You have most likely tried sending a message to a business through social media platform or messaging app. What you didn’t expect is an immediate response—in an instant, you were able to receive an answer to your query.

In today’s fast-paced world, even customer support concerns must be addressed quickly; otherwise, you’re putting your business in jeopardy. Fortunately, there are ways to do this without the need to train your representatives to type faster—chatbots.

Chatbots is perhaps one of the most powerful weapons for marketers today, leading to the prevalence of conversational marketing. As marketing aims to find your target audience and communicate to them how your product or service can solve their problem, chatbots, alongside messaging apps, have become essential in conversational marketing.

Not only can they address consumer concerns swiftly, but they can also be leveraged for engagement because there are billions of possible leads. Facebook Messenger alone has 1.2 billion monthly active users. An estimated 5 billion monthly active users are logged into different messaging apps. That’s billions of people that you can easily reach out to listen to their needs.

What is a Chatbot?

In its simplest form, a chatbot is a software or computer program that utilizes a messaging app to communicate with people. In light of businesses, it can be used to simulate human conversations through machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI), and natural learning processing (NLP) to provide customer support.

Chatbots are programmed to automatically engage with messages they receive. Their responses may be processed in the same way, but their answers differ depending on specific keywords in the messages. ML integration helps them adapt their responses to fit the conversation.

Chatbots were reportedly have been in development as early as the 1950s, but it was only recently when it started being used heavily as a business tool. Perhaps it was driven by the rise of mobile use, with data from Google Trends showing that the search volume around chatbots grew 19 times more as people began to realize their value.

Facebook, which owns and operates its own messaging app Messenger, also presented data relevant to chatbots, showing that: 

• 2 billion messages are sent between consumers and businesses monthly
• 56% of customers would rather send a message than call customer service
• 53% are more likely to choose companies that they can message

In another survey conducted by conversational marketing platform Drift, it was found that people all over the world are using online chat on business websites to send a message, including key decision-makers and executives (making up 41%). Meanwhile, consumers expect chatbots to provide instant answers, with 75% of the respondents saying so; however, it came to a close second to online chat.

How to Choose the Right Chatbot Platform

When choosing the right chatbot platform to build your own from scratch, here are a few factors to consider.

Customizable and Can Be Integrated with Your Other Systems

Choose a platform that can share messages between users, bots, and your other cross-functional systems, as well as share the success and failure categorization of messages.

Easy to Use

If you can write your code, choose a platform that can support it. However, you can also go for one that comes with customizable templates to make things easier and faster. Make sure that updating to improve its features can easily be done.

Multiple Channel Support

You’d want to work on a platform that supports bots for a website, mobile apps, SMS, e-mail or social media, as well as allowing interaction with corporate tools like Slack, Telegram, Skype, and others.

NLP and Speech Support

Even though you have an option to update your bot, you preferably want a platform that will allow it to grow through NLP and speech support. With these two on hand, your bot will likely have a better understanding of user intent so it can respond with relevant content.

Industry Experience and Domain Knowledge

Choose a platform provider that understands your business nature and industry. Their experience and knowledge are useful in assessing and identifying which features actually matter to facilitate better bottom lines for you.

Offers Free Demo or Trial

Since chatbot development may be quite an expensive endeavor for small businesses, it will be helpful to go with a provider that offers a free trial. ConvertoBot, for instance, offers a free demo.

What are the Benefits of Using Chatbots for Your Small Business?

If you think chatbots are only advantageous to large businesses because they can easily afford it, perhaps learning about its benefits can change your mind. 

Save Time and Money

As you try to scale up, you’re bound to need to be more hands-on, which also means more workers to pay. While chatbots cannot completely replace the human workforce, it is an inexpensive alternative that requires one-time investment and can help you cut back on staffing expenses and even significantly reduce traffic costs.

Choose to integrate a customer support chatbot to answer simple customer concerns. Of course, you will still need agents to whom you can pass the complex queries. Automating this part of the process can save you time and resources—employees can focus on other efforts like social listening, and you get to reduce costs or allocate it to other business activities.

Provide 24/7 Support for Improved Customer Experience (CX)

A standard customer support call can last for minutes, with at least 7 minutes spent on just waiting to be assigned to an agent. The wait can even be longer if the query is done through email. Chatbots are helping eliminate the delay by being a tool that doesn’t need a break and is on 24/7.

According to the Drift survey, consumers find chatbots the most useful when providing quick answers in an emergency. However, understandably, most organizations don’t offer 24-hour support and won’t be able to help when the office is closed.

With support on board, chatbots can improve customer satisfaction among your customers by giving them the information they need any time of the day (or night). Aside from the wait, the total length of conversations may be reduced by employing chatbots.

In addition, chatbots are infallible in a way that they are capable of handling multiple queries and are always focused on work. They are not influenced by emotions and can appropriately interact because they are programmed as such.

Get More Leads and Sales for Growth

Chatbots are great lead generation tools. In the process of engaging with visitors or giving user support, they can ask the website’s visitors why and how they ended up there to find out if they are qualified leads, as well as capture the visitor’s contact information. Once the visitor provides their contact information, a sales representative can take it from there.

Another way that bots can contribute to company growth is through eCommerce. They can be programmed to sell products based on the user’s behavior, and even remember answers to tailor their responses. Through this, they can create an almost human-like personal interaction and service. You can also use them to send tips and offers to users who opt-in to this service.

Chatbots and Lead Generation

It’s not easy to gather high-quality leads, but it’s a necessity, nonetheless. This is in part because potential customers and clients are not always willing to provide their personal information, especially if they don’t have a lot of details about the business just yet.

Once they have everything they need and have reached out to you, though, you have to be prepared, especially if they have clarifications or other concerns. This is where online live chat and chatbots come in. However, which one is better in lead generation, and will it work for you?

Chatbots vs. Live Chat

Live chats are available when a visitor is on your homepage, though it only works if there is a person at the other end of the line. It doesn’t guarantee 24/7 response as live chat agents will most likely clock out at the end of the workday. In addition, there is a chance for a delay if they can’t immediately reply to the visitor’s message because they may be addressing another visitor’s concern.

Chatbots, on the other hand, answer all of the challenges of live chat. In terms of cost-efficiency, bots are a better option. It can also be programmed to replace static forms on your site for when the visitor is ready to convert, so it can collect the information you need to move them through the next stages of the buying process.

However, regardless of the chat widget you choose, both are effective in lead generation as long as the visitors get the content that they need to make converting a lot easier.

How to Use Chatbots for Lead Generation

Now that you understand what chatbots are for, the advantages you can enjoy by employing them on your processes, and the factors that make it ideal for your business, it’s time to get it running.

Define Goals and Use Case

There are many possible uses for chatbots, and you need to find out yours first so you can properly define your goal and create a use case. Talk to your teams to know what you’d like to accomplish. In the case of leveraging a chatbot for lead generation, make sure to discuss the challenges your teams face when it comes to generating leads and how the program can help.

Choose the Platforms

Chatbots can be placed on any of your channels. For instance, you can host it on your homepage for visitors who already know what your business is and what your products and services are. You may even put a chatbot on your eCommerce site. You can also integrate it with your email autoresponder or CRM, and on your business’ Facebook page.

The bots need to be programmed accordingly. You can tailor a chatbot for your business and to your target audience. Be sure to take into account the demographics of your users for each network. So, gather as much information on your prospects and customers as possible.

Build Your Content Strategy

What kind of content would you like your visitors to see and engage with during their chatbot interaction? You can start with FAQs or questions they are likely to ask the bot. You can find out about the frequently asked questions by asking your Customer Support, Sales, and Marketing teams—or those that often interact with customers—about them.

Evaluate whether or not you need new content or if your existing ones are enough to support your goals.

Craft the Bot’s Voice and Personality

Give your chatbot a personality to humanize the experience, but don’t forget to align it with your brand. You may also want to be transparent with the users that they will indeed be talking to a bot, though you can choose to give it a name. Make sure to tap your creative team and copywriter when starting with this process, including setting clear guidelines for a consistent bot voice.

Write an Opening Message

A welcoming opening message and greetings can help in engaging users to get them to respond. A few tips to remember are:

• Be compelling. Avoid sounding robotic. Have fun with it without losing the bot’s personality and brand voice.
• Set expectations by letting customers know that they’re chatting with a bot at the onset. This allows them to understand the potential conversation limits. Inform them of how and when they can chat with a person, as well.
• Once the user starts engaging, ask them questions to keep the conversation going.

Map Out Customer Journeys

A map of your customers’ journey helps determine where the conversation with the bot may go. There are tools available that can help you visualize what the conversation journey may look like. Add all the possible questions as possible replies that they can click or tap.

Get the Best Possible Responses

Each question should have the ideal replies that the user can choose from. Create multiple answers for every problem, so you have better chances of satisfying their needs.

Build Out All Conversation Trees

From the questions you ask and the responses available to the user, you need to continue building the conversation. Make sure that each stage is satisfying the customer’s needs, and know which point to bring in a customer service representative.

Add Visual Components

Bring personality to your bot by including emojis, images, or animated GIFs into the conversation.

Guide Customers to Checkout Using CTAs

The chatbot interaction should culminate with a CTA to move the user forward. It could be linked to a specific product page on your website, to the checkout page, or an option to share their experience with a friend on the social network. Be smart about where the CTA should lead to, as this kind of interaction could lead to high-value conversions.

Test Your Conversations

A chatbot conversation can turn to a complex map of messages, so test every possible interaction. This assures you that your users can find valuable information easily and will not be stuck or feel frustrated with the experience. A live preview functionality can significantly help you out.

Push Live and Monitor

Lastly, put your chatbot live and monitor its interactions, making sure that there are no leaks in the journey or users are not stuck.

Conversations with Chatbots

One-on-one conversations with your prospects are the best way to truly capture them. So many businesses have realized this potential that according to a survey by Oracle, 80% of businesses want chatbots by 2020. This is not surprising since chatbots address one of the main concerns in business-related communications, response time, and availability. 

With more and more messaging apps popping up today, and businesses moving in the digital space for marketing and promotions, you will need every tool in the arsenal possible to meet your goals. Build your own ConvertoBot today and put your customers’ needs to heart for a better bottom line.

ConvertoBot is a leading chatbot website and social media bots platform. Set up a free account today.

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