TOPICS: Chatbot for Businesses    Building a chatbot   

Chatbots for Small Businesses - 4 Ways Using a Bot Can Benefit a Small Business

Chatbot development has been reinventing the way businesses market themselves, generate leads, and provide customer support. This is especially true for startups and small businesses, which are able to dramatically reduce operating costs and increase leads and revenue by building chat bots for their websites. This article looks at four key benefits of online chatbots for small business websites.

Chatbot Benefit 1: Automated answers to frequently asked questions.

The initial stages of any startup’s journey involve focused and consistent efforts at engaging the attention of its target audience. These efforts include, among other things, a clear presentation of the unique selling points of the business, targeted delivery of its brand message, and proactive measures towards building trust with its potential customers. Additionally, given the widespread competition in practically every industry at present, the average small business only has a limited window of time to establish itself. As such, assigning any available resources and manpower to tasks they are best suited to, becomes paramount.

From the point of view of the consumers, new businesses are difficult to trust unless they have a clear business model, and appear committed to offering high-quality customer support. One of the first parameters that the average modern consumer uses to judge the caliber of a new business is its responsiveness. Well-designed websites with detailed information on them are helpful, but they are often deemed inadequate if they are unable to answer their visitors’ questions in quick time. This is precisely why so many small businesses create a chatbot for their websites.

Small businesses can program their online chatbots to answer the most common questions that their potential customers tend to ask. The simplest way to do this is to convert the website’s FAQs into an interactive question-and-answer format and build it into the chat script. The best chatbots for small business websites are constantly updated with answers to new questions that customers bring to the chat window, thus helping the business appear proactive and attuned to its customer’s requirements.
By delegating the chatbot with the task of answering frequently asked questions, small businesses can free up the man hours that their employees would otherwise have to spend dispensing the same information over and over again. Their employees can now focus on more complex tasks that require human attention, which in turn streamlines operations and makes for a more optimized use of resources.

Chatbot Benefit 2: Efficient problem solving without human intervention.

With detail-oriented chatbot development, small businesses can broaden the range of issues that their online chatbots can address. Unlike human-human interactions where language barriers and other constraints can play their part, human-chatbot interactions are very well suited to customer support situations.

The best chatbots for small business websites are those that can pick up on keywords and other markers in visitors’ comments and questions, and use them to gauge what the visitor is looking for. They can then offer relevant suggestions and help the visitors find the product, service, or assistance they seek. To a large extent, this exercise can be carried out without human intervention, which saves the business a great deal of time and effort.

Chatbot Benefit 3: Alignment with consumer preferences.

In recent years, a variety of studies have concluded that when it comes to customer support and complaints, humans often tend to prefer talking to chatbots. Calling or emailing a customer support desk entails long waiting times and the restrictions of business hours and working days. Chatbots for small business bring no such limitations to the table.

Moreover, talking to a chatbot often feels less invasive than talking to a human support representative. The pressures of adhering to a specific speaking style, and repeating the same issue to a different person on a different day, do not apply to interactions with online chatbots. In the light of these parameters, small businesses that create a chatbot for their websites make better impressions on their consumers. This contributes towards building trust and acquiring repeat business in the long run.

Chatbot Benefit 4: An inexpensive substitute for manpower.

Finally, the fact that small business chatbots are able to achieve all of the objectives mentioned above, while simultaneously minimizing operating costs for the business, makes them indispensable for startups looking to establish themselves. Budget constraints force most small businesses to run a tight ship, due to which they are often unable to allocate manpower to certain areas of their business. With chatbots taking charge of the bulk of customer support tasks, these businesses can operate with a much smaller staff, and by extension, on a much smaller budget. Chatbots can handle huge volumes of requests at a time, and always with the same degree of accuracy and efficiency. With proper chatbot development, small businesses can leverage these benefits for considerable savings of both time and money.

Find more informative articles on chatbot development on our blog. Our team will also be happy to answer any questions that you may have about building chatbots for your website.