Chatbots in Business – How to Effectively Use Them?

Image by mohamed Hassan from Pixabay

Have you ever wondered why companies operate 24 hours on their websites? Perhaps you’re also fascinated with how you tend to receive instant responses to your queries online. Well, that’s the power of chatbots.

Who knew that powerful automated tools would act on behalf of human beings and perform human duties perfectly? Indeed, this artificial intelligence (AI) resource is now moving businesses to greater heights no one has ever imagined before.

If you’re newly learning about Shopify chatbot and how you can use it for your business, understand that; the bot is an AI tool that operates like a salesperson. The bot greets customers in your online retail store. It then proceeds to offer the help that your potential clients need by finding whatever they’re looking for.

The AI chatbot will ask customers relevant questions to better understand their needs. In short, the chatbot apps interact with potential clients the same way a human customer service representative would.

Many customers continue to benefit from Shopify stores because they help shorten the sales cycle. Customers manage to find whatever they want faster than it usually happens with the typical sales process.

So, AI Chatbots are tools that businesses use 24/7 to help customers ask questions, resolve their problems, and meet their needs quickly. Presently, 1.4 billion people use them on an almost regular basis.

Chatbot growth is now prominent across many industries. LeadBots is one of the chatbot marketing apps that many businesses continue to embrace. These bots are lead generation chatbots that are pre-built and designed for each particular industry your business could base on.

The bot helps gather lead information. It also aids in the customer qualification and appointment setting. So, you get to benefit from:

• Targeting the right customers, with a 5% to 15% conversion rate, or even higher depending on the lead offer
• Qualified leads help you maximize your time on customers that are likely to close
• Easy and customized setups

One great advantage of AI chatbots is that they can back up multi-language. This is particularly useful for global brands. So, while initiating a conversation, a chatbot can ask customers the user language they prefer. The tool can also detect the user’s language via their phrase input.

Our article explores further how to make good use of chatbots in businesses.

How to Use Chatbots Effectively in Your Business

Image by Satheesh Sankaran from Pixabay

1. Decide How You’ll Build Your Bot

There are two common methods, which you can use to build your Chatbot. They include:

The Use of Coding

This option favors those with an excellent command of coding languages like Python. It’s also favorable to those who can spend extra time and money creating a chatbot.

You can build your Chatbot from scratch and customize it to work your way. But, you’ll also require a technical team to help out.

Using a Chatbot Builder

A chatbot-building platform is ideal for those who don’t know much about coding. It’s also favorable if you’re not ready to spend much time and money building the chatbot app.

2. Establish a Clear Purpose for Your Chatbot

If you’re planning to use Shopify bots for your business, you must first determine why you will use them. Ask yourself, ‘what’s the purpose of using the online chatbot in my business?’

The purpose can be your audience’s needs. In this case, you can establish a Shopify chat purposely to offer your users what they need. You use the bot to meet your audience’s needs through:

• Providing relevant answers to their questions
• Informing them about the products they can buy
• Highlighting the services you offer that can benefit them
• Directing them to relevant articles they need to read

Whatever it is, you need to start by identifying the cause behind building your chatbot app. This is the only way to begin right and ensure the bot benefits your business.

Once you establish a clear purpose, it becomes easier to select the right platform. You can now create platforms like a website chatbot or a Facebook messenger Shopify chat.

Selecting the platform will depend entirely on your audience’s needs and preferences. So, you’ll have to target the platform your audience uses the most to connect with you. Afterward, you can establish your online Chatbot for the particular site.

Other platforms that you can use to build your bot include:

• SMS Text that uses SMS mobile texting
• eCommerce platforms, which are systems that integrate with or work on an eCommerce platform
• Slack
• Twitter
• Kik

3. Gain a Deeper Understanding of Your Customers

Your customers will hardly talk to your business to give feedback. Instead, Chatbots provide your business with comprehensive and actionable customer records.

You get to understand the areas your customers like or dislike most. This will help your business improve its products and services to satisfy customers’ needs better.

Remember, the probability of selling your goods and services is proportional to the data provided by the customer. Thankfully, chatbots can help improve the rate of customer data.

In short, bots are ideal tools for businesses to learn customer expectations better. With the data given by the chatbot-customer interaction, it becomes easier to set customer-specific targets.

The best part is that the bots can always give you feedback. Hence, you can plan with your team how to make improvements where necessary. You can achieve this quickly by making some inferences from the data given by the bot.

Bottomline

The progression in AI has given businesses valuable tools and resources that continue to benefit both business owners and customers.

It helps to know that conversational marketing will be the next beautiful aspect that will revolutionize customer service. Chatbots are already here with us. And from the look of things, they’ll continue to sustain conversational marketing firmly.

Research has shown that Chatbot’s cost savings alone in the banking industry are projected to attain $7.3 B globally in 2023. This will be a notable increase from 2019 where the cost savings from bots were at $209 M.

Indeed, those who have already initiated their chatbot apps are in the right direction. But, it’s not too late for the businesses that are not yet using them. Remember that this is a powerful tool that will take your business to greater levels by:

• Boosting your revenue
• Improving user experience
• Enhancing customer loyalty