This is how you win new customers with a chatbot

Selling used to be different. Simpler. People knew no better than the offering of the shop around the corner. The arrival of the internet and social media changed everything. Shouting loudly that you have the best, tastiest, finest, cheapest or most special products no longer works. The consumer no longer simply buys the first product that comes along. They look online and compare the offering before buying anything. As a company you therefore no longer compete only with the shop down the road, but with the online offering from the whole country.

Attracting new customers therefore has everything to do with understanding where your customer is, what they want and need. In this article I explain how you can deploy a chatbot to help you with this.

Seek your customers out

Because your customers no longer come to you automatically, you have to go looking for them. It is important that you move in the same places as your customers. Social media and messaging apps such as Facebook and WhatsApp are the places where potential customers come together and talk to each other about their needs. That is where you want to be!

But how do you make sure you respond to your customers' needs at every moment of the day? With the help of a chatbot, for example.

An example:

Two friends are talking about the upcoming football match of their favourite professional club. They spontaneously decide that this time they want to watch the match in the stadium rather than at home in front of the TV. One of the lads asks the chatbot in the Facebook Messenger app straight away whether tickets can still be ordered. And, without leaving the app, a little later they have ordered two tickets.

You can also plan your train journey, order your plane ticket or submit your energy reading via Facebook Messenger bots.

Chatbots on websites

Chatbots can therefore be deployed well in messaging apps, but they can also considerably improve the customer experience on your website. By integrating a chatbot into your website you are always there for customer questions.

Watermelon offers the possibility of also adding the chatbot you deploy on Facebook Messenger or Twitter, for example, to your website. A small icon then appears at the bottom right of the screen for visitors who open your website. With one click they start a conversation to get their questions answered.

The chatbot can also proactively supply the potential customer with information, or give a discount, that persuades them to make a purchase. It knows exactly how long a customer has been buying a particular product. Because it takes this into account it can also help with building brand loyalty and increasing engagement. That makes a chatbot a valuable addition to your sales team!

Customer care

It is not only new customers who benefit from a chatbot. Customers who have already made a purchase are also supported with complaints or problems. The chatbot collects the information, offers solutions and when it gets too complex, it forwards it to one of its human colleagues.

Most questions are solved by the chatbot, which means only the challenging problems end up with customer service. This lowers the workload and only makes the work more enjoyable for the customer service department. On top of that the customer is helped much faster. In short: win-win!

A chatbot can hold thousands of conversations at once and so also collect data (and email addresses) on a large scale. You can then also use all this information perfectly for improving your other marketing activities. Think for example of personalised offers based on the collected data. Or large-scale campaigns in which you target specific audiences with an offer that will appeal to them all.

Want to know more?

Would you like to know more about how to deploy chatbots successfully? Download the free whitepaper by clicking the button below!