It is easy to fall victim to the myths around chatbot implementations or for that matter, any other new technology. Would it be worth the return on investment? Will my upfront/annual cost be too high? When will I break even? Would my customer service agents need a lot of training? Would my visitors get the correct information? But with the growing pain points of customer service, lack of automation and not leveraging artificial intelligence can hamper your business. Some of the issues customers often face when interacting with a brand is –
- Long resolution time
- Not being able to reach an agent
- Not being responded to all
- Not finding accurate information
- Inaccessible, incomplete, or incorrect Knowledge base
To address such issues, organizations around the industries such as Healthcare, Retail, E-commerce are using technology to provide a more seamless and uninterrupted customer experience. But the question remains – “Will chatbots help increase profits?” Let us dive deeper into the topic and see two ways chatbots can improve the bottom line.
How chatbots can help drive your ROI?
With Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning being the future of Customer Service, AI-powered Chatbots have a highly disruptive impact on customer experience, leading to the majority of business leaders utilizing its power to make profits. We will discuss two important ways organizations can take advantage of chatbots to improve bottom-line profitability.
Cost Savings with a Chatbot
A study from Juniper Research shows that Self Service Chatbots are expected to trim business costs by almost $1.3 billion by 2023. With Chatbots becoming attractive to the industry, here are some solid ways businesses are saving money –
1. Cheaper 24*7 Availability
Customers demand answers, and they demand it now. For companies to maintain a competitive advantage, providing uninterrupted top-notch customer service is imperative. However, maintaining continuous customer service doesn’t come cheap. Not having someone attend to your customers off-hours can result in a loss of customer engagement and decreased loyalty while hiring and training users for late nights can cost companies a lot of money.
That is where chatbots come in handy. When deployed, they provide exceptional support to your human agents by being available round the clock. With preset responses and Natural Language Processing (NLP), the customers can receive help at any time of the day without human intervention.
2. Efficient Human Resource allocation
AI Chatbots easily take care of simpler and repetitive customer queries and customer needs. It helps take the burden off agents, freeing them of monotonous tasks like finding out order status or providing visitors with forms available on the website. Instead, human agents can solve more complex problems – tier I and II.
This also proves helpful in employee retention. Allocating meaningful and challenging tasks keeps employees also engaged, leading to as this leads to higher employee productivity and lesser churn.
3. Economical Scalability
Customer Service chatbots do not observe Christmas or Thanksgiving, but humans do. In fact, the holiday season counts for an exponential increase in customer support tickets. Now providing increased support requires an increased number of agents. This is where chatbots come to the rescue. Hiring, onboarding, and training human agents cost money and cause unnecessary delays. But with virtual assistants or chatbots, you can increase “agents” and when required. A chatbot can handle hundreds of chat at one time, making increased demand not a hindrance to exceptional customer support.
Revenue Growth with a Chatbot
1. Word of Mouth
One of the key ways leading companies to differentiate themselves from others is by quality customer engagement. According to Nielsen, 92% of consumers believe suggestions from friends and family more than advertising. Hence, businesses – small and big sized, are looking to provide their customers with a fantastic user experience to drive profits.
Many case studies show that chatbots, a key driver of revenue growth, can play an important role in fostering brand loyalty, especially in the age of Social Media. Providing accurate and instant insights into customers’ queries can create meaningful relationships and lead to profits through word of mouth.
2. Lead Generation and Increase in Conversion Rate
Marketing a product is easier with chatbots. A chatbot often has the functionality of pre-chat forms that collect very insightful data. Using this data collected from messaging apps like a Facebook messenger or WhatsApp bots or chatbots on your websites and mobile apps, to understand customer behavior and providing them with products catered to their exact needs can turn leads into quick customers. With good customer service, the visitor is already your ally. Collecting important data like product preferences, product reviews, phone numbers, city, state, or zip code can help sales and support teams find the right demographic to sell their products and services allowing easier penetration.
3. Upselling to your existing customers
Sales and profits do not always come from new customers. They also come from existing customer interactions. Businesses are leveraging upselling and cross-selling strategies into their sales process more often today. Upselling is a sales technique to induce someone to purchase more expensive items or upgrades in an attempt to make a more profitable sale. This helps increase the number of orders and improve consumer lifetime value, improving shoppers’ journey. For example, you might consider recommending the new line of comfortable socks if your visitor is interested in a new pair of sneakers.
Conclusion
As the world is embracing AI technology, companies are seeing the need to automate their customer service. With chatbots being the future of conversational intelligence, including it in your customer service strategy can prove helpful in not just providing exceptional customer service but also saving money. If you’re looking for ways to grow your profits through a powerful AI-powered chatbot platform, check out our page to know more.
