The world is getting increasingly interconnected and what that means is that information flow will increase both in speed and size. Instant access to information has been at an all-time high while businesses are struggling to keep up with the infinite queries of prospective buyers and shoppers.
There are various reasons that a B2B should consider an externally facing alongside an internal chatbot. Externally facing chatbots interact with your customers. Internally facing chatbots assist your employees.
They are capable of supplying information to a wide userbase instantly. Chatbots have grown incredibly useful in various ways. They support consumers to find information, research brands, product lineups, and services. It will also assist with making purchases. All this goes on establishing an improved sales funnel and increasing overall conversions.
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How Will A Chatbot Assist In Conversion?
Customer Facing Tool
Usually, an unsuspecting visitor would be browsing your website or your business landing page to find a solution to a problem they’re facing or a query they want to resolve. Typically, they will use a search bar and look for what they’re searching for or scroll through the excruciating details in your webpages for information. Here it becomes a life-saver. It eliminates these taxing steps and presents a clear and instant answer. Essentially a chatbot will save time which means that it will assists conversions more quickly. It also gives lightning-fast service.
Data Mining
Another way in which a it assists conversion is through data mining. It isn’t possible for humans to manually mine customer data and organize it with a response to organizational trends in a time-bound fashion. This is time-consuming for the marketing team, putting all their essential tasks on hold. In this way, B2B chatbots frameworks automate the process of data management and help map the data as per the organizational trends.
Lead Generation
Thinking of gathering leads? Well, a it will help you with that too. In any marketing team, gathering leads is one of the central targets and all their efforts are centered around this one significant goal. The answer to lead generation is to create more enjoyable experiences for the guests/prospects. B2B chatbots examine the visitor interactions then map the visitor’s journey, create quantitative behavior analytics, and develop a profile for the visitor based on calculating the probability of the visitor transforming into a lead. It’s an effective way for marketers or sales teams to easily locate qualified leads and assists them to retain existing customers by generating bespoke responses.
Agile Sales Process
It also retain a lot of metrics about user interaction, based on this by tracking their social profile activities, can generate behavior patterns and buyer’s persona map. By utilizing predictive analytics, sales crews can separate the quality leads from the sales pipeline. This way it can help the sales teams to develop tailored interaction approaches to each lead, which improves the odds of converting quality leads into customers.
An early grasp on Google Dialogflow will help you learn about chatbots rather quickly. Learn more about chatbots here too.
How to Build An Effective Chatbot
Chatbot have been relatively new in the marketing and lead generation domains. In 2016, chatbots garnered a lot of attention when the major businesses started incorporating chatbots into their website and marketing designs. 5 years later chatbots have come a long way, and their functionality has increased multi-fold. Chatbots today are capable of not only sustaining a customer conversation but also assisting in every stage of the sales funnel. They also serve as an effective customer support channel.
There are 3 significant areas you should be focussing on while developing your chatbot.
#1 You Bot Design & Process
Bots usually don’t serve a single purpose. If you think that you can build a bot, deploy it on your website, and poof! your conversions are off the roof, oh well, that’s a recipe for disaster. Sadly, it doesn’t work like that. You have to clearly define prompts and design a rough communication into making your chatbot effective. This entails having a deep understanding of who are your customers, and what they usually look for on your website. By thinking like a customer you’ll have a handle on what keywords or phrases they might use while interacting with your chatbot and that can help you design an effective conversational flow.
#2 Make the Flow Conversational
What makes a chatbot truly successful is that while talking, it doesn’t feel like a chatbot. A good conversational flow can make or break your customer experience. If your chatbot throws a prompt like, “Please share your name, email, and address?” that’s a terrible flow. Nobody talks like that. Instead of having flows like, “Hi [Mark] What can I help you with today?” or “Hey [Tom] do you need any help?”A lot of effort will go into improving the copywriting of the bot. Developing a design that has a conversational tone makes the customer feel more welcomed and interactive.
#3 Rely On Data
When you have a bot with which you’re satisfied and it feels like your customers would like talking to test it as much as you can with real customers on your website. With this, you can record interaction time, bounce rates, retention, and other significant metrics. You can then quantitatively observe how it is performing. If there are areas such as conversational prompts, backlinks, or any other thing which works you can improve it. If not, eliminate it. You must also note and take consistent feedback from your customers about their interaction and how it can be improved. A combination of customer feedback with quantitative analysis of your chatbot modules will make it a powerhouse of support and conversions. The main reason for putting your chatbot in front of your customers is to quantitatively assess what works and what doesn’t. And in every industry, the tone and style of the conversation will be different. Know your customers. Track the data, examine it, learn from it, and next make smarter actionable decisions in the future based on what the data showed.
#4 Integrate & Don’t Interrupt
Your chatbot shouldn’t impose its presence on the user. You have to design how effectively it will engage with the users. Planning its interactions with the user such as offering assistance should be carefully approached. Don’t aggressively pop-up in front of the users the time he/she lands on a home page. Engagement should be bespoke and tailored to the user’s behavior and actions. The chatbot’s attention and greeting conversation course will be altered for a user returning to perform a transaction and a first-time visitor. Draft scripts for various visitor situations to ensure when the chatbot can be an asset to a user’s experience and not an interruption in the overall process. To happily introduce users to conversational selling, be upfront and transparent about what it can and can’t do. In the event something cannot be done by the chatbot, connect to a customer rep. Explain its boundaries from the start of the communication. Then show people how to use it and present precise examples. Handling expectations from the inception will prevent users from being disappointed in the end.
In Conclusion
Almost like all other elements in marketing, development, and business spheres, conversational sales are evolving to fit in with the modern world. More and more businesses are being humanized and they want to interact with people, not presentations or pitch decks. Depending on your platform, you can use the most advanced AI technologies to advance the limits of what’s plausible for conversational selling. If you’re lacking developer firepower, you might just want to create an easy chatbot that remains on your business website or social media handles to give visitors a friendly welcome and propose ways to interact with your business and maximize your features. In the coming years as the barriers between customers and business, interaction dissolve, those that are ready to adopt conversational selling will have competitive advantage leaps and bounds ahead.
You can also find more knowledge about successfully navigating the muddy trenches of the B2B world successfully here in our blog.
Thanks for reading this far!
