Chat Bots For Small Business
If you’re active on social media (or just spending a lot of time on the internet in general), you’ve probably heard a lot of bad stuff about bots, but the truth is that bots aren’t all bad — when you’re in control of them, bots can actually be good for your business.
A bot (a term drawn from a diminutive form of “robot”) is a digital program that carries out automated tasks over the internet and can even interact with systems and users. In other words, bots are just artificial intelligence doing stuff online. They get a bad reputation because some are created to troll or harass people on social media by posting misleading news articles or leaving offensive comments. Bots are also known to follow social media accounts, which can be burdensome when you’re trying to build your presence on a platform — having a lot of fake followers makes you look bad and can negatively affect the algorithms that show your posts to other users.
But here’s the thing: Bots can actually be helpful too. In fact, that’s why this type of artificial intelligence was designed. It makes your life easier as a business owner and it improves the experience for your customer.
The Role of Bots
Bots can be programmed to carry out basic conversations over a messaging platform and provide basic customer assistance. Countless millennials will probably remember their first experience with a bot back in the late ‘90s when they talked with SmarterChild over AOL Instant Messenger.
SmarterChild was supposed to help students with their homework by looking up information they had questions about and providing answers. SmarterChild could also look up things like the weather and movie showtimes. If a kid asked, “What’s the temperature outside,” then SmarterChild could reply, “75 degrees Fahrenheit.”
This is how more and more business owners are using bots to improve customer service. Bots can be used in website chat windows or social media services like Facebook Messenger so that they can address the needs of your clientele when you’re unavailable or focused on other things.
That’s great because, in today’s society, more than 50% of people say they would rather send a message than call a customer service hotline. If messaging assistance is available, that means you’re more likely to retain the patronage of those customers.
Why Bots are Better than Humans
Now, don’t assume that bots can do everything. Nothing replaces the assistance of a real, thinking, sympathetic, problem-solving human on the other end of a customer service message. But in some ways, using a bot can be beneficial and give you an advantage over businesses that rely on human capital (i.e. real employees) to answer every single message.
Think about it this way:
One of your customers is stressing out about a purchase they made. They want a response right away. Your messaging bot can reply instantaneously, so your customer doesn’t have to wait hours or even days for somebody to get back to them.
Don’t think that instant response is limited to business hours. Because bots don’t need to sleep the way people do, your customers can count on assistance 24 hours a day, seven days a week. No more waiting until 9:00 AM or until after the weekend or holiday.
Some customers can be very frustrating, but you never have to worry about bots losing their temper. They’ll continue to take whatever abuse a rude customer has to offer without ever feeling degraded or (worse!) lashing back at the customer.
Bots are created exclusively for the purpose of answering messages, so you don’t have to worry about wasting their time. If you had to answer all of those messages, you would never get anything done. But thanks to bots, you can now focus your time and energy on other things related to your business (or checking out and going home at the end of the workday without having to worry about business messages).
Count on Your Bot to…
When you have a bot set up on your website, you’ll be able to program it to detect a few keywords in the questions being asked of it, and then it can provide a programmed answer based on those questions. The development and improvement of AI in recent years means bots are very efficient at providing the appropriate answer — of course, if it’s a complicated issue that your customer has, the bot may need to tell them they have to talk with a representative from your business. (Ideally, the bot can then take a message from the customer or even set up an appointment when a representative can call the customer).
You can count on a bot to take care of the following tasks:
Providing assistance or directions
Accepting a complaint or resolving a problem
Booking a reservation for a restaurant or hotel
Accepting payment for an invoice
Adding a name and contact information to a mailing list
And as mentioned earlier, every minute that you don’t spend checking messages is just one more minute you can spend focusing on other aspects of your business — when your time and energy are of better use!