The FUTURE of Conversational Marketing is NOW — How Chatbots Can Scale and Automate your Customer Experience?

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Chatbots Life

9 min readJun 18, 2021

Introduction

Over the past few years, many businesses and companies have reaped the benefits of technological advancements, especially in the field of Artificial Intelligence. 86% of companies agree that AI will be an established and recognized technology in their firms in 2021.

As a result of these advancements, customers have increased their expectations too. With all the industries going behind a screen, where everything is available at the click of a button, the only thing that lacks from making the customer experience whole is a personalized touch.

Customers expect to get instant solutions to their problems and queries rather than having to wait even a few minutes for it. Businesses lose almost 75% of their customers due to long waiting hours.

Why is Customer Service Chatbot Essential?

A chatbot for a website uses the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning to deliver automated responses to customer queries. The opportunities that are tied up with retail chatbots are enormous.

Here are a few statistics that will convince you that conversational AI is the way forward.

56% of users now prefer a chatbot over customer support
65% of businesses that use chatbots are SaaS companies (Software as a Service)
Chatbots can reduce operation costs by almost 30% as they save time and do not require any manpower
And a whopping 95% of the people feel that the main benefit of chatbots is their exceptional customer service

How Chatbot-based Conversational Marketing Helps to Scale and Automate Customer Experience for Brands

Maruti Techlabs

Maruti Techlabs is a software development company that delivers technology consultancy and solutions. It was founded in 2009, and it’s predominantly located in India.

Problems

During the initial stages of their journey, they faced significant challenges in lead generation and improving their sales. Upon trusting their ideas and strategies, they were slowly increasing their website traffic to around 50,000 customers per month. However, their conversion rate wasn’t impressive, as many people turned back almost immediately.

Maruti then introduced a human-run, live chat tool on their website to connect with their customers. However, most of the traffic was coming from outside India when the company’s support team was offline. They were losing a significant portion of their traffic since their responses were late, even via the live chat system.

Features of Chatbot-based Conversational Marketing

Real-Time Personalization

Customers are delighted when their experience with a company feels a lot more personalized to them.

Conversational marketing deals and focuses on the customer to feel more engaged even in the most basic interactions. It further enhances this by making related recommendations.

For example, when you book a flight ticket on a website, a chatbot may recommend hotels nearby or give you information on certain tourist attractions.

Smoother Customer Journey

Conversational commerce through chatbots is designed to improve customer experience.

Think of a sales rep at an apparel store; don’t they quickly help you find exactly what you’re looking for? Conversational chatbots are developed keeping the customer’s journey in mind.

The chatbot can initiate a conversation with the customer, learn about their queries, and then provide helpful and insightful answers. It’s just like talking to a human, except with much faster response times.

A statistic shows that almost 56% of the people have positively changed their views and expectations on customer service with a chatbot.

More Convenience and Less Friction

Conversational Chatbots are all about making things easier for the customer. They help the company guide its customers through the process of making a sale. It is a lot more convenient for customers to deal with a responsive chatbot rather than figure things out independently.

Indigo’s conversational AI-powered assistant solves customer discrepancies and helps its customers find answers to commonly asked questions such as flight cancellation, COVID-19 related queries, and revised travel mandates without the need for human intervention.

Personify your Brand

The most critical facet of a chatbot is how diverse it can get. It can interact with new customers to find out what they need and solve problems that existing customers face simultaneously.

Based on the target audience, chatbots can be programmed to follow different conversational styles and tones to portray exactly what your brand stands for and what your customer needs.

24*7 Availability

As you saw earlier in one of the previous examples, the main problem a business faces is providing support round the clock. Over 50% of the customers expect that a business should be open 24*7.

Setting up a customer support team that works 24*7 for your company may prove to be expensive. The company will need to find and train an overseas team of professionals to handle the night-time traffic. But with a conversational AI chatbot, assisting customers 24*7 becomes effortless.

Multi-Channel Availability

Multi-channel availability refers to the various channels and platforms through which customers can access customer support. It makes use of messengers Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, Slack, and many more, so that you can communicate and stay in touch with your customers using the channels that they prefer, instead of asking them to use the company app.

Reports suggest that over 300,000 chatbots are present in Facebook Messenger alone, wherein over 8 billion messages are exchanged between customers and businesses in a single day.

Collect Actionable Feedback

Marketing professionals have touted the importance of collecting feedback from customers for decades. And no, with chatbots, collecting actionable feedback is easier than ever.

Rather than asking a customer to fill out a clunky form, a chatbot can be immensely beneficial in such scenarios. It can collect feedback from the customer as a natural part of the conversation. Customers do not feel like they are inconvenienced, and businesses can get the information they want.

The Future Conversational Marketing Trends that are Dominating Now

Interactive Messaging Platforms

As mentioned earlier, customer service bots have found their place in instant messaging platforms too. The best example for this would be the BookMyShow company.

Anytime you book a ticket for a movie or any event on BookMyShow, you get an instant notification on WhatsApp. You also receive your ticket so that you don’t have to download it from their website separately. This effectively increases the customer experience.

Increased Adoption of Chatbots

Conversational AI is growing in many industries. Research by AI Multiple found that the interest in chatbots has increased by almost 5 times in the last 5 years, and the market forecast is expected to reach nearly $1.3 billion by 2025.

Optimizing Customer Experience

Customer experience increased tenfold with the implementation of AI chatbots. A comprehensive study done by Aspect a few years ago showed that the customers were most impressed by the following things about conversational marketing,

Instant answers
User-friendly interface
Friendly nature of the bot
Accuracy of the results and
Overall success with the interaction

Increasing Demand for Voice-Driven Interfaces

Voice-driven chat platforms like Google Home and Amazon Echo have changed the marketing game. Customers want an easier alternative to chat-based platforms. Voice-based platforms are similar to text-based platforms with a key difference.

Customers speak to the platform rather than typing. A study by Juniper Research shows that there will be at least 8 billion voice assistants, like Google Assistant, by 2023. Companies around the world have started experimenting with voice-based alternatives to text-only platforms.

Voice-driven interfaces have a big scope in the conversational commerce industry. Instead of typing out their queries, the user is enabled to speak with the bot directly. This, in turn, optimizes the customer experience.

AI is Opening Various Opportunities

AI Oracle and venture capitalist Dr Kai-Fu Lee said, “AI is going to change the world more than anything in the history of humanity. More than electricity.”

Techgrabyte showed that AI would have a major impact on the Energy, Finance, Healthcare, Automotive, Manufacturing, and Retail sectors, leading to many new possibilities and opportunities.

Enhanced Focus on Customer Data

Companies are increasingly becoming data-driven and data-focused. Rather than relying on intuition and common sense, companies want hard data to inform their decisions.

Conversational chatbots are expected to assist in this endeavour. These chatbots can collect user data and then pass it on to companies. This is why focusing on customer data can lead to a better customer engagement process and tailored marketing strategies that specifically cater to the customer’s needs, especially with frequent recurring ones.

Conclusion

Chatbots provide a one-stop solution for customers on the one side and sales and marketing teams on the other.

If you are looking to revamp your business with the help of conversational AI, then WotNot is the perfect place for you. Trusted by over 3000 companies, WotNot helps you make powerful chatbots through a simple process that does not require any knowledge in coding to work with. WotNot also provides detailed analytics that can further assist you in optimizing your chatbot to gain better performance.

We hope that you found this guide to chatbots helpful. Feel free to contact our support team to find out more.

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