Find Out How Intelligent Chatbots Are Already Transforming Sales Initiatives for Next-Gen Enterprises
As per a Salesforce report, CRM initiatives powered by AI could boost business revenue by a whopping$1.1 trillion by 2021. Put simply, a chatbot is an advanced tool that is powered by AI or artificial intelligence. Equipped with the power of AI, a chatbot will intelligently digitize customer experiences. As engagement with prospects and customers is digitized, the business receives massive, quantifiable benefits at lightning-fast speeds. Before we explain how your business can harness the selling power of chatbots, let’s discover what makes them the perfect sales enablement tools of today.
The world of chatbots explored
Let us have a look at what chatbots can do for your business in a digital world that is built on the foundation of hyper-connectedness. Imagine your business website as your virtual storefront. The moment a customer visits your website, he is actually stepping into your digital store with a need in mind. That means you have a chance to convert that visitor into a customer just like when someone visits your physical store. To make sure that the visitor is immediately attended to in your digital storefront, you’ll have to invest in a virtual salesperson — here’s where a chatbot comes in.
Today, chatbots are one of the most trusted digital customer service tools. By unlocking the power of well-designed and properly deployed chatbots in the sales funnel, your business will improve lead quality and optimize its sales cycle.
There are lots of chatbots out there, and your business will need an AI chatbot that’ll distinguish itself from run-of-the-mill ones. An AI chatbot will be programmed with the capability to decode the intention behind every question it receives. This way, the chatbot will provide the most relevant information to the user at the right moment. For this reason, AI chatbots open up a new world of up-selling and cross-selling opportunities.
Now you have a basic idea of the capabilities a well-programmed AI chatbot brings to the sales cycle. So now, let’s discover how chatbots will revolutionize any enterprise’s sales initiatives.
Maximizing returns from sales initiatives
Technology is simultaneously shaping the world and evolving at a very fast pace. Nowadays, enterprises need the support of conversation bots to help craft tomorrow’s commerce experiences in unimaginable ways. Companies that don’t utilize the power of innovative chatbots see the competition outperforming them in a gamut of fields, including process efficiency, sales volume, and customer service.
A case in point: One of the world’s most popular floral brands discovered that almost 70 percent of its orders came from Facebook Messenger. By using fully automated Messenger chatbots, a leading fashion retailer found its sales go up by almost 300 percent!
It’s important to keep in mind that your conversational bots are different from normal chatbots. A conversational chatbot is AI-powered using next-wave innovation. Thanks to the incredible advances in NLP and AI technologies, chatbots are engineered with cognitive engines to dynamically and efficiently decode customer experiences. That’s how these chatbots are already driving conversational marketing forward and automating sales pipelines.
As touchscreen smartphones are replacing feature phones, shoppers are viewing these well-programmed conversation bots not just as luxuries but as pure necessity in shaping their overall buying experience. In the next couple of years, more and more people will appreciate the help given by conversational bots provided by brands.
Connecting with customers through a channel of their choice
More and more people are gravitating toward text messaging and away from other slower modes of communication, such as email and telephone calls. For instance, a recent study in one of the leading tech blogs revealed that over 90 percent of people living in North America, Asia, and Europe want to message businesses directly. But, sadly, most businesses lack the infrastructure to meet this particular customer requirement.
If businesses want to sustain their relevance, they must make sure the customer’s digital experience aligns with consumer demands. Also, businesses must consider supporting contact channels that their customers use to effectively stay in contact with their target audience.
Delivering support around the clock
The availability of human agents for many businesses is limited by working hours. This means inquiries from customers and prospects pile up after hours unanswered. As far as today’s customers are concerned, waiting a long time to receive service is considered outrageous, as people want to be served in real time and move on with their lives. How do you bridge this gap? And how do you attend to customers’ inquiries without having to hire night shift employees? Well, the answer is well-built AI-enabled virtual assistants, or conversational bots.
Conversational bots don’t need to take time off or holidays, and they’re always available to handle customer inquiries, no matter the time of day. Which is why businesses should take advantage of this technology to provide the level of convenience that today’s consumers have come to expect. Convenience delivers loyalty! Sometimes against people’s will! People tend to want to do business with entities that provide the highest levels of convenience, and that’s why companies like Amazon, Uber, and Grubhub have been so successful in attracting new customers and retaining them over time. It’s all about the customer experience.
A recent study revealed that up to 77 percent of shoppers picked a service or product because of the rich customer experience backing it. The same study even revealed that nearly 64 percent of customers don’t want to do business with a brand that offers a flawed customer experience. With conversational bots, many brands have already taken customer engagement to a whole new level while bringing down the burden on their employees.
It may seem impossible to compete with the big boys, but the same technology they use is now available to even the smallest businesses. Equipped with the right tech and some creativity, any size business can provide the convenience people deserve. This convenience entails being available to customers whenever they need assistance with shopping, getting information, or just asking for support. Don’t force your customers to stay in congested contact queues to wait for what they need.
Cutting back the dependence on traditional lead forms
Lead generation forms are becoming a thing of the past. Technically referred to as web forms, they are used for capturing prospects’ details. These lead forms were doing a fabulous job collecting prospect information until Facebook launched in 2004. With the launch of Facebook, customers changed the way they searched for and connected with their favorite brands. Other innovative technology leaders followed the same mentality and started introducing game-changing ways of collecting prospect information and creating seamless digital experiences across different mobile devices.
Many businesses still rely on web forms for collecting prospect information. But businesses will have to keep in mind that consumers today don’t want to spend time keying in their personal information on forms. On top of that, if your lead form is collecting more than five pieces of information from the prospect, then the conversion potential decreases dramatically.
Here is where chatbots can turn things around. By using conversational bots, brands can collect information from prospects in a more engaging way. Why? Because providing information feels more natural through a conversation format than filling out static web forms. A conversational chat widget on your website will engage anonymous website visitors in interesting conversations and encourage them to open up and identify themselves as they share their needs. This will help create relationships with website visitors who might otherwise remain anonymous. Apart from that, an AI-enabled conversational bot can drastically enhance the response time of your team. How? Well, consider this example: A prospect is in conversation with an intelligent bot, and the prospect shares their work email address, which can be instantly passed to a salesperson or an automated marketing engine that will immediately send a follow-up email. Recreating such a scenario isn’t possible with a web form, especially when a prospect chooses to enter the email address but skips submitting the form altogether.
Getting a ready-to-deploy conversation bot
Now that you know about the many benefits a good conversational bot brings to the table, the question is: Where will your business find such an ROI-centric conversational bot?
Zebyl chatbots are equipped with the latest NPL capabilities for engaging in intelligent conversations and integrate with a number of software applications to carry out complex tasks. Even better, Zebylbots support multiple channels, ranging from websites to phone lines, SMS, Facebook messenger and more.
So what’s holding you back? Improve your returns on marketing investments and deliver a cross-channel marketing experience to your customers with Zeybl’s intelligent chatbots. For more details, visit Zebyl’s official website and schedule a free consultation today.
Author: Pejman Rajabian
Chief Technology Adviser
Zebyl Inc.
