Chatbots: These Conversational Assistants Improves Your Business

Chatbots or conversational robots allow, from your website or your Facebook page, to interact with visitors in an automated way, on the basis of pre-programmed conversations. Non-intrusive, they are well received by visitors and promote contact with your potential customers, to bring them to the sale or to make an appointment.

With a chatbot, it is always the visitor who authorizes the conversation. In this, chatbots differ from commonly used tools, such as e-mailing or opening a pop-up on a website.

• Sending commercial emails is often equated with spam, because Internet users are overwhelmed with junk mail in their email.
• As for pop-ups, they are displayed at any time to invite the Internet user to subscribe to a newsletter or download an ebook, when he has not asked for anything.

If chatbots are well received, it is because the visitor has control over the information he receives. Not only do you not risk seeing people exasperated by your messages turn away from your brand, but above all you enter into a relationship with people who are ready to follow you.

As a result, the opening rate of a chatbot easily reaches 80% (compared to 10% on average for emailing).

Once the conversation is activated, visitors enjoy the dialogue that takes place in the format of instant messaging: fast, spontaneous, playful.

Chatbots are particularly attractive from this point of view because they allow information to be sent in short and varied formats: Texts, images, videos, audio, links, emoticons, animations, response buttons, etc.

Calls to action can take many forms and they allow the visitor, with one click, to watch a video, download an ebook, contact an advisor, make an appointment, or buy directly.

A Powerful Tool To Set You Apart From The Competition

Today, most French people, and more generally Europeans, own a smartphone or tablet. The moment they consider a purchase, they quickly check the information online, wherever they are: at home, on the street or in the store…

Professionals also need to have quick access to information from their suppliers and will be more responsive if they receive a notification on their professional smartphone.

With a chatbot, potential customers receive the information exactly when they need it. For the company, this represents certain advantages.

A Competitive Advantage

By providing an immediate response to your prospect, you help him find the solution to his problem.

In addition, chatbots are relatively new and still little used in France. Currently, it’s virgin territory to conquer, so it’s the perfect time to embark on this new adventure and get a big lead on your competitors!

This is a golden opportunity for any company that wants to find new customers and develop its sales. With chatbots, seize this opportunity to gain a competitive advantage in digital marketing!

A Financial Advantage

Your chatbot helps relieve the telephone support, because it can initiate several simultaneous individual conversations.

For common questions, visitors will obtain the information they want without delay; for those who have more complex questions, they will be redirected to an advisor who can deal with their request specifically during the opening hours of your service. It’s as if people were phoning a call center open 24 hours a day. Except that in terms of budget, it has nothing to do with it!

Chatbots therefore offer a real opportunity for companies that want to reduce their sales support costs and improve the availability of their customer service.

Chatbots At The Service Of Your Marketing Strategy

Ultimately, robots maintain the conversation with your potential customers: they answer common questions, offer solutions to their problems, provide useful information about your brand or your products and services. They can also bring them up to the sale or appointment, depending on what you have to offer.

This is of course possible thanks to the technology used. Chatbots are software robots that increasingly integrate natural language to interact with a human being, through instant messaging (chat). The functions using artificial intelligence are more or less advanced depending on the system.

• In the simplest systems, the chatbot asks questions and offers the most common pre-recorded answers that the visitor can choose with a click.
• In advanced language analysis systems, the visitor asks questions in their natural language. The robot analyzes the keywords and sends pre-programmed answers according to a decision tree. This way, he can anticipate or filter inquiries.

But no matter how technologically powerful the tool, to be effective, your chatbot must rely on a solid marketing strategy, in order to bring visitors where you want to take them. Scenarios, writing questions or answers, choice of menus offered, keywords, calls to action. The design of a high-performance chatbot leaves nothing to chance.

Used well, chatbots can have a real impact on your business development, regardless of your company’s sector of activity.

How To Create A Chatbot?

With Facebook Messenger, you can create one easily and inexpensively. But this option is limited to answering a few simple questions and does not allow you to collect the contact details of the prospects with whom you converse.

To get a return on investment, you have to choose the right solution. By developing scripts and integrating multimedia content, it is possible to personalize and enrich your chatbot in order to implement your marketing strategy. 

Finally, the last possibility is to recruit a team of developers. This solution is rather reserved for large budgets and will be justified if your project requires specific and/or advanced functionalities. But make no mistake, technology is not everything! To take full advantage of this promising tool, the design and implementation of a successful chatbot must be based on a solid marketing strategy.