One of the best inventions that support business is chatbots. It is a machine that engages human beings and helps them to shop online. Chatbots can help ecommerce sites in several ways. These bots can help you to answer common questions, boost customer engagement, and enhance the online customer experience.
Meaning of Chatbots:
Terms such as natural language processing, virtual assistants, or even chatbots are common in the modern marketing environment. We cannot run away from the fact that some of these terms are so confusing.
The number of people who are using chatbots continues to increase with each passing day. These are special computer programs that are specially designed to interact with customers automatically. Chatbots can proactively respond to messages that contain particular phrases or words by providing predefined responses.
Chatbots also use machine learning and natural language processing to assess and understand incoming messages and stimulate conversations. These programs are referred to as AI chatbots. The tree chatbot engages with your visitors and provides predetermined options that you can choose from and all of them come with relevant responses.
Many times, chatbots work in the live chat windows. However, we have more specialized programs like Tidio that allow users to engage with these bots on social media platforms through Facebook messenger.
How Chatbots Work:
All interactions on chatbots focus on two major activities; analyzing the users’ request and returning a response. In analyzing the user’s request, the computer program will break down incoming messages to identify the intent of users and match it with the relevant information.
In returning responses, chatbots deliver the identified messages to satisfy the request and intent of the users. Chatbots process a predefined set of inputs by giving visitors specific options that they need to choose from.
The owner of the ecommerce site will determine the most ideal responses to these ideal responses. The response can either be information that is retrieved from a resource like a knowledge base or a statistic text. It can also be a reference or link to a page where visitors can learn more.
Chatbots normally act on a choice-based input. These machines have a pre-defined logic that allows it to give different responses depending on the action of the customer.
Chatbots use natural language processing to understand the unique inputs that users input and offer the most relevant answers. More advanced chatbots use machine learning and artificial intelligence to imitate real conversations. In some cases, visitors may even to realize that they are talking to a machine.
What Chatbots are Important to E-Commerce:
Ecommerce chatbots can help you to increase your online sales. When you use them in ecommerce, these bots can help you to retain a high proportion of your visitors. The bots are also excellent platforms that you can use to build customer loyalty.
As a result, most customers prefer to use self-service tools like chatbots in their interactions with a brand. It is one of the best ways to solve simple inquiries. Most customers, especially millennials and younger shoppers prefer to use live chat because of the convenience and speed at which you solve issues.
With chatbots, customers will not have to wait for long hours before they can speak to a customer support representative. Most customers need help to complete a purchase and chatbot can help them. It is one of the best ways to create value by transforming the journey of the customer. Here are the other benefits of chatbots to store owners.
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Scaling Customer Service with fewer Employees:
The number of customers who are turning to make online purchases has been on the rise. As a result, the volume and complexity of customer inquiries keep on increasing. Chatbots will help your brand to process basic inquires without involving the employees. Therefore, your staff will be free to handle more complex business matters.
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Bots also Increase Conversations:
Chatbots provide assistance to customers when they need it most. These machines also answer the common pre-sale questions like shipping inquiries among others.
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Bots Will Help You to Overcome the Abandonment of Shopping Carts:
Chatbots can send messages to customers who abandon their purchase. Once you program the system, it will send these messages without having to notify them.
Chatbots work 24/7
Chatbots can help you in processing customer inquiries during the hours you are offline. It is an excellent feature that will help shoppers from different time zones. It is an excellent solution for shoppers who are active during your non-office hours.
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Chatbots Provide an Open Insane Rate When You integrate it With the Facebook Messenger:
Most marketers admit that they receive close to 80% open rate on Messenger and only 20% on email. It implies that messenger has a more superior reach than the other communication channels. Advanced chatbots such as Tidio provide messenger integration to assist you avail of this opportunity.
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Increase Customer Satisfaction:
The last advantage of using chatbot is that it increases the level of satisfaction among customers. The reason is that you process customer inquiries at a faster speed. These bots will help the customer along the way through the purchase journey and hence they won’t have to wait for a response.
How to Use Chatbots:
By now, you know what a chatbot is and why you should have this system. Chatbots come with several benefits to your online store. Here are some of the best ways to use chatbots for business success.
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Streaming Customer Service:
Customers ask questions regarding your products and services on a daily basis. Customers will want to know about your shipping and delivery among other services. Other clients may want to know about your time frames and shipping cost. Other may want to know the status of their order as they wait for shipping of their goods.
Chatbots will free up your team so that they can give your existing and potential customers the information that they want. The information that bots provide depends on the kind of customers you are addressing.
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Communicate With Your Customers to Increase the Order Value:
Chatbots can suggest products to visitors and notify them about discounts among other incentives. These bots also give users additional information that helps them to make informed purchase decisions. You can get all this information after launching dedicated bots that focus on sales.
One of the best examples is Tidio as it allows you to build several bots. You may create different bots that engage with your users on product pages, category pages and so on. The bots can also suggest other product options and add-on that enrich the experience that you have with a product.
In summary, bots act as a salesperson to offer suggestions and guidance to shoppers who come to your store.
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Preventing the Abandonment of the Shopping Cart:
Shopping cart abandonment is one of the things that plague most online stores and continues to increase over time. However, chatbots will not entirely eliminate this problem. These bots will help you to ease this problem and retain some of the sales you had lost.
Chatbots can offer assistance to your visitors when they decide to abandon to sign up for an account during the process of purchase. The bots will also give your customers help when they are about to leave your page, cart, or checkout.
Lastly, chatbots will send reminders to any visitor who leaves items in the cart. The system can offer a discount code so as to entice them to complete the process of purchasing.
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Encouraging the Returning Visitors to Purchase:
Very few customers will purchase a product when they visit your website for the first time. Most of them think that online purchasing needs a lengthy research process. Giving your visitors some incentives to buy from your site will speed up this process. Chatbots will help you to automate the whole process by engaging with all the people who visit your website.
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Personalize Communications:
Online shopping is getting more personal over time. In the past, customers would only interact with the website and the content that is there when buying online. The good thing about chatbots is that they personalize the whole process.
These bots can great new visitors, give them assistance, help them overcome simple problems while buying, answer common questions from clients, and many more. Chatbots can also takeover whenever your customer service team is busy serving other customers.
Once you give your customers such a shopping experience, you will increase your customer base and revenue. Therefore, chatbots and an excellent investment for any business that wants to stand out from the crowd.
How to Build Highly Functional Chatbots:
1. Define the Goals for Your Chatbots:
The first thing you will want to do is defining what you would like the bots to do for you. The bots can great new visitors and help them, point to specific discounts and products, overcome abandonment of shopping cart, processing support inquiries, and react to particular user behaviors. Once you know how you will be using a chatbot, you will be in a better position to determine the best solution.
2. Outline the Chain of Events That Take Place on the Side of the Visitor:
Once you define the goals, you should determine the things that trigger the automation. Some of the visitors would be hearing about your website for the first time. Apart from engaging these visitors, the chatbots should ease the anxiety that people have when visiting an e-commerce site for the very first time.
Clearly outline the chain of activities that take place whenever a person visits your website. Once you have all the possible actions, you can use different messages to target all those reasons. Therefore, you should know what is taking place in the mind of the visitor when developing chatbots.
Once you know what is taking place in the mind of the visitor, you will know what you would like to achieve using the chatbots. From here, you can build a bot that triggers, conditions, and even actions.
Triggers are those things that get the chatbots to work. Once the visitor clicks on a chatbot, it opens a specific window. The action is what takes place when triggers activate the chatbot. Some of the actions include sending an email, displaying a message, or asking a visitor a question among others.
The condition will provide additional information to help in delivering a response that is more relevant. For instance, you could talk about the location of your visitor. If the chatbot is providing shipping info, this criterion will assist in delivering relevant and not generic responses.
3. Building the Chatbot:
Once you put all the above information together, you can go ahead and build the chatbot. The first thing you need to do is to select a trigger. For instance, you may want to activate a bot when a person is visiting your site for the first time. Tidio is the best because it has triggers that are predefined for this purpose.
The next thing is to add the first action of the bot. visitors may be a bit anxious because they are new to your store. Give the visitor a few seconds to browse through your website and familiarize himself with what you offer. Thus, you can choose ‘Delay action” and choose the most appropriate time interval like 5 seconds.
After the five seconds, the chatbot can display a welcome message by greeting the visitor. You can program the bot to say something about her self during the greeting. In this case, you will be using the decision ‘quick reply’ actions.
You have the actions to specify the messages and suggest the most appropriate responses to the visitor. Building the chatbot will get fun as you specify various interactions depending on the responses you get from the visitor.
The good thing about Tidio is that it will ask you want you to want to do as you drag and drop new actions. The process of building chatbots is not a complicated one. You will design it depending on what you would like to achieve using this machine
Conversational chatbots allow you to control the whole conversation. You will bring the visitors close to your goals by enticing them to make a purchase, engage, or any other thing you wish to accomplish. There is no human interaction at any point during all these conversations.
Conclusion:
There is so much that you can take home from this advanced guide to chatbots. These are programs that are specially designed to automatically interact with your visitors. Chatbots can help you to achieve a broad range of business objectives.
Some of them include streamlining customer service & support, increasing sales, and overcoming the abandonment of shopping cart among others. One of the platforms of chatbots that is easy to launch is Tidio. It has predefined chatbot automation that will get you started within a few minutes.
Want the best chatbots solution for your brand? Get in touch with us for the best way forward.
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