Discover the Benefits of Chatbots and why is it a Growing Trend?

Chatbot technology enables organizations to reduce costs, time, and human resources. The most common domains where businesses deploy conversational bots are customer support, after-sales service, and CRM, followed by sales and marketing.

According to a 2017 survey, consumers were more receptive to chatbots in the online retail industry though the technology, today, has entered almost all industry verticals.

Based on a research by Statista, the size of the chatbot market is estimated to touch nearly $1.25 billion in 2025, which is a significant increase from the market size in 2016 which witnessed under $200 million.

What are the benefits of Chatbot that businesses can avail?

Chatbot technology has been considered a powerful tool to help businesses improve their customer service, sales, and marketing. Chatbot software applications simulate human conversations and offer customized responses to user questions and queries. By using chatbots, businesses reduce costs, increase productivity, and assure customer satisfaction. There is no question why enterprises want to hire chatbot developers that are renowned for building customized solutions for their marketing and customer support needs.

Here are some of the driving factors of chatbots popularity and some of the major advantages of chatbot integration for various business processes.

Let us look at each factor and chatbot benefits in detail:

Increased customer engagement

Chatbots can provide tailored and timely responses relevant to customers’ queries, requirements, and preferences; additionally, they offer proactive actions, recommendations, and tips to customers as per their behavior patterns, context, and purposes.

The popularity of chatbots is also due to their capability to make customers feel valued, privileged, and honored while also bringing down the workload and costs of the human workforce for businesses. The amazing technology of chatbots creates a positive and memorable customer experience leading to higher retention, loyalty, and advocacy.

Improved lead generation

Businesses get immense benefits from chatbots for lead generation. The bots engage potential customers through personalized and interactive conversation; moreover, they can provide relevant information, answer general questions, and qualify leads as per users’ needs and preferences. Chatbots can also ask for and save contact details, schedule an appointment, and follow up with leads through emails or pushed messages, or notifications. By using chatbots, businesses increase the lead generation process and enhance conversions.

Reduced customer service costs

The biggest benefit of chatbots that drives the growing popularity of chatbot applications is automatizing customer service integrated with artificial intelligence development at markedly reduced costs. Customer services, for businesses, are costly and time-consuming affairs. Chatbots, an automated software program, can interact with customers via text or voice, and provide solutions in the form of answers and guidance. Here the conversational AI Chatbots benefits in customer service are unmatched.

AI Chatbots are known to reduce customer service costs by:

• Handling common and repetitive queries
• Freeing up human staff for any complex and personalized tasks
• Offering 24/7 service and thus nullifying the need to hire more human staff
• Improving customer satisfaction and loyalty and thus bringing down the risks of churn and negative feedback.
• Integrating with other systems and platforms to streamline customer’s journey and increase conversions.

Monitor consumer data to gain insights

As a part of AI in mobile development, the present-day chatbots are used to monitor consumer data and gain insights that can help businesses enhance their products, and improve marketing through the best customer satisfaction.

Here are some ways chatbots can monitor consumer data and gain insights:

• Collect feedback from customers via surveys, reviews/ratings, or open-ended questions. This can help businesses improve their products and services.
• Analyze customer behavior and preferences based on their interactions. This helps businesses segment their customers and customize their offerings to different groups of customers.
• Track and check customer satisfaction and loyalty based on their responses, actions, or emotions. Businesses, through this data, can measure the effectiveness of their chatbot and their efficiency in serving customers.

Devise conversational marketing strategies

A conversational marketing strategy is a way of utilizing chatbot to engage with leads, qualify them, and drive them toward a desired action like booking an appointment, signing up for a subscription, or making a purchase. These are some of the business benefits of chatbots in implementing marketing strategies for improved growth.

A conversational AI chatbot can be vital in devising a marketing strategy with these steps:

• Define the goal and the target audience of the chatbot: what is the primary goal of the chatbot? Who are the ideal customers or prospects a chatbot wants to reach?
• Define the conversation flow and script for the chatbot: how shall the chatbot greet the visitors, ask questions, provide answers, and tackle queries? What are the key messages and CTAs that the chatbot conveys?
• Choose the chatbot platform plus channel: where will the chatbot be deployed? On a portal, a mobile application, a social media platform, or a messaging application? How will the chatbot attract and retain visitors’ attention?
• Test and optimize the chatbot: how will the chatbot measure its performance and effectiveness? What are the parameters and measurements that the bot will track and analyze? How will the tool learn from user feedback and improve its responses?

Meeting customers’ or users’ expectations

Chatbot and related tools are becoming more popular as a surefire way to ensure customer service and support. To meet customer expectations it is best that you as a business, partner with an expert app development company to build modern chatbots with the following features:

• Personalization: Chatbots customize their responses based on the customer’s profile, preferences, and history. The tools use a friendly and conversational tone to match the brand’s voice.
• Relevance: Chatbots provide accurate and relevant information to answer the customer’s questions or solve their problem. This is one of the top advantages of chatbots in customer service.
• Empathy: AI Chatbots show empathy and understanding of the customer’s emotions and needs; additionally, they are engineered to apologize for any inconvenience or mistake, and offer solutions or alternatives.
• Transparency: Chatbot software tools frankly declare their identity and limitations as a chatbot without pretending to be human.
• Feedback: The chatbot benefits with customer feedback received by employing the Tools of chatbots can be used to improve their performances and functionalities.

Achieve scalability of support

One of the main benefits of chatbot is their ability to provide scalable support for customers or visitors. These tools can handle multiple queries at the same time with no compromise on speed or quality.

In addition, these software tools can also leverage NLP (natural language processing) and ML (machine learning) to study customer needs and offer solutions accordingly. Another benefit of Chatbot is that it can be integrated with other software tools and channels to target customers anywhere in the world.

Streamline customer onboarding process

Customer onboarding is the process of introducing new customers to a specific product or service. This process extends with help to achieve their desired outcomes. Considered by experts as a crucial step in building trust, this process could be time-consuming, complex, and pricey when you rely on manual methods or a human workforce. Chatbot tools, here, are the breakthrough.

Chatbots interact with potential customers through texts or voice and can provide personalized guidance through intelligent answers. Plus, they collect feedback and give suggestions throughout the customer journey.

Here is how they can streamline the customer onboarding process:

• Reduce friction and improve engagement by greeting customers, portraying the value proposition, and guiding them through the sign-up and activation, etc., process. These tools can also provide tips and tutorials to encourage customers to explore the features and benefits of specific products or services.
• Save time and manhours by handling multiple customers simultaneously, 24/7, without requiring human support. These automated tools markedly reduce the workload of supporting teams, and free up their time to focus on other complex or urgent tasks.
• Improve customer satisfaction and retention by providing instant and sensible responses, and tailoring the conversation to the customer’s needs and preferences; furthermore, the bots also collect feedback, check user satisfaction, and identify potential issues or risks.

Balance automation with a human touch

Software tools of chatbots interact with users through text messages or voice notes to provide business benefits such as improved customer service, reduced costs, and enhanced user experience. However, these bots also face some challenges such as maintaining user trust and handling complex requests.

Developers have been constantly improving chatbots that can balance automation with a human touch, which means they don’t just perform tasks efficiently and accurately, but also show empathy, personality, and humor when needed.

This is one of the top reasons of chatbots popularity and a leading chatbot benefit for businesses that is revolutionizing all the business process. Thus, contemporary chatbot can create more engaging and satisfying interactions with customers to assure their loyalty and retention.

Chatbot platforms and developers’ tools

Chatbot platforms and developers’ tools simply mean software apps that enable users to create, deploy and manage chatbots. Chatbot platforms provide various features such as…

• Natural Language Processing (NLP) to allow tools to learn and generate natural language
• Dialogue management to control the flow and logic of the conversation
• User interface design to define the appearance and functionality of the chatbot
• Analytics to measure the performance and user satisfaction of the chatbot
• Integrations to connect the chatbot to external services and platforms.

Developer tools are specialized software that helps chatbot developers to program, debug, test, and optimize their chatbots. These tools include…

• Code editors, the programs that allow developers to write and edit code
• Frameworks, the collections of code to provide common functionality and structure for chatbots
• Libraries, the sets of code with specific features and functions for chatbots
• APIs, the interfaces that allow chatbots to communicate with other applications; and
• SDKs, the tools to simplify the development of chatbots for specific platforms or languages.

The Popularity of Chatbots is here to stay

Chatbots have already become an integral part of the modern business landscape and knowing how to build a chatbot that serves your business well is the key. The custom chatbot features and benefits for companies include but are not limited to customer service, marketing, sales, and productivity.

These specialized automated tools are not a passing trend, but a lasting innovation that will continue to grow and evolve with the challenging and changing needs and preferences of customers and market trends alike. Chatbot software tools would continue to provide significant benefits for both customers and businesses in the coming years.

Ashish Parmar

He is the Co-Founder and CEO of Prismetric . An enthusiastic entrepreneur, interested to discuss new app ideas, rich gadget tricks and trends, and admires signature tech business styles to readily embrace. He enjoys learning most modern app crafting methods, exploring smart technologies and passionate about writing his thoughts too. Inventions related to mobile and software technology inspire Ashish and he likes to inspire the like-minded community through the finesse of his work.