The benefits of live chat and chatbots
Chatbots can engage with website visitors when no one else in your company is available to. This process ensures that prospects and customers have the best user experience possible. Rule-based (e.g., via pre-set decision trees) and AI chatbots, which can be built to support a variety of use cases, can significantly enhance live chat technology.
Chatbots follow a set of rules and logic (that you determine), which helps guide visitors through a conversation with a specific objective (e.g., capture emails, connect to customer support, etc.). They can react to both what visitors click (e.g., buttons or options within the chat) and what they type.
Let’s not forget about AI chatbots. These require a "training period" and can even process natural language to best understand the needs of the web visitor.
However, it is important to remind ourselves that AI cannot fully replace human interactions all together. Even though it might be tempting to use AI as a replacement for reps, we need to think of AI as a virtual assistant helping reps interpret the needs of a particular web visitor.
This includes: suggesting how to best handle the issues being raised, presenting relevant documents to a potential prospect and contributing to the improvement the overall chat experience for both parties.
Instead of overautomating, we need to find a way to work with technology, instead of having technology replace and impersonate humans.
...or even when all your other human reps are busy. This means that if a potential lead visits your website, they will still have the opportunity to interact and obtain relevant information. No opportunity is missed or left aside, even when you are on a beach sipping on a cocktail instead of checking your messages.
No more waiting time after filling out a form - a chatbot replies within a couples of seconds to a request. Chatbots allow visitors to immediately engage with you, which increases the likelihood of converting website traffic over time. Any website visitor can engage anytime and from anywhere, and still get an instantaneous reply.
Chatbots can start a conversation at any moment in time, whenever a lead is ready and willing to engage. Engaging with a lead on a high-intent website page (for instance) helps generate qualified leads more easily and quickly. Embedding a chatbot in strategic places, based on where relevant content is located, helps intercept leads when their level of attention is high and more likely to react.
Chatbots can act as filters – an extra layer of qualification. You can configure your chatbots against different criteria (e.g., email is known, company is X, contact is to determine which leads are worth pushing to sales, or should be redirected to other reps (e.g., for customer support). Meanwhile, your team can simply check their calendar to see when they will speak to a prospect next!
Another reason why chatbots are great is that they can help identify your visitors’. A chatbot will know whether it is engaging with an anonymous visitor, an individual from a target account, or even an existing client. When it comes to existing clients, you can personalize their experience based on what is already known about them, like skipping the steps that ask for information you already have (e.g., email address, name) or tailoring your message to their specific product/service interests.
