Why Chatbots for Websites Need to Be Self-Sufficient
Support is not optional. You have to have it.
If you don’t have support, you have:
- Lack of website credibility
- No customer retention
- No customer experience insight
- Reduced customer lifetime value
As a small business or startup, you can’t maintain live chat support. You need to find an alternative so you can save your time for work on marketing and product.
You may have heard of chatbots for websites, but do you know how they work or how they can benefit your business?
The immediate advantage chatbots have over live chat is the absence of chatter. Chatbots make it so you don’t have to talk to customers.
You should want to talk to and hear from your customers every once in a while. But it is hard to keep up, and you don’t need to talk to every single customer.
When you use a chatbot, you save time for potential customers, your business, and customer research.
- Customers searching for answers are able to save time by not having to talk to a human or wait for answers.
- You are saving time for your business by not having to answer live chat or emailed customer questions.
- Customer research is information you don’t have to collect. You can understand what is helpful and what is not helpful to customers by including surveys.
Your time is precious, and customers believe theirs is as well. They don’t want to wait for answers to their questions, and you don’t want to be bombarded with millions of questions at once.
Support is your common ground with your customers. You can use it to get to know them and build relationships.
Support gives customers a place to voice their concerns and opinions about your company and product. You can meet them where they are by allowing them to have conversations about their wants and needs.
Solving customer pain points will help you connect with them. For example, you can make short, educational videos and tips accessible in your support. That way:
- You build initial trust
- Customers are more likely to be patient with you
- It demonstrates your expertise when customers need it most\
Before you add chatbot support, you don’t know that your customers are even having certain questions. It may be that many customers are curious about your refund policy, but you don’t have the support in place to capture those inquiries.
Getting to know customers is not only easy, but it also benefits your company greatly in the long run. Customers notice more than you think, and you want to be the company that stands out to them as supporting their wants and needs.
There are many different types of chatbots — the ones that talk and the ones that don’t. Most people can easily point to the ones that talk but they prefer the ones that don’t.
Chatbots that give the most accessible help without requiring any extra work are the ones to look out for. You want to look for:
- Fast help
- Valuable data
- Self-Sufficiency
For a larger company, hiring people to run live chat is no big deal, but smaller companies want a chatbot that can run itself.
Customers are beginning to know what to look for when they need answers to their questions. They will look for an icon in the bottom right or left corner of the page, so that’s a necessary feature for a chatbot.
Users want to be able to get immediate help, and when help is on the bottom corner of every page it is the most immediate and accessible.
Speed is one of the biggest and most competitive features in support software. If the answer is too slow to get to the customer, the customer won’t wait around long enough to get it.
The data and analytics that chatbots provide are extremely valuable. This is data you can’t get anywhere else.
A chatbot gets you more sales or sign ups because it forces you to address customer concerns by giving you data that can’t be ignored.
Chatbots are also there to capture skepticism. You can easily see who the skeptics are and what they are skeptical about — that way, you can adjust and update your information to better help customers.
Ignoring customer complaints can be easy to do, especially when you are in over your head. You don’t want to let those complaints overwhelm you, but you want to make sure that you are capturing them in order to make your website better.
Many chatbots, namely the good ones, are self-sufficient. They can do it all on their own — the FAQs, the data, the customer research. All of it.
That way, you can improve your website without any extra work. You get to have support, but you don’t have to run the support with your own man power.
The self-sufficiency of a chatbot is what makes it different from live chat. For small businesses and startups, the overwhelming factor is not being able to keep up.
You want to look for a chatbot that collects questions and provides answers without your input. Once you set everything up, it should do all the work for you.
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