Did you know that 75% of customers anticipate receiving an answer to their questions within five minutes?
Yet, here’s something intriguing about this pattern. People don’t always want to talk to a human, even if they require assistance right away. In fact, 56% of customers would rather chat with a sales representative or a sales chatbot than have a phone call (I’m looking at you, millennials.)
The reality is that the standard for customer satisfaction in today’s market is extremely high. Nonetheless, present-day advances in marketing technologies give a variety of tools to satisfy your customer.
Businesses of all sizes are able to use chatbot technology. A well-designed sales chatbot can improve your customer experience and strengthen your relationship with them, no matter if you run a small pizza place or several flower shops in town.
There are a variety of chatbot types with varying levels of capabilities. They can be as straightforward as a pizza-ordering assistant or a sales chatbot that can help your customers with questions about shipping, prices, or other FAQs. Some marketers even opt for QR codes for businesses. Customers can scan this QR code, subscribe to a chatbot, and immediately get answers to their queries.
I’d like to touch upon the topic of sales chatbots that help small business owners improve sales processes, marketing, and customer experience as a whole.
First and foremost, a sales chatbot offers many useful features—such as FAQ flows, question submission, segmentation, CRM integration, and service evaluation—that cannot be overlooked.
Let’s go over each one by one.
Sales chatbot for FAQs
Sales and support teams deal with repetitive tasks daily and end up answering the same questions over and over again. Letting the chatbot respond to the questions frees your sales team to spend their time more productively, a sales call, for example, ultimately benefiting the business. Think about FAQs your customers might have about the product, service, or online course you offer, and answer these questions with a help of your chatbot.
Question submission to a chatbot
Several actions could trigger a conversation with a sales chatbot. However, the most common one is a keyword trigger. Even when you receive a message during non-working hours, a specific keyword such as shipping price or method, refund, and so on will trigger a conversation. Then a customer will get a direct answer from a sales chatbot, or a standard message to wait until the operator joins the conversation.
Sales chatbot can facilitate customer segmentation
Segmentation is yet another useful way of using chatbots for sales. Segments allow you to create custom-use lists that can be incorporated into your next marketing campaign or databases. The ability to automatically collect the data of all users that interact with your sales chatbot, and store it, will be useful in the long run.
Integrate your chatbot with a CRM
One of the most vital features of a good sales chatbot is its ability to integrate with a CRM platform. This means that CRM users can properly manage the conversations conducted within a chatbot, bypassing manual uploads or time-consuming data transfer routines. What is more, with a CRM and sales chatbot combo, business owners will be able to see the users’ relevant data and payment history.
Sales chatbot can conduct service evaluation
Make sure to track the efficiency of your sales chatbot. Pay attention to subscription and unsubscription data, questions that usually bring the conversations to a stop. Analyze and measure key performance indicators. This can help you evaluate your sales chatbot and make timely corrections.
Building an effective sales chatbot is not as hard as many business owners might think. The worst thing you can do to launch a bot that isn’t ready yet. For example, incomplete message flows, or irrelevant answers could really deter customers from your business.
In order to avoid these mistakes, here are five tips that will guide you on your way to a reliable sales chatbot. These are:
- Solid conversational marketing strategy;
- Supplying your sales chatbot with data;
- Personalizing conversations
- Switching from chatbot to live chat
- Learning and constant evolution of your sales chatbot
Let’s start with a solid conversational marketing strategy.
Sales chatbot implementation tips
From the very start, you have to carefully go over the concept of your business. Why do you want to start using a sales chatbot? What is your goal?
Do you really need a chatbot for sales?
The thing is, around 40% of use-based campaigns deploy chatbot features for unknown reasons, like those who want to have a sales chatbot because other companies have it. This may undermine your chatbot’s performance, but it also may influence negatively the customer experience.
The moment you realize your company’s concept, you can start implementing it in your sales chatbot. Start slow and evolve your conversational marketing strategy. If your business gets a lot of customers from social media, start small and create a chatbot for your business account on Instagram. This can be a part of your Instagram promotion strategy. Later you can expand to other platforms: Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Telegram. A subscription widget for your sales chatbot can be a great addition to the process of building an ecommerce website for your business.
Next, supply your sales chatbot with data.
Once you get to a sales chatbot configuration part, set up a flow your customer will easily follow. You can start with FAQs. It’s worth noting that an advanced sales chatbot with sufficient data and functionality can do way more than just answer frequently asked questions. This is especially true if we talk about the capabilities of AI solutions like GPT 3 chat bot by an Open AI company.
Personalization of your sales chatbot
It’s crucial to personalize conversations with your customers. After you create a functional strategy plan and gather all the required information for your sales chatbot, you can decide on the right tone of voice. Try to settle with the tone that matches your brand’s image (don’t sound too serious if you cater to gen Z customers). Use brief and understandable sentences that will allow the conversation to flow intuitively. Also, supply your sales chatbot with customer data to avoid asking additional questions such as phone number, address, or name.
Sales chatbot and sales representative combo
It’s also important that your sales chatbot can easily connect your customers to a human sales manager, if you have one, that is. Chatbot technology is quite developed, but it’s not perfect, and sometimes even a well-designed sales chatbot can’t help your customer. Try to ensure a quick transfer to a human manager to satisfy your customer’s needs. Don’t forget to ask if the responses were useful and on point. Better yet, provide alternative options to contact you (company phone number or email).
Update your chatbot for better sales
And finally. Last, but definitely not least — update as often as possible. Your sales chatbot can always be improved and reworked. After running a sales chatbot for a few days, review and analyze the performance of your chatbot. Go ahead and ask yourself: where do my customers get stuck? Which conversation flow is the least used? Maybe get rid of it altogether.
Soon enough, your sales chatbot will work like a seasoned sales manager.
That’s all I’ve got about chatbots for now
Hope I covered major points to consider when designing a sales chatbot for your business. Be it a small eCommerce store or a local coffee shop that lets you order on the go when you are still on your way to work. I’m working on an article about platforms that can help you build a sales chatbot with no prior knowledge of coding or other technical skills.
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