save money by not having to hire additional staff, can reduce wait time, and increase customer satisfaction.

Conversational AI tools, meanwhile, are able to read a user’s prompt and respond in a more human or natural way, reading into the user’s intent to solve more complicated problems or answer questions that may be worded in an unexpected manner. For instance, with conversation AI, a user may enter a prompt complaining that their Internet service is down. The AI bot could then ask a series of questions designed to help troubleshoot the problem, such as having the user reset their router or sending a signal to reset the router for them.

Finally, Chatbots and conversation AI platforms both allow businesses to offer multi-lingual support for customers around the globe, regardless of language.

Reduce customer requests with chatbots

Another value chatbots bring to the table is the ability to reduce customer requests and support tickets. By automatically providing users with answers to common (and even uncommon) issues, chatbots help eliminate unnecessary support requests, freeing agents to work on more complicated issues and allowing them to resolve tickets faster.

This leads to greater customer satisfaction, better feedback loops, and reduced overhead, as you will need less support staff. Typical customer requests a chatbot could help with include providing customers with return information, resolving payment issues, and offering self-help options.

Customers are also able to provide feedback to the company, which can help the organization identify problems with websites, interfaces, or other user experiences.

Provide more customer data

In addition to collecting valuable feedback related to user experience, chatbots also provide a way to collect important customer data that can help guide prospects through the sales funnel. AI-powered chatbots can detect user intent and customer sentiment, giving insight into a customer’s needs and their feeling about the product or service. 

Armed with these sales metrics, agents are able to better determine the mood of the client and help them find a solution more suited to their needs. It also helps agents provide more customized service to consumers, as chatbots relay personalized information it “picks up” from its conversation.

Enhance customer engagement

Chatbots are great at providing fast responses to users and helping them resolve issues through self-help options. Another way chatbots help businesses is by enhancing customer engagement, which can be defined as any interaction with the customer or prospect. This can include automated messages designed to “warm up” a potential client, send order status updates, send reminders for appointments, or alert customers for items that match their interests.

This type of engagement not only raises customer satisfaction but can also help increase sales and brand awareness. 

Increase lead generation and sales

A final business use for chatbots is to increase sales and lead generation. Chatbots are capable of handling some of the more tedious tasks associated with sales funnels, such as data collecting, qualifying leads, scheduling demos, and nurturing clients. Examples of nurturing could include answer questions or providing information about a product or service. This, in turn, leads to fewer abandoned carts, better conversion rates, decreased bounce rates, and the potential to boost upsells.

Chatbots also help generate leads by using AI, ML, and natural language processing (NLP) to interpret user prompts and simulate natural conversation. Using this ability, chatbots can impersonate human interaction to gain valuable insight into a customer, which they can then pass on to sales teams. For instance, in addition to the intent and sentiment metrics we discussed before, AI bots can also collect information on the language and location of the customer, which pages they engaged with on your website, and any personal preferences. This data is then relayed to the marketing team, who can use the data to create personalized and targeted marketing campaigns.

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