Is It Time For Small Businesses To Add A Chat Bot To Their Websites?

As new technologies take over, customer’s expectations are quickly growing. One of their expectations is to get real-time interactions online. Even though Chat Bots are one of the fastest growing digital marketing tools, this niche is still in its infancy. So adding a chat bot to your website could be an excellent opportunity to get ahead of your competition.

At least 1.5 billion people and growing use chat bots

According to Small Business Genius it is estimated that nearly a quarter of the world was using chat bots as of last year. Why are Chat Bots becoming so popular? There are many reasons. But we believe the most important reason is customer preference. According to GFK 68% of consumers and 83% of millennials text more than they talk on their phones. Like texting, chatting gives the consumer many similar benefits.

  • Allows us to avoid real eye contact, and for some millennials that is a benefit
  • It can be less stressful than phone calls because you have more time to think about answers
  • You can get a record of the conversation
  • It’s direct and immediate

Businesses benefit from chat because they can;

  • Improve the customer service experience with fast responses and 24/7 availability
  • Save money by enabling employees to spend more of their time on crucial tasks, not answering phones
  • Gain insights into your customer by gathering information about what they want
  • Keep visitors on your website engaged and on the site longer
  • Give you a chance to sell when you cannot talk directly to the customer

Another reason Chat Bots are becoming so popular is the growth of artificial intelligence (ai). Ai enables Chat Bots to communicate in a more human-like way. So ai makes Chat Bots more comfortable for people to communicate with.

Types of chat bots

There are basically two types of Chat Bots. There are Chat Bots that use Machine Learning and scripted Chat Bots. Unlike their scripted counterparts machine-intelligent (ai) Chat Bots can understand questions and commands the way real people phrase them, as opposed to only understanding a set of predefined commands. This is beneficial if you’re looking to offer a human-like experience. A scripted Chat Bot has a set of questions it can respond to with a corresponding set of answers. This means each conversation can only follow a number of defined paths.

You can see an example of a Chat Bot with Machine Learning (ai) here https://www.pandorabots.com/mitsuku/. Here you can see how a scripted Chat Bot might work. This site shows you how their Chat Bot works and gives you an example of their Chat Bot in the lower left on their page.

The Take Away From This Article

Like texting, Chat Bots are becoming main stream. Now that so many people are open to chatting on line it is a great way keep visitors engaged on your website. It is a great way to sell your company to visitors when you are not there and it is a great way get information about visitors to your site.

In our blog, “Future Proof Your Business” we talked about the top marketing trends for 2019. In that blog you’ll see machine Learning, Voice Search, and Artificial Intelligence were top trends. Chat Bots using Natural Language Programming (NLP) employ machine learning and artificial intelligence. Adding a Chat Bot to your website can also help lay the ground work for updating your website to be more effective with smart speaker searches which is the next big trend. The reason Chat Bots will help SEO is you can see how people are asking questions in your Chat Bot so you can use similar wording and phrases to what you see people asking your hat Bot.