4 Reasons Why Chatbots are becoming the New Norm
Chatbots save, time, money, people, shoes….maybe not shoes.
Over the years, businesses have gone through a remarkable evolution in the way they interact with their customers. The first breakthrough came in the form of the telephone, then came email, followed closely by smartphone applications and now, everybody welcome — The Chatbot!
Recent technological advances, like chatbots, provide consumers with an interactive, easy to use, customer service experience. At the same time freeing up company resources, allowing for the development of more efficient day-to-day practices.
Read on to learn just four of the ways chatbots are helping online businesses achieve their organizational goals and help their customers with their innovative service.
1. Resource Allocation
The majority of customer service inquiries placed each day are resolved by scripted interactions, and business owners are finding their employees better utilized when assisting inquiries of a more esoteric nature.
The more employee time is spent on menial assignments, the less time time they have to perform tasks more beneficial to the organization.
Specialized chatbots, dedicated to handling these types of issues, free up resources and allow company staff to allocate their time to tasks that better the overall business .
2. Scalable Customer Support
When a business finally decides it’s time to expand their customer base, they first need to expand their resources in order to accommodate for the projected growth.
Unfortunately, human customer service agents can only attend to a finite number of inquiries in a working day. This is where the chatbot steps in.
Chatbots are more than capable of handling a number of simultaneous customer inquiries. They are an automated service, and can also operate around the clock, 24 hours a day seven days a week. This drastically reduces the pressure on their human counterparts, freeing live agents to handle some of the customers more difficult problems.
3. Increases Time Spent on Page
Average time spent on a page is an important factor when seeking to encourage a commitment to buy. As chatbots are interactive by nature, they have the ability to increase customer engagement and, therefore, average time spent on a page. Higher engagement then leads to an increased potential for customer spending as one study found customer engagement increases spending by up to 40%.
Rather than sending a customer a PDF product manual with complex information written in fine print. Businesses are now opting to let a chotbot walk their customers step by step through the process. Setting chatbots up to answer FAQ’s about a particular service, or walking customers through a product operation, encourages the visitor to stay on the site and engage more with the brand.
Customers are now finding chatbots more convenient for speedy resolutions when inquiries are time sensitive. Instant messaging eliminates the frustrations associated with being put on hold or waiting around for an email reply to an otherwise easily resolved issue.
4. Provides an Additional Sales Channel
Chatbots are also broadening customer reach by providing businesses with additional sales channels.
Much in the same way marketers scour social media pages and forums to gain information about their customers. Chatbots can be set up in these sites to assist the sales department and interact with customers where they hang out.
This is exactly what we are doing at Waylo.
When users are doing research for their next big holiday they don’t immediately go to www.IWantToBookAHolidayWithNoResearch.com. First they check out blogs and ask friends about the best places to go. Waylo can be integrated into any blog or website to add additional revenue channels for bloggers to earn some extra cash. Let’s face it Travel Bloggers are the ones that have done all of the research and get you interested in checking out those cool trains in Japan they should be able to make a living from all that hard work.
Large businesses are already using automated chatbots in social hangouts, like Facebook messenger. They have reported benefits like getting access to real time feedback and a reduction in buyer hesitations caused by factors slowing down the sales process.
The Chatbots of Tomorrow
The chatbots of tomorrow start today. They learn, they get better, we train them, and they train us. Ultimately over time the use of chatbots in our daily lives will become completely ubiquitous. We will begin to prefer to deal with a smart chatbot while we lay in bed at 11pm, instead of waiting till 9am when the office opens so you can ask if your new Swatch Watch is waterproof or not.
At Waylo we are tackling the travel industry with our smart chatbots but over the next couple years more of our services are going to be made more convenient by the use of chatbots. Imagine if government departments around the world start to adopt this technology? No more waiting on hold with the Passport Office to find out if you are legally allowed to enter Mexico, or is this just a one sided wall?
Originally published at blog.thewaylo.com
