Imagine – a customer writes to you after working hours, your staff is on holiday, and the customer is annoyed because no one has replied. The next day, the customer is already buying from a competitor. That’s where artificial intelligence chatbots come in, ready to help you avoid these situations and more. Let’s take a look at how they can benefit your business.
24/7 customer service without additional human resources
A chatbot has no work schedule, no need for lunch breaks or days off, and even less need to complain about being overworked. This means that customers can contact the chatbot at any time, whether it’s a Friday evening or Sunday morning.
Even if a customer is looking for simple answers such as the opening hours of your store, the robot can respond instantly. Otherwise, the customer may immediately forget about you.
Faster answers to frequently asked questions
Every company has a number of frequently asked questions that every second customer asks, such as “How do I return a product?”, “Do you offer a guarantee?” etc. These questions are answered by the robot within a second, leaving your customer service team to deal with more important matters. Chatbots are able to resolve these questions so quickly that customers sometimes don’t even realise they’re not talking to a human.
Filtering enquiries and directing them to the right specialist
Chatbots are great helpers when it comes to managing a large number of customer enquiries and routing them to the right professionals. They are able to efficiently classify enquiries based on their content and immediately allocate them to the appropriate categories, such as technical support, sales or other business areas.
This is particularly useful when clients have a wide range of questions and your team needs to ensure that each one is dealt with quickly and accurately. Chatbots also help you predetermine the level of complexity of your queries, solving the simpler ones themselves and passing on the more complex ones to specialists.
Automating the sales process and generating qualified leads
Wouldn’t it be great if someone else could collect potential customers for you and even “warm them up”? Chatbots can do it! Not only do they answer questions about your products or services, but they can also recommend something extra. They do this naturally, without any pressure. All this information is then passed on to your sales team, who just need to close the deal.
Cost optimisation in customer service
It’s no secret that in business, one of the most important things is money. It’s not cheap to hire a large customer service team, especially if you need people working around the clock or in different languages. Chatbots can do the job for you at a much lower cost.
For example, Chatfuel, tailored for social network replies, starts at just €19.99/month, Tidio, with its ticket opening function, starts at €29/month, and HubSpot, which allows you to build chatbots to your liking, costs €20/month, although the price can go as high as €880/month to get more features. However, when you consider that one chatbot can do the work of several people around the clock, the price does not seem so high.
Collecting data on customer needs and behaviour
A chatbot can also be your data analyst, collecting information about what your customers ask most often, what they’re interested in and where the most common problems occur. This data helps you improve your services, products or update your website. For example, if a robot notices that many people are asking where to find a price list for your products, it’s worth making it easier to access.
Multilingual service at no extra cost
If you have customers from all over the world and your employees only speak 1-3 languages, chatbots are a lifesaver. They can work in several languages at once and are adept at using automatic translation tools, so communication with your customers is seamless.
Which chatbot to choose?
There are already a number of chatbots available, so it’s important to consider your business needs and goals when choosing one, including the number of languages you need, integrations with other tools and features, and how much you can afford to pay for the chatbot service.
Some of the most popular are Tidio, Zendesk, HubSpot, ProProfs Desk, Intercom and others. You can try the free versions of many robots before making a decision.
Chatbots are true business helpers that help you optimise your work, reduce costs and provide a better customer experience. So if you want to outperform your competitors and make your team’s job easier, chatbots are the right solution.
