Why should I invest in chatbot development or integration? Well, this is an intelligent question, and it must be answered. If you don’t get the answer, then it means there is no rationale for making such an investment. Here are the top 10 benefits that a small and medium business can reap from chatbot technology.

1. Keep Your Business up and Running 24/7

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An employee stays productive 5 to 6 hours a day. However, a chatbot remains so 24 hours

Ever thought to keep your store or business open 24/7, but couldn’t materialize your idea because of the associated upfront cost? It’s understandable. Running additional shifts means hiring, managing and retaining more people. Thankfully, chatbot or talking bot takes away the apprehensions. It can serve your customers and other stakeholders without being exhausted.

2. Reduce Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

Reducing CAC is one of the key business challenges. It seems chatbot can make a big difference.

Chatbot can handle your sales operation and reduce your customer acquisition cost significantly. Yes, it’s your new sales person that can accept and process hundreds of requests in one go. The query handling capability of the chatbot depends on the chatbot platform you use. For instance, a chatbot created with IBM Watson can process 500 gigabytes of data, the equivalent of a million books, per second. So, it can handle any amount of queries your customers can have.

3. Increase Net Business Promoters

Customer satisfaction is just a survival concept while Net Promoter Score (NPS) is the real recipe for thriving.

NPS not just assesses customer satisfaction and overall customer relationships but also connects it with the revenue growth. It digs the sentiment of the customers and their loyalty by seeking a response to the question as what’s the likelihood of them in recommending your business to their friends and family.

By serving customers promptly with a chatbot, you can delight customers. Even if you couldn’t resolve their issues, they will feel good about the prompt approach you adopted, and that will help you get the favor of the indirect word-of-mouth marketing.

More than two-thirds of Fortune 1000 companies use the NPS metric as per Bloomberg, and most of them are banking on innovative technologies like chatbots.

Top 5 companies from Fortune 1000 List (Excluding technology companies) using chatbots

4. Drives In-App Purchase with Better Engagement

Offering your business app for free is a wonderful strategy but earning through in-app purchases is not a bad idea.

With chatbots becoming popular as a customer engagement platform, it’s a wise take to integrate it with your business app or release it as a standalone app to drive your in-app sales. Spontaneity and intelligence make them do their job in the best possible manner. However, before you embark on chatbot development, understand the pricing or other types of expectation that your target customers tend to have. Analyze the buying process/cycle for your products/services.

5. Increasing Retention Rates

Improving customer engagement and satisfaction is a meaningful way to increase retention rate and contain the churn rate, thankfully chatbots can do it reasonably well.

ROI is directly proportional to the customer retention and churn rate. It decreases as your customers leave your network and rise when you succeed in retaining them. According to InsightSquared a reduction of 5 percent in the customer churn rate, increases profit margin between 25 and 125 percent.

However, to make your chatbot capable of doing so, you need to infuse it with the desired intelligence. Thus, the need is of an AI-enabled and well-connected chatbot that can understand what your customers expect and what’s making them think indifferent towards your business.

6. Stay In the Spotlight

With their counterparts and big enterprises vying to get the bigger pie of the market staying in the spotlight has become essential for a small and medium business.

Offering new customer experiences with technologies as latest as chatbot you make your prospects and customers feel that you are up-to-date. Besides, it helps with improving business outcomes, including increased revenue growth and market position because people love to interact with new platforms.

Thus, devising an engaging chatbot platform, you can push your business endeavor from sales and marketing to brand awareness to hiring new employees.

7. Delivering Personalized Experience

Customers love personalized experiences everywhere, and businesses that deliver make a good profit out of it; luckily chatbots are a great means to deliver that.

Chatbots can read the human intent thanks to built-in AI as well as retrieve and analyze the previous conversations to deliver a more personalized experience to consumers. Personalized experience translates into a better engagement with customers and, that is instrumental in driving customer acquisition and customer satisfaction.

8. Derive Business Intelligence

Decoding customer behavior and predicting market trends is a must for gaining an edge on the competition.

Citing the cut-throat competition in the market, it has become essential for businesses to derive actionable business intelligence (BI) and evolve their modus operandi and innovate their products and services to better suit the demand of the customers. Interestingly, they need business intelligence not just with precision but also at the right time. It’s a matter of relief that chatbots equipped with AI and machine learning techniques can do a great favor.

If you want to make the most of your BI, you should consider building your chatbot using the right chatbot platforms. Also, configure it to track specific events or actions that users take on the chatbot.

9. Better Conversation with Interpersonal and Social Skills

Interpersonal and social skills are attributes of a good speaker and listener, and it’s time for businesses to adopt the same in their communication.

Websites and apps that we use as a customer engagement platform resort to professional communication language. Take a look at the CTA (call to action) buttons — “sign up,” “log in,” “download,” “click,” “fill in,” they seem to deliver a command to the users. They lack the social touch that people love to connect with. On the contrary, chatbots treat your prospects/customers like a friend with informal communications by using terms like “please,” “hello,” “for sure,” “how is it going?” and much more. Thanks to their NLP (Natural language processing) attribute. Building a better rapport with users, you can achieve your goals in a better way.

10. More Revenue Opportunities

Who doesn’t like to have an extra source of income or bonus? Can you say no?

By having a deeper understanding of the market and the needs and challenges of your customers you can explore new ways to serve them. In fact, this is what Google, Amazon, and all leaders do to stay ahead of the competition. Chatbot itself has come out of that endeavor only. Hence, not just augment your existing product lines and do cross-selling and upselling but go beyond to discover more opportunities.