AI chatbots can interact with your existing and prospective customers, generate leads, suggest products/services, and even facilitate sales. They can make sales cycles shorter and simplify different business processes.
When it comes to business applications and the pros of AI chatbots, there are too many to list. Therefore, in this post, the focus will be on the ways in which AI chatbots help with business growth.
Here are five ways in which AI chatbots can help you grow your business.
1. Improve Your Customer Service
The most common use of AI chatbots for businesses is to provide customer service and support. While most businesses still rely on human agents and VOIP-based solutions for call routing, chatbots have their own set of advantages.
Here are some of the most notable advantages of using AI chatbots for customer service:
- Instant problem resolution for customers
- 24x7 support
- Ability to answer queries in multiple languages
- Cheaper than hiring a team of customer service representatives
Using AI chatbots can help your business provide better and quicker customer service. This, in turn, fosters customer loyalty and helps you retain customers in the long run.
2. Generate and Assign Leads
AI Chatbots can also be used to identify potential customers and assign these leads to your business’ sales representatives.
Chatbots can interact with your website or social media account visitors and answer questions outside of your business’ working hours. They can allow prospects to make sales inquiries and can even direct them to the right resources or people.
Take Roof AI’s chatbot, for example. It answers simple questions about a property that a prospect is interested in and then assigns the lead to a sales agent. The agent can then take over the case and guide the prospect further and even go for a tour of the property.
Image via Roof AI
This can be replicated for any product or service business where chatbots can answer basic questions and direct the more complex ones to the right people.
3. Recommend Products and Services
Some AI-powered chatbots are advanced enough to not just answer basic questions but also provide personalized product/service recommendations. They can ask a series of questions to a prospect and then suggest the products/services that best meet their needs.
Chatbots like these act as a personal shopping/sales assistant to prospective customers and help them make the right purchase decisions. This improves their experience with your business and also helps drive more sales.
Here’s an example of a conversation by the AI chatbot used by eBay. It is a shopping assistant that helps eBay’s customers find the right products from its huge list of products. This shortens the sales cycle and simplifies the whole purchase process for a customer.
Image via eBay
4. Ease the Site Navigation
Adding to the point above, chatbots can not just recommend products or services, but can also direct your website visitors to the right pages. This is especially useful for businesses that run a blog or want their website visitors to consume more of their content.
This is also useful for other types of businesses that have a large and complex website, which might be difficult to navigate. Chatbots can help website visitors find exactly what they are looking for, be it a product/service page or a product help guide.
One brilliant example of such a chatbot is Ava by Dell. She helps Dell’s website visitors find what they are looking for. She also answers questions and helps prospective customers find the right Dell products.
Image via Dell
5. Facilitate Sales
Some of the most advanced chatbot solutions can further simplify your sales process by actually facilitating sales without any human interaction. These chatbots are capable of taking orders directly and are able to get those orders delivered.
There are many examples of such chatbots that you use in your daily life. Placing an order from the Starbucks app is actually facilitated by an AI chatbot. Booking a Lyft ride from Facebook messenger or Slack is also facilitated by an AI chatbot.
These are just some of the most popular examples of how AI chatbots can help businesses grow by taking orders and driving sales conversions.
Conclusion
AI chatbots can help you grow your business by improving customer experience, shortening the sales process, and taking orders directly from customers.
If you were considering investing in AI chatbots for your business, hopefully, this post has made that decision easier for you. Use AI chatbots for one or more of the above-mentioned use cases and grow your business.