Let’s dive into what chatbots are all about: the ins and outs of what they offer and why you might consider using chatbots for your business.
A chatbot is a service that your clients interact with via a chat interface. Chatbots live in any major chat product, be it Facebook Messenger, Slack or Snapchat.
By using a chatbot, your clients won’t have to browse or have endless (and tedious) conversations with customer service representatives. Chatbots quickly become the best personal shopper, problem solver and friend your clients have never met.
In marketing, for example, chatbots can guide customers to the information they’re looking for, inspire them or help them choose the right products, or enhance employee productivity by automating necessary processes. You’ve seen these on Your.MD, where medical advice is readily dispensed as soon as you describe your symptoms, at H&M’s outfit inspiration chatbot that is cleverly saving shoppers from the deluge of the online shopping jungle, or Talla’s chatbots designed to onboard and train employees.
There are two types of chatbots that can simulate human conversations and the type you go with really depends on your needs and on what problem you’re trying to solve:
But first things first. What you, and only you, can figure out is what issue or problem you’re trying to solve with your chatbot. And that’s the hardest part of building chatbots – it’s really not the technical part.
It’s configuring a chatbot that users will keep coming back to and that will continue to provide value for your users time after time.
Once you’ve figured out the problem you’re setting out to solve, you’re onto the technical part (which we’ll cover in detail later): you simply pick your platform and set up your server.
And off you go, flying into the realm of AI. Welcome to the chatbot club.
Chatbots are emerging out of a perfect storm. As the personalization of virtual communication and predictive assistance develops through the use of sensors and wearable devices that are synced with each other, AI accuracy is improving (up to 90% today) in machine parsing and understanding requests. And, these trends are all ripe for the picking, ready to be integrated into the world of messaging services. That’s not an understatement: three out of four of all Internet users around the globe are using messaging services today.
So, since the app age is over and you no longer need to fret over developing an app for your business, take comfort in the fact that just five apps are dominating global app use. And, no surprise, Facebook, Slack and Snapchat are right there leading the five. So, the logical step is to integrate your business’s chatbot into one of the platforms that your clients or customers use routinely every day. Easy, right? It actually is, sort of.
So when should you think about building a chatbot into your business model? Chatbots make sense when:
Customer service and online retail are the obvious examples in the perfect match of a chatbot to a business use.
But they can go further. Bots like Shop Spring help shoppers narrow down what they’re looking for, taking the active research part out of buying, ultimately making a potentially overwhelming experience into a pleasant one.
And, Facebook Messenger is initiating and completing orders through payment services (Paypal, Venmo), or restaurant meal delivery services, saving your clients’ contacts and favorite menu items for future orders. In a day and age when we think twice about picking up the phone, chatbots make transactions seamless and, with zero chance of miscommunication, a win win for everyone.
Or, take healthcare, which demands the same high-level of security and confidentiality as financial transactions. HealthTap and other medical bots connect patients with doctors on call in real time, store their health records and billing, and help them find additional resources.
In all these cases, chatbots are making communication seamless, creating better user experiences and strengthening companies’ ties to their customers.
In a nutshell: done well, chatbots are the ultimate brand loyalty builder.
While chatbots are great at saving you time, they’re also changing the way you could be conducting your business. They can monetize your social media platform, push promotions and offers on demand, keep an eye on the internal processes of your company and be responsive to your customers and team members 24/7.
Bots in e-Commerce
E-Commerce is the most obvious candidate for chatbots. From pre-sale to post-sale, you can program chatbots to become personal shoppers, offer targeted, product-specific discounts or coupons in real time and make targeted suggestions based on your customer’s location and browsing history.
And, they can help you seal the real deal where the big brands struggle the most: after you’ve locked in a sale, get feedback, keep them updated on shipping notifications and build trust further by easing your customer’s path toward returns, scheduling service or putting them in contact with third-party service providers. Be there for your customers post-sale and they will thank you in the future.
The platform of choice
What you might not know about the cutthroat e-Commerce revolution is that Facebook Messenger has been leading the way, which, given that it has the highest conversion rate of all the apps (as well as 1.2 Bn users), is possibly the best thing an e-Commerce company could hear. What’s a better way to engage customers than Facebook Messenger, where your customers are already spending a few hours each day? Responding promptly to customer queries, requests or complaints on social media can help your business grow by 20-40%. There’s nothing better than instant communication.
Beyond e-Commerce
In addition to upping sales, cutting costs, and acting as your customer care, sales, marketing, HR, IT, and other teams, chatbots can act as a personal assistant, sending emails, scheduling and re-scheduling meetings and events, or order supplies, manage internal knowledge databases and more.
Or, have your chatbot save you time by helping you to stay on top of news and industry goings-on, or automating other business processes generally. Program your chatbot to answer FAQs from employees or customers, get feedback from team members, or help it upsell and cross-sell based on a customer’s history. The opportunities for automation are literally endless.
Perhaps most valuable of all, chatbots know what your customers truly think about your brand as they gather data from each interaction they have and offer your customers the opportunity to give you feedback and share their feelings. <3 ?
MyTradingHub’s motto -- “connect, share and become a better trader with MyTradingHub” -- just wasn’t connecting well with subscribers back in 2016.
MyTrainingHub is a web-based social and educational platform for users looking to trade on the foreign exchange markets. However, as one of several forex training companies out there, MyTradingHub struggled to keep the new traders around long enough to complete their training.
Their primary metric measures the number of users who have viewed 80% of MyTradingHub’s content and performed specific tasks like quizzes. The metric was declining, as users supposedly “forgot about it.” As MyTradingHub’s CEO put it, “in finance and education, timing is everything.” They needed to get ahead of the game again -- to stay there.
So, MyTradingHub launched an interactive Facebook Messenger chatbot to help users interact with the trading platform and continue their training. The primary metric increased by 59% and the company’s pages experienced 17% more traffic towards the training pages, a definite up in user engagement -- with zero changes to the company’s existing content.
