Automation in Your Small Business: 3 Challenges Chatbots Help to Overcome

Let's be honest, the biggest issue small business owners face is limited resources and hence the inability to hire a team of agents capable of taking on routine tasks. As a result, small businesses suffer from low lead conversion rate, a lack of 24/7/365 customer support, and a lack of customer data. This article is about how a business owner can solve the above three issues by delegating routine tasks to a chatbot.

What is a Chatbot
Types of Chatbots
3 Common Challenges Every Small Business Face
Where to Get a Chatbot
Conclusion

What is a Chatbot

A chatbot is a program that allows you to automate communication with customers with no or little help from human agents. It can simulate a human conversation taking on the role of a virtual sales assistant or a customer support agent. Thanks to chatbots and customer experience automation (CXA), the routine processes become faster for customers, and your team can fully dedicate itself to creative tasks.

Chatbots can be implemented in a variety of channels (websites, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, SMS, etc). Thanks to the advantages of chatbots, not only small businesses, but also such giants as LinkedIn, Starbucks, British Airways and eBay are using them, writes Business Insider. While the key players within the chatbot industry, such as Facebook, Google, and Microsoft continue to invest in the development of chatbot technologies.

Types of Chatbots

There are two main types of chatbots depending on how they work.

Scripted — based on a decision-tree algorithm, which implies a predefined set of conditional rules and if/then logic. That's why scripted bots are also called rule-based bots. The smartness of such a bot depends on the complexity of rules, so you really can put lots of stuff into it. But however smart a scripted bot might be, it can't answer off-script questions and doesn't learn through conversations. If you want to add intelligence to it, you have to do it manually.

AI powered — the natural language processing (NLP) technology is at the heart of these bots. NLP enables them to understand the intent of a question, generate meaningful answers and learn from experience and training. The AI chatbot's ability to keep natural conversation flow and engage in friendly chat makes people feel more comfortable taking them as real human agents. Although 40% of people don't care whether or not they speak with an agent or a chatbot, claims Hubspot.

In general, scripted bots are easier and cheaper to create, because you don't need any special skills for that. Building an AI chatbot from scratch requires solid coding skills and money. However you can create both types of bots inside the TruVISIBILITY platform with an intuitive no-coding visual builder. In case you want to know, the cost of a TruVISIBILITY AI chatbot starts from $0. Worth trying, huh?

3 Common Challenges Every Small Business Faces

No matter what you are doing — running a small cozy bed and breakfast, offering courses on self-development, fixing motorcycles or cooking cupcakes. Any small business has to deal with these three issues:

Low lead conversion rate — your prospects don't want to become paying customers;
Lack of 24/7/365 customer support — you can't answer customers’ questions day and night;
Lack of customer data — you find it difficult to get your customers’ personal information which is vital for optimizing your business processes.

Of course, a good team of professionals can solve all those problems. However together with a team of professionals, you also get increased personnel costs. Luckily, chatbot technologies are developed enough to set you free from pricy humans. Now let's see how chatbots can help.

Low Lead Conversion Rate

Lead conversion is the process of turning a person interested in your product into a paying customer. And there are dozens or reasons why your prospects stop at some point and decide not to make a purchase. Maybe your landing page is poor. Maybe your call to action is not clear. Maybe your pricing is bad. Maybe all this together, and even your product pictures are bad — such a cherry on a cake! Whatever it is, sometimes it’s just enough to install a live chat to boost your conversion rate by 45%, says Neil Patel, one of the top 10 marketers according to Forbes. Why is it so?

Let’s fancy a traditional open-air market in Chinatown, crowded and noisy. Sellers scream and wave hands to attract your attention. Once they get it, they will do their best to convince you to make a purchase, answering any question you have. That is a classic customer's journey down a marketing funnel: awareness, interest, desire, action.

Your website or a Facebook group is the same market, just without all the noise. Nobody actively tries to take a visitor through a sales funnel to a purchasing decision. Nobody is here to give a prompt answer to a sudden question. Simply speaking, you don't have a salesman. As a result, you may lose the lead.

Although a live chat mentioned by Neil Patel implies having a human agent to talk to a prospect, a properly set up chatbot can also take a visitor by the hand and bring them through the marketing funnel. Here's a simple scenario:

First of all, a chatbot greets a visitor;
Then offers relevant information;
After that, asks for additional information to know the visitor better;
Finally, the chatbot makes a suitable offer.

That’s how a chatbot can help you create a compelling sales funnel and thus convert leads into buyers.

However the role of a chatbot in the lead conversion doesn’t end with guiding a customer through a simple funnel. Sometimes prospects just stop halfway. They might get bewildered by their sudden doubts. Or something might distract them. Or everything at once! The person was going to buy a smartphone on your website, but in the end for no obvious reason began to read smartphone reviews, then watch YouTube, and then completely switched to the breaking news. How to get them back into the sales funnel?

Well, for such complex cases you need a smart AI chatbot stuffed with intents — components that represent a visitor’s goal or purpose within his questions or statements. The bot can check if a customer is still online, ask them about any doubts they have, and try to convince them to make a purchase. If the client left, the chatbot can send them an email with a reminder: “Hey [username], you’ve just put a smartphone in the cart! Don’t you want to buy it? Tomorrow it might rise in price by 15%! I warned you. Sincerely yours, Mr. Smart AI Chatbot”.

Lack of 24/7/365 Customer Support

Providing personalized 24/7/365 online assistance in a customer's journey increases the chance of sales. That is a vital rule no matter what you sell. Nowadays customers are not as patient as they used to be. And they expect brands to respond to their sales inquiries instantly. That’s the reason why 67% of US millennials are willing to buy from providers that offer chatbot support, isn’t it? And the reason why 41% of all business chatbots are used for sales purposes.

Meanwhile, customers' queries are typical, and in the majority of cases responding to them doesn't require any specific expertise.

Remember the catchphrase “Have you tried turning it off and on again?” from The IT Crowd series? It helped to solve 99,9% of queries addressed to a technical support department represented by Roy, Moss and their grifting supervisor Jen. For cases when that phrase wasn’t enough, IT support workers had another solution: “Is it definitely plugged in?” That’s why a tape-recorder based answering machine created by Roy was more than enough to help out the whole Reynholm Industries. And that answering machine was an analogue prototype of a simple scripted chatbot!

Of course nowadays you can build a much more complex customer support chatbot, than a Roy’s answering machine. And you don’t need a tape-recorder for that.

For instance, one of the most popular bots is a FAQ chatbot which answers the frequently asked questions. And you can load in it as many questions as you want. Play around with a decision-tree structure to make your chatbot more interesting than just a mere FAQ section.

Another example is a smart AI chatbot which can not only answer typical questions, but also offer help when a visitor hits a bottleneck in their customer's journey.

In short, an AI chatbot is online 24/7/365 ready to provide concise answers to customers’ questions. You can tweak the bot’s behavior however you like, modifying its content and train its artificial intelligence designing complex intents. If a visitor’s query is too specific, a chatbot can route them to a live agent. 64% of customer service agents who utilize AI chatbots are able to spend most of their time solving difficult cases, states Salesforce. Thus customers receive valuable support while costs and workload for a team reduce.

Lack of Customer Data

He who controls information controls the world, said Dr. Stephen Franklin from The Babylon 5 series. And one of the most desired pieces of informational cake is personal data. The better you know your customer, the more effective your sales efforts will be. You may create a simple spreadsheet with email addresses for email marketing or a complex database with customer profiles for personalized offers. The former is simple: just offer your prospects something free in exchange for their email. The latter is difficult, because it implies collecting heaps of specific information.

Just see, a refined customer profile should contain the following data:

Demographic — concrete characteristics of a person, such as age, sex, job title and income. That information can tell you about a customer's behavior.
Geographic — city, area, region, country. Knowing those, you can optimize your logistics and marketing.
Psychographic — details about lifestyle, goals, pains, habits, values and interests of a person will give you insights on their psychology.
Behavioral — these traits show how the mindset of a person manifests in life. Engagement, readiness to buy, purchasing history, product usage, satisfaction, loyalty or account age, attention required.

Sounds like you need a special human to lure so much vital info from a visitor, right? Actually, just a chatbot is enough. A good chatbot. In a meaningful conversation with a client, it will learn his name, date of birth, location, email address, personal preferences — anything you want to know. Later you can use that data to build customer profiles for more effective audience segmentation and other marketing activities.

Where To Get a Chatbot

Now when you know how useful and handy chatbots are, let's see how to get one. Here on TruVISIBILITY platform we offer a TruCHAT App which allows you to easily create a chatbot. You can use a template. Modify it to your needs with the help of a Diagram View tool. It visualizes the chatbot structure and allows you to dive into scripts and components under the hood of a chatbot. Or you can build and train your own chatbot from scratch without a single line of code!

The TruVISIBILITY chatbot can be integrated at any website by simply pasting a piece of code into your HTML. It can be connected to Facebook Messenger, Twitter, Telegram, Viber and Slack. If you don’t have a website or a landing page, build one right here on TruVISIBILITY with a TruSITE App and link a chatbot to it. Simple!

Conclusion

Congratulations, now you know how chatbots, both scripted and AI, can manage routine work, providing more effective customer interaction! They are capable of turning leads into paying customers, replying to customers’ queries, and collecting vital personal data for building customers’ profiles. You’ve also learnt how easy it is to get a chatbot with our TruVISIBILITY platform, no matter how complex the bot you need. Chatbots free your team for big strategic tasks and save budget. So why not start using the chatbot for your small business right now?