Why Chatbots are the Future of Marketing?

September 2, 2019Artifficial Intelligence, News, Technology 0

Article by Shashank Kulshrestha (Author at Thedigiblog)

All of us Have Heard about Bots and Robots. Businesses in Today Time are Worried about Making a Decision Relating to it. A lot of us are Worried about Choosing or not Choosing a Bot for our Business. Well, Chatbots are doing really well in the eCommerce Industry.
As a marketer, you should test all the possible methods to the ground. So, Chatbots are something which must be tested with your business. Our business audience is always evolving and expectations keep rising. Also, we have to meet our monthly goals. So, we keep implementing techniques, sending more messages and emails, creating more content and at the end crossing our fingers for results. If you have implemented a technique then you must remember its results even in the far future. Because, if you don’t remember past then you may commit the same mistake again.

For every marketer, business, entrepreneur-marketing is the next best channel of marketing.
In this age of Bots technology, it is over to you if you use this resource or power for good or something bad. Reasonable use will result in good and unnecessary use will result in bad. For those who are not aware of a Bot, let’s talk about it first.

What is a Bot? and Chatbot?

At a lot of places, you may find something very complicated and rocket science about it. But, honestly, there is nothing to complicate it. A bot is nothing more than a computer program programmed by humans to perform a set of instructions.
Most advanced bots are powered by AI (Artificial Intelligence) technology. AI helps bots in understanding complex requests, give personalized responses, and improve themselves with time. Bots are still in the beginning years, there is a lot more coming in the future about the bots and tasks they can perform. Presently, most of the bots follow set of instructions and they can’t do more than defined instructions.
Chatbots are programmed to perform messaging and on-platform tasks like order placing, appointment booking, answering questions of users, suggesting content to users, and other business tasks. Chatbots can easily be created with coding or even with easy to create bot platforms without writing a single line of code.

Example of Working of a Chatbot

A user needs track pants for him, Arriving on your website. Usually, he can browse through hundreds of available options looking for the best one. But if your website is having a Chatbot, it will pop up a message asking what he is looking for. The user will put in or select track pants. Now, the chatbot will get back to the user with top 10 track pants depending on reviews and ratings. This will help the user in making a selection faster. After making a selection, Chatbot will ask the user for shipment and delivery information and place an order by self. The only things user need to to do is make payment. This will make the purchase process faster and easy for users.

Chatbots are capable of working with popular messaging platforms like Facebook messenger, WhatsApp, Skype, Viper, and, WeChat. Also, chatbots can be integrated on your website by just pasting the bot code on your website.

Why Chatbots are the Need of Hour?

While searching for information, every user wants to get access to information as quick as possible. As the result, you have voice search, people have quickly opted to voice search. Voice search is quicker than a text search. Email marketing has grown rapidly in past years and it resulted in email inboxes filled with clutter and spam. Then, people moved to social media to follow brands and connect with them because social media was easy to adopt and drop.

Social media helped brands in connecting to their customers personally and serving them in a better way. But, social media is something which helped people in following brands. What customer need is a direct solution to their problem? So, to provide a direct solution, Chatbots are the thing which was needed. Not all the brands are open 24*7 for helping their customers. We need something to take care of customers even in off-hours. Using messaging apps, chatbots help customers in finding a solution to their problem no matter what device, or platform they are using. Chatbots eliminates inbox clutter, form filling problems, wasting time in searching, and browsing through pages to find a solution to a problem.

When did Chatbots Start Making Presence?

After years of distracting ads, spam emails, cold calls, notifications, and, inbox clutter, content marketing came into the role and helped brands in connecting with users and make relationships based on trust. Content marketing was all good but the problem was more content and the decreasing possibility of people to read it. As we create more content, content becomes less lovable. As marketers have ruined content and email, it is also easy and possible to ruin chatbots marketing.

How? Here is How it is Possible:

A user asked to Chatbot to book an appointment for mobile repair on Wednesday, unfortunately, chatbot was instructed to perform bookings for the same day only. In this case, the user will get disappointed because chatbot will not be able to understand that the user is asking an appointment for Wednesday. In this case, you will probably lose the customer and also brand value for that particular customer will go down. This will totally ruin the customer experience.

With Email Marketing, Social Media, and Content Marketing, you still have the chance to get in touch with the user if something gets wrong. But, if anything goes wrong with Chatbot, the user will leave or unsubscribe instantly and after this, you will not be having any control over it. The reason why chatbots are being loved is that they are available on all major messaging apps and provide instant access to users. Chatbots also provide a solution to customer’s problems in real time without letting them wait for long.

Is it Hard to Build a Chatbot?

Well, building a chatbot isn’t all about technicalities. You have to understand the need and design it accordingly. Study existing conversations of customers with your brand and find out what are the things users are looking for. What questions they usually ask, what are the questions which can be possibility asked relating to existing questions. Then design the entire chatbot conversation process.
The ultimate goal of a chatbot is to understand the customer’s need and provide a solution to it instantly. Don’t make mistake to take chatbot just as a communication channel otherwise you will get misguided from its original purpose. Best bots are capable of making micro-decisions to improve customer experience. You should analyze your chatbot on daily bases, look for new queries asked by users and work on including them to chatbot for the future.
There are two ways to build a chatbot, one is doing it by coding and second way is to build it with chatbots creating platforms which will let you create a chatbot without writing a single line of code.

Using a framework, you can create your own chatbot. If you are among those who don’t have knowledge about coding, you can build your own chatbot using chatbots platforms like:
Chatfuel
Botsify
Flow XO
Beep Boop
Bottr
Motion Ai
Chattypeople
QnA Maker
Recast.Ai
Botkit