How can chatbots help your business?
A few years ago, chabots were the hype. Everybody felt there was potential but nobody knew what chatbot use cases will bring the most value.
Where do we stand now?
How not to use a chatbot
Do not create a chatbot like a new website. This is the biggest mistake I often see.
Chatbots are really just automated conversations. They should complement not replace your web site.
The exchanges between the chatbot and the user should be as short as possible. Use your website for long-form text and a chatbot for the action where you want an interaction (poetry not intended).
The main reason is usability, especially on mobile devices. You do not want to scroll back up from a long block of text back to its beginning just to see what it has to say.
Test your chatbot on a mobile device first and work on it, until it feels right. This is how you know you have done a good job building an effective chatbot.
Short and simple is hard. But a well crafted chatbot will reward you with a lot of saved time and a high conversion rate.
Here’s a list of simple and more advanced ways chatbots can help your business.
Conversational forms
Every business needs a form. Be it a contact form, newsletter sign up form or a lead generation form.
Conversational forms have the same function but obtaining the form data via a conversation makes them more accessible and friendly.
As a result, conversational forms often see much higher conversion rates compared to regular forms.
The conversation acts as an icebreaker after which you seamlessly ask for information you need and explain why you need it if necessary. Or you can ask some basic questions and the present a classical form with stacked inputs. You can test which one performs better.
With stacked inputs you can emulate a classical form in a web chatbot too and get the best of the both worlds.
Bonus point - No spam, even without reCAPTCHA. Recently I have replaced my old contact form on my old company page with a simple contact form chatbot.
The main reason was that it was exploited by spam bots a little too much. The result - no spam ever after. It will take a while until spammers adjust their bots to deal with chatbot forms.
Of course, chatbots can serve many other functions. Like this one, trying to get you to sign up for our launch list 😀.
Decision trees, solution guides and recommendation bots
A chatbot can be your customer's best guide.
Example: Do I have to pay the parking ticket? A chatbot lawyer can answer that.
The chatbot first works out whether an appeal is possible through a series of simple questions, such as were there clearly visible parking signs, and then guides users through the appeals process.
The result - Chatbot lawyer overturns 160,000 parking tickets in London and New York in just a few months.
If you can break the decision process into several steps, you can guide customers towards the best choice or course of action.
A Chatbot can be the best product or service guide. Or a solution guide on how to solve their problem.
Throw a conversational form at the end and you have a combo that provides value both for the customer and helps you grow your business.
The beauty of our no-code chatbot platform is that you can create a bot really quickly just like you would create a Word document.
You can embed it into your existing web page anywhere you want.
Or you can create a standalone conversational landing page with optional side bar with your logo and slogan.