Artificial Intelligence-powered Chatbots: Increasing business growth in India
As businesses seek to personalise the way they engage with their customers, AI-powered chatbots with their predictive capability are becoming an integral part of the purchase experience.
With its assurance of limitless possibilities, artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming more ubiquitous in the business arena. Its potential to augment human abilities has been demonstrated across functions, and AI-driven chatbots have played a critical role here.
Today’s chatbots can do it all, from helping you order a pizza, to guiding you through a complex B2B sales process.
With the surge in the trend of chatbots and their market prospect, it has become imperative for businesses to upgrade the ways in which they engage with their customers.
As conveyed by Grand View Research, the chatbot market worldwide is set to reach a staggering $123 billion by the year 2025 with an annual growth rate of 24.3%.
As chatbot and AI are being weaved together, AI-powered chatbots are becoming a prominent feature in business growth. Here’s what you need to know about its importance:
Available 24×7
Most customers when looking for information don’t really want to connect to a sales agent or your support executive to get the job done. They want to access information that is useful for them and when they want it.
It makes no sense for a customer to call a call center to check the whereabouts of their order; neither does it make sense for customers to wait and talk to a support executive to learn the capabilities and limitations of your product or even wait for a custom quote.
For every user query or action that can be answered by setting up a bot flow which shares the status of their shipment immediately or connects the user to the right knowledge base article or a FAQ, it lets them learn and digest the information as per their convenience. All of this assistance can be provided to your customers 24*7.
AI chatbots are virtual assistants that help with user queries and provide solutions faster. AI chatbots also help in reducing friction and effort on the part of the customer and results in better customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores for your organisations. Lower friction also enhances the overall experience of the customer.
Enhanced lead generation and nurturing
Most of the businesses operate in an omnichannel model. They sell across the website and other social media channels. AI chatbots create an effortless way for customers to communicate with your business via existing messaging platforms such as Facebook Messenger.
With chatbots, you can engage your customers with personalised messaging, guide them in their purchase journey, and provide contextual information at the right time.
Chatbots can also be used to qualify leads based on their responses, interactions with your business and interest. Qualified leads ensure better utilisation of your sales agents and better lead-to-conversion ratios.
Cut down operational costs
According to Chatbots Magazine, using virtual agents or chatbots can help businesses to save up to 30%.
In addition to enabling a brand experience which is simpler and more seamless for customers, chatbots also reduce a significant amount of cost and resources for the organisation.
Chatbots help reduce manpower, bring in efficiency, automate and personalise the experience for your prospects and yield better ROIs.
They are easy to implement and directly impact your businesses topline and bottomline.
Offer pre-emptive support
As AI-powered chatbots gain knowledge from customer interactions, they can pick up patterns in user behavior. And as they “learn” from these patterns, they can begin to predict potential issues. With the help of this information, they can proactively address those issues before they ever create problems for customers.
For example, if your chatbot picks up on the fact that customers tend to ask questions about a specific aspect roughly two days into the onboarding process, it might start conversations at that spot in the customer journey with information about that aspect or feature.
This way, customers get the information they need before even having to ask, thus saving their time and energy.
Video Bots
Chatbots integrated with video are gaining popularity. Video integration helps offer personalised support and also helps businesses pitch products to the prospective customers instantly – enabling businesses to hit the lead response time of less than 5 minutes.
Impact businesses by improving sales and customer services
Chatbots gather customer information such as name, contact details and profession to create customer profiles. Based on the customer interactions, interest and actions taken on your platform, they can be used to build personas as well via progressive profiling. Information captured on chatbots can be directly synced with your CRM.
What this means is that you can use marketing automation tools to nurture your leads better and provide customer intelligence to your sales team and help them pitch better.
Personalised and proactive conversations initiated by chatbots also help improve your brand perception and improve overall experience for the customers and prospects.
Scalability
A human agent can handle a handful of customer interaction at once. Chatbots on the other hand are built for scale.
Most chatbots are well equipped to handle millions in traffic and thousands of interactions simultaneously. Businesses can respond faster, better and contextually with chatbots as compared to initiating responses via humans.
Additionally, chatbots are quicker to train and are cheaper on the infrastructural requirements.
Conclusion
Automation technologies are taking over all the domains of our lives. From small enterprises to some of the giants in the market today, AI and chatbots are being integrated on a large scale and these enhancements are making lives easier in many ways.
This makes one thing pretty clear that chatbots are here to stay, and their development will impact both businesses as well as consumers.
(Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of YourStory.)