Murray Newlands — May 9, 2017 The era of the chatbot is well underway, so businesses need to develop efficient chatbots to stay competitive. Chatbots have changed the way brands communicate with their target audiences, and savvy marketers are beginning to leverage bots to drive growth.
Innovative platforms, such as Chattypeople, https://botsify.com and Manychat.com, allow you to create a chatbot in minutes. Building a chatbot with many tools does not require any prior coding knowledge. You can create AI-powered chatbots that help you build your sales pipeline and cultivate the relationships with your audience.
I’ve put together a guide to help you build an efficient chatbot that will allow you to grow your company and establish your brand’s quality.
How Can Chatbots Affect Your Small Business?
Chatbots allow you to reach consumers through their preferred devices, revolutionizing the way you interact with your potential clients. These tools that lets you track your bot’s performance, which you can then use to tweak your bot to perfection.
Implementing a chatbot can help your small business because it can:
- Work as part of your marketing campaigns
- Deliver special offers to customers
- Answer client questions
- Provide a self-serving alternative
- Save you time and resources
- Monetize your social media
Creating an Efficient Chatbot
Chose your chatbot building platform and give it a try. Building a chatbot is very exciting, and it comes with a huge number of optional features. Instead of getting carried away, you need to focus on creating a lean chatbot that provides solutions to your customers.
An effective chatbot will help your clients, and sometimes your own employees, solve issues and get the answers they want. Personality is very important, but usability and functionality will determine the success of your bot. In order to build an effective chatbot, you need to:
Understand Your Audience
Before you create your chatbot, you need to research your audience to learn about which features appeal most to them. Many tools allow you to choose from an array of features, but implementing all of them will make your bot slow and unstable.
You can start by asking your current customers what features they would like to see in your bot, then run a few surveys aimed towards your target audience. By understanding your audience, you will be able to:
- Determine what features to add to your bot
- Set the right tone of voice and use the right language
- Find the best channels to market your chatbot through
Set Realistic Goals
You have to take an honest look at your specific scenario and give yourself tangible goals that you can accomplish. Setting unrealistic goals will only undermine your efforts and put unnecessary pressure on your team. Most tools alow you to track a variety of different metrics, so find the ones that hold true value for your company, and set yourself an attainable set of milestones.
Advertise Your Chatbot
Even if you build a perfect chatbot, you will have to help drive traffic to it after you launch it. There are many different ways you can direct users to your chatbot, including:
- Blog posts featuring your chatbot
- Email marketing
- PPC ads
- Social media campaigns
- Some types of traditional advertising
- Launching chatbot-specific promotions
Test Your Bot On All Devices
Keep in mind that users will interact with chatbots from a variety of devices, platforms, and browsers. You have to test your chatbot on all devices, including desktops, phones, and even gaming consoles. Similarly, you have to test out your chatbot on different operating systems and browsers to make sure it works properly across all platforms.
Create Seamless Interactions
One of the reasons chatbots are so popular is their ability to mimic the natural flow of conversations. Chatbots are the only platform that is capable of creating such a seamless experience to clients, so use them to your advantage. Try to minimize the need for human intervention, but build a bot that is able to recognize when an issue requires human help to finish a task to create the best experience for your audience.
Use Your Chatbot as a Customer Care Tool
Clients love to find solutions to their problems independently, so let them use your chatbot as a self-serving tool. Complex chatbots can help you fulfill an array of tasks, including:
- Editing profile and contact information
- Updating billing details
- Viewing and managing orders
- Answering questions about your products
- Setting up appointments with human representatives
Give Your Chatbot a Unique Name and Personality
Giving your chatbot a unique name and personality will make it both memorable and easy to find. Customers should be able to search for your bot on Google or Facebook and find it right away. Besides visibility, giving your chatbot personality will set a standard for users. Consumers like to feel in control, and creating a bot with a specific persona will help them to create accurate expectations.
Integrate Your Bot to Your Content Marketing
Chatbots are powerful distribution channels because they deliver content and promotions to clients through familiar channels. Most tools chatbots interact with users through Facebook, so they are more likely to engage your customer as they will not have to switch from one application to another.
Content marketing depends on engaging your audience and delivering relevant content, and chatbots can collect valuable information, and in turn, help you share it with your audience at a more personal level.
Improve Your Chatbot
Tools offers an impressive number of metrics you can use to optimize and tweak your bot to perfection. Some adjustments you may want to consider are:
- Changing jargon used
- Trying different tones of voice
- Altering introduction scripts
- Offering different features
- Testing different CTAs
Finally…
Building a chatbot for your small business may seem like a scary task, but thanks to tool platforms, you can now build a complex bot without investing a huge amount of time or money. Follow the steps outlined above to build a lasting relationship with your audience and use your chatbot as a growth-hacking tool for your small company.
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