When you want to complain or find out more information about a particular brand or service, what do you do?
Would you go for a long-haul phone call or a live chat session with customer care?
Like me, most of you will prefer the latter, right?
As per Comm100, 82% of customers were satisfied with their live chat experience. Compare that to just 61% of email users and a worrying 44% of phone users.
That’s right! Connecting with brands has become so much simpler over chat. Do you want something? You just chat it out!
But there’s a catch.
Imagine you’re a customer who’s trying to get some information about your favorite brand at some odd hour. Or, put yourself in the shoes of a customer support fellow trying to reply to thousands of queries in such a short period of time. Both seem like a nightmare, right? Not quite, because this is where chatbot marketing comes in.
First things first, a chatbot is a miniature software program running on the web which automates certain tasks on your behalf. Typically it communicates with your prospective customers in a typical chat-like interface.
More and more companies are investing in these kinds of chatbots to help automate personal responses and improve response times. The most advanced chatbots are written in Python Programming Language and powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and trained to recognize customer communication patterns through Natural Language Processing (NLP).
Without delving further into technical jargon let us look at what our Tawk.to chatbot interface looks like.
This 24×7 service helps you automate tasks, reduce response times and in most cases are easy to deploy. But is that all? Let’s take a quick look :
- Order placing – In case of an e-Commerce store selling clothes, food, accessories, etc., a chatbot is a boon since it allows taking orders directly in the chat. At the very least it narrows down customer choices before coming to a point where a human sales rep has to be involved.
- Order tracking – “My packages were supposed to arrive tomorrow but they didn’t!” — most of us have been there, done that — either as a customer or a business. Chatbots liberate us from this pain associated with selling goods. A fancy chatbot allows tracking packages, while a simpler one can inform a person about the shipping and delivery automatically.
- Customer Support – A chatbot is a handy tool for promptly answering common questions of FAQs. In addition to working 24/7, chatbots help solve the problem of handling customers across time zones.
- Scheduling Meetings – From booking an Uber to setting an early morning alarm, a chatbot may be extremely helpful to streamline your daily drills.
Here is another instance of chatbot marketing in action.
Wait.. is that a feminist chatbot?! ?
Also, you might not want to miss out on this interesting case study of Flipkart deploying chatbots just before its “Big Billion Day” sale sometime in 2019. The e-com giant designed clickable ads which would take a user straight to WhatsApp. Once there, a chatbot-powered digital assistant developed by NetCore Solutions would take over and engage with customers for the then upcoming Big Billion Day sales event. The company ended up earning no less than $2.5 million USD (about INR 17 crore) in sales revenue!
A mock-up of the process, courtesy of NetCore Solutions, is shown below :
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