What roles can your webshop chatbot take on?
Alexander Wijninga
| 5 min
Chatbots come in all shapes and sizes, so there is always a perfect fit to be found for your business. Where can your webshop achieve the most gains? That's a good place to deploy a chatbot. In doing so, you follow the same process as when hiring a new employee: you choose an applicant based on their qualities, which you want to use for a specific purpose. The same applies to a chatbot. With various customer service software, you can deploy a chatbot as a customer service representative, which may sound familiar to you. However, a chatbot can fulfill many more roles. For example, it can also serve as an HR assistant. You can fully customize a chatbot to your liking, so you always remain in control. In this blog, you will read about the different roles that chatbots can take on. Read on and discover which type of chatbot is right for your organization!
The Benefits of a Chatbot in E-commerce
There are many advantages to deploying an e-commerce chatbot for businesses. As a company in this industry, your website plays a huge role in the success of your online store. You can easily increase this success with your own chatbot by handling 85 percent of customer contact in one fell swoop. Your customers receive answers to their questions in no time, so they can continue shopping right away. Your chatbot also easily generates leads by collecting contact information, which you can then use in your marketing or sales process.
💡 Take a look: The Best AI Chatbots For Lead Generation
What can a chatbot do for your e-commerce business?
Deploying a chatbot quickly pays off. Research from Business Insider has shown that you can save 29 to 46 percent in costs by using a chatbot. High customer satisfaction through the use of a chatbot leads to a significant increase in your revenue.
For example, Nissan Israel's online store saw a substantial increase in revenue in the first month that the chatbot went live. Revenue grew by a whopping 380,000 euros! This was mainly due to customers having to wait a long time for answers to questions about products. Nissan Israel received hundreds of messages a day, and responses were not always quick, leading to delayed or missed purchases. This is something you want to avoid at all costs. A chatbot assists customers in finding an interesting model, responds to emails, or sends follow-up emails to potential customers. In this way, the number of purchases grew. As a result, Nissan Israel received about ten times more purchases via Facebook with a chatbot than without one.
What roles are suitable for a chatbot?
Since you set up the conversations for a chatbot yourself, a chatbot can be interesting for any type of business. To give you an idea of the possibilities, we have listed various roles below:
Customer Service Chatbots
A chatbot is a valuable addition to your customer service team. A chatbot can handle up to 90% of all first-line customer contact for you by automating repetitive questions. This way, you can save time and money. When implementing a customer service chatbot, it is a good idea to make it widely available. For example, activate it on your social media channels and install a widget on your website. This way, your customers can contact you in any way they want and expect a quick response. When you also set up a pop-up message, you will see even more traffic to the chatbot.
💡 Improve Your Customer Service With The Best Messenger Chatbots
Leadpages started such an experiment with a chatbot pop-up message on their website. Before they had set up a welcome message via a pop-up, the chatbot conducted 310 conversations per month. After setting up the pop-up message, this grew to more than 1100 conversations per month. This way, you maintain a warm relationship with your customers, and they are more motivated to buy your products.
A Sales Chatbot as a Personal Shopper
Do you want to invest in your sales process? Get a chatbot for your sales department! You can set up a chatbot to act as a personal assistant. Your personal shopping assistant supports your customers in finding the right product on your website. For example, is the customer looking for a red shirt with long sleeves? A chatbot can show all options at lightning speed. Thanks to the chatbot, your customer doesn't have to be overwhelmed by a large selection on your website. Your chatbot is also capable of sending your customers a reminder when items have been in the shopping cart for some time. In this way, your chatbot supports your customers at every stage of the customer journey.
One company that capitalizes on this well is Hipmunk. Hipmunk helps with travel planning and has integrated a proactive chatbot. By immediately asking people where they want to go and offering good deals on flights, people have a faster chance to book one of their deals.
Lead-Generating Chatbot
To generate leads with a chatbot, have the chatbot request customer information during a conversation. Make sure to ask for the customer's name and email address at the beginning of each conversation. To advertise more specifically to the customer, request as much relevant information as possible. Your bot automatically stores this information in your CRM system. With the chatbot, you automatically build a complete customer database—the perfect foundation for an email campaign!
A company that goes a step further is MongoDB. MongoDB has set up the chatbot to directly schedule an introductory meeting with every lead that starts a conversation. This way, you create warm leads almost instantly. The sales staff have linked their calendars to the chatbot platform, and from there, the chatbot fills in all appointments.
A Digital HR Assistant
To give your HR department a helping hand, you can deploy a chatbot to answer colleagues' questions. Teach the chatbot, for example, how many vacation days there are, what the opening hours are for your office, or when certain campaigns go live. This way, your employees' questions are quickly answered, and the HR department is relieved.
Lexy was developed for the company Chasma and is an example of such an HR assistant. Lexy is knowledgeable about everything. For example, she answers questions about policies, documents, and work schedules. In addition, she also proactively sends messages to employees. For instance, she sends pop-ups about training or lets you know when an appointment with a client is approaching.
A Chatbot as a Guide
At large events, it is useful to deploy a chatbot as a guide. A chatbot navigates visitors through the event via the chat window. This is user-friendly and increases the likelihood that people will be at the designated location on time, for example, before the start of a particular band or presentation. In this way, you can easily guide visitors to, for example, a food truck or another stage. Additionally, visitors can request a schedule of activities or other important information.
A huge festival that makes use of this is Coachella. In addition to navigating visitors, the chatbot also assists with registration and ticket sales. It is also programmed to tell you how to get to the festival.
Do you want to deploy a chatbot yourself?
Quickly build and program a chatbot on Watermelon's user-friendly platform and decide for yourself which roles your chatbot will take on for your business! Easily have your chatbot collaborate with colleagues and forward conversations to each other. Working in the customer service team becomes more fun and easier with Watermelon. Sign up for free today!
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