Bots are everywhere around us. They now are the technological revolution that they promised to become a few years ago. We may not realize it yet, but these bots take up different forms and are all around us, from Siri on our iPhones to Google Assistant and Alexa. They’re already a part of our everyday lives. But chatbots are not restricted in their potential. You can use your chatbot for everything in the business scenario too, from customer acquisition to customer retention.
Bots have a huge potential to save time. They even have the ability to carry out complex tasks with relative ease and in different ways. These have made them valuable and necessary to us but how about businesses? What are the prospects of bots to help develop your business?
Chatbots have been vastly used in the business world of late. If you’re tech-savvy and are into business, then there’s a high chance you know about chatbots. But what do chatbots really offer the business? How do they help the company grow and retain customers?
7 ways to increase your customer retention with chatbots
This goes far beyond just chatting with customers. You can use chatbots to gather information and gain deeper insights into your customers. This is in fact, one of the chatbots’ most potent abilities. The way a business chooses to program its chatbot will determine its work. So, you should program your chatbot to be able to pick up important data points about your customers. It will do this by analyzing and tracking their purchasing patterns. It will also be a managing database that stores basic details about customers.
If you are a retailer of food or clothing (fashion generally), this insight from the bot will be particularly useful for you. Having a knowledge of the customers’ patterns will give you a good idea of the products that they prefer. You can use this information to manage your inventory accordingly.
Chatbots also have the ability to store information about the type of questions that they ask. This gives the business management an idea of expected questions customers ask. It even helps equip the business to answer or tackle such questions in the future. You can even upsell additional products. All you need to do is increase the sales funnel through tactics like providing coupon codes.
This is the most basic way for small businesses to use chatbots. If you're not counting this as one of the ways to use your chatbot for customer acquisition, you're missing out. The bots are used as the first point of contact between the customers and the business. This is even more necessary if you are in an industry that has plenty of jargon; there is a high chance that people will call you to ask basic questions.
So, it will be a great idea for you to load your chatbot with the most frequently asked questions. This will save a lot of time for both the customer and the business. It will even increase customer satisfaction as they get answers rapidly.
You might find chatbots to be more useful to international businesses for this purpose. With chatbots, you are assured of a 24/7 customer service that can cater to customers worldwide, irrespective of the time zone.
Many businesses now use chatbots in a way that solely focuses on content. It has now become a part of their strategy.
These bots provide the customers with content that is specific and relevant to them and their needs. Content that is specially curated for them. This way, the business can gain more traffic through social media without appearing to spam anybody or force anybody.
There are a plethora of languages in the world, and quite frankly, everyone prefers to speak their first language. So, as a business, you can be more effective in your use of chatbots by programming them to speak more than one language.
If you have customers spread across the globe, you would not expect them all to speak the same language. So, you should make provisions for your customers to be able to relate with your brand in their mother tongue or first language. This makes it easier for your customers to relate with you. They will even be more willing to reach out to your customer support service. This ease of communication increases your ability to retain your customers.
With a multilingual chatbot, your business will be able to retain customers better. So, you should make sure that language is not a barrier to the growth you expect to make.
To make it possible to retain your customers with your chatbot, you should make it possible for your customers to purchase directly from the chat interface. You should always make look for ways to improve your chatbots and provide more functionalities for your customers. Your competitors are also looking for ways to improve their business, so, you have to always be on the move.
You will be able to retain customers by adding more functionalities to your chatbots. You can even make the bots lead customers back to your online store. Your chatbot should be able to work as a payment tool to make payments easier. When there is ease in carrying out financial transactions, your customers will easily come back and purchase some more. So, you can use a chatbot to hold on to them or gain new ones.
If you aren't using your chatbot to request customer feedback, then you are not using it the right way. This is one of the simplest ways to use a customer retention chatbot. By using your chatbot to provide user feedback, they can inform you about how they feel. They can even tell you what they think about the service which you provide. This way, you know what your customers want, and you can improve on it so you can retain them.
When creating your loyalty programs, in order to bring your most loyal customers even closer to you, you can also add chatbots to it. Train your chatbot to ask your customers for referrals. Reward the customers that are most loyal and provide them with discounts. Your chatbot must be able to do all that you need it to do in your loyalty program.
Since your customers like such loyalty programs, you should train your chatbots to retain your customers. Tempt them towards everything you have to offer them in your loyalty program.
You can also train your chatbot to send ‘thank you’ messages to everyone. This is one step into ensuring that your customers are happy, and it might compel them to come back. Every time they complete a purchase, you should compliment them. Thank them for their patronage, trust and the loyalty that they have in your business and your brand.
How does chatbot improve customer service?
Chatbots are a powerful way to engage with your customers at scale and understand them. But they cannot answer every question your customers have. Some are complex, some situational. You still need humans to handle these queries.
That’s where live chat comes into the picture. While your bots handle the repetitive queries, live chat allows your agents to handle the complex and situational ones.
It allows your customers to continue the conversation over the same channel without needing to switch to a phone call or draft an email.
Live chat gives your support team speed and scale. Where they would only be able to handle one customer at a time on a phone call, they can converse with as many customers as they are comfortable with over live chat.
The result? Better customer service and higher retention rates!
Conclusion
Customer retention is an important part of every business. It is the only way you can ensure that your business continues to grow. If you're already using a chatbot to automate some of your business processes, then why not use a chatbot for customer retention as well? The fact that chatbots relate directly with the customers means that you can target your audience easily with a chatbot. This is something you should definitely take advantage of.
Go on, build your own customer retention chatbot.
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