In today's world, messaging has become one of the most popular methods of communication. Whether over text or through a messenger application, it's how a lot of people prefer talking with one another. Because of this, businesses have started developing chatbots, customers can message and talk to as if they were human. More and more businesses moving towards automation are using chatbots for online customer service to resolve issues and answer simple questions.
The global chatbot market is expected to surpass approximately $994 million by 2024, at an annual growth rate of 27%. Chatbots have evolved from the days of stilted, binary conversation to not only understanding typed or spoken words, but also analyzing the context of usage.
First: what is a chatbot?
In the digital world, a bot is a script or a software program designed to carry out repetitive automated tasks. They are useful in delivering personalized content experience, answering common customer service FAQ's, and streamlining product purchases. Chatbots work within chat platforms which determine the possible ways in which the chatbot can interact with a user, group, or team. However, the actual behaviour of the chatbot is determined by the bot itself. Zoho Cliq is one example of a bot-building platform which allows users to build chatbots to fit their requirements.
Here are some use cases in which using a bot to regulate your everyday workflows could come in handy.
Increasing conversational rates
In this era, "instant" has become the go-to word, with the rate of chatbot use ballooning in the digital world. By using AI technology for conversational marketing, businesses can automate routine processes to, engage and assist customers more effectively. When used for customer support, AI chatbots reduce the amount of time invested in doing a mundane task, and bots powered with natural language processing can initiate conversations with customers to assist them.
Studies have found chatbots can answer 80% of standard questions, and 37% of people polled used customer service bots to get instant information. Chatbots are capable of gathering huge volumes of customer data from multiple mediums and translating them into useful information and valuable business insights which help personalize customer experience.
Replace search strings
Doing an online search can bring you results that may be irrelevant and useless. One of the limitations of a search engine is its dependency on key words and phrases that attempt to translate individual human thoughts into something a machine can understand. Chatbots potentially change the way you seek information. Instead of listing hundreds of results, specialized chatbots in different domains do the legwork for you, thereby eliminating your need to search.
Gain customer insights and retain them
"When the customer comes first, the customer will last" - Robert Half
Depending on the programming language you use, your chatbot can gather insights on your customers and analyze their purchasing patterns and habits. By monitoring your customers' patterns, you can learn more about the products and services they prefer. You may even find out if there are common problems or issues with your organization's offerings.
Your chatbot can also store and analyze information on the types of questions it's commonly asked. Not only does this make the chatbot better equipped to answer future questions and upsell additional products, it also gives you a better understanding of what your customers need to know to complete the purchase. With this information, you will be better equipped to market effectively.
Pushing out notifications
Since chatbots can intelligently predict customer behaviour, they can push appropriate notifications to the right people at the right time. This way, notifications can be a powerful marketing tool to reach and retain your customers. There are typically two types of push notifications, namely:
1. Notifications on product updates: Chatbots can send messages about new features, bug fixes, maintenance updates, and product usage statistics.
2. Notifications on promotions: Chatbots can also push out advertisements, discounts, deals, and sponsored messages to engage customers.
Automating everyday workflows
Chatbot automation can considerably reduce the time invested in doing a repetitive task, such as pulling leads or parsing and processing data. With chatbots, you can streamline a variety of business processes across all your teams. Instead of your employees spending a significant part of their day completing routine yet essential tasks, your chatbot can do it and give them more time to focus on revenue-generating activities. Put simply, many activities your employees complete on a daily basis can be handled by a chatbot.
Bottom line
With a multitude of possibilities available with bots, they are here to stay. The present and future of AI has the potential to make any business a success. It's time to leave behind traditional customer service and communication and say hello to the opportunities chatbots provide.
As you have mentioned in the article that a chatbot can notify whenever a particular site is having any updates . So would you please tell me the procedure of embedding this feature in any chatbot.
Hi Meenal, The chatbot works in a messaging software. It is like a company/team's internal assistant. You can use the bots webhook handler to connect it to a third party service of your choice. Also to be noted is that, you cannot host this chatbot on a website!