4 ways to deploy a highly effective Chatbot in your business right now

Mike Lovegrove
Chatbots Life
Published in
4 min readMay 11, 2017

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Every day more and more people are becoming aware of chatbot technology, and what it can be utilised for. However, there is still a common misconception that this technology is still not good enough to deploy just yet.

If you also have this view, you are lumping this technology in with artificial intelligence. And, if this ACTUALLY was the case, then you would be correct.

Here’s what’s wrong with that view. While a chatbot can harness AI, it is NOT solely powered by such. By coupling decision tree, basic natural language processing and machine learning, then we are in a position to create a powerful chatbot right now.

Below are four ways to harness this technology today:

1. Customer Engagement

As business owners, we all know about the importance of making sure that our customer base feels valued. Sending them free relevant content is a way to do this.

However, what we also know is that doing so via email (or even social media to an extent) does not have the effect of what it used to. The issue is that most emails are deleted before they are opened, and social content is scrolled by.

In this situation, if you deploy a chatbot, your company is in a position to engage in personal conversation with every single customer/fan around a particular topic. Once you understand your various audiences, start to send them contextual information via your bot, and they will interact with it every time.

2. Selling products

As businesses people, we should also understand that every time we ask our customers to perform another action on our website/app/etc, the likelihood that they do not purchase a product increases. I.e. The number of actionable steps in inversely proportional to the likelihood of a sale.

By deploying a chatbot, you have the opportunity to ask your customers what they need, and then surface the right product for them. Rather than getting them to ‘search’ for said product, and performing a number of actions (causing drop off), they can find the desired product in one step.

The result? Highly satisfied customer AND a much more efficient sales funnel.

3. Automating services

As a consumer, we have all been placed on hold for excess 45 minutes when trying to get hold of our power provider, our telco or our internet provider. And, when this happens to us, we always turn to the person next to us (whoever they are) to vent in frustration.

As a company, it’s obviously not ideal to have a frustrated customer, regardless of the product related issue that they’re having.

Well, good news! But implementing a chatbot, your company has the ability to serve these customers at the same time right away! If you integrate with internal databases, you have the opportunity to give your customers their personal information (account balances, data remaining etc) in real time.

Yes, there will be the occasional situation where the chatbot cannot serve a customer. Simply push said customer to a service rep (which you now only need a few of), and that problem is solved.

Related: Introducing Bot the Builder

4. Internal efficiencies

If you currently work (or have worked) in a large corporate, you will be well aware of the problems with booking meeting rooms, applying for time off, getting a group of people together at a time that works for everyone etc.

In such cases, we once again have the ability to solve this problems with a chatbot.

Imagine sending a message to your company bot saying ‘Book a meeting room with Steve tomorrow’ and for the bot to find the best time and location for both of you to meet?

Would this make your work day more efficient? You bet it would.

Obviously this example is slightly more complex then the other three points above, but it is still possible right now.

So, there you have it. Right now, you can:

  1. Engage with your consumers.
  2. Sell to your consumers
  3. Automate services with your consumers
  4. Increase work efficiency

All by implementing a chatbot.

If the above does not convince you, head over to our website for more.

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Known as the guy that was the founder of JRNY - Fintech is my jam 🚀