Facebook’s F8 Developer Conference has just ended. If you have been looking to learn about chatbots, recently, all chatbots were placed on pause. Facebook’s “bot pause” is officially over, meaning you can now connect your bots to business pages just like before and start testing or playing around again.

You can read all about it here.

So…

Chatbots. What are they?

Chatbots are synthetic intelligence coordinations which are programmed to engage customer’s interactions through the use of voice and texts. Generally, these engagements are direct and interact with people in a somewhat human-like way about limited business issues. The trending of chatbots has been initiated through the messaging apps and social media.

But why the rising popularity of chatbots?

We have all lately witnessed the rapid growth of many valuable social media canvases’ such as Facebook Messenger, Skype, and Twitter. However, the influence of using chatbot for business growth and progress has elevated the mode of online marketing to a higher level of the total. Many of the business sectors are now using the all-around chatbots to take their customers services to a different level.

Let’s have quick look at the benefits and changes that come along with the Chatbots.

From the customer perspective

1. Direct and quick responses
These artificial intelligence systems provide instant responses to the customer’s queries. Clients have less to worry about waiting for emails or phone calls when they have simple queries. Such simple inquiries may be related to operating hours, addresses, prices, and so on.

2. Swift resolutions
Chatbots can also be designed in a way that allows its users to have a quick view of the available products and services depending on the user’s preference. All the important and relevant statistics can be exchanged through the bot. With the delivery of sufficient information at the right time, decision making on the next step becomes easier.

3. Saves a significant amount of time
This system also provides customers with complete knowledge on a variety of products and services on the same site. This allows clients to make quick and informed decisions. Clients do not have to spend a lot of time talking to the management over the phone or even examining their needs on many tabs

From the business perspective

1. Providing a great deal of analytics
One of the most basic principles of marketing is to provide interactive patterns of prospective clients – their purchasing trends, preferences, dislikes and other features. These behavioural patterns provided by Chatbots creates important insights to help your business make decisions on the kind products and services to offer. They also give a deeper understanding of the solutions which needs to be absorbed for better delivery of services.

2. Improved customer service
The Chatbot system helps to provide for customer inquiries in a greatly improved way. Business clients can get enhanced answers and immediate responses to their inquiries. This will make it easy for the clients to make decisions. As a matter of fact, chatbot communications tend to be more human thus garnering improved responses.

3. Increases productivity
People do not like waiting for long these days. Just imagine the number of people a customer support manages to assist at the same time. Obviously very few people. However, using chatbots can enable a business to cater to countless people at the same time. This system has an automated accessibility to a firm’s database. This makes it easy instantly cater to all the basic queries from potential customers. Those queries which appear to be more complicated can take care of by the customer support staff.

4. Better targeting
We have Chatbots that makes it easier for business to target and serve clients in a better way. One good example of such system is the Facebook Messenger. This bot enables brands to provide targeted content on the basis of clients purchase and social networking history.

5. Reduced costs
These important systems are relatively cheap to develop. Even though the responses, abilities, and intelligence vary depending on the specific bot, developing a simple one is fast and will cost a few coins. Maintaining the Chatbots is not a problem either. The system developers offer estimations on what you can afford.

6. Making each customer visit count
Controlling the number of time customers spends on your website is one tough task. Of course, there are many alternatives to make such potential clients spend time on your page but the most outstanding option is through the use of chatbots.

Final words

You should incorporate chatbots in your business if you want to maintain good relations with your customers. It not only ensures improved productivity but also helps you cater to the customer support services to many. This, in turn, will empower and enhance your business progress.

The author, Hanafi Mohd Sam, also blogs at https://www.hanafimohdsam.com.