Five Ways Your Small Business Can Benefit from Chatbots

If you are a small business owner, you may have noticed all of the recent fuss around chatbots and the benefits they can provide to small business operations. Just a few years ago, the development of customized chatbots for small business owners seemed out of reach, given the resources constraints (financial and otherwise) with which small businesses are faced.

But today, businesses of all sizes are benefiting from the development of customized chatbots to engage their customers, prospects, employees, and partners more efficiently and cost-effectively.

Chatbots Have the Potential to Change the Way Small Businesses Operate

The business environment is standing on the verge of potentially massive changes as chatbots have the potential to dramatically change the way in which consumer and workplace communications are conducted.

For small business owners exploring the potential of developing a chatbot for their business, here are seven potential benefits to consider:

Scalability of Customer Service

As automated solutions, chatbots enable your business to handle more customer communications than ever before. If your support center currently relies solely on human agents to answer customer questions and concerns, your scaling opportunities are limited to the number of agents you can reasonably afford to hire and the number of web chats they can handle. With chatbots, you can cost-effectively scale those operations without creating huge staffing requirements.

Streamlined Sales Operations

Many small businesses find that their customers and prospects have a difficult time determining the right product or service for their current needs. Deploying a customized chatbot to help drive the sales qualification process and point the customer in the right direction. By answering questions and collecting customer input along the way, the chatbot can either close the sale on your behalf or turn the customer over to a live agent when the customer is deemed qualified.

Product and Industry Education

If you operate in a more complex industry and offer products and services that are difficult to understand for many customers, chatbots can be used to take your customers and prospects through a process that will simplify things by helping them to understand your industry jargon and either address their customer service needs or prepare them to be taken through your sales process. Many companies even find that the effective use of chatbots can replace user manuals for onboarding new customers.

Appeal to Younger Consumers

Numerous studies and surveys have found that younger consumers prefer to research and learn via chat, rather than reading and sorting through volumes of content. Millennials, in particular, have a fondness for communication via chat and text in everything from social relationships to their interactions with their favorite brands.

Workplace Efficiencies

When you consider how you might leverage chatbots for your small business, you should think about benefits other than just customer communications. Chatbots can serve a number of internal uses very well, including answering questions about business processes and guiding employees to the information they need when they need it in order to perform their job roles more effectively.

Contact us to learn more.