How Chatbots Can Revolutionize your Small Business

While the concept of chatbots has recently attracted the eyeballs of many, it is hard to believe that its history can be traced back to the early 1960s. Once designed to convincingly stimulate how a human would behave as a conversational partner, the concept has evolved and is now being used by businesses to help them communicate to their target customers to imbibe their psyche. As per recent reports, it is revealed that 80 per cent of businesses are expected to be using chatbots technology by the year 2020.

Read on to know how this revolutionary concept of chatbots can bring revolution to a small business venture.

Using Chatbots as a Customer Resource

Customer retention is of utmost importance to businesses to ensure a strong customer base. So, anything that can enhance the customer retention becomes a helpful tool for any business. Chatbots can help out businesses perfectly by building a customer resource as they actually remember the information users tell them. Chatbots helps you by engaging with your customers and create an actual database of their information, so that you can use it for the betterment of your own products and services. This way, chatbots can help you trigger the basic concerns and questions of your customers, and to further enhance customer retention.

Chatbots Simplifies Sales

Sales and management is another important facet of any business. As per recent reports, 55 per cent of all online sales enquiries go unanswered for over 5 days, while only 5 per cent are responded to within 5 minutes. With chatbots coming into the picture, the process of sales can be much more effective and streamlined. With each potential customer talking to a virtual assistant one-to-one, there could be smooth engagements with customers and the gap between customers’ demand and supply could be bridged.

Chatbots to cut Down on Operational Costs

Hiring employees to solve customer queries is essential, but it could be quite costly to hire so many employees when you are giving 24/7 customer care services. There’s no denying the fact that chatbots cannot replace human presence, but it could be smartly used as a substitute to hold off things for a while. What chatbots can do is that it can help in solving less challenging and repetitive queries (FAQs) of the customers that require lesser human efforts, so that customer service agents can focus on more complex queries. This way, chatbots can cut down operational costs too.

Chatbots for Streamlining Payments

One of the biggest advantages of chatbots is that it helps in streamlining the process of payment. Customers can pay for their products without even leaving the chat interface and that makes it easier for both customers and the company to look after the process of payment. Bots that store payment details of regular customers make ordering new products or services easy to purchase, hence increasing engagements.

Chatbots Boost Brand Image

Chatbots are designed to enhance B2C interactions, and this way it makes a good rapport with customers, who expect simple business interactions and responses to their complaints and queries. And, if a brand manages to do so, it gives a good impression of the brand to its customers.