Why Sales Teams Love Business-Oriented Chatbots

Let’s start with an analogy:

Jane Doe, a multitasking teacher, and side-hustling knitter visits urwebsite.com to buy baby food but can’t find the nutritional information. She uses the website’s live chat support hoping for a bot’s response. The bot has no helpful information but transfers her to human support. Jane leaves her screen to change her baby’s diaper, and when she returns, there’s no response yet. She opens another tab, finds the information she needs at a different store, and places an order. Just as her order is confirmed, the previous tab’s human support message pops up: “Hi, how may I be of help?”

Question:

In your opinion, why did urwebsite.com owner lose a buyer? Think about it for a moment as you read on.

I’ll share my answer at the end of the article.

The average wait time of an individual using the live chat option is roughly 35 seconds, and with every growing second you have an unanswered chat, you are very likely to lose a prospect.

As an Online-Based Entrepreneur, Why Should You Get a Chatbot?

Take a moment to look at these statistics":

• The average wait time of an individual using the live chat option is roughly about 35 seconds (Statista).

• 53% of customers are likely to abandon their online purchases if they can’t find quick answers to their questions. 85% will exit after a 2-minute waiting time (Arise)

• 41% of customers prefer live chat support over other communication options.

• Getting immediate answers to questions is the main reason why 79% of customers prefer live chat.

• 85.6% of customers are satisfied with their live chat sessions.

• Live chat improves conversion rates by 40%.

• 30% of customers expect live chat options on a website.

Chatbots —automated platforms that interact directly with customers— are arguably one of the most significant inventions for modern businesses. They help enterprises increase their productivity and achieve their objectives faster. According to Statista, over 40% of US businesses have interacted with online retailers through chatbots.

While chatbots are innovative, helpful, and cost-saving, their ability to use information and data to close sales is the most advanced and significant advantage that sales teams and CEOs will be looking at. However, closing sales, gaining and retaining customers, and improving sales depend on several factors.

This article explores how chatbots help businesses close deals by automating specific processes, improving efficiency, and making sales easier.

Why Sales Teams Love Chatbots

1. Chatbots Automate Customer-Business Interaction

Getting the human power to meet all users’ queries in a short time is expensive for your business! The best solution is to automate interaction on a subscription chatbot model or build one.

The customer-business interaction establishes real-time value sharing between a user and the company’s representatives. It works toward attaining marketing and sales goals. Businesses spend millions yearly to create the best AI chatbots to boost sales because sales teams understand the immense power of first-line and subsequent interactions.

In a live chat session, customers feel good when they get a quick response to their queries, as the average waiting capacity drops with each second. You don’t want to lose those prospects now, do you? That’s what makes a chatbot better than human support.

Sales teams must maintain the quality of the first contact with customers; from the welcome to onboarding and then purchase, customers must feel welcome and at ease.

A pleasant page on a website that delivers a well-constructed message will attract most visitors and get them interested in products and services. Businesses leverage intuitive AI chatbots to help customers feel relaxed from the first contact, gradually guiding them to make choices and become paying customers. Personalization of chatbots encourages trustworthiness in guests.

An enterprise must train its machine to help potential customers navigate pages to find the products and services they are interested in. These pages should also contain product information or train the bots with details of all available products and use cases so they can provide users with valuable and intuitive responses directly.

2. Chatbots Reduce the Time Taken to Close Sales

For the sales team, spending valuable team trying to convert customers one at a time is no longer a necessary evil. Having a system that automates the entire process is very desirable. Whether onboarding a client or working on prospects, businesses deploy chatbots to reduce time spent, potentially increasing efficiency and saving money. It is always best to know early enough if a lead will buy from you or not.

In hopeful cases, sales teams typically go through the cycle of discussing options and prices several times before customers make purchases. Now, you can automate that process via your chatbot so the sales team can reduce the time spent on such a cycle and focus on other areas. Automating the interaction at that point could also improve customers’ expectations by offering detailed demonstrations that further underline the product’s or service’s impact.

The dilemma of sales is that many customers want to spend ample time getting assurances about a product’s price and effectiveness, while every sales team would love to close deals in a short time. Deploying Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbots brings a middle ground where customers and businesses interact, saving time and helping customers decide.

3. Chatbots Make Lead Qualification Easier

Although lead generation takes place before sales, it is crucial to closing sales; it helps the team target the right people. Chatbots help qualify leads and separate customers into different categories. Hot prospects are often easier to sell than cold ones, but sales teams must do extra work to prime them for sales.

Businesses deploy chatbots to keep communication flowing between the team and the lead. Since the audience can discontinue the interactions with the bot, the process naturally separates the hot leads from the rest.

How does this help businesses close sales faster? Chatbots collect data about user behavior and their interactions with guests; you can access the information through the dashboard of a sophisticated tool. Companies can use the information to target and retarget hot leads, eventually converting them to paying customers, usually after several tries.

4. Chatbots Improve Self-service and Helps Customers Decide Faster

Decision-making is sometimes straightforward for many customers. For example, some customers buy a different product from the one that attracted them, sometimes due to price differences or sudden buyer impulse. That favors the salesperson, as they get more sales. Chatbots make this process efficient by providing top-quality self-service options that allow customers to “sell” to themselves without involving a human agent.

Another angle is that chatbots help customers make decisions faster through defined prompts that leave little room for hesitation. The more time customers have to hesitate and second-guess, the easier it becomes for them to abandon the cart and leave. But with chatbots, businesses can easily remove that hesitation and close sales faster.

5. Chatbots Collect Useful Data for Analysis

Closing sales is about giving customers the best deals and offers they may not get from other businesses. Data is crucial to closing sales, especially for an untested audience. Companies spend time and money tracking user data to make better decisions about products and offers. It is one way to stay head-above-shoulders in the competition with other similar businesses.

Chatbots can collect and review such data.

Chatbots, for example, collect data about user preferences and specific interests, and businesses create offers to attract them. Chatbots work both ways, helping customers and companies get the best from each other. By collecting valuable customer data, businesses can easily predict customer satisfaction and emerging trends and create offers that align with them.

E.g., someone orders baby toys (a professional/academic kit) from your online store through a chatbot. Your analytics team can profile the buyer using the engagement information on the dashboard.

The best part of this method is that companies can keep their customers engaged for a long time through regular, better-suited, and automated offers. That takes you a step further in a competitive market.

6. Chatbots Enhance Upselling

After closing a sale, every good salesperson tries to upsell because it increases profits and promotes customer retention. Upselling is why customers sometimes end up buying more products from a company. That is possible with chatbots programmed with information from data analytics. But upselling is not limited to post-sales but can take place during pre-sales. The goal is to offer customers products that relate to their original search, giving them more value to buy. It is essential to see your product as ‘values’ for your clients.

Imagine someone who has just bought a phone from your store, and your chatbot pops up to recommend screen guards, silicon cases, and wireless earbuds that are compatible with the exact products they bought so they can preserve the phone’s value and durability.

Sinker…and Hook?

Remember the question I asked in the beginning?

Well, what urwebsite.com did wrong was:

(1) Failing to fully automate their website and product page,

(2) Respond too late to human conversations in a live chat, which is strongly connected to (3) Using a bot trained with insufficient data or machine learning (ML) capabilities.

For your business, get a business-oriented chatbot with smart dashboard analytics to give your business an advantage in the highly-competitive business world. It should have a robust database and deep ML capabilities.

Lead image by El Nino on istock.