Chatbots are expected to become a billion dollar industry within 10 years. That in itself is shocking but, then again, people were skeptical about apps taking off at one point. Chatbots have been revolutionizing customer service as more and more businesses turn to this technology to streamline their operations.
They’ve been around for a long time but not until recent years have e-commerce businesses really begun to truly value them as impactful virtual employees.
Chatbots can chat and do so much more but in the context of e-commerce, chatbots operate on an AI-based technology to offer immediate support to customer queries. They use NLP (Natural Language Processing) to understand what is being said and to respond with an appropriate answer.
On Facebook alone, there are over 30,000 chatbots, which means most of us have at one interacted with one without even knowing it.
You are probably thinking, how this going to affect my business?
I’ve gathered 3 good reasons why chatbots may be good for your business and how it can make it more efficient.
Automated tasks
You know the same old questions customers contact you about, those that they manage to miss on the FAQs page. How frustrating is it to receive them? And how much worse is it to have to answer them over and over again? Well, that is precisely the kind of repetitive task a chatbot can take care of, freeing up time for more pressing matters.
24/7 Customer service
Outside of answering repetitive queries from customers, chatbots allow you to be available to your customers all the time. I mean, 24/7, 365 days. They can offer solutions to simple queries at any time of the day, which works out well for your customers in different time zones.
Personalized communication
As they can recognize the typing pattern of every customer, chatbots can have normal conversational exchanges with customers. This allows them to make the customer feel like they are speaking with a real human. They answer the customer’s specific query instead of offering general and sometimes irrelevant information.
Interactive chatbots as used in e-commerce are still a relatively new technology. They are always in development, which means customers will need to understand that there may be glitches here and there. Chatbots have the potential to greatly improve e-commerce and transform customer-business relations.
