They say people don’t buy logic, they buy emotions. This reminds me of this on-seeing trend set by most brick-and mortar-stores nowadays, where you would notice, professionally dressed customer service reps greeting and welcoming walk-in customers at shopping malls, hotels, and restaurants.
What they do is, they try to start a friendly conversation with the customers to gauge buyer persona, and gradually, pitch them about their new products and ongoing promotions.
This is also practiced as a retail greeting at supermarkets and grocery stores. It signifies the company’s investment in enriching the customer service department. It helps them build trust and cement customer loyalty.
In my opinion, there is this remarkable consumer psychology behind this aforementioned strategy. It is mainly to nurture one’s emotional attachment with a brand. This kind gesture will go a long way and will eventually demonstrate the brand’s strength of having a decent set of manners and work ethic.
The smart approach behind this warm welcome is to make the customer feel acknowledged. When you are giving your buyer a feel that you are delighted to have them at your shop, you are fostering a friendly relationship with them.
Customer support representatives are the facet of the company and it’s in their hands to create a meaningful and lasting impression on their clients. Just like a fan base is immensely important for singers, a happy and satisfied clientele is necessary for growing businesses. You can outgrow your competitors in today’s market only if you know how to resonate with customer needs and preferences.
Growth Hacking
When people talk about growth hacking, their first response is usually towards acquiring new customers and expanding the customer base. They skip the need to tackle churn effectively. They may not know this but the key motive should be to retain existing customers. This is indeed a challenge but quite less expensive than onboarding new customers.
Primarily, companies across the world apply growth hacks around building massive target audiences. They may not realize that fostering trust and loyalty in potential customers at hand is more important and effective in the long run, for overall brand development.
According to Harvard Business Review, attracting new consumers might cost five to twenty-five times more than keeping existing customers.
Your marketing strategy is brilliant if your prime focus is to reduce churn for the sustainable growth of the company. This might be new for you but fervid marketers consider stamping out churn as growth hacking 2.0.
If you are a marketer and you are well aware of your target audience’s needs, above all, you have thoroughly identified the pain points of your customers, BINGO, half of your task is already completed. You are good to go for attaining a high Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), a parameter that helps companies measure predicted revenue from a specific customer.
Are Chatbots Best for Growth Hacking?
Just like making efforts to wow shoppers the moment they walk into your store, likewise, enabling chatbots, an app that imitates a conversation with a human support agent to give a human touch into your customer support, will serve as an enthusiastic welcome to the website visitors. E-businesses can surely hit a home run in no time.
It paves a way for a wide range of upselling and cross-selling opportunities. Your business will grow by leaps and bounds when rightly put in the hands of a well-programmed chatbot.
Chatbots are best for growth hacking, trust me, you will see your business expanding in front of your very eyes.
What are the Benefits of Using Chatbots for Customer Support?
The need to be available at all times is at the heart of chatbots’ burgeoning prominence across different industry sectors. You’ll also need to use a bot at some point if you want to keep clients engaged all day and improve their experience.
This will help with consumer requests management by giving timely responses and enhancing customer satisfaction.
Chatbots are avant-garde and they have got so many advantages in the real world. Let’s take a look at some of the benefits that chatbots bring to customers.
Chatbot Benefits for Customers
Round-the-clock availability: 24/7 availability skips the need for customers to wait for the next available operator.
Prompt response: Chatbots can promptly and simultaneously address the queries of thousands of clients, reducing the average response time.
Consistent responses: Chatbots aid businesses to maintain a high level of consistency in their responses. They also enhance customers’ overall experience with the brand.
Omnichannel: Omni-channel message support features are included with AI-powered bots, allowing customers to engage with businesses via numerous channels such as websites, facebook, and so on.
Customization: By engaging customers in one-on-one chats, keeping an innate tone, and being effective at interactive communication, bots may ensure a touch of customization.
Multilinguistic: Your company can train the sales bot to respond to consumer questions in their native language and expand its reach to other markets or areas.
Place an order without human support: Customers can place orders or complete transactions without the assistance of a human, credit given to bot-driven automation.
What are the Advantages of Using Chatbots for Businesses?
You want to build strong relationships with your client, chatbots are the secret recipe. Your organization may deploy chatbots to interact and communicate with website visitors, in turn developing strong ties with the clients. You can check off growth marketing goals as well as increase sales and improve customer service by introducing chatbots in your business.
A chatbot incorporated into a business can help customers communicate more effectively. It reaps out potential benefits for businesses in numerous ways.
Chatbots Benefits for Businesses
1. Grow customer engagement
Chatbots are the gateway for companies in taking client engagement to the next level. Bots are your pal because they help you provide consistent responses and don’t make customers land in the frustration phase where they keep on getting useless information. Customers will only stay engaged with your website if they are given meaningful and timely responses. You can drive customer engagement with user data and make it more enticing by leveraging conversational AI chatbots.
2. Shoot up lead generation
How to use chatbots for lead generation? Bots have matured over time where they can engage clients with personalized messaging throughout their journey. In fact, your company can employ chatbots to generate leads by assisting clients in making smart and quick decisions. In order to get booming conversion rates, AI-enabled bots can utilize a pre-programmed quiz to fascinate users to fill out a form and generate potential leads.
3. Minimize customer support costs
Chatbot implementation is an investment in minimizing customer support costs. Instead of hiring more staff for the customer service department, you can save this money and invest in training and upgrading your employee skillset.
A company can cut down expenses in a variety of ways by using chatbots. They can instead invest in:
- Employee Training and Skill Development
- Compensation and Benefits
- Infrastructure and Security Charges
Customer service with AI chatbots can also profit in a variety of ways:
Boost chat support during peak hours.
- Regular business operations can be automated.
- Encourage implementation of new customer service models.
Additionally, AI-bots can be escalated during busy business hours without incurring additional costs. Furthermore, by delivering a frictionless experience for customers, bots save a considerable amount of money and offer value to the bottom line.
4. Generate valuable insights from customer data
Chatbots are an effective tool in gleaning valuable insights, entailing buying patterns and consumer behavior. It can help businesses to market their products and expand the audience reach. Bots can also be used to collect feedback via simple questions. They can be utilized to improve products or optimize a website.
5. Chalk out a workable marketing strategy
Conversational marketing is all about leveraging the power of real-time customer interactions to guide prospects through the sales process. It can assist your company in creating genuine client experiences and fostering long-term partnerships. When businesses utilize chatbots for marketing, they can effortlessly communicate with customers through tailored messaging and intelligent bots, increasing conversion rates.
6. Striking a good balance between human touch and automation
Chatbots strike a good balance between AI technology and human touch through seamless customer care. Similarly, integrating a chatbot and live chat software allows consumers to self-serve while still being able to engage with a human agent if needed. By using AI-enabled chatbots as the primary channel, your company allows customers to get real-time service, quick response to queries, in turn driving customer satisfaction.
7. Meeting customer needs
Customers look forward to prompting responses to their grievances or questions they may have. Undoubtedly, chatbots are becoming smarter every day, businesses can put them to work by automating some repetitive tasks, routine interactions, and meeting customer expectations.
8. Promotes scalability
A customer-centric business always looks for opportunities to scale assistance and broaden its horizon to touch the zenith. With your business expansion and scalability of support, traffic surge would be a piece of cake for a chatbot to handle conversations during peak hours, without requiring significant expenditure. This is where chatbots will be your best helping hand. They ensure that your company can manage discussions during busy hours without having to hire more support staff.
9. Frictionless customer acquisition
Customers love being pampered and treated well. They will still hum and haw to find the content on their own. It does not matter how many manuals or content guides you provide. After all, customers like brands that guide them towards the right track. This is where chatbots come in helpful, as they can help educate clients and streamline the customer onboarding process.
10. Making customer journey smoother
Prospects being lost midway through a sales funnel is never ideal, and no business wants that to happen. Customers may feel repulsed from making a purchase for a variety of reasons, including a lengthy check-out procedure or revealing hidden expenses at the checkout stage.
Chatbots can assist brands in reducing turnover rates and improving the customer experience. At various points of the customer journey, you may design the correct bot scripts to effectively engage customers and answer their questions.
Read more: Comprehensive Guide to Design a Techstack for Chatbot
Top Growth Hacks to Use AI-Powered Chatbots
1. Enable a trigger button to escalate to a human support agent
You know what makes a company stand out among its competitors in the market, their ability to respond quickly to their customers especially when they need any assistance. The ability to empathize with the customer’s pain points and timely address the issue with effective communication is the key to an efficient customer support department. This is the top reason to use a chatbot instead of waiting for a human support agent to cater to your queries. You can get immediate responses only through a chatbot.
Though, you may encounter a situation where a chatbot won’t be able to answer all of your questions. It is not a miracle cure for every issue. Customers are likely to grow frustrated if they are locked in the loop of explanation and repeating a problem with no appropriate solution. It is better to give customers the facility to communicate with the human whenever they feel like the issue shall better be discussed with a human support agent. The option should be a click away. Users shall not feel irksome in finding the right button to reach out to human support.
To escalate to a human support representative, you can add a trigger button or prompt command. The chatbot will have received basic information about the problem and will forward it to a member of staff. It saves the customer’s time and they can relax while knowing that help is on the way.
Combining chatbots with live customer support staff is the most effective strategy. Start with a live chat to check if the chatbot can solve a typical problem.
2. Chatbots can become your pal through personalization
While it’s not a good idea to try to convince a customer that a chatbot is a human customer rep, basic manners cost you nothing. Consumers will find interacting with a chatbot more engaging if it is personalized.
Your chatbot can be programmed to address a customer by name. Rather than striking up a conversation with a stranger, “Hello,” train the chatbot to respond with “Hi (name of customer). I hope you’re having a good day. What can I do to assist you?” On top of this, it’s better to program your chatbot to remember prior chats’ preferences and transactions. This, once again, lends a personal touch to the discussion.
There’s no need to make small conversation if you don’t want to. That is beyond most AI’s capabilities, and it will irritate a consumer who simply wants a response to a question.
3. Finding out the reason for unsubscription – Ask questions for feedback
No matter how good your service is, not every customer will stick around. Customers’ needs and circumstances change over time, and they finally move on to greener pastures. However, it is helpful to understand why this is the case. You can persuade them to change their minds with the help of a chatbot.
Gain insights on why clients are canceling their subscriptions to a service. Examine the responses to observe buying behaviour and ongoing trends that are booming nowadays.
Are you unable to address the needs of a specific group of customers? Do customers believe they aren’t getting their money’s worth? Are you missing out on value for money factor?. Use this information to develop a future reselling or upgrading strategy.
Use a chatbot to appear at this point and make a customer an offer, especially if they alter their mind.
For instance, a ten percent discount on renewal. This will not set you back any money. You were on the verge of losing a customer, but you’ve managed to keep them. Consider it a 90% savings rather than a 10% loss of revenue.
4. Avoid Open-ended questions, use menu options
Chatbots’ capacity to maintain an open-ended conversation is one of its most appealing features. Some clients like menu branching, which is comparable to what is available on phone services. This enables your chatbot to serve as a resource and information hub, quickly getting to the heart of a customer’s issue.
Ask your chatbot a series of questions, each with a distinct set of replies. The chatbot can then demonstrate its enormous expertise based on the response. It’s a quick and effective way to respond smartly to questions, and you won’t even have to use AI if you don’t want to. This task will be easily accomplished with a button bot. AI, on the other hand, will make it possible to turn closed queries into open-ended discussions.
5. Customized menu options in accordance with buyer’s persona
With a chatbot, you can facilitate customers with upselling and cross-selling opportunities and provide upgraded software packages. Tailoring menu items to diverse buyer personas demonstrates that you understand a customer’s demands.
Make sure a chatbot’s programming takes this into account. Although each consumer is different, a personality profile can be created and FAQs can be modified accordingly.
A chatbot answering a customer’s question with, for example, is an example of this “Have you thought about upgrading your package to this item if you’re looking to finish this task? It will cover all of your requirements, and we may provide you with a discount.”
This informs your customer about the various options for resolving their issues.The consumer is more likely to continue with you and refer you to others for your remarkable customer service.
6. Improve the learning curve of customers by introducing different chatbots
Chatbots are an excellent tool to educate your clients while conversing with them. By offering more information than is requested, you can cultivate and deepen your relationship with a customer. This can be used to introduce clients to existing resources that they may not be aware of.
Create a client profile for your chatbot and utilize the information to send the customer on an educational trip. Direct them to your company’s eBooks, podcasts, and blog postings. This allows customers to see the vast amount of information you have to provide.
Customer profiles can also be used to make personalized recommendations via a chatbot. Allow the chatbot to recommend a new template or software application that is relevant to the customer’s job description or relates to earlier questions. Your consumer will stay on your books if they are learning from their interactions with you.
7. Make personalization P1
We previously explored how chatbots may put your customers at ease by using a conversational, tailored approach. Personalized material based on a user’s location and habits is also crucial. This is referred to as localization.
Personalization and localization, together with growth hacks number 2 and number 5, create a truly unique offering for your customer. This gives the impression that the service user is at the center of the universe. Customers will continue to do business with you if they feel understood. They don’t need to search elsewhere for their requirements to be addressed.
This is essential for the overall company’s development. Existing customer loyalty is up to sixteen times more profitable than obtaining new customers, and reducing customer churn by 2% equates to a 10% reduction in operating costs.
Key Takeaways
Chatbots are gradually changing the face of customer service. They’re bringing a fresh perspective to customer service, sales, marketing, and website engagement. So, if you make full use of bots in terms of customer insights, lead generation, and customer care scalability, you’ll need a strategy.
However, identifying the areas of concern before implementing chatbots to achieve the desired business benefits is equally important. With so many advantages for organizations, defying the trend and not implementing a bot sooner rather than later would be a mistake.
So, if you are looking for AI experts who can make a flawless chatbot for your business, look no further and get in touch with us.