From Customer Service to Sales: How Chatbots Are Driving Business Success

What is a chatbot?

A chatbot is a computer application simulating human-user interactions through text or voice inputs. The widespread application of chatbots in businesses is primarily for customers and employees. Chatbots can understand user queries, provide appropriate responses, and further automate tasks by acting autonomously without any human guidance. This is enabled by utilizing technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP).

Different types of chatbots

• Rule-based chatbot: They follow pre-defined rule-based workflows to interact with users and answer their queries. This finds scope in most of the straightforward tasks and offers a great deal of flexibility.
• Keyword-based chatbot: They are configured to recognize special keywords and orchestrate pre-defined responses and chat workflows using this trigger.
• Voice chatbot: Voice chatbots interact with users using voice commands and not text. Some hybrid solutions provide options to switch between text and voice.
• Gen AI chatbot: This is the new-age chatbots that utilize AI, ML, and NLP to interpret user inputs dynamically, and process the response. They are trained using datasets and also learn from interaction every time to furnish a more relevant and accurate response

Key features and functionality

Chatbots have been a revelation over the past few years, finding widespread usage in businesses. Chatbots are used for conversing with customers on their brand website, and messenger apps like WhatsApp, Instagram, or Facebook chat. It has predominantly found significant adoption by helping engage new customers with brands, helping resolve employee queries, and providing prompt customer service to customers.

Chatbots are still evolving at a fast pace and could solve highly complex use cases using advanced features. Highlighting some core features of chatbots in their current form:

• Response Generation: Respond based on user queries, understanding the input, and providing appropriate answers or suggestion
• Task Automation: They can help automate repetitive tasks like order status, delivery tracking, and ticket status in a matter of seconds without human involvement
• Keyword trigger: Chatbots can be configured to respond contextually by comprehending relevant keywords and personalizing accurate responses
• Integration: Chatbots integrated with databases and other systems can multiply their effectiveness. Accessing critical information like order details, and transaction history helps them resolve queries faster

• Chatbot Builder: Teams can simulate their conversations with users by creating different flows with conditional response workflows
• All Channels: Chatbots are deployed across multiple channels like website chat, WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram chat, and more
• Human-bot hybrid interface: Advanced chatbots have a seamless switch from bot to human for cases where the bot may not have an appropriate response. Chats are assigned to human agents in such cases
• Multilingual support: Chatbots can provide interactions in multiple languages helping users converse in their preferred language of communication
• Personalized conversations: Integrated chatbots help customers with personalized interactions using customer data to give more tailored responses

Chatbot use cases in business processes

Chatbots can be standalone apps or native apps within a CRM or other solution. Chatbots have proved to be very effective for businesses helping them stay connected with their customers round the clock, saving a lot of time and repetitive effort and as a consequence important manhours. Some popular use cases include sales, marketing, support, and customer service.

Sales: Teams leverage chatbots for multiple sales use cases which helps them scale with high productivity while also providing a superior customer experience at every interaction. Chatbots can help generate leads in website or messenger chats 24X7. They can also help in lead enrichment and qualification by asking for an additional set of personal details and other qualifying questions from buyers. Another interesting feature of chatbots is to act as a virtual sales agent, helping recommend the right products or services and providing information about new products to prospective customers. Some sales teams utilize chatbots very effectively increasing their throughput significantly.

Marketing: Chatbots can help marketing functions engage website visitors with interactive polls, surveys, and other gamified engagements. They can double up as a content distribution channel delivering the latest blogs, videos, or product information to prospective customers.

Customer Service: Customer service teams have been one of the early adopters of chatbots helping them provide 24/7 support to customers. Basic customer inquiries like order status, delivery delays, and other account information have been completely moved to chatbots with zero human involvement. Call scheduling and appointment modifications have been made self-serve using chatbots. They have helped brands instantly answer customer queries and re-direct human agents to complex queries automatically.

Internal Employees: Lately organizations have started deploying chatbots for several internal use cases to address employee queries and issues instantly. HR teams use it to provide new employees with prompt onboarding with information about company policies, culture, vision, and more. HR teams also it for self-service of employee requests like leaves and furnish important details like holidays etc. They also facilitate quick training with quizzes and training modules. IT teams have been using chatbots to troubleshoot basic issues like password reset, and system issues before handing over to IT service staff.

Advantages of chatbots

• Available 24/7: Perhaps one of the biggest wins chatbots offer to help businesses operate round the clock outside business hours. This is especially useful for answering customer questions and issues
• Prompt response: Chatbots enable users to get quick responses for most basic issues or queries. There is no dependency to wait for a human agent to resolve basic issues over a couple of days.
• Manage scale: They can help businesses scale up their operations without having to invest much in staffing and resources. Chatbots can concurrently handle a high volume of inquiries and run on auto-pilot

• More Efficient: Chatbots help teams make their operations more efficient and boost productivity with lower staffing resources needed to engage visitors and customers.
• Uniform Experience: Chatbots with their consistent flows give a uniform brand experience and service quality to all customers unlike human agents
• Cost Savings: One key advantage chatbots add to organizations is the significant cost benefit through this automation via the cost of staffing resources and infrastructure. The only additional cost is the cost of software licenses.

While there are benefits galore for teams that adopt chatbots for their business use cases. There may be certain disadvantages associated with chatbot apps as well. Advanced Chatbots with AI and NLP features are highly complex software and can be pretty costly for a lot of teams. On the customer experience front, standardized responses from chatbots may result in session drop-offs as customers are attuned to human interactions. Some users recognize chatbots are hesitant to share critical information, so brands should do enough to add a deep layer of trust to comfort the users. Organizations should be extra careful to provide an exit for a seamless bot-agent switch to prevent cases of users entangled in unending flows.

Conclusion

Without a doubt, chatbots have proved to be indispensable tools for modern organizations. They offer a host of benefits and have applications across use cases in any organization. Helping sales teams qualify leads to getting enriched data for marketing functions or prompt service to internal employees, chatbots have helped teams do more with fewer resources. In a way, they have revolutionized the way businesses interact, engage, and respond to customer queries. The chatbots are still evolving with a lot of promising developments like Gen AI chatbot, multilingual support with advanced ML, NLP and AI features expected to benefit businesses more in the future. With a host of advantages boosting efficiency, instant responses, and helping save staffing costs, chatbots are a perfect addition to the arsenal for organizations of all sizes and scales.