Posted on by

Are Chatbots a Better Marketing Tool?

biggest-growth-opportuniuty-is-customer-experience

Customer expectations have increased over the last few years. In fact, a recent study by Google showed that 61% of people expect businesses to deliver personalized brands. Similarly, the number of people who want to reach businesses through messaging has increased. However, it’s difficult for companies to keep up on chat. This challenge has led to many businesses losing leads who attempted to reach them through live chat.

Live Chat May Not Work

While live chat may help you to communicate with your visitors, you’ll need a solution that can help tailor your conversations to your visitors and their problems. You need to sift through each and every conversation and answer all your customers’ questions. Unfortunately, your sales team may have a difficult time keeping up. The poor customer experience may add unnecessary friction to your site visitors.

A Chatbot is a Better Alternative

A chatbot that can engage prospects, organize them, and also direct them to the right place will be a win-win both to your site visitors and the sales team. But before you build your chatbot, it’s important to have a look at the live chat transcripts. They’re important, especially when it comes to conversational marketing because you get to hear the prospect’s words on what they want to do.

To start your chatbot, bucket all intents from live chat into three classifications: sales, support, and others. Visitors to your website can then select the chatbot that matches their intent.

Getting technical support for a particular product on the website can be a challenge. But there are more thorough resources that are better-suited to provide your visitors with answers. Therefore, instead of keeping visitors in the chatbot, you can use what you know about them from the CRM to direct them in the right place. The chatbot can look into their contacts, and serve them with a detailed webpage depending on the products they’re using.

Visitors Want to Talk to Your Sales Team

Most of your website visitors who interact with live chat want to reach your sales team. However, this doesn’t mean that they want to connect to a human right away. For your sales team to communicate with prospects, they need the visitors’ name, email, and website. Therefore, the ideal chatbot should be programmed to collect this information naturally.

According to NewVoiceMedia, prospects can become frustrated if they are required to repeat themselves. To combat this problem, you can check the CRM and collect the needed information up-front. This way, your sales team won’t spend valuable time requesting email addresses.

Expected Results

Your chatbot success can come in a few ways:

  • It can anticipate the next step of a conversation and use quick replies. Opening up a new chat and clicking on a button is less laborious than typing in a text field. Therefore, your prospects won’t have to create the first message.
  • A chatbot has multiple-choice options that can drive more engagement. This makes it easier to start and maintain a conversation.
  • Chatbots can write like humans. Prospects often don’t want to talk about sales. Instead, most of them want to talk about products they are yet to use.

Bottom Line

Chatbots can help you meet your prospects wherever they are. Before you get started, interview your sales team and look at the chat transcripts. Group the questions your visitors ask into different categories. It’s also important that you and your team think about the best ways to help your visitors.

For more information about chatbots, message soOlis here.