Robots have long since earned their place on assembly lines, especially in the hardest, most complex or repetitive tasks. This trend is beginning to be noticed in other sectors and in a few years the presence of robots, bots or artificial intelligences doing work that was once reserved exclusively for flesh-and-blood people will be the norm. One of the sectors that is benefiting most from bots is customer service.
How to use chatbots in my digital communication strategy
Chatbots are programs that can interact with a real person following certain patterns to solve that person’s problem or question. They are programmed taking into account what kind of information or need the user needs to cover, in order to find the most appropriate answer and solve the problem. In a customer service what the user demands is: effectiveness (to solve a need satisfactorily) and efficiency (to do it in the shortest time and with the least possible damage).
The chatbot will always try to complete the process in as few steps as possible, so in principle it can be a cheap and efficient way to provide this service.
When setting up a digital communication strategy, it is necessary to take into account each of the stages of the conversion funnel and to be clear at which stage a chatbot could be more useful for our service or product:
- Recognition: it is about the user noticing our presence. To do this, we could use the automatic chats on the web or social networks to show or demonstrate our product or service. At this stage, it is necessary to define what type of message you want to communicate in the first impact: surprising? appealing? collaborative? professional?
- Consideration: the user has an idea in his head of what he is looking for and is at the stage of getting informed and deciding. The goal of the chatbot at this point is to provide the precise information the user needs to make the purchase decision. The chatbot must be able to deduce from the user’s questions or keywords, what information to display. This is a good moment to inform about offers, discounts or promotions.
- Conversion: the customer is clear about what he/she is looking for. They only need the link or information to make the purchase. The chatbot can use previous user information such as search history, gelolocation, etc. to deduce the best place to make the purchase. If it is online, the chatbot can be in charge of guiding the customer through the purchase process to avoid cart abandonment.
- Loyalty: the sale of a product does not end when the customer has purchased it. It is necessary to control the user experience to know their satisfaction and also to be able to help them with the after-sales service. Chatbots work very well for the initial phase of the technical service because it filters the user’s query and directs it to the most appropriate professional or department.
What services can I offer through a chatbot?
A chatbot must work through a specific channel. The most popular nowadays are those that are implemented on company websites and those that are integrated into social networks. In both cases, the idea is to capture, sell and build user loyalty.
These are some of the services that a chatbot already successfully delivers:
- Check flights: flight tickets vary a lot and having a tool that updates you in real time is especially useful.
- Revervar in a restaurant: a chatbot connected to a restaurant’s reservation system makes human participation unnecessary to perform this action.
- Content dissemination: some chatbots in instant messaging apps send news to their users through dedicated groups or channels. Users can interact with the bot to decide whether they are interested in that content or prefer to move on and see new content.
- Product search: locate a specific product by searching several stores simultaneously.
- Comparisons: compares several products or services according to given parameters.
What are the main advantages of chatbots?
Chatbots cannot completely replace the work of a person, but they can be used for more routine tasks and actions that need to be solved quickly. The biggest advantages of chatbots are:
- Real-time response
- Always accessible and available
- More natural language than traditional search engines
- Efficiency in providing solutions
- Simplicity of use
