7 Benefits Of Custom Chatbot For Better Business Development
More than 50% of customers expect a business to be available 24/7, and almost 92% want an immediate response when contacting customer support, according to a study by Hubspot. As a business how do you achieve this without raising your cost through the roof? The answer is with a ‘Custom Chatbot’.
A Custom chatbot is your one-stop solution for fast, responsive, and 24/7 customer support. But its benefits stretch beyond just extending your online customer support presence.
A fully customizable chatbot solution can accelerate your business growth and market reach.
How? Keep reading to find out.
What is a Custom Chatbot?
Chatbots are simply conversational AI (Artificial Intelligence) that automates conversations with your clients. It’s can be a replacement or an extension to your human customer support team.
Chatbots use something called Natural Language Processing (NLP) to answer your customer’s inquiries in a natural and helpful way. Even though they’re talking to a bot, it feels far from it.
A custom chatbot is a tailor-made chatbot that is specific to your business needs. You can build it from scratch without any coding. For example, Ideta’s chatbot solution allows you to fully customize its size, colour, response time, set your own brand logo and different interaction types.
You can also build different themed chatbots to go on different platforms, such as Livechat and Dialogflow for your website, Callbot for answering inbound calls, or even Autoreply and Auto Comment bots for your social media channel.
How A Custom Chatbot Can Accelerate Your Business Development
1. Increase your sales
It’s impossible to consider business development or growth without increasing your sales. No matter how many leads you generate, you grow your business without increasing those sales numbers every month.
You can customize chatbots to engage in persuasive interactions with your customers. By customizing it, you can use a chatbot to introduce new products and services to the customers without sounding too promotional. This generally helps to create a positive impression on the customers regarding the brand and also creates excitement about new products.
Long wait times can lead to lost sales. Especially for online businesses, customers often need support or additional information to make that final purchase decision. If they have to wait on the phone or in a live chat queue for a long time, they end up losing interest in the purchase.
Chatbots are available 24/7 and deliver real-time responses to consumers. They can have a very human-like conversation with a chatbot, which enforced their confidence in the purchase.
35% of business leaders claim that chatbots have helped them close sales deals, as reported by an Intercom study. They also experienced an average of 67% increase in overall sales after implementing a chatbot.
With faster conversions, 24/7 support, and a more efficient sales cycle, a custom chatbot can definitely boost your sales figure and grow your business.
2. Effective lead generation
Business development is all about expanding the dimension of your business, reaching new customers, and entering new markets. But it’s easier said than done. You might end up spending thousands on lead generation, without getting any returns or results.
Custom chatbots are a great resource to support your lead generation goals and often get you guaranteed results. You can deliver automated and personalized communication to support your consumers ‘purchase journey’. This will not only result in higher customer retention but also the feedbacks from your existing customers can be used to attract new ones.
With a chatbot, your business can always ensure that consumer interaction is always flowing in a positive direction and getting you higher conversion rates. They can also get you valuable insights by monitoring consumer data.
For example, you can customize Ideta’s AI Chatbot to conduct engaging survey’s with customers visiting your webpage. It can help you to collect insights into why some customers are leaving the page with a purchase, or which product appeals more to the consumers.
You can also use chatbots to track the consumer’s purchase patterns and behaviours, by analysing the type of questions they ask. When there’s a custom chatbot present 24/7 on your website, consumers tend to engage more because they know that they’ll get an instant response. They’ll often ask the simplest of questions or information, which means that you’ll get more consumer data to support your lead generation goals.
Custom social media bots like Ideta’s Facebook Chat Plugin can take effective feedbacks from consumers whenever they visit your social media page. You can simply customize it to pop up in the Facebook messenger box whenever a customer visits your page. You can even add popular questions, so customers don’t have to write much. They can simply click on the question and get an instant answer.
This feature influences customers to ask questions more frequently on your social media page. Almost 38% of millennials give feedback at least once a week via social media, according to a survey by Telus International.
3. Saves your cost
You can’t think of business development or growth without more financial resources. When you’re business is at the growth stage, it’ll always need money and more investments. But you can’t take your business far with a high operating cost.
Yes, you need to grow your customer service department, but you need to do it in a cost-efficient way. Investing in chatbots is far more cost-effective than adding more employees to the payroll, paying for their training, insurance, benefits, and yearly increments.
Investing in a chatbot can help you reduce almost 70% of your customer service cost. In 2019, using chatbots saved up to $209 million in the banking industry, as shown in a study by Juniper Research. Its expected to save $7.3 billion in business operations cost globally by 2023.
So, investing in a custom chatbot will definitely save your operations costs and free up your financial resources. You can spend the saved cost on expanding your products, services, or your marketing strategies. It gives you a more sustainable approach to business development.
4. Multi-language customer support
The best customer service is when a customer feels comfortable interacting with the agent. Getting support should never feel like a challenge for a customer. Language is often one of the biggest barriers to positive customer service.
Think about it, if you went to a shop to purchase an item you like, but the staff didn’t speak your language, it might end up being a negative experience. You might also decide to cancel the purchase. So, language is critical in customer service.
However, you can’t always hire customer support agents who are masters of different languages. Multi-lingual or bilingual employees are hard to find and often expensive to hire.
Chatbots are your one-stop solution to multi-lingual customer support. You can customize them to have different language options, so your customers can simply choose what language they want to interact in. It’s a simple feature that goes a long way in building consumer trust and increasing brand loyalty.
5. Expand your business into global markets
Growing your business means expanding your operations and exploring new markets. Having an automated customer support setup can allow you to easily transition into international markets.
In 2017, cross-border transactions made up over a quarter of Amazon sellers revenue. In this digital age, you need many resources to expand your market across borders.
If your products are suitable for the international markets and you have a cross-border delivery channel, all you need more is a customer support infrastructure ready to serve consumers from different locations and cultures.
By allowing consumers to access your product and business information in their own language, you’re actually building trust across borders and cultures. A truly diverse business is a business for the future, and custom chatbots can help you to achieve that.
The 24/7 availability of a custom chatbot means that you don’t have to worry about different time zones. No matter which part of the world you consumer’s in, they always contact your business and get a real-time response.
6. Proactive customer interaction
Why do most customer calls or emails sound angry or negative? It’s because they’re the ones often calling you, instead of your business reaching out to them.
Most customers will only bother to dial your number or write a long email when they’re faced with an issue. So, interactions are often negative from the get-go. That’s why you need a proactive approach to customer support.
In today’s face-paced lifestyle, you can’t wait around for a customer to contact you. Chatbots allow you to start a conversation with your customer to create more meaningful engagements.
Most companies apply a ‘passive customer interaction’ method in providing customer support. It means that the agents only respond to customers when they’re contacted. While inbound calls or emails are only sent on specific occasions, mostly communications are only initiated by a customer.
You can easily customize Ideta’s chatbot to pop up and greet customers or ask them questions whenever they visit your webpage. A simple “Can I help you with anything today?”, “How are you?”, “Which product are you looking for?” can create more positive and meaningful interactions with your customers, which might end up in a sale.
This will always help your business to stay one step ahead of its competitors and improve your brand value in the long run.
7. Improved Productivity
Customer service can often be a repetitive and mundane task. Most of the time you’re keeping employees on a large payroll to answer the same questions on every other call, go through the same sales pitch, or solve the same problems.
Chatbots have endless patience. With solutions like Ideta, you can build a custom chatbot using Dialogflow. It lets you enter pre-written Q&A’s, so the AI can take over those repetitive interactions.
If a customer has a more complex query or wants precise information, the chatbot can simply extract information from the conversation and send it over to a human agent. This helps you save a lot of time in customer support, and frees your employees from repetitive tasks.
This way, you can utilize your staff to solve more complex business problems and perform more skilled tasks.
Why Choose Ideta’s Custom Chatbot?
If you want to build a customized chatbot for your business, generally you’ll have to invest a lot of time in learning how to code or hire a developer. It’s a costly and time-consuming process.
With Ideta, you don’t need any coding or technical skills to build your own chatbot. It’s as easy as selecting, dragging, and dropping. Let’s take a look at some of the customizable features of Ideta’s chatbots:
- Customize the visuals: You’ll have full control over that chatbot’s design. Its colour, the pop-up size of the chat bubble, shape, icon, the pop-up animation, everything is in your hands.
- Interaction type: Different businesses have different interaction types. You might want a chatbot for solving customer issues, for a sales pitch, product promotion, book appointments, or just to greet your customers. You can configure your chatbot to engage in any type of interaction.
- Multichannel Communication: You can customize your chatbot to work on almost any platform, whether it’s Facebook, Messenger, Slack, SMS, Website, Google Home, and much more.
These are just some of the customizable features you can get with Ideta’s chatbot solutions. You can also create as many bots as you want without any extra cost, whether it’s for LiveChat, auto-reply, or even a call bot.
Custom chatbots are all about flexibility, and Ideta provides plenty of that.
Let’s Wrap This Up
If you’re thinking about business development and growth, you’ll need to rely on automated solutions like chatbots. Not only it saves you a lot of costs but also opens the door to new opportunities.
Responsive and real-time customer service goes a long way in creating brand loyalty, which gives you a competitive edge in the long run. Check out Ideta’s custom chatbot solutions to start on the journey of automating your customer support today.