Posted: February 15, 2021
While chatbots used to have the functional helpfulness of Microsoft Word’s much maligned Clippy from the 90s, the latest iteration of chatbots have capabilities far and beyond what Clippy could ever do.
As more consumer experiences move online, both as a natural progression and a reckoning from the COVID-19 pandemic, providing excellent customer service whenever and wherever consumers are is imperative to a successful business’s bottom line in 2021 and into the future. But it isn’t always feasible to have customer success agents manning the phones and chat services all hours of the day, seven days a week! Larger companies often have the budgets to provide that level of service, but that isn't always the case either.
Chatbots that are implemented on websites or in apps bridge that coverage gap in answering consumer questions and pointing them in the right direction. The level of intelligence and capability ranges wildly now, from a basic search tool to simulating a human customer service agent.
Before we dive into the chatbot options currently available, let’s review the benefits of using this tool for your business and digital marketing strategy. Because 35% of consumers want to see more brands using chatbots! (Source: Ubisend)
Chatbots for Business
Guiding leads on your website or business app to convert to customers is the job facing marketers and sales teams alike. Would having an always available, technological tool that embeds directly into your website/app help you in keeping visitors engaged and getting higher conversion rates?
That’s a resounding YES! Some businesses have seen an increase of 50% in their conversion rates, even without optimizing their website first (Source: Chatrunner) but we think you should optimize your website as well.
The reason why chatbots are so effective is that by switching from leads forms to conversational chatbots to collect data and nurture leads, it becomes more organic for a lead to convert to a customer. And collecting more data is always helpful when improving and implementing digital marketing campaigns.
Chatbots for Digital Marketing
As you can see from the benefits of using chatbots to increase your customer service offerings, those same benefits can shore up your digital marketing efforts as well.
Switching from using lead forms (boring!) to chatbots (exciting!) decreases the friction in having leads fill out their contact information and interests, thereby increasing the amount of data that you can capture for your marketing and sales strategies. If y
The Types of Chatbots
Depending on the level of complexity of a situation and the job role of the chatbot in question, there is a full spectrum of chatbot selections to choose from. Here, we’ll quickly dive into a few of them. It should be noted that these selections are primarily for customer service and assistance based chatbots. There are other roles/services that chatbots that can be performed, but they are outside the scope of this blog post.
With that said, let’s talk chatbots!
Button-based bot
If you find your customer service agents running through the same scripts or through the same scenarios over and over again, related to your website or app, a button-based bot could be the answer. Relying on a simple pre-defined scenario path, a button-based bot can perform simple, repetitive tasks without the complications of AI learning. But because of that, it isn’t going to fool anyone into thinking they are chatting with a human being. You’ve most likely encountered these types of bots when you go to a new website and there’s a chatbot pop-up in the lower corner of the browser. The cost for button-based bots is low, and the development is quick and simple!
Hybrid bot
The next level of understanding for a bot is a hybrid bot, a combination of a button-based bot with limited natural language understanding (NLU) that gives it some similarities to an AI bot. Unlike a button-based bot that can only function properly when given pre-coded answers, a hybrid bot can respond when presented with answers in natural language. This helps customers feel like they are given more positive customer service and that a company has considered the customer experience. While the cost associated with a hybrid bot is like a button-based bot, it takes considerably more development initially, with higher ongoing costs for training and maintaining the bot as well.
If only every chatbot looked this cute.
AI bot
For larger companies that are receiving hundreds of queries a day, their support team has more than 20 people, or there are peak periods in a day when customers often call in at the same time and encounter delays, an AI bot can help alleviate that pressure.
AI bots also have the capabilities to tackle a wide array of topics to varying degrees of complexity. Depending on its development, AI bots can range from provide a current customer available upgrade options, explain usage statistics, relay terms of purchase and delivery for retail products, or even go through initial diagnostic procedures before connecting a customer with a customer support technician.
This far more expanded list of complex tasks that an AI bot can accomplish that the Button-based and Hybrid bots cannot comes down to the AI bot’s capacity to comprehend natural language. This allows it to better understand a user’s intent and learn from it, collect data, and provide support.
Naturally, all of this doesn’t come cheap. AI bots require significant upfront investments and continued costs related to future development and support. But when done correctly and with real noticeable improvement for the customer experience, such costs can appear negligible to the increase in business because of their use.
One of the most cited examples of a chatbot increasing a company’s bottom-line happened when Amtrak introduced Julie, their AI chatbot that helps customers book tickets, make changes to itineraries, and gather information. According to Amtrak, implementing Julie “led to an increase of bookings by 25%, $1 million saved on customer service, 50% growth in year-to-year user’s communication with Julie, [and] 30% increase of revenue from online ticket booking,” (Source: Medium).
HOW TO DEVELOP A CHATBOT
If you are working with a marketing team or agency, they are likely to have tools or know developers that can help you through the process of visualizing, developing, and implementing the chatbot that you are imagining.
If you are forging the chatbot path by yourself, first see if any of the tools that you currently use offer chatbot services. HubSpot, for example, has a chatbot feature that can be used across all tier levels of service. The capabilities are limited in the Free version of HubSpot, but increase up to the Enterprise tier.
If that isn’t a possibility, you can research various chatbot specific services like Chatbot.com, ManyChat, or FreshChat. If you’re looking for something more substantial, such as a Hybrid or AI chatbot, you may find better results by asking your network for developer referrals or searching for developers online.
Start first with the goals and tasks that you are looking for a chatbot to complete. That will help dictate the timeline, budget, and research plans you’ll need to develop to take your idea from fruition to completion.
Are you totally lost and looking for an easy button? Four Tens can help! Reach out to our digital marketing experts today and we’ll walk you through your chatbot options and what you can expect from the process.