27 Jun
4 Ways Marketing Teams Can Use Chatbots
Chatbots and virtual assistants have created a major paradigm shift in how humans interact with technology. The ability to chat through text or talk using voice with applications, services and brands are fueling this wave of innovation.
With the power of artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP), chatbots are solving a multitude of business challenges.
Besides handling customer care queries, AI-powered chatbots are grabbing more attention in the field of marketing by automating low level, mundane and repetitive tasks.
A survey by Business Insider shows that 80% of businesses want chatbots by 2020
With dynamic conversational capabilities, chatbots are becoming an incredibly powerful marketing tool for businesses to improve customer engagement, reduce costs, qualify leads, provide 24/7 support, and improve their internal team efficiencies.
GARTNER PREDICTS THAT 15% OF ALL CUSTOMER SERVICE INTERACTIONS WILL BE COMPLETELY HANDLED BY AI, AN INCREASE OF 400% FROM 2017 BY 2021.
Adopting a marketing chatbot in your organization has immense potential to give you a major competitive advantage as a marketer.
4 WAYS MARKETING CAN USE CHATBOTS
1.INTEGRATION WITH MARTECH APPLICATIONS
The constant need to interface disconnected LOB systems through manual means stands as a hurdle for many marketing operations.
Integrating an AI-powered chatbot can help marketing teams quickly switch across different applications like CMS, CRM, LOB, BI and analytics software to get customer insights and use them to make business-related decisions. It provides a gateway to tap into customer information and provide personalized experiences.
Chatbots can provide immediate, easy and anywhere access to data and act as a virtual assistant in terms of providing technical support, account management, or any marketing related information.
By 2019, 40% of enterprises will be actively using chatbots to facilitate business processes using natural-language interactions – Gartner
These bots extract relevant insights from information systems and send proactive KPI alerts to marketing teams providing them with real-time information and eventually boosting your marketing team’s productivity.
2. ENHANCE CUSTOMER SERVICE
Customer service and marketing have a harmonious relationship. Marketing is strained due to various pressures and there is a constant need to do everything possible to enhance their customer service capabilities.
Chatbots not only can help your team address repetitive tasks but also have the ability to handle a seemingly unlimited number of customer service requests simultaneously.
Juniper research forecasts that chatbots will be responsible for cost savings of over $8 billion per annum by 2022, up from $20 million this year
Chatbots act as the first line of agents and provide the right information to the user as soon as he/she asks a question. It provides real-time responses without incurring additional costs and can automate repetitive tasks. This helps increase employee productivity and result in a substantial reduction in operational costs.
If the marketing bot is unable to answer specific complex questions, a customer can always connect with human agents to get their issues addressed.
Expecting your support team to have the ability to answer each and every question on your social media profiles can be terribly time-consuming and expensive. Instead, leveraging chatbots allows you to keep your social media presence fresh and dynamic.
With a marketing chatbot, you can remain accessible to consumers 24/7, answer their queries and mimic real conversations with the help of natural language understanding.
These bots help reduce the stress on call centres and enable organizations to meet rising customer demand for self-service and stay competitive.
They offer virtual 24/7 assistance to your marketing team, employees and customers and provide the required information even during the non-service work hours.
Learn More: Top chatbot use cases in different industries
3. DRIVE HIGH-QUALITY LEADS
Qualifying leads can be tricky! It is not always easy for the marketing team to decide which leads can be a valuable prospect for your offerings. Qualifying a lead requires marketers to invest a lot of time in order to perform multiple levels of screening, which tends to eat into their productive hours at work. And often, the leads may not even qualified buyers, which further diminishes overall efficiency.
In such scenarios, leveraging chatbots can save time by asking qualifier questions to your customers and drawing important conclusions. They can also engage with customers right when they are on your website, which makes it easy to connect with website visitors and answer their questions in real-time, thereby facilitating closure of more leads and deals. After successfully qualifying a lead as a prospect, the chatbot will send it to your sales team for further steps which helps enhance productivity and enables faster conversion.
4. SEND RELEVANT NOTIFICATIONS
Usually, if there are any updates regarding your organization, products, or services, channels most commonly used to relay this information to customers and employees are emails, text messages and so on.
However, sending notifications this way may annoy your customer and may even depict a one-sided perspective which may eventually cause them to lose interest in your products.
As customer expectations and behaviours are seeing a massive shift, it has become more critical than ever for the marketing team to be sensitive and adapt to rapid changes.
Whether it is using chatbots to trigger regular updates to customers and employees or capturing and analyzing data to send personalized notifications to customers based on their usage patterns, chatbots are set to transform the way marketing teams operate.
CONCLUSION
Incorporating a chatbot into your marketing strategy can boost customer engagement, qualify leads, streamline your marketing efforts, reach new consumers and increase ROI.
While the thought of creating an AI-powered chatbot may seem challenging, using powerful chatbot building platforms can make this immensely easy and quick time to market.
Are you planning to get your own marketing chatbot for your business? If so, check out BotCore – An enterprise-ready chatbot builder platform that helps you to build your own bot that boost your marketing team’s productivity and enhance customer experience!
Learn More: Basic Resources Required to Build an Enterprise Chatbot
If you’d like to learn more about this topic, please feel free to get in touch with one of our experts for a personalized consultation.
Rakesh Reddy is our co-founder and a serial entrepreneur. A mechanical engineer by education, his business vision and direction as Chairman & CEO drives us to excellence. An avid team player, he works with his executive team to trigger growth for Acuvate across geographies and business areas. His business acumen, strategy and planning skills catalyzed the growth of Acuvate since its inception. A natural leader, he has been able to successfully bootstrap his companies, help win customers and successfully constitute the company’s board and a robust leadership team.
Rakesh Reddy