Marketers have used sales funnels for almost a century. The term was first coined by E. St. Elmo Lewis, who developed a purchase funnel. While the idea behind a funnel has remained the same over all these years, we have developed new technologies to push leads towards making a purchase.
Innovations like customer-service hotlines have moved on to email, and now, we have a potential solution that will further decrease our dependence on human agents: a sales chatbot.
Support and sales chatbot use combinations of rules, conditional logic, artificial intelligence, and automation to allow businesses to respond to customer inquiries rapidly. Companies can take data based on the actions taken by current and potential customers, use artificial intelligence and machine learning to make sense of it, and use this data to predict their next moves. Sales chatbots can answer customer questions, gauge customer interest in products, and suggest other products they might find useful. They do this using a combination of instant messaging and a large database of answers.
You can deploy a chatbot for every stage of the funnel.
Before we go into more detail about how to deploy sales chatbots in specific sales funnel stages, let’s discuss some other ways chatbots are changing how companies do business.
Chatbots are no longer “the next big thing” -- they’re already here! As of May 2020, there are 300,000 chatbots on Facebook Messenger alone, and countless other websites are seeing the benefits of chatbots. Here are five ways chatbots are helping businesses transform into responsive enterprises:
While nothing beats the human touch of customer service agents, chatbots are coming close to imitating the experience, at least on chat. Unlike humans, chatbots never sleep or take breaks, and they don’t get tired. Instead of hiring customer service staff to work at 3 am and wrestling with their schedules, you can get a chatbot to answer customer inquiries. Such a system will ensure that you have a constant presence while your staff can operate at peak hours.
One of my greatest pet peeves is calling a tech support hotline the weekend after Cyber Monday. It’s almost impossible to get through to an agent. If we do get to speak to one, it usually comes after waiting for hours on the phone. And when their suggestions don’t work the first time, we usually end up calling -- and waiting for a few more hours -- again. With the support and sales chatbots, your customers will never have to wait hours for someone to answer basic questions. Multiple people can ask questions to a chatbot at the same time. Even if thousands of users message your chatbot, they can expect an error-free answer in real-time. This helps make people happier with your product and after-sales service.
Every year, businesses spend around $1.3 trillion to answer more than 260 million customer service calls. Even if your business outsources its customer service to another country where the labor costs are far lower, the operational expenses associated with customer and tech support services pile up very quickly. These expenses include agent salaries and incentives, office space rental, telephony, and training. However, most of these calls are of the “general inquiry” category, which means they could be answered easily. Instead of getting a human to answer these inquiries, you can deploy a chatbot instead, then have the chatbot escalate the inquiry to a live chat with a human agent (if the questions become more complicated). If you’re worried about the cost of coding a chatbot, you’d be surprised to know that there are no-code chatbot platforms that help you develop a chatbot quickly and easily. Using a sales chatbot will help you reduce your customer support workforce or allow you to assign your employees to more complex tasks. Some industry observers predict that chatbots will answer 90% of customer service inquiries by 2025, which means companies could cut operational costs by billions of dollars.
A typical customer service agent will require around two weeks for product-specific training. If you’re outsourcing your customer service overseas, you will have to wait for another two weeks for language and culture training after an agent is hired. If your business is expanding rapidly, you cannot afford to wait that long.
In contrast, chatbots learn quickly. As long as you have a large enough data set that contains both questions and answers, they can use artificial intelligence to anticipate customer inquiries and provide informative answers. You can even create learning cycles for chatbots to roll out new pricing and product information or even change welcome messages depending on the season. It’s as easy as putting in new phrases, testing them for a couple of days, and going live.
If you run a SaaS business, you could teach your chatbot to take customer inquiries, search for specific keywords, and build a proposal email around those keywords based on the client’s industry and budget -- a process that could take a few days for a human. Still, you would only require a few minutes for a chatbot integrated with a proposal software.
Regardless of your business’s size or niche, a chatbot can help qualified leads through your sales funnel, giving the information they might need to make a purchase while providing you with data that could help you make the sale.
Before you develop or deploy a chatbot, you need to define your customer journey first. Your chatbot should feed into how you do business. You want to provide a good customer experience for potential buyers. Even a simple chatbot armed with answers to frequently asked questions would go a long way in streamlining your marketing process and growing your business.
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