Does your business need a chatbot? The answer is yes.
We’ve fallen nuts over bolts for chatbots at M8.Digital. We think they are an excellent way to boost lead conversion, broadcast marketing material and create business efficiencies through self-serving. These are the three key areas we look at when we start a bot with a client and below I go through exactly why.
Lead Generation
It’s much harder to say no to a person than a web form. Forms suck — and the general public hates them. They are tired and ready for innovation which is where a chatbot comes in.
A little personality goes a long way in the sales game and chatbots are full of them (at least the ones we make are!) Forms are dry, boring and a pain to fill out. Human connection is far more stimulating which is why chatbots tend to convert far better! Some people have seen ludicrous increases of 300% on their lead-gen when switching to one. Drift is one such player in this space who take chatbot lead-gen and interfaces to the next level with inline calendars!
We load up all our chatbots with business-specific FAQs as a baseline requirement. This is important in order to emulate a conversation you’d have with a real human over the phone or through a messaging channel. It also builds trust in your leads and gives them instant answers to questions they might ordinarily have to wait for via email or phone.
Broadcasting Marketing Material
This is probably one of the most powerful features that the messenger platform has to offer. One business we spoke to saw insane open rates of 90% when they switched to a messenger bot for broadcasts. Email campaigns typically get between 10–25% open rates. The best part is that customers can reply to marketing material with an instant response!
Most email campaigns come from a no-reply address which means asking questions in response is difficult. The friction to messaging is low so these broadcasts typically see far greater engagement.
Business automation and self-serve
This is the one that really gets us excited. Self-serve is the holy grail of a customer experience team — giving customers the best possible facility to perform actions that they would normally ring in for themselves. Most corporates that we deal with have obscure customer portals that are clunky and tricky to use, so they end up calling in to make simple changes such as changing an email address.
Whilst this seems harmless, the business inefficiency begins to back up. If an average call takes around 6–7 minutes and 100 people need to perform a small transaction each month, that’s around 10 hours of customer support time completely wasted. And those are conservative numbers.
That’s not to mention the wait times that the caller usually experiences. Chatbots, when done correctly, can automate these small tasks in a familiar way to customers — just by chatting online.
We think call centres can almost be entirely replaced by a well-trained AI chatbot. Our clients just won’t let us do it (yet)!
What about internally?
Chatbots can also create internal business efficiencies. Organising meetings is one of the most painful things to work with — but there’s a chatbot for that! Check out x.ai. Amy, my new (AI) personal assistant, organises meetings with clients and colleagues without me having any intervention. All I have to do is CC her in and ask her to set something up and she handles the rest. How cool is that?
Bonus: Personalisation and customer satisfaction
Personalisation is the other holy grail of CX — making each customer feel like the business is designed specifically for them. Tools like smooch allow you profile your customers across channels so you can provide the ultimate personalised experience through chatbots. Imagine this: You jump on the FedEx site to check an order, and a message pops up giving you an update on your order. All without even asking!
So… how do I get a chatbot?
That’s the tricky part. Tools like Chatfuel allow you to create simple chatbots that can collect leads for you and reply to simple requests.
When you want to start automating your business and giving your customers a personalised experience you probably need to look at getting a custom chatbot built specifically for your needs. If you think you want to create a chatbot to do so, you should get in touch! We’d love to work with you.
Originally published at Mayte.
