Key benefits of chatbots for businesses

Chatbots offer businesses multiple benefits – and this is why adoption is surging. According to Gartner, by 2027, chatbots will be the primary customer service channel for nearly 25% of companies. And in a survey conducted between January and February 2022, 54% of respondents said their business used some sort of chatbot.

Let’s start with how chatbots can improve customer experience. Providing excellent CX is critical for nurturing loyalty and increasing customer lifetime value – something that benefits all businesses.

Customer support chatbots can be designed to resolve frequently asked questions and other common customer queries. This helps accelerate time to first resolution, an important contact center KPI. This improves customer experience by providing customers with fast solutions to their queries.

Before the widespread adoption of chatbots, customers would wait in queues to talk to an agent by phone or by chat. According to Statista, depending on the industry, customers will expect a reply with 2.5 minutes before abandoning their session.

Chatbots eliminate this challenge entirely by providing instant replies to customers, keeping them engaged.

This can be either with a keyword menu in the case of keyword or rule-based chatbots, or with a personalized greeting through a conversational experience with AI chatbots.

Learn more about what kinds of chatbots businesses can use in our blog all about chatbots coming of age.

With the rise of LLM technology recently, AI chatbots are on the rise. Running on LLM AI, these chatbots can communicate with customers in any language in a conversational manner.

In addition to providing instant replies, they can do this in any language at any time of day.

When paired with a customer data platform, chatbots can provide personalized, contextual customer support.

This level of personalized support results in even higher positive outcomes – and 72% of personalized interactions being resolved without human agent takeover.

Using customer data empowers chatbots to pull contextual data that is relevant to customers and their customer journey and use this information to shape the conversation. This results in proactive customer service. Returning customers receive information relevant to their previous experiences. This can be in the form of contextual support for a recent purchase, offering delivery updates or complimentary products – or even something as simple as welcoming a customer back and using their name.

Providing fast customer support, 24/7 in any language is impressive – but can you do it on any channel at any time and preserve full conversational context?

That’s what being omnichannel means. And with omnichannel chatbots, customers can engage with businesses across any channel they prefer – while preserving context of their conversation.

Customers appreciate consistent experiences, and with an omnichannel chatbot, businesses can provide these across any channel, at all times.

Next, let’s take a look at the business-centric benefits of chatbots.

A lot of customer service requests are common enquiries. It’s why we call them “frequently asked questions.” They’re repetitive and get asked a lot.

Chatbots can take on the FAQs and provide instant information about:

This frees up human agents to deal with critical customer service issues that require a highly trained human agent’s interaction.

In these cases, chatbots can again be of assistance by identifying customer queries and assigning them to the best agent based on criteria such as:

This helps optimize your customer service department, balance workloads, and assign tasks to the most appropriate and capable agents. As a result, queries are processed faster and at higher positive resolution rates – happier agents and happier customers.

Agent churn rates are also reduced thanks to improved employee satisfaction owing to reduced strain, optimized workload, and improved sense of value contribution by avoiding repetitive work (i.e. replying to the same question multiple times a day).

AI chatbots can use customer data to enrich conversational experiences with customers to answer questions while also gathering valuable customer data.

When paired with a customer data platform, chatbots can populate critical lead scoring fields such as the customer’s page view history, wishlist or shopping cart, and general preferences. This valuable data can be used for lead scoring and how to best target customers.

Chatbots can also be employed to guide first-time visitors or high-scoring leads through sales journeys by proactively providing product information.

With chatbots designed to guide customers through the sales process, businesses boost conversions, decrease bounce rates, and reduce shopping cart abandonment.

Businesses can only grow as fast as they can serve customers. Think about it – Henry Ford didn’t invent the automobile, he just discovered a cost-effective way to produce cars faster than anyone else.

Business growth goes hand in hand with the capacity to serve more customers.

And chatbots help with this. From lead scoring and nurturing web visitors to guiding them through the sales process towards conversions – they help you get more customers. And thanks to always-on, multilanguage capabilities, chatbots can even help you cross language barriers and scale to new markets.

Chatbots even help you keep your customers. By providing fast and proactive customer service, you’ll reduce churn and improve CLTV.

While chatbots come with an upfront investment (and what groundbreaking technology doesn’t?) they will help you to earn more while also optimizing your existing costs.

Consider the benefit of automating FAQ handling and improved customer service triaging. You may not need to hire more agents – you may just need to optimize what your agents handle.

And you may not need to hire more sales staff, either – just optimize your sales processes by introducing chatbots that guide high-scoring leads towards conversion, leaving higher-demand customers for your experienced sales professionals.

By implementing chatbots, you get to serve more and more customers and grow your business – without growing your operation.

Chatbots benefit businesses from an operational standpoint by helping them to scale without having to grow their entire operation. This includes optimizing existing departments staffed with well-trained and experienced personnel to improve both their output and job satisfaction through offloading repetitive tasks on to chatbots.

In addition, lead generation improves, sales figures grow, and customer loyalty endures. This is thanks to the customer-centric benefits of chatbots – instant, personalized service around the clock, on any channel for unparalleled convenience. This creates unrivaled customer experiences that benefit businesses and customers alike.