Chatbots, a latest buzz word in the tech-world are making waves. Businesses can leverage their pervasive nature to connect with their customers. They can be programmed to expedite the customer buying journey such as generating awareness, returning search results based on the queries, guiding potential customers on different products by influencing their decisions towards a successful product sale.
What are chatbots?
Developed using artificial intelligence, chatbots are the systems that you can interact via text or voice commands. Those conversations are generally upfront like asking for a particular service, weather report or tracing a complex problem within your system.
Currently, chatbots are widely used as a part of instant messaging platforms such as Facebook Messenger, WeChat as well as B2C marketing and customer services. They are viewed as the future of social interactions and are revolutionizing the way business interact with customers.
How chatbots are contributing towards the buying journey?
Chatbots are contributing towards business success in a way that websites and mobile apps are unable to do. They are empowering the businesses to advance their consumer engagement quality by supporting the buying journey.
Consider this, a website is generally filled with information. Whenever a customer looks for information, they conduct a search, view the search results and selects what appears to be the best part of information and later consumes the information mentioned on the website. However, when a chatbot comes into the picture and consumer asks the similar question, the chatbot will provide equivalent information on the same native messaging app that they are already using, which is great!
Chatbots capabilities
The capabilities of chatbots are in rapid progression. Earlier, chatbots only possessed the answering abilities. This scenario worked fine only when a customer wanted answers of few common questions related to a product or service. However, this is a great option rather than filling a big ‘inquiry’ form on the website and wait for the response.
Chatbots are also empowering conversational commerce wherein a customer could ask questions related to your product and make a purchase from the chat itself. Nowadays, chatbots are also capable of providing product recommendations to the customers based on the history of questions and responses.
In coming days, the payment processing abilities will also be added to chatbots. This addition will speed up the consumer buying process and help to make the checkout process seamless.
In conclusion, chatbots provide everything the business and customers need in completing the buying journey. By using chatbots, businesses can demonstrate that they follow latest trends and are ahead of the competition.