Does your business need a chatbot? In a word, yes. If you have customers you need a chatbot for your business. A common misconception is that chatbots are only useful if you meet certain criteria or have certain scenarios. In reality, all businesses can benefit from chatbots, no matter the size.
The better question is: Which type of bot is best for you? Chatbots come in many sizes and shapes.
Nonetheless, below you’ll find 7 reasons why your business needs a chatbot, regardless of what type of business it is.
7 Reasons Your Business Needs A Chatbot
1. Save time and money with intelligent automation
By far the main purpose of a chatbot is to save you time and money but automating your business. All businesses have questions that they need to answer on a repetitive basis. Things like opening times, location, prices and other frequently asked questions.
Whether you are a mom and pop store, a dentist, lawyer, hair salon, real estate agent, restaurant, architect or whatever there are customer interactions in your business that could be automated.
The other great thing about chatbots is that because they have no emotion and are programmed to give the same response to the same queries you can cut out all human error and provide a consistent and predictable service to your customers.
You can monitor and measure everything and implement improvements whenever you want. No longer will you need to spend time training your employees when you can simply give a chatbot new instructions that it will implement immediately.
This frees up your employees to do meaningful and rewarding work that is only a positive for your business.
2. Capture leads and sales organically
One of the main strengths of chatbots are their ability to generate leads and make sales in an organic and natural way. You can guide prospects down marketing funnels that feel natural because they are chatting, just like they would do with a friend. They don’t feel like they’re being sold or manipulated and that’s powerful.
Using a Facebook Messenger bot allows makes consumers feel at ease because all interactions are happening on a trusted platform and there is greater transparency there.
Better still, you can gain access to the user data Facebook holds about your prospects. For example, something simple like addressing your prospect by their first name without them having to type it in is powerful.
And when it comes to capturing lead data like email addresses and phone numbers its simply a matter of them tapping the data that’s already there. That removes any resistance associated with providing you their data. In a way they think you already have it so all they have to do is confirm. This drives up conversions by an insane amount.
So if you have any type of leads to collect or sales to make a chatbot is the best technology that you can use today to dramatically improve conversions and lower your cost.
3. Build trust and rapport
Chatbots have changed the way you collect data from customers. Before you would ask them to fill out long, static online forms but with chatbots they simply tap and select predefined answers or chat in an interactive way. This helps to build and trust and rapport right from the beginning as opposed to simply filling out forms.
4. Be available, instantly, 24/7
We live in an instant gratification society and in todays on demand world everyone wants everything now. The average response time of most businesses is over 10 hours but with the internet and social media if you wait 10 hours to respond to your prospects you’ve probably lost them to someone else.
A chatbot solves that problem by giving them instant responses to their most common enquiries. It can even guide them through to making a sale all without your intervention.
Being available 24/7 is something that is costly for a human to do but with chatbots that the service you can provide to customers all over the world no matter what time zone they are in.
People want to communicate with customers how they want to, at a time when its convenient to them. Messaging apps allow consumers to do business with you when they want to, without any pressure and this is a very powerful service to provide your potential and existing customers.
5. Supercharge you marketing
With chatbots you’re able to segment and retarget your customers based on what they say while chatting to your bot. That in itself is very powerful as it allows you to laser target the correct audience. Because of the instant responses and quick inputs chatbots also increae conversions and increases your return on investment when it comes to your advertising spend.
6. Reach your customers where they spend most of their time
People spend most of their time on messaging apps talking to friends and family, so doesn’t it make sense to reach them where they spend most of their time?
The clever thing about this is that they will continuously be exposed to you and your brand in their chat app and this builds automatic familiarity and trust.
Facebook Messenger in particular is the biggest messaging app in the world with 1.3 billion active monthly users so right now it makes sense to have a chatbot on this platform.
7. Improves your brand
Having a chatbot positions you and your brand as an innovative, forward thinking business that is investing, growing and improving. By default this communicates that because you have the latest technology you will also provide the better product or service.
No matter what size or type of business you have chatbots are one of the smallest and smartest investments you can make to instantly boost your brand.
