How Chatbots For Marketing Helps To Improve Customer Experience?

Imagine you are surfing through some online store and a chat pops up offering you some of the best products or suggesting what to buy, just like a friend would do when you go shopping with them. This is nothing but an implementation of chatbots technology for marketing. The utilization of technology for innovative marketing purposes has proven to be beneficial in many ways.

It helps to enhance business orientation as well as improve customer interaction and experience. This is a fitting example of application of technology in non-tech business or e-commerce store. If you wonder what a chatbot is and how one can be used for marketing, then keep reading. We will be discussing what chatbot is, its type, benefits and much more in this article.

Also Read: How To Keep Winning Big In The Market Using Competitive Intelligence?

What Is A Chatbot?

A chatbot is basically a software tool or computer program that automates conversation with a customer. Chatbots can be programmed with different responses on the basis of common customer questions or requests. Most chatbots are programmed with specific responses and built-out conversation trees. Still, chatbots are typically classified into three categories- Simple, Smart, and Hybrid chatbots.

1. Simple Chatbots

It is often known as rule-based bots and these types of bot have limited capabilities. That means simple chatbots are task specific, they only ask questions based on predetermined options from which customers can select their query. These types of bots are mostly used for straightforward dialogue and are quite easy to build and deploy.

2. Smart Chatbots

Smart chatbots are powered with AI technology to create human-like interactions with customers. These bots are specially programmed to understand language, intent and sentiment of a customer to have a free flowing conversation. Smart chatbots are a bit hard to implement and execute, as they require studying a lot of data in order to understand the customer’s context of the interaction.

3. Hybrid Chatbots

As its name suggests, hybrid chatbots are a blend of simple and smart bots. These types of bots have some rule-based tasks, but at the same time they can execute free-flowing interaction with a customer. Hybrid chatbot is a perfect tool for businesses to use for marketing through customer service.

What Is Chatbot Marketing?

Chatbot marketing is a strategy that utilizes a chatbot to market the business and products through customer services. Deploying a chatbot technology based marketing technique ensures that customer service requests aren’t going unanswered, and it can also help with lead generation and sales.

An organization can simply use it as a lead nurturing device. This can be a powerful tool in the digital marketing arsenal, sometimes even more powerful than email marketing, as it allows a more direct form of one-on-one communication.

Different Functions Of Chatbots In Marketing

Bots have become essential for marketing, as it provides functioning by automating basic processes including answering common customer questions, and even making sales. Along with this there are more functions that can be dealt with by chatbots, and these functions are as discussed below.

Delivering Customer Support

A chatbot is a great assistant that enables you to attend your customers 24/7 and answer their questions. Moreover, the chatbot helps to solve the problem of different time zones. For example, a US based customer can discuss their UK based product related problems and report an issue with the help of a chatbot without worrying about if a customer service person will be available at this time.

Enabling Making Orders 

A chatbot allows direct ordering in chat. It is an important marketing tool for e-commerce stores selling products such as clothes, food, accessories and others.  It can also assist customers to find certain products even before the purchase is done and can lead to sales without any need of a sales person. Although, it can connect customers with real sales representatives if needed or asked.

Tracking Orders

Chatbots liberate businesses from the hassle of tracking customer’s order that always appear with selling goods online. A sophisticated chatbot enables tracking packages, while the simpler one can inform a person about the shipping and delivery automatically. It also asks for feedback, reviews and offers other products by studying customer buying patterning and search history.

Sharing News And Updates

Chatbot provides a new way to communicate with people and educate them about your brand and makes the communication process easy. Bots can be used to share the latest news such as the launch of new collections of clothes, or updates regarding fashion shows. It provides an option to stay in touch with your audience, keeping customers engaged.

Scheduling Meetings

A chatbot more helpful for one-person brands in any industry such as hair salons, fitness trainers, DJ services. Individuals can connect their chatbots to Google Calendar, and your very own virtual assistant will take care of your appointments while you’re busy with other customers or appointments.

In the initial stage, chatbots were used to reduce the burden of time consuming tasks such as waiting in line to reach a customer care representative and provide better customer service. Although, with advancement in technology, chatbots have much more to offer to businesses including the following:

• Customer experience is one of the important aspects to take care of in order to maintain brand legacy. This requires solving the client’s problem fast and being present with instant reply. A chatbot can just do that for your business and help you improve customer’s trust in your brand.
• Chatbots can be utilized for completing orders without making users move to a website or other page. Completing orders and paying in the chat takes less time and effort from your customers. This makes the process easy and comfortable for customers, especially for e-commerce stores.
• Chatbot can assist to boost engagement. It provides a chance to communicate with a large number of targeted audiences on various software and mobile applications.
• Data collected with the help of chatbot can provide insights on the audience’s needs and preferences, which can be used to market your product on the basis of customer preferences. In short, with such collective information business can apply different chatbot marketing strategies as well as upgrade overall marketing to achieve better financial and communication results.
• Deploying chatbot marketing can help in lead nurturing, by smoothly and rapidly moving prospects down the sales funnel. It can showcase different products and options related to what a customer is looking for and offer the best customer service online also.

Nowadays, there are many third-party services available in the market that make it easy for businesses and organizations to build their own chatbot services without needing special coding and development skills or expert staff. Moreover, tech companies are focusing on developing more advanced bot technology that will be able to eliminate any kind of communication barriers between businesses and customers.

Afterall, only a satisfied customer will continue buying your products and services. So it is really important as an organization to provide satisfactory customer experience.