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After all, the last thing busy entrepreneurs want to do is spend their precious time answering everyday, repetitive queries.
Fortunately, you don’t have to‑your chatbot will do it for you. Meanwhile, you can focus on the creative and strategic aspects of running your business.
Did you know that chatbot marketing was valued at $137.6 million in 2023? This is expected to rise to $454.8 million by 2027.
So, why are businesses adopting chatbots rampantly? For starters, they can help save 2.5 billion hours by just performing customer support functions.
This helps especially because customer support representatives conduct around 17 interactions daily. Modern chatbots are capable of handling 80% of these interactions efficiently.
All of these mind-boggling numbers have a point to make. Businesses of all sizes stand to benefit from chatbots. Small businesses, in particular, may be able to maximize their output with little investment.
Let’s find out how chatbots can help.
What Is a Chatbot?
Chatbots facilitate customer interactions by combining computer algorithms and programs that are designed to mimic human conversation. Over time, modern chatbots have evolved and are a lot more humanized than their older counterparts.
Of course, business owners retain total control as chatbots function based on certain predefined rules. But combine these rules with Artificial Intelligence (AI), and you’ve created a super smart chatbot that does more than just gather and transmit information.
Even if you’re not surehow to write quotes or qualify leads or even keep your accounts in order, you can depend on your chatbots to do it for you. They can identify prospects, answer customer queries, solve their issues, process orders, and write quotes to generate new business, among other tasks.
The good news is that building and implementing a chatbot with Smartsupp ** ** is extremely easy and only takes a few minutes.. Thanks to evolving technologies like natural language processing and machine learning, you can create your own chatbot without any coding.
So, how can a chatbot benefit your small business? Let’s find out.
Benefits of Chatbots for Small Businesses
Chatbots can equip small businesses to provide quick and efficient responses to customers. They use human language in their answers, which means it’s a win-win for both, your customers and business. Here are a few benefits to look forward to.
Small business owners often hesitate to adopt chatbots due to fears of complicated implementation requiring extensive IT knowledge, concerns about high costs, or worries that automated interactions might feel impersonal and untrustworthy.
However, solutions like Mira AI prove these concerns are unfounded. With intuitive setup processes, cost-effective plans, and over 90% of customers rating chatbot conversations positively, modern chatbots offer an accessible, trustworthy, and efficient way to enhance customer experience.
1. Improve Response Time
One of the greatest benefits of chatbots is that they’re available 24/7/365, even outside of business hours and on holidays. Your customers can get prompt responses and virtual assistance anytime they need it, irrespective of the time of day. For small businesses with customers from different time zones, this can be a boon.
Having a hard time managing your customer service? Install a chatbot and get to work! It’ll easily answer simple and repetitive questions in a matter of seconds, while freeing up your human representatives to handle more complex issues. Ultimately, faster response times result in more efficient service and higher customer satisfaction.
2. Provide More Consistent Support
Customer support agents usually vary in their level of training and expertise. Customers may, therefore, experience inconsistencies when talking to them. Also, customers who contact you frequently may end up speaking to different agents every time. Repeating their information/queries time and again can leave them frustrated.
Chatbots can come to your rescue. As mentioned, they work on a predefined set of rules. They can gather and store customer data securely. This information can be pulled out whenever the customer contacts your support team and the query can move ahead from where it was left off previously. This is key to providing consistent customer service experiences.
Furthermore,chatbots have unlimited patience. They’re capable of providing the necessary support no matter how long the interaction lasts and how the customer behaves. Rest assured, the chatbot will always be empathetic towards each customer and respond appropriately.
3. Save Time and Effort
As mentioned, chatbots can automate repetitive tasks, such as answering basic queries and scheduling appointments. This way, you and your staff have ample time to work on the more complex tasks, improving overall business productivity.
Further, chatbots can handle multiple inquiries from customers at the same time. So, you need not worry about the increased number of queries even during peak hours.
4. Bring Down Personnel Costs
Chatbots can reduce your dependence on human customer service and sales representatives by automating responses to predefined questions. This can help you save costs related to recruitment and salaries, while lowering the workload for your human workforce.
For a small business, every penny saved is a penny earned. You can redirect these saved resources towards areas of growth and development.
Chatbots are agreat addition to any team. You can add to its strengths and abilities without hiring additional personnel. This way, you create potential for reaping significant ROI in the long haul.
5. Enhance Lead Generation
Chatbots can support the growth of your small business by helping you generate more leads. You can, for example, use chatbots to create interactive quizzes to engage with prospects. This is a great way to educate them about your products and services, which in turn, can boost sales.
You can also use your chatbot to create drip campaigns, and schedule calls and appointments. Because chatbots can be easily integrated with messengers (Facebook Messenger, for instance), you can easily reach and engage your target audience over a platform where they are frequently available.
6. Boost Conversions
Chatbots can help with increasing sales for your business. When customers visit your website and browse through your products, your chatbot can make personalized recommendations and present similar or higher-priced options along with the best deals.
They can also present customers with one-time or limited-period discounts and coupon codes for immediate purchases. This way, they can help bolster conversion rates and add to the business’s revenue.
7. Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment
Not only are modern chatbots effective in increasing conversions, they can also lower the risk of shopping cart abandonment. Of course, they can augment the overall shopping experience for customers through personalized greetings, discounts, guidance, and assistance with payments.
More importantly, they can identify customers with items pending in their shopping cart. They can then present pop-ups or send email reminders and encourage them to complete their purchase. Offering limited-time deals or a coupon can work wonders.
8. Offer Multilingual Support
Thanks to the growth of e-commerce, customers are no longer limited to shopping at local offline stores. They can browse and buy products from anywhere in the world. But how do small businesses deal with the language barriers and deliver an exceptional customer experience? Chatbots can save the day here too.
By offering multilingual support, chatbots can detect foreign languages and respond to international customers in a language that they’re comfortable with. These AI-driven bots can communicate not only through text but also voice. Further, multilingual chatbots can answer questions and perform simple tasks in the customer’s preferred language.
Conclusion
Chatbots have been around for years, but their recent evolution has been nothing short of pathbreaking. And it’s expected to grow further. It is, therefore, in your small business’s best interest to incorporate chatbots into your business strategy. Your competitors are surely doing it.
Looking for a dependable chatbot for your online store? Smartsupp offers a new AI shopping assistant, Mira, which harnesses the power of artificial intelligence to help boost sales. One thing is for sure: integrating it into your sales process will open doors to endless opportunities for your small business. Be smart, do the right thing, and invest in a chatbot today!