Impact of chatbot development on your small business

By Bhupinder Kour

As the competition in the business world is rising, acquiring customers has become the second priority. The prime focus has been on retaining them and providing higher loyalty experience to them. The most practical solution to this situation is to introduce a chatbot to your online presence.

Also called chatterbot or AI-enabled bots, chatbots open a whole new realm of customer engagement across all the business verticals. The bots are considered the future of the customer services and management. Skeptical? Let’s look into these statistics first:

-In a 2017 Worldwide Statista survey, 34% of users said they prefered to get answered by an AI-enabled chatbot instead of a human being.

-67% of users participated in a study declared to prefer getting in touch with their favorite brands and service providers via online chat over a phone call.

-The international chatbot market is predicted to cross 1.25 billion US dollars by 2025, with a CGPR of 24.3%.

-More than 2 billion of business-specific messages are sent on the Facebook Messenger chats, says Facebook IQ.

Now, as you are acquainted with these statistics, let’s move to what will be the impact of developing a chatbot for your business.

[amazon_link asins=’1491974826′ template=’ProductAd’ store=’succeedingi0d-20′ marketplace=’US’ link_id=’e8f0a6e6-a9ff-11e8-824c-b15f178c5bed’]Benefits of having a chatbot for your business

-Amplified customer experience

Chatbots make business interactions simpler. With the help of machine learning, it easily understands the customer concern and provide them with faster and effective resolutions in real time. It employs the existing recorded customer data to determine what sort of services to be offered to the customer, and then showcases appropriate visual content and discount offers. This not only pleases the users, but also improves the brand’s open rate, engagement ratio, and customer retention rate.

-Enhanced sales and marketing services

Chatbots analyze and store the customer information like names, contact details, occupation, age, gender, etc. while interacting with the customers. This makes it easier for the sales and marketing team to understand the customer behavior and pitch accordingly.

-Better social presence

By integrating to the social media platforms, the bot caters to the needs of the users on different platforms and also improves your social presence. It boosts your brand’s position in the social media search, which eventually contributes to your social media marketing strategy.

-Boost to employee engagement

By taking over 50% of the tiresome and routine work, the chatbot makes the employees more available for performing other productive tasks. This encourages the humans to learn and contribute more to their brand, with lesser-to-no chances of leaving the job.

-Lower operational costs

Every year, as per a market survey, around 265 billion support requests are made. And to serve them, a major number of employees and resources are brought on board, which costs brands a considerable amount of $1.3 trillion. But, now with the introduction of chatbots, this task can be done without a mass hiring. An individual bot will entertain three or more users at the same time, 24 x 7 x 365 days, which implies a significant decrease in the operational costs.

Another market research revealed that chatbot will handle about 90% of the customer inquiries in the next five years, which will cut down the business operational costs by $8 billion.

Now, as you are familiar with the benefits of investing in chatbot development along with its growing market scope, are you ready for having your own bot? If so, here are the things you must consider:

[amazon_link asins=’1484231104′ template=’ProductAd’ store=’succeedingi0d-20′ marketplace=’US’ link_id=’f3da88f8-a9ff-11e8-9379-5b9cc5ea9b39′]Things to consider about chatbot development

-The prime motive behind developing a chatbot should be personalization. The user should feel comfortable when using the chatbot, with your bot greeting by the customername and storing all the details for providing customized offers and predicting the customer’s next move.

-The second thing to consider is the design. Though the user will seek for faster and simpler services, an engaging design will add to the value to your bot by making them hooked to your bot.

-Ask users for only requisite, new details rather than asking all the details repeatedly; this avoid irritating the customer.

-Integrate your chatbot with natural langugage process (NLP) library capabilities to minimize the grammatical mistakes and make the conversation more humane.

-Keep a set of KPIs on the basis of which you could analyze and improve the performance of your bot.

Chatbots, as you can sense from the statistics shared above, will soon rule the business market, especially in the field of customer service. They will be integrated into the existing apps or will be launched individually to leverage ample benefits and sustain your business against skyrocketing competition. So, if you don’t want to miss this marvelous opportunity and mark a brighter future of your brand, consider chatbot development today itself. Analyze your business needs and discuss with a reputed mobile app development agency to build a perfect chatbot for your business.

_______

Holding a Bachelor’s degree in Technology and two years of work experience in a mobile app development company, Bhupinder Kour is focused on making technology digestible to all. Being someone who stays updated with the latest tech trends, she’s always armed to write and spread the knowledge. When not found writing, you will find her answering on Quora while sipping coffee.

Leave a Reply

The Self-Employment Survival Guide can help you succeed. Learn all about it here.

Self-Employment Survival Guide book cover