10 Benefits of Chatbots for All Kinds of Businesses

You visit any site today and chances are you’ll find a chatbot. More than 80% of internet consumers have interacted with a bot at some point.

It shows that brands are using chatbots — not because every other brand is using it or because it's the latest trend.

But because they provide actual benefits for both businesses and consumers.

With each year, as the need for automation grows, you have more reasons to add a chatbot to your platform. Functions like customer support and lead generation are common across industries. And a chatbot has a key role to play in the automation of these functions, regardless of the chatbot pricing plan that you choose.

Although there are different benefits of chatbots in healthcare or eCommerce, there are ample benefits that are applicable across industries.

What are they?

Let’s have a look. 

Benefits of Chatbots for All Kinds of Businesses

1. Increased Lead Generation

The first answer that comes to mind when you think of what problems chatbots solve for businesses is lead generation. For marketers, automated lead generation is a blessing. Because let’s face it, despite the importance of lead generation as the first step in a marketing campaign, the activity overall is time-consuming and mundane.

Regardless of your efforts, not every lead is going to convert. Hence, instead of investing time to generate leads, chatbots help you just automate the process. It engages with site visitors and asks for lead information in a conversational manner. It is a definite upgrade from forms or emails where there’s limited scope for two-way interaction.

Once your bot generates the leads, it automatically records these leads into your CRM by integrating your CRM with the chatbot. You can choose reputed Chatbots like WotNot that integrates with all the major CRM systems like Salesforce, Hubspot, Zoho, FreshCRM, etc.

Lead generation chatbots also take it a notch higher since bots can qualify and nurture leads, making the sales process easier. Bots can be programmed to ask qualification questions in the chat, allow visitors to book appointments, and direct them to a live agent as and when needed. 

2. Reduced Costs

Yes, bots are all great. But as a business owner, one of the biggest questions you might have while considering a new tech tool is, “Will it be cost-effective?”

In terms of chatbots, the answer is a big yes.

There are numerous chatbot pricing options available. It ultimately depends on the scale, type, and size of your business. But all in all, you can get a chatbot anywhere between $0-$1000.

But in the money you spend, you are waving off the customer support and marketing resources you would otherwise need such as:

• Chatbots operate 24*7, eliminating the need to hire full-time staff and paying for the infrastructure and salaries incurred for round-the-clock support. 

• Chatbots automate a lot of routine processes such as training, first-level support, lead generation, employee onboarding, training, etc, helping you optimize costs in all these areas. 

• Chatbots help you personalize all your customer interactions, at a fraction of the cost.

3. Efficient Customer Support

If you want to ace customer support, there are three things you need to get right. Timing, speed, and accuracy. Ask yourself, how can you provide the right answers, at the right time, without the customers having to wait? 

With chatbots. 

Your agents can attend to one customer at a time while others are subjected to waiting. Research suggests that the average waiting time in customer support across industries is 46 seconds. The higher the waiting time, the higher the chances of the customer getting frustrated which results in a bad experience.

An apparent benefit of chatbot is that customers get instant answers. Most customer queries are repetitive, which means they can be easily automated with chatbots. For example, you can identify and list down all common questions and add their responses on an FAQ bot.

While your bot automates the first-level queries, your agents can handle more complex queries and invest time in situations that require their attention. Moreover, chatbots are also consistent. You’re assured that every customer that requires help, will get consistent answers with accuracy.

4. Engaged Site Visitors

A low conversion rate is a sad reality in many industries. While the average conversion rate across industries is 2.35% but the top 25% of companies are converting at 5% or higher. It shows that if you want to aim for above average, you need conversion rate optimization tools like a chatbot that engages your site visitors and converts visitors into leads.

For example, every time a visitor visits WotNot’s website, they are greeted via a chatbot notification sound that draws the attention of the visitor to the bot. There’s also a popup message with a pop culture reference that resonates with the user and urges them to have a conversation with the chatbot.

The result? Higher engagement.

If designed rightly, chatbot conversations can make the visitor stay longer. AI chatbots can also personalize the conversations with tailored and multilingual scripts. It can speak the language of the customer to break barriers of customer communication and resonate with the visitors in real-time. 

5. Increased Sales

67%. That’s the rate at which companies were able to increase their sales through chatbots.

How?

There are three major drivers for sales - capturing leads, guiding prospects, and nurturing them through conversations. An advantage of chatbot is that it fulfills all three. Sure, it generates leads. But a chatbot conversation can do a lot more. It can guide the user in their buying journey and close sales in the following ways:

Order efficiency: Chatbots make it easier for customers to place orders or book for that matter. If you consider the buying journey, it significantly reduces the number of steps it takes to purchase a product. A lot of service industries like restaurants and eCommerce are facilitating purchases on the chat interface itself.

For example, a Middle Eastern online food aggregator Eat Easy leveraged WotNot to build a bot where users can place orders, and restaurants can list themselves without any human intervention. As a result, they could automate more than 250K+ orders and queries on their bot.

Schedule appointments: Appointments are a turning point in a sales journey. When a visitor books an appointment, it shows higher commitment and buying intention from their end. Chatbots have booking and demo integrations that allow users to schedule appointments on the chat. It boosts sales in service industries like real estate, healthcare, salons, and travel.

Overall, chatbots aim for a customized buying experience resulting in more consumers feeling comfortable with buying from chatbots.

6. 24*7 Availability

While it's not impossible to be available to your customers at all times, it’s certainly costly. Round-the-clock support is what the customers seek. Especially, if you’re a global business where you have to take into consideration the different time zones and cultural differences.

Instead of training your agents for different languages or cultural nuances and offering services 24*7, consider the time and money you can save by just integrating a chatbot to do the same.

Chatbots fulfill the gaps that arise from human nature. An important benefit of chatbot is that it reduces human error and ensures everyone gets a consistent response. Chatbots are not affected by rude or frustrated customers. They don’t fall sick nor do they need holidays. They don’t get bored answering the same question again and again.

We’re not implying your agent support isn’t crucial. But instead of subjecting the agents to mundane questions and odd timings, you can leverage chatbots to take over these difficult responsibilities, making agents more productive at their tasks. At the same time, you’re also ensuring real-time availability to your customers. Even if they’re in a completely different time zone or have a query at 3 AM, you can be assured they will be addressed. 

9. Personalization

Personalization has been the core focus of marketing for a while now. Regardless of your industry, it is essential to connect with your customers on a personal level, especially if their buying journey is online.

A benefit of chatbot is that its nature itself is conversational. Hence, it utilizes all the elements of instant messaging to keep the liveness of two-way interaction. It can address the user by their names, use rich media to resonate with them, and have a customized flow based on their requirements.

The first step towards personalization is to identify the needs of your customers and tailor conversations for them. Product recommendation chatbots upsell and cross-sell based on customer preferences and buying history.

Chatbot marketing entails working with a range of tools to hit the right note of personalization. For example, its integration with CRM allows you to get a comprehensive understanding of the visitor. You can also integrate a bot with a sales intelligence tool like Zoominfo. With such tools, the bot recognizes the user even before the user adds their information.

Personalization holds true for live chat as well. Your agents can access customer profiles to gather all relevant information about the customer and their conversational history to pick up where they last left off. 

8. Branding Benefits

For many customers, chatbots are the first touchpoint with a brand. This makes your chatbot a powerful branding tool. Everything that goes into building your chatbot resonates with your brand on a deeper level. From the font you use, the flow, the colors, the tone, etc. It allows you to use bots to dictate how users perceive your brand.

With bots, brands can maintain a consistent and a positive customer experience for users. It helps with 

• Brand recall

• Fostering brand loyalty

• Building trust and credibility 

• Acquiring new customers

For example, WotNot offers you the option to customize and be creative to interpret all these factors according to your brand. It allows you to choose your brand color, font, image, and flow to build a bot that best represents your brand. It also offers you the experience and expertise to give your bot a much-needed competitive edge. 

9. Access to Customer Data

Another major benefit of chatbot is that it gives access to customer data. Almost all chatbot platforms come with an analytics dashboard that gives brands insight into the chatbot performance.

The metrics and KPIs provide know-how as to where the customers are coming from, what they’re looking for, what is the most popular flow, and how many are returning users.

An underrated advantage of chatbots is their ability to collect quality data from a single source rather than multiple sources across the web. This not only helps you tweak your chatbot but also provides an insight into customer behavior and helps you understand them better. 

10. Wide Range of Applications

While a lot has been said about the benefits of chatbots for customers, you also need to be aware of the internal benefits they offer to businesses as well. Chatbots have numerous use-cases that businesses have yet to uncover - hence the increasing number of bot builders.

Some of these include

Human Resources: Chatbots help you streamline internal processes by providing training materials to employees, onboarding new employees, and providing the essential company database to all employees anytime they need it.

Marketing: Apart from lead generation, chatbots help customers sign up for emails, register for webinars, schedule demos, etc.

Help Desk: Chatbots act as a help center for both internal and external usage. It helps both customers and employees raise IT tickets and request assistance.

Customer Service: Chatbots provide instant answers to FAQs and solve all general issues that customers may have. 

Finishing Thoughts

We can go on and on about the benefits of chatbots for businesses but ultimately it's the results that speak for themselves. There’s overwhelming evidence that proves that bots have significantly helped companies reduce their costs and increase their customer satisfaction.

If you need help with how chatbots can benefit your industry, you can book a demo with us and we can help you understand all the whats and how you may have. Or you can simply sign up and find out for yourself.