How will chatbot upgrade your retail?

Today’s retail business is impossible without messaging. New generation customers are not wasting time on “Hello, I am writing you an email about…” A lot of companies have Facebook accounts and offer the possibility to send a fast message. It can provide quick help there is even a shorter way. Telepathy? Well not yet, but a chatbot is here to serve you. 

In this article you will find out about actual advantages  chabots can bring to your website or any other communication channels:

• How can a chatbot save you on service costs
• Increase revenue
• Rise customers satisfaction
• Provide a personalized experience
• Increase contact center productivity

With a chatbot the company can 

 

20 points	Improve Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) Scores
40%	Saved service costs
Up to 10%	More leads
30%	Increased agents productivity
67%	Increase sales

 

A chatbot is a tool everybody talks about these days. Either on the website or in favorite customers’ channels it frees service agents from work by talking to customers. The chatbot is praised for being able to save companies up to 30 % of service costs and improve sales. Sounds too good to be true right? For this we looked closely into the miracles it can actually bring to a retail company.

It saves time and money

Chatbots Life magazine states that chatbots will save companies 2.5 billion customer service hours by the end of 2023. How? The chatbot can follow a question-answer pattern and therefore is very useful in answering repetitive, simple questions that may have bothered your customer’s service specialists before. It can provide information about shipping prices, order tracking or return policy. FAQ is no longer the job for your agents, and they can focus on more added value tasks. Studies say that  64% of agents in companies that have chatbots can focus on solving only sophisticated tasks. It’s no wonder when, according to IBM, chatbots can handle up to 80% of tasks on their own. You can teach it to do tasks like: helping customers to track the order, make a purchase, or give a quiz and provide them with product recommendations. Moreover, this way chatbots will collect leads.

 

It increase revenue

First of all, it stops your customer from leaving your brand and spending their money somewhere else. Customers do not like waiting, study shows that 20%  generation Z customers will leave after experiencing slow live chat response. Chatbots can also reduce cart abandonment. Yes, some of these 75% percent of left carts can have a happy ending. Companies that have chatbot converts up to 30% more carts. 

Today’s business also focuses on ways to make customers loyal. They try to reward people that shop more and provide personal offers. Chatbots are amazing at giving recommendations. Instead of sending emails to spam, make chatbot do it.

Chatbot messages open rate is around 70-80% and a click rate of 15–60%. Yes, it may sound incredible knowing that email marketing can get only around 20% open rate while the click rate is, well… only 4%. The reason for this is that customers that got messages from bots caused it with their own actions, for example contacting the page or liking it. This means that they are more ready to be interested in the offer than customers, fed with advertisement emails, scanning through them with a good attention (or gmail) filter. It’s surprising, how different communication channels provide more opportunities for old marketing strategies.

A helpful bot is great for giving customized product offers. At first, the bot will ask a few simple questions and use the answers to choose products most adapted to customers’ vision. After this point, the customer is more likely to choose an item to buy, revenue grows. In fact, companies that adopted chatbots reported a 67% increase in sales.

It improves customer experience 

From the start of websites chatbots many things have changed. Nowadays, customers don’t have to get frustrated if the bot does not understand their question. Natural language processing helps to understand even messages with spelling mistakes. Companies can also offer a human-bot integration. Carefully measured systems allow the customer to move from the bot to a live agent anytime during the conversation- when a chabot cannot help, or the customer decides that he wants to talk to a person.

On its own, chatbot can provide a consistent, 24/7 support. If the business chooses a bot that can perform certain actions, it will handle the situation then the service specialist cannot be around. If in the middle of the night the bot will receive a request that goes beyond its capacities it will inform the customer about service working hours.

Data shows that 60% of millennials prefer chatbots to other communication channels, because they can give instant answers. With a new generation focused on service speed, and availability, a little robot that can answer to numerous visitors at once, 24 hours a week is just what a business needs. 

It makes your business stand out

While this may not make you the only company using a chatbot in your retail industry, it will certainly give you the air of innovations. Bots are a relatively new tool in the market. If you will be fast enough, getting one will not be a necessity caused by customers’ needs, but an opportunity to show your customers they can use new and exciting ways to reach you. The bot can provide innovative and fun experiences for your customers. The research found that around 43% percent of customers would prefer to buy an item from a bot.

It can be extremely adaptive 

The bot is an easily customized technology. It can be set up for the healthcare system, travel agencies or financial institutions. This means it can be easily adapted to nuances of your services, as well as your audience. There are a lot of features to choose from, so you can make the bot effective and suitable for particular situations. Do you want the bot to give promotions? No worries. Need a bot only for frequent questions? That’s what it was made for! Before setting up the bot consider the audience. If you have a lot of customers from different countries, making the bot multilingual can be a fast way to their hearts. Or maybe your company’s Facebook page is where all the action is happening? You can make the bot to engage with questions asked in comments or even collect leads from there. Or maybe want a bot which is simple to talk to? Consider implementing different bots in different parts of your website. One for the main page, another for the price page. Think about the time you offer the web page visitor to engage with a bot: it can be the same moment they opened the web, or maybe it’s more clever to make sure that a customer is in need of help and offer it just in time.

Modern bots are clever, providing instant answers 24/7. They can easily reach customers in their favorite communication platforms or offer help for the ones lost in your site. AI-powered bots can be an amazing experience for your customers since they can understand multiple ways the same question is asked, even with spelling mistakes. It’s created using natural language technologies so customers can get a rich natural experience, this way deleting the difference between a conversation with a robot vs. human.

Whenever you decide to make your bot simple or sophisticated, with personality or without, it can show instant improvements in your customer service. The bots can deal with repetitive questions and, feeding service specialists for  more serious tasks, it raises their productivity, reduces service costs and time, and increases revenue.