When you hear the term conversational marketing, you may wonder what that means. Did you know that conversations are more likely to lead to a conversion, especially when paired with a live response?
Thanks to chatbot development and the power of artificial intelligence, website messengers have become more interactive on websites.
Chatbots are more likely to lead to conversion and gain any business the customers they crave.
In fact, over the last five years, Chatbots have become an integral part of marketing and user support. Keep reading to learn more about chatbot development and your website.
What Are Chatbots?
A chatbot is a computer program that can have conversations through a messaging interface. Facebook messenger is a great example, as in 2017, it already had 1.3 billion monthly active users.
Experts estimate that in 2021, 74% of users prefer chatbots while looking for answers to simple questions. Aside from this, Chatbots have become a useful marketing tool for businesses of all sizes. According to B2B and B2C companies, 57% of businesses claim that chatbot delivers a big ROI on minimal investment.
Many companies are reporting getting enormous value from their bots, 1-800-Flowers received more than 70% of its Facebook Messenger orders from new customers, and Sephora reports an increase of makeover appointments by over 11%.
Communication is the key to converting visitors, and conversational marketing is the newest tool in the leaking bucket.
Sparking the growth of the global chatbot market is the rising need to understand consumer behavior. User experience can often lead to the success or failure of a business.
What Are the Key Differences Between Live Chat and Chatbots?
When you go into the details, you can see how these two on-site support systems differ.
The Chatbot:
- Has a robot avatar
- Has a bot-type name
- Replies immediately
- Provides multiple answers to one question and then asks for you to select one
- At each step, other multi-tiered answer selections appear until you are routed to page or person to complete your inquiry
The Live Chat:
- Has real people profile pictures
- Has a person’s name along with the photo
- May respond in a few minutes. It will specify the usual reply time
- Once the conversation begins, it continues until your problem is resolved or answered
Sometimes a business will use a chatbot in combination with live chat to help guide the visitor to the right place through inquiries.
Chatbot Development
Currently, artificial intelligence (AI) powers the more advanced chatbots. This implementation helps businesses solve problems, send personalized messages, and improve their customer communications over time.
This technology may be very new, but many people use chatbots daily without even knowing it.
Businesses now have many options when deciding to include a chatbot on their website, which makes it more involved in some ways. Chatbots can have a voice or be entirely text-based. It’s best to test your chatbot in every metric before making it live.
How Do Chatbots Work?
Every communication with a chatbot focuses on two principal activities:
- Review of the user’s input, where the computer program breaks down the incoming message to understand the visitor’s intent and matches it with related information.
- It is returning the reply, which is the delivery of messages to meet the user’s purpose or inquiry.
The type of chatbot will determine the responses. Some of these can include:
- Static Text
- Information pulled from a Knowledge Base or similar resource.
- A link or reference to a website.
- The result of an action completed by the chatbot, such as a newsletter signup
What to Consider When Developing a Chatbox for Your Website
Many things can affect your customer’s reaction to your chatbot. So, it is a good idea to make a list of what you want to do to discuss with your website designer. Here are a few suggestions:
- Personalization is the main idea behind getting a chatbot. Your welcome screen should inform the user about the aspects of your bot. For instance, a user feels more comfortable when the bot is using his name for greeting and interaction.
- The design of your bot is another thing that users will notice. They are more likely to trust a well-constructed bot.
- Make sure that you use correct text formatting, high-quality links, and high-resolution pictures in your bot replies.
- Ask users upfront for all the information you need rather than asking repeat questions.
- Link your chatbot with an NLP library to help reduce grammatical errors.
Benefits of Using a Chatbot in Your Business
There are a lot of reasons that using a chatbot is beneficial for any business, such as:
- They have huge potential. Even though the technology is still new, they are getting more popular with the continuing development of AI. The possibilities for bots, both in business and personal lives, are infinite.
- Depending on what you want to do, they can be easy to build without any coding knowledge being needed.
- Brand building is crucial. The chatbot represents the business brand when it is communicating with a customer. From a marketing perspective, it is perfect.
- They are excellent in every time zone. If you have customers in multiple time zones, chatbots are perfect for taking on human work for many kinds of tasks.
Types of Chatbots
There are two main types of chatbots.
Simple – Conversations with this type of chatbot take place in pre-defined ways and directions. In essence, you’ll get a pre-programmed reply to each question you ask.
Intelligent – Bots that use artificial intelligence can provide more flexible replies to user questions.
This type of bot (like ChatGPT) improves from each conversation. It then uses this to answer future questions better. Aside from this, there are differences in bots based on the person, teams, and domain or brand-specific).
Chatbots Today
Chatbots has evolved and been adapted to business needs and are continuing to improve at lightning speed. Before long, it seems that a lot of customer service will be taken on by bots enabling businesses to focus their people on more income centric work.
Since people are moving away from downloading apps, bots are the answer for the future. Apps take up valuable space on your smartphone and have limited uses. Building chatbots for a website helps businesses convert visitors to customers.
People who visit websites can now talk to the bots to get answers to their questions or help with problems they may have. This solution is much simpler than filling up their memory with applications for every online service they use.
These friendly chatbots help get them what they need and where they need to go to get it.
Concluding Thoughts
Chatbot development has come a long way, and the future is progressing at a very fast pace. Businesses should use these advances to serve the needs of their visitors and customers.
According to Hubspot, if we look at WeChat as an example, bots are the future in customer service, sales, and communications on websites.
If you need assistance in developing your website, Utopian Kreations can help. Get to in touch with us to see how we can help.
