Happy October!
As a small business owner, you may feel like you’re constantly trying to keep all the plates spinning. Doing all the work yourself can be next to impossible! Competition between online businesses is fierce, and it can be difficult to set yourself apart from the crowd when you feel like you’re hustling 24/7. It can feel like your to-do list is always growing and never shrinking, no matter how much work you do.
Taking time to engage with customers can be difficult when you’re trying to keep the administrative side of the business afloat. Now, with the advent of chatbots, particularly on social media, small business owners can work smarter, not harder. Using chatbots to engage your customers can help both products- and service-based businesses increase their bottom line.
3 Ways Bots Can Help Grow Your Bottom Line
Tip #1: Immediate Engagement
You’re not always at your computer ready to respond to a customer inquiry or click, but your chatbot is! Chatbots have been around for years in one form or another (does anyone remember AOL’s smarter child?) but are becoming increasingly popular as a form of customer service. When you employ a chatbot, it can engage with your customers the moment they interact with your site, whether it’s upon page load or upon click.
Upon engagement, chatbots can make recommendations to the customer based on a variety of data sets, increasing the likelihood of conversion and repeat purchases. Chatbots can also be used after purchase for customer satisfaction inquiries and additional purchase suggestions.
Tip #2: Pop Quiz
People love quizzes. Businesses should too. Online quizzes can teach a business a lot about their customers, and they can also help chatbots influence customer decision-making based on the results. Any content you can create that requires intensive engagement from the customer while also being fun and feeling educational or frivolous depending on your sales goals will improve your business even if the customer chooses not to purchase. The more data you collect about potential and current customers, the more specific and effective your marketing strategy can be!
Tip #3: Q&A
When your customer has a question, it’s likely they’re not the first or only one to ask. Programming a chatbot to answer frequently asked questions helps customers feel like someone is responding directly to them and provides assistance without requiring the customer to dig through an ever-growing online database of answers. With a Q&A chatbot, you can regularly add questions as they become common and change answers to questions as needed. Unlike an old-school FAQ page, chatbots have the ability to learn customer responses and better predict future customer behavior.
Lighten your workload by taking the easily-answered questions off your plate with a chatbot that can respond to Facebook messages and website inquiries. If you have a customer service team, they’ll be freed up to take more complex problems and take their time working through them while the chatbot answers the more simple questions without needing interference from a team member.
If you would like to know how we help business owners automate various parts of their business so they can focus on doing what they love, give us a call at (630) 282-4750. We’d be happy to give you a free consultation!
