Why Web Chat Has Emerged as One of the Top Business Strategies This Year

As many business owners and marketers have seen, web chat in the form of chatbots, has emerged as one of the top business strategies of 2017 as this cutting-edge technology has proven to provide significant benefits for both businesses and consumers.

Chat bots are software programs that mimic online conversation or “chat” with people. Chatbots can transform (and even improve) the way you interact with your customers and prospects while driving down the costs associated with managing online customer questions and requests.

Chatbots Have the Potential to Changing Everything in Business

Most marketers and business strategists agree that we are currently standing on the verge of huge changes in how businesses communicate with, support, and sell to their customers and prospects. And while on the surface, the use of chabots may not seem to be a highly-impactful business strategy, the technology and its potential uses are advancing very quickly, presenting an amazing opportunity for companies for companies to learn and grow as they continue to deploy them to the marketplace.

Chatbots are Becoming More Human-Like in their Interactions

Today, there are two types of chatbots. The first, unintelligent chatbots, interact using predefined conversation flows written to address common and predictable questions and requests with known answers. The second type, artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots leverage machine learning to improve their performance over time. Each presents powerful opportunities to provide competitive advantages and both approaches are progressing to the point where it is very difficult for a consumer to know whether they are interacting with a person or a software program.

And unlike most human agents, a well-designed chatbot is laser-focused to answer questions and requests in a timely and efficient manner while easily and thoroughly capturing all of the relevant data from the session. The value of this data is incorporating it into responses in order to further improve service performance over time.

The Ways in Which Chatbots Can Impact Your Business Strategies

As a business owner, marketer or technologist seeking to identify the top business strategies for consideration as you plan your company’s future initiatives, the use of chatbots deserves a serious look for several reasons:

Improve Customer Experience with Your Brand

A chatbot program provides your customers and prospects with immediate access to the assistance they are looking for on a 24/7 basis. In addition, a well-planned chatbot has the potential of answering customer requests and providing they information they need much more quickly than even your best customer service agents.

Reduce Labor Expenses

Chatbots are that rare technology that will allow businesses to enhance the customer support experience while driving down your costs to providing this support. The idea for most chatbots is not in replacing 100% of your human agents, but instead offloading the most frequently asked questions and requests to automation and handing off sessions to human agents whenever necessary.

Drive More Sales

From a sales perspective, one of the key benefits chatbots can provide is the ability to immediately walk new prospects through the sales process. With the volumes of information out there describing products and services, the guidance a chatbot can provide will minimize the number of frustrated people who leave the site without making a purchase.

Want to learn more about the use of chatbots in business strategies? Contact us.