Introduction

Surely you have heard about chatbots work lately, but do you know what they are and why they are important in your marketing strategy. In this post, we reveal everything you need to know so that you want to implement it in your design.

Today the Internet is very crowded. It isn’t easy to stand out among so much information. Companies look for digital channels to draw attention and have contact with users. Consumers accept this fact and prefer to have contact with companies through messages.

Goodbye to the digital media of before. Traditional media such as call centres are already obsolete. The solution proposed to make both companies and consumers happy is chatbots.

Chatbot-what-is-how-they-work surely you have heard of them, you know that chatbots are in fashion, you sense that they are important, but you do not know what they are or where to start implementing them in your company. That is why you mustn’t miss this post. In less than 2 minutes, they will stop being strangers to you, and you will want to have one.

But a chatbot is much more than an automatic messaging service. It is a very effective tool that provides great advantages. Start your adventure in the exciting world of live chats!

We assure you that once you have recited this article, you will not be able to live without one.

What is a Chatbot?

And understandably, we can define a chatbot as an assistant that communicates with users through text messages. On many other occasions, it takes shape by becoming a virtual companion that integrates into websites applications conversing and helping users.

It is a technology that allows the user to have a conversation through software integrated into a certain messaging system, such as Facebook, Twitter, Telegram, Whatsapp, etc.

The system is programmed to interact with the client and resolve doubts, but without a physical person answering. They have the advantage that they are always available to answer users’ questions who want to contact you at any time of the day.

How do Chatbots Work?

It is worth noting that understanding humans is not easy for a machine. The subtle and nuanced way in which we communicate is a very complex task to recreate artificially, which is why chatbots use several principles of natural language:

Natural Language Processing (Nlp)

Natural Language Processing is used to break user input into sentences and words. It also extends the meaning of the text through a series of techniques such as: Converting everything to lowercase or correcting misspellings before determining the meaning of the word. This stage is where other factors such as the user’s emotions are also considered.

Natural Language Understanding (Cln)

Natural language understanding helps the chatbot to understand what the user has said, the tackles it uses are such as lexicons, synonyms and topics. These tackles are used together as algorithms or rules to build the dialogue that will tell the chatbot how to respond in the best possible way.

Natural Language Generation (Lng)

Delivering a memorable, personalized customer experience, and going beyond providing pre-packaged answers, requires natural language generation. The chatbot can query data repositories and thus use that information to create a response.

Conversational AI technology takes PLN and CLN to the next level, allowing companies to create advanced dialogue systems.

They use memories and personal preferences and the chat’s contextual understanding to offer a realistic and attractive natural language interface.

Depending on their design and programming, we canister find two well-differentiated types of chatbots :

Simple chatbots:  This artificial intelligence software works based on a series of guidelines and keywords (previously “prepared”). If the user asks a question without that keyword, the “robot” will not understand it and will respond by inviting another question.

Smart Chatbots:  They are a category of higher-level and complexity. Designed in line with the thoughts and philosophy of Artificial Intelligence, it does not work based on questions or keywords. Live chat responds with proposals or ideas on the typed text. It remains a step further by offering a wide variety of dialogue streams and providing a more natural and “human” experience.

Main Functions of a Chatbot

There is no doubt that live chats work and are a tool that the user understands and finds attractive. It is not magic! Chatbots provide features that greatly enhance the user experience:

Improve customer service

They eliminate tedious waiting in online conversations by offering automatic answers without waiting. They are also a tool to use as a search engine for words, products, services, etc.

Facilitates The Purchase Or Conversion Processes

Just by typing a few words and the chatbot (depending on its design) will send this information to the appropriate person and take the appropriate action. Another very interesting task is the reminder of preferences for each user, shortening the path to a future conversion.

Personalized Communication

The user experience improvement is encouraged with the use of personalized communication for each user. The interaction is personal and specifies what increases the chances of ending with the desired action.

When to Implement a Chatbot in your Company?

You will be thinking when is the perfect time to implement one in your company, well, you should do it now. There is no ideal moment in your company’s strategy if what you are looking for is:

Solve questions about your products, services or brand

  • Tell how your product works
  • Send emails to your customers
  • Personalized and immediate customer service
  • Accessibility for the client, with a more intuitive border
  • Proximity with the client, since it allows you to speak in the language that the worker uses in his real life

Why Should you Have One?

We live in a highly mechanized world; therefore, companies must grow at the rate of technological development. It can become the solution you should consider when expanding or improving customer-facing services.

Today’s trend is to use mobile phones and messaging services a lot:  Therefore, implementing artificial intelligence software is a good opportunity for your business. The benefits that this “new co-worker” can generate are the following:

 Cost

The chatbot does not require a full-time physical person to be serving customers. The chatbot is responsible for helping the customer in real-time and at any time of the day. It allows us to reduce costs and improve the quality of customer service.

 Higher sales conversion

Chatbots can be programmed to record useful information from users/customers, process it and, based on it, orient or guide the user to purchase a product or service that suits its characteristics. Get to know that data thanks to the algorithms. These are important to understand the user’s needs, thus increasing the sales conversion.

User Information

Live chats serve thousands of users simultaneously, extracting important information, such as consumer behaviour, characteristics, user questions, etc. Although prior some data may seem unimportant to you, they will be useful for future marketing campaigns.

Benefits of Implementing a Chatbot

This web support can help you enhance and improve many aspects of your company and website. Let’s see some of them:

 Sales increase

  • 52% of previous visitors are more likely to buy again if live chat is always available on the website.
  • 38% of Internet users are more likely to shop on websites that offer live chat.
  • 79% of businesses say that offering live chat has had positive sales, revenue and customer retention.

The response time must be below for the customer experience to be satisfactory. On average, customers wait 2 minutes in a live chat. To reach those figures, the help of a chatbot is essential! Increased customer retention

Customer retention is a process that prevents customers from switching to other companies and stopping consuming in ours. For this, live chat and a good chatbot integration are also essential. For example, 63% of people who spend between €200 and €400 online per month are more likely to buy from and be loyal to companies that offer live chat.

Once this happens, our company is in charge of creating and maintaining the relationship with these clients.

Through professional Chatbot programs, we can better understand the behavior of our users, their needs and their interests. Collecting all this data is a critical part of any chatbot software worthy of its name.

Conversion Increase

To increase conversions, we must customize the chatbot, add the option to open a minimized chat window and mention the names of already registered users. In which “Hello, [María], how can we help you, appears. The latter helps customers intuitively trust our company by requesting assistance without any problem and instantly.

Chatbot-apply-business-strategy example of a chatbot opening a conversation via a notification.

Increased Brand Reputation

A chatbot generates that 41% of the users of our clientele trust our company more. The belief they place in us is a factor that influences the brand and improves its reputation among potential customers and partners.

The Future of Chatbots

Chatbots have not yet reached their full potential, and according to current trends, it is a tool that will be used more and more. It will lead to higher levels of customer participation, where the importance of how companies and consumers interact online will be vital.

As chatbots develop and develop more sophisticated, they will create significant value for consumers and businesses. As more investment is made in digital technology, they will also help transform various aspects of communication into non-points of communication. We can imagine.

The future chatbots will be better equipped to manage proactive conversations, where they can predict an incident and report a ticket, thus solving future problems before they arise, reducing costs and optimizing support channels. They will be able to answer your questions, and at the same time, they will be able to talk, think and develop emotional relationships with customers.