Benefits of Using Chatbots in your Business

The chatbot is a customer relationship management tool. Speed, availability, if these conversational robots do not replace humans, significantly improve customer satisfaction.

The chatbot should be integrated into your digital marketing strategy, but be careful not to fall into certain traps. It is widely requested by users of social networks, such as Facebook, but also on company websites. It is, moreover, relatively easy to set up, even without technical knowledge.

What is a Chatbot?

The chatbot is a customer relationship automation tool, based on the principle of artificial intelligence. More precisely, this device is an automaton that is able to converse with the client through instant messaging.

Like the voice assistant from Apple or Google, the user can ask questions about your business, your products or your services to the bot, which will then be able to answer it, without your having to intervene.

To do this, you will then have to anticipate the potential questions of your customers and prospects in order to integrate them into your chatbot.

What is the Point of Chatbots?

Deploying this technology on your website or on Facebook Messenger can have many advantages if it is correctly incorporated into your digital communication strategy :

  • it allows you to relieve your customer service of common and easily resolved questions, and focus only on complex requests. Intrinsically, this saves up to 30% of the costs associated with the latter;
  • it helps to strengthen customer satisfaction. They are available 24/24 and 7/7. They therefore make it possible to meet Internet users’ needs for autonomy and immediacy. While 60% of consumers shop in the evenings and weekends, only 50% of France’s customer services are available on weekends. Setting up 24/7 customer service can be very expensive and is therefore not within all businesses’ reach. However, this gap between consumers’ real needs and the ability of companies to respond is often a source of dissatisfaction for customers and can cause opportunities to be lost. A conversational bot improves customer satisfaction and sometimes even builds loyalty;

Similarly, according to a Forrester study, 72% of Internet users prefer to find answers themselves on the web, rather than calling on customer service. Indeed, the response time of telephone customer services are often long. In addition, it is sometimes necessary to go through several interlocutors to achieve a solution to your problem. A chatbot will allow the customer to get instant responses.

They are also interacting more and more naturally. In the past, the machine’s difficulties in understanding and processing natural language hampered the implementation of this technology. Today, the considerable advances in artificial intelligence lead to much better satisfaction rates.

Pitfalls to avoid in its design

Be careful, if the chatbot is a great technological tool, it is not suitable for everyone or for all companies. In order for it to have real added value in your marketing strategy, you must avoid falling into certain traps:

Create a Chatbot because it’s trendy:

Before creating your own virtual agent, ask yourself the objectives that the latter will fulfill. Wanting to do like everyone else is, in fact, not a relevant technique. It will therefore first be necessary to audit your customer service internally, its strengths and weaknesses. The idea is to find out what can be improved and whether setting up a robot can fill in some gaps.

Not adapting to customers:

Like any marketing approach, it is important to know who your chatbot is for (age, gender, location, etc.) to build a solid and effective knowledge base. The more you know about the target user base, the better the chatbot will meet your objectives. Why? Quite simply because it allows you to anticipate the recurring questions of your target and to give them the best answers and therefore to improve the quality of the user experience.

Expect the chatbot to respond to complex issues:

The purpose of a chatbot is not to replace your “customer service”. It is designed to answer more or less basic questions but is not able to handle complex requests that require human intervention. For example, the robot will be able to tell the customer what procedure to follow to obtain a refund, but it will not be able to process the request itself.

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