Five ways chatbots can save businesses and customers time and money

 

In all likelihood, you’ve used a chatbot before even if you didn’t know it. Chatbots are the new hype in the tech world just as mobile apps were in 2008 and just like mobile apps, it seems chatbots are here to stay. Hundreds of thousands of chatbots have already been developed and deployed across various messaging apps and websites. Chatbots are helping businesses by driving increased sales and reducing the strain and customer support staffs. They’re helping customers by automating customer service and offering a customized online shopping experience. Here’s a more detailed look at how chatbots are helping businesses and customers alike to save time and money.

Chatbots as personal assistants

The average small business doesn’t have room in the budget for personal assistants and many don’t even have office assistants or secretaries. Thanks to chatbots you don’t need to worry about finding more office space or room in the budget for personal assistants. Chatbots can be programmed to work at every employee’s workstation. They can assist in setting up, modifying, or cancelling appointments, they can manage employee’s calendars as well as remind them of upcoming appointments, they can send and receive emails on employees’ behalf and they can connect employees with the appropriate IT or HR staff when needed.

Gathering feedback

Chatbots are excellent tools when it comes to gathering feedback. Helpful feedback is essential for every business and chatbots can aid in gathering feedback both formally and informally. The advantage chatbots have over automated surveys via text is that they can ask follow up questions to better understand customer responses and customer responses don’t have to be limited to numbers on a number scale. Another advantage that chatbots have is they have access to every prior interaction it’s ever had and can access that vast database of information to provide better assistance.

Personalized newsfeeds and reminders

Chatbots that scour the news sites for only the information that’s relevant for the user are hugely popular and are great time savers. Whether it’s for work or pleasure, having a chatbot that can sort through all the news and handpick only stories that you want to see are a huge help.

Automated business processes

Chatbots are great for automating tasks including many business processes. For example, a chatbot can be setup to alert relevant team members when a given task is complete. It could be set up to ask frequently asked questions posed by either employees or customers. Chatbots can facilitate better communication between departments and can even automate a lot of customer service by asking for identifying information, pulling up accounts, determining the nature of the customer’s problem, and routing them to the support staff member that’s best equipped to provide assistance for that customer.

Knowing what customers think

Thanks to machine learning and natural language processing, chatbots are better than any employee can ever be at offering a customized experienced for every customer. With each successive interaction with the same customer, it can get better and better and knowing what the customer is thinking and it can make suggestions and upsell to customers when they think they’ll be receptive to it.

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Source: entrepreneur.com/article/303554#

Building a chatbot for your brand is easier than ever

As is always the case with new technologies, chatbots have become more affordable and practical as their use has become more widespread in the business world. When chatbots first became a thing, the cost and difficulty associated with designing one made them prohibitive for all but the biggest brand names. Today, even the smallest small businesses can benefit from a chatbot.

Why you need one

Chatbots are useful even for smaller businesses. For one, they free up human resources. People who want to ask a question about your business or inquire about an order, or complain about issues they’re having with a product you sold can initiate a chat session with your company’s chatbot over SMS or a social media messaging platform. For smaller businesses that don’t have 24/7 support, this chatbot could, at the very least, acknowledge a customer’s inquiry and submit a request ticket to human support agents to handle during business hours. A chatbot will also be able to resolve easier issues and answer frequently asked questions without any assistance from humans thanks to machine learning and natural language processing.

Chatbots also have a lot of the same functionality that mobile apps offer but with a number of key advantages. Chatbots are easier to develop and maintain than a mobile application and chatbots don’t require users to go to an app store and download a file which takes up space on their phone since chatbots operate solely on chat-based applications that most smartphone users will already have.

Open-source chatbot projects

Open-source chatbot projects are chatbots that anyone is free to use. The only problem with open-source projects is that they’ll most likely need to be modified in order to work with your company’s vision for the chatbot. Modification will require some knowledge of coding and most small businesses would have to outsource that to somebody for a cost.

Chatbot maker software

Recently, chatbot maker software has been springing up. This software operates a lot like website builders like Wix or Weebly. An advantage to this method is that it requires no coding whatsoever. The software takes care of the coding part for you. You simply use their interface to design your chatbot the way you want and it translates your design into code. This too will require an investment but it will cost a lot less than developing your own chatbot from scratch or modifying an open-source chatbot. Functionality will be more limited than these options however but probably sufficient for the average small business.

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Source: businessinsider.com/how-to-create-chatbot-business-2017-10?r=UK&IR=T

Tips for integrating chatbots into your business model

 

People no longer have the same reservations about talking to machines as they might have just a few years ago. Already, 65% of smartphone owners report using voice assistants on their phones. Advances in machine learning and natural language processing have allowed chatbots to become more practical and utilitarian than ever. Chatbots are computer programs designed to communicate with humans via voice or text. Early applications of chatbots include Map applications that give verbal directions while driving and can understand users’ verbal request for directions as well. AI assistants like Siri, Bixby, and Alexa are also examples of chatbots that can understand to some degree what humans are saying or asking of them and respond in kind. Now we’re beginning to see more task-specific chatbots designed to work on a single website or within a single application to connect customers to brands. But as brands rush out to develop chatbots because it’s the trendy thing to do, they aren’t taking care to really integrate their chatbot into their business model and as a result, their chatbot isn’t as effective as it could be. A chatbot can potentially add a lot to your business, but only if it’s integrated properly.

What will your bot do for you?

You shouldn’t be developing a chatbot just to have one. Before you invest one dollar into developing a chatbot, you need to have clear goals in mind for it. What challenge will the chatbot solve for your business? Which performance indicators do you hope to achieve with your chatbot?

How will it work?

Chatbots are complex computer programs. They have to have access to lots of data to make them accurate. Where will that data come from. Do you already have stored transcripts of customer service interactions that you can feed them. Will you be able to grant your chatbot access to databases of information that it will need to succeed? How will you use Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing to make your chatbot better at conversing in a way that seems natural? What will your bot do when it encounters a question or statement that it doesn’t know how to respond to.

Where will it fit in?

How will your bot be integrated into your existing staff. If your bot will be functioning primarily in a customer service role, how will support tickets be divided across customer support staff and your chatbot? Will your chatbot be able to hand customers over to live agents if it gets stuck? If your chatbot is designed to aid customers in the online shopping experience, will it be able to get through the entire processing of narrowing in on the right product all the way through the checkout or will your chatbot need to be integrated with a sales team that can take over at some point in the interaction? Perhaps you plan to create a chatbot to be used for employees rather than customers. How can your chatbot bridge the gap between employees and IT or HR?

Having answers to these questions up front will allow you to be wiser as you invest in a chatbot that will be able to help your business rise to the next level.

Mobile Technology News brought to you by biztexter.com

Source: forbesindia.   com/blog/technology/integrating-chatbots-into-your-business-model/