What Is A Chatbot? How Chatbots Can Help Your Business

Many companies have been forced to go online due to the COVID lockdown, many for the first time. Once they have created a website the marketing world tells them to start posting and talking about their products and services on social media.

Unfortunately, this brings pre-sales, sales, and support queries to their social media presence such as Facebook, and requires an army of staff to answer the normally highly repetitive questions raised by consumers as they discover, learn about, query and eventually reach a buying decision.

This can tie up a team of staff 24/7 repeatedly answering the same questions, providing clarity, brochures, and links to website product pages.

There is a better way! Free up your staff to answer the obscure technical questions or have them closing the sale conversations started by Chatbots: AI-powered digital assistants.

By analysing all queries raised by consumers for pre-sales, sales, and support and building a chatbot around them to provide 24/7 answers can provide fantastic savings. Only questions that are not yet in its database of answers would be passed onto your sales and support staff.

The public has already confirmed that they prefer to have automated answers where possible to avoid ‘salespeople’

Introduction

Chatbots are the new best friends of enterprise organisations, used to answer general queries and have great conversational intelligence, offering up an incredible level of conversational intelligence and natural interaction. Chatbots can answer a vast number of questions across all spheres, such as sales, support, marketing, and public relations. The majority of enterprise organisations using chatbots for customer support use them for public relations inquiries.

 Chatbots are an exciting development in enterprise marketing and is a popular trend used by organisations looking to improve customer engagement and drive brand awareness. Chatbots solve one of the biggest problems in modern customer service, the lack of efficiency.

What Is A Chatbot?

A chatbot is a digital assistant which uses artificial intelligence to give a human-like reply to any pre-sales, sales, and support questions. It can also direct consumers to your products or services website or in some cases show digitial products and services inside the conversation and complete the sale!

There are Different Types of Chatbots

The three primary types of chatbots are:

• Simple chatbots. Simple chatbots have limited capabilities, and are usually called rule-based bots. They are task or problem-specific, examples are Fast food Ordering Bots.

• Smart chatbots. These AI-enabled smart chatbots are designed to simulate near-human interactions with customers and have free-flowing conversations and determine and understand the intent (the purpose of the conversation), language and sentiment. They need to be programmed and trained using example data. examples are Virtual Assistants.

• Hybrid chatbots. They are a combination of simple and smart chatbots.

Why You Need A Chatbot

There are so many automated marketing options out there it’s difficult to know where to start. A Chatbot will help your company to automate the most repetitive and confusing parts of a customer engagement so you can free up your staff to focus on more complicated questions. Chatbots also enable intelligent, well-formed natural language conversations to be turned into actual responses. This is the holy grail of customer engagement and will no doubt change the way the next generation interacts with both customers and businesses.

How Do Chatbots Work?

Using the Chatbot platform with Facebook Messenger, allows each chatbot to be unique. It is an embedded app that runs on the device. When a consumer signs into Facebook Messenger, the app connects to the Facebook platform and begins to perform tasks based on the information the user provides.

There are two main bot areas – Conversations and Bots. A bot is essentially a short message box that provides a user with information. Bots are automated services designed to answer questions, perform certain actions, perform general tasks and more. Bots are designed to use natural language to perform a certain task, for example, “Are you open on Sundays?” to respond with results such as “Yes, they are open on Sundays between 10 and 4 pm”.

Setting Up A Chatbot

Provided you have access to a bot platform connecting a chatbot to your social media or website takes only a few clicks and authentication. However, the main work is spent on designing the chatbot’s automation flows around the required conversation areas – general enquiries, pre-sales, sales or support. Analysis of existing conversations and emails in each of these areas will allow a skilled conversation designer to provide the flows necessary to provide a detailed level of engagement for any potential conversation.

Which Chatbot Platforms to Chose?

Currently, there are many chatbot platforms that can answer questions and link customers to appropriate content on your website and social media pages. These platforms all come with different unique features, and it can be quite challenging to understand which chatbot is best for your business.

Many of the more famous chatbot platforms are tailored for B2B and CRM queries where they act as a “Chat Concierge”, i.e. they provide the answer to your query before a human ever has to ask. They typically use natural language processing (NLP) and sophisticated search technology to provide an answer to your question that is tailored to your website or social media page. They perform natural language queries (MLQ) that are provided by third-party databases.

During the last 5 years Smart Octopus Voice Agency has used and test four generic Chatbot platforms before settling on one for our current Smart Octopus Bots platform which offered the most messaging platform support and integration that we offer to our customs and via our training courses.

Cost Savings from Using Chatbots

One of the big advantages of using a Chatbot is that Chatbots offer efficiency in much the same way that a human does but with vastly lower costs. Although Chatbots are being integrated into websites to answer routine questions and some social media posts are automated, a few crucial automated tasks such as response to pre-sales, sales and support queries have been ignored. Many businesses are currently saving millions as a result.

Chatbots can deliver cheaper and better service to customers as they’re able to handle low-volume tasks with minimum costs. Automating the majority of the process for your customers or employees. The higher volume tasks done by workers are split up and done by the best workers who can focus on higher level work.

Summary

These new market changes are affecting all businesses. We know how many other examples exist across the globe of customers demanding more self-service, live online chatrooms rather than traditional face-to-face interaction. The new wave of customers is already having an impact on many sectors, from automotive to travel, retail to healthcare and the public sector to help with other aspects of their life, including finance.

It has never been easier to start implementing a Chatbot for your business, if you’d like to work with us to increase your sales and customer engagement or reduce your support conversations on social media simply click here and complete the form and we will be in touch.