Increasing choices and innumerable options have made customers demanding and picky. They expect the businesses to anticipate and fulfill their needs, failing which, they quickly hop from one brand to another without remorse. As a result, customer retention has become a genuinely challenging task for entrepreneurs. In the midst of all this, AI-assisted Chatbots are the real game changers. They facilitate enterprises in understanding their customers, forecasting their needs, and fulfilling them efficiently. In truth, the future of Customer Relationship Management lies in conversational AI platforms, specifically their chatbots with AI capabilities.

Chatbots are basically programs that allow automatic engagement with site visitors. These can also be programmed to respond to received messages. AI-powered chatbots are capable of holding contextual conversations using Natural Language Processing (NLP), which creates human-like interactions. In fact, more often than not, it becomes difficult to gauge whether you are conversing with a bot or a live customer service agent. The chatbots are that good.

The simplest way to guarantee customer retention is by enhancing the customer experience. The more valued and satisfied the customer feels, the more they are likely to stick. But how do businesses ensure that? Chatbots are the easiest and most effective way of enhancing and increasing customer satisfaction. Here’s how the chatbots achieve that:

Customers today demand immediate attention. A customer service agent may not always be free to attend to them as they may be occupied addressing someone else. Even this slight delay is enough to turn a client against the company. The only way you can provide instant assistance is by deploying chatbots. When a customer or a client has something to ask, the chatbot will provide instant help, ensuring there is no wait time.

The quick response time makes the customers feel valued. In turn, their happiness quotient increases, due to which they are most likely to place their trust in the brand. 

Customer service agents are not always available. They usually have fixed working days with limited working hours. But this does not mean the customers will only contact the customer service agents at those times. As businesses have become global, some customers may be at odds in relation to time zone, which does not make them any less important. At these crucial times, when a customer wants to speak to a company representative and none is available, they develop negative feelings toward the brand. With chatbots, one does not have to wait for an appropriate time or day. The AI-enabled bots are always at your beck and call.

When it comes to customer queries, it follows the 80/20 rule. It means 80% of queries are regular in nature which the chatbot can answer with ease. Nonetheless, 20% of queries are quite typical in nature, requiring a human touch. During such instances, the chatbot asks the customer for their contact details so that the customer service agent can contact them with a full and final resolution. The fact that there is someone listening to the customer’s issues and working actively to resolve them propels the customer to become a loyal client.

Humans though smart, are still limited in their capabilities. They cannot communicate in multiple languages or check the complete history of a client instantly and give recommendations. On the contrary, chatbots powered by Artificial Intelligence suffer from no such limitations. They are capable of delivering highly personalized customer experiences, for example, communicating in their native language, sending messages at a time convenient to the customer, giving recommendations based on their search and purchase history, etc.

Personalized experiences delivered by chatbots are unsurpassable. For this reason, they are key players in customer retention. Businesses are delivering more relevant offers on their landing pages with bot-assisted personalization, and 80% of consumers desire a personalized experience. Furthermore, you can use them to welcome returning customers and assist them in purchasing decisions. Bots can also direct the audience to appropriate product pages based on their responses. Your bot can also link customers to relevant guides and tutorials on your site if they are interested in learning more about a topic. This is how personalized an experience the chatbot can deliver.

The success of a business depends on how well it understands the customer and their needs. Chatbots are powered by AI and hence can understand even the most complex queries, detect intent, and engage with the audience. They can also do predictive analysis, which helps forecast what the customer is likely to need in the future. For example, if a customer has purchased a shirt, the bot will recommend other pieces of clothing to complete the ensemble.

Today’s chatbots from conversational AI platforms are so enhanced that based on the simple browsing history of the visitor, they can recommend products, blogs, and other snippets of news that are most likely to interest them. Such small proactive ways of making the customer feel like a king/Queen is why chatbots are the future of customer retention.

Conversational AI platforms have chatbots that can gather customer feedback and opinions through a regular flow of conversation, a short opinion survey, or a feedback report. These are extremely important for a business if they wish to know their customer well. Aided by a robust analytics feature, this feedback plays a vital role in garnering in-depth customer insights. After all, a business can only appease their customer if it can correctly anticipate and eliminate obstacles that prevent them from completing a purchase. A happy customer is a loyal customer.

Chatbots are the future of customer retention, and there should be no doubt about it in your mind. These AI-propelled programs provide instant assistance, personalized experience, and a deeper understanding of the customer's desires. But retaining customers is not as easy as it seems. On their own, chatbots are not enough. They need to be fortified with transcription recording tools, AI writing software, and such. Needless to say, if you wish to make your business grow, Chatbots are the way to go.