Top 10 Ways Online Businesses Can Provide a Better Customer Experience with Chatbots

A bad customer experience can quickly lead to a brand’s degrowth. It increases customer churn, reduces potential revenue growth, drives negative word-of-mouth publicity, reduces net promoter score, and ultimately sends a lot more business to your competitors. This is not a risk that any brand should take.

67% of customers have stated that a bad experience with one brand has led them to do business with another. When they do have a bad experience, 37% say they will gladly share negative customer feedback on social media—which, as we all know, can quickly snowball into astronomical proportions, putting brands in long-term ‘damage control’ mode.

The truth is that providing a poor customer experience can have far more negative consequences. Loss of customers is the force that will compel you to change your customer support strategy quite strongly.

How to provide a better customer experience: Tips for your business

• Send automated messages that are relevant and helpful – Instead of requiring an employee to respond to every inquiry and interaction, relying on AI-powered text messages frees manpower to focus on the most critical tasks while still providing customers with real-time, personalized service.

• Use chatbots to improve customer service – Instead of requiring an employee to respond to every inquiry and interaction, relying on AI-powered text messages frees up staff to focus on the most critical tasks while still providing customers with real-time, personalized service.

• Automate the process of interacting with customers – AI-powered chatbots, automated emails, etc. are very useful in providing immediate responses to the queries of the customers.

• Respond quickly to customer queries – Hence the customers will get a fast response to common FAQ-type questions and this will reduce the time they spend in getting these answers.

• Use chatbots to automate tasks and processes – Chatbots don’t just provide instant answers to common queries but can also assign certain tasks to the relevant department. For instance, if the customer wants to resolve some technical issue, then the chatbot can divert them to the technical department or arrange for a call from that department to the customer.

• Monitor customer sentiment and interactions with chatbots – Using a labeled dataset, chatbots can identify users’ sentiments from unstructured input and categorize them as positive, negative, or neutral. Chatbots can respond or take necessary actions based on the emotional tone depicted in customer text.

• Use chatbots to improve customer retention rates – You should make it possible for your customers to purchase directly from the chat interface in order to keep them with your chatbot. You should always look for ways to improve your chatbots and give your customers more options. Because your competitors are also looking for ways to improve their businesses, you must be constantly on the move.

Benefits of chatbots for businesses

The use of artificial intelligence-based chatbots has provided businesses with many benefits. One of the chief benefits is that it reduces the time taken to resolve every query and saves time, money, and human effort. It also becomes possible to provide 24×7 customer support to your customers and enhance their experience. It is also possible to install multi-lingual chatbots that can be completely integrated into your existing systems.

• Improved customer engagement – The advancement in artificial intelligence technology has enabled software designers to create well-advanced, machine learning-based chatbots that improve with time. These chatbots provide the user with the experience of chatting with a human being.

• Reduced customer support costs – Engaging human agents to deal with every small customer query can prove to be very expensive. Usually, unless there is a major complaint regarding some of the products or services, it is possible to resolve queries with the help of AI-enabled chatbots. Hence using such chatbots will reduce the cost of maintaining the customer support department.

• More personalized experience – The human-like chatbots are very good at providing a personalized experience to the customers when they initiate a chat with them. These chatbots are great and understand the customer’s query and their state of mind from some recognizable keywords used by customers when making a complaint. They respond in accordance with the complaint or query and make the customer happy with prompt services.

• Eliminate language barriers – Advanced AI technology allows you to install multi-lingual chatbots which can be used to identify the language that the consumer is using. They then use the same language to answer the queries, and this enhances the customer experience to a large extent. Modern technology allows you to choose one or many languages according to the geo-political area that the chatbot is meant for.

• Get scalability in support – Chatbots are able to meet customer demands at scale and this makes them extremely useful. These bots are helping many businesses avail successful customer support and services. They are also helping businesses in almost every industry scale their customer service and improve the rate of customer satisfaction along with it.

Few examples of businesses that have successfully implemented chatbots.

Many companies in varied industries have used chatbots with a positive impact on their marketing and have benefitted a lot from them. These companies have decided the use AI technology with a positive impact on customer services and sales.

One thing that you should bear in mind is that customers are smart and most of the time they are able to tell the difference between a chatbot and a human agent. Hence the companies like HelloFresh have chatbots that straightaway acknowledges that you are talking to a machine. This gives the customers a feeling of authenticity of the business and they chat comfortably with the bots or ask for a human agent if the nature of their query is complicated.

There are many other companies that provide similar authentic experiences to the customers, thus making them loyal to your brand. At the same time, they also are more likely to opt for you every time they require your services or products. They also act as your brand ambassadors and spread word-of-mouth publicity about your brand.

Let us look at some other companies that have used chatbots in order to enhance their leads and sales.

Domino’s Pizza

This company has a chatbot for Messenger as well as their website and the name given to the bot is also DOM which is true to their brand voice. With the help of this bot, customers can place orders, and customize their pizza within the same chat with a chatbot. This bot also has the ability to save and repeat orders and find the store closest to you.

Of course, digital ordering of foodstuff is old in the market, but with Domino’s, you don’t need to download or install anything as there is no app. You can do it all on your mobile.

Mountain Dew

This is another classic example of the drink that claims to be the official drink of gamers. They use a chatbot to connect directly with their customers, leveraging advocacy and engagement to take their bot and branding to new heights.

This energy drink has created a partnership with Twitch the world’s leading live streaming platform their PC gaming rig manufacturer.

Their first combined chatbot was named DEWbot and it played a major role in their larger promotions. In fact, their chatbot became so popular that Mountain Dew also won the Shorty award for best use of chatbots.

There are many other companies that have successfully used chatbots in their sales or customer support departments with a lot of success. It has been observed generally that it is always better for the chatbot to present itself as one instead of trying to make the customer believe that it is a human. This direct and truthful approach to the matter wins the trust and satisfaction of a customer.

How to create a successful chatbot: proper design, user onboarding, engagement loops

It is not at all easy to be a chatbot because customers judge them a lot. In fact, they’ve been labeled as boring, poor listeners, awkward conversationalists, and, worst of all, ineffective. To be fair, there are many bad chatbots out there.

However, this is not their fault because bots are created by humans. So we need to stop blaming the bots and start thinking about better ways to design chatbots that are helpful, engaging, and fun. The good news is that it’s much simpler than you might think.

To implement a good chatbot for your company, you don’t need a specialized IT department, but you do need to put some thought into its creation.

The design of the bot depends on your brand voice and the purpose of the bot. For instance, if a bot is designed to be used in a children’s garment website then it can afford to be colorful and fun. However, one meant for a hospital needs to be more formal. Hence, designing the personality of the bot depends on its purpose.

An onboarding chatbot is one that offers assistance to new users in learning about your products. These bots answer questions about features and functionality along with providing them help if they face difficulty anywhere. These chatbots are usually artificial intelligence powered and they improve with time.

Engagement loops are the name given to design strategies that make the chatbot more interactive with the customers who in turn become more engaged in the conversation. It enhances customer retention and gives them a better experience. This in turn requires lesser human intervention and this in turn saves cost.

Conclusion: Why is now the perfect time to build a chatbot and how businesses can benefit from them?

As we have seen there are multiple benefits to adopting the use of well-designed chatbots. If you are waiting for the right time to include chatbots in your marketing or customer care strategy then don’t. in fact, now is the perfect time to opt for this cutting-edge technology. This is because even now it is very easy to opt for chatbots even if you do not know how to write even one line of code.

With the help of ready-to-use chatbots created by the companies like Botspice, you can build and install a chatbot with a distinct process. This process is usually identified and recommended by the company’s self-design instructions. Hence, do not wait and simply go for this excellent technology that will add impetus to your strategies for your internet business.

Simply conduct rather simple research online to look for the chatbot that suits your purpose and simply integrate it with your existing systems. You will almost immediately see more traffic on your website or e-commerce site and better feedback from the most satisfied consumers.