AI and Chatbots are all over the news lately, with companies moving to automate their low-level, repetitive tasks in droves. With the sector relatively new however, some might remain confused as to how exactly chatbots work and whether the return on investment actually lives up to the hype. Does your company need to consider chatbots?
Do you have any departments spending 10+ hours a week on repetitive tasks?
Is your team struggling to keep up with your growing business?
Do you want to increase your conversions from your customer outreach strategy?
If you answered yes to any one of these questions, then your company could benefit from chatbots and see decreased costs as well as increased customer conversions.
First though, what are chatbots?
Chatbots are a useful, efficient form of automated customer engagement. Bots are simple artificial intelligence tools that interact with your customers. Those interactions can be straightforward, like asking a customer to refill their prescription or provide missing information to process an insurance claim, or more complex, like having a customer troubleshoot a problem with their internet service or help them to make a product purchase decision.
Chatbots, using Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, are able to answer your customer inquiries as well as automate your sales & marketing messages via based on the conversation mapping you have created. The context and cognition is built from ingesting existing data from your business which can include: knowledge base, FAQs, case history, incident reports, or just plain old documents.
Companies have started to use chatbots in order to bolster and automate customer support functions, supercharge their marketing and sales campaigns, and streamline IT and HR service desk operations.
Now, why does your company need them and what results will you see?
There are two main reasons companies are choosing to integrate chatbots into their customer engagement strategy. One, is to create and retain loyal and engaged customers and two, is to lower their operational tasks and costs at the same time.
More Engaged Customers
The world is completely mobile. 80% of all internet traffic in the world is now consumed on mobile devices and the most ubiquitous form of communication for mobile is texting or messaging. In order to reach your customers and keep them, active and engaged, companies must effectively engage their customers on their mobile devices
In fact, Gen Xers and Millennials are now texting more than 100 times a day, compared to just an average of 0 to 1 phone call. More than 70 percent of Gen Z and Millennials say they sleep with their phones within reach, and automatically pick up their phones if they’re awakened in the middle of the night.
This is perhaps just one reason why chatbots and automated messaging perform at significantly higher rates than traditional forms of engagement like email and apps. Open rates for text message for example, sit at 98% with the majority opened within 90 seconds, while email is just opened 24% of the time. When you include a call to action in your text message, companies see an average click-through-rate of 36%, compared to an average of just 6% CTR in emails.
Lower Costs for You
Companies that implement chatbots have seen significant reduction in operational costs when it comes to customer support and marketing techniques.
Call center costs for example, have been dramatically reduced because of chatbots, with companies reporting a 50% reduction in call volume since implementation. If you’re struggling to keep up with customer support demand, chatbots can be a great way to automate repetitive support functions and leave your reps to focus on what they do best.
Would you like to learn more about what your company can do with chatbots? Reach out to us at [email protected] with any questions you may have.
