Artificial intelligence has drastically changed the way businesses interact with their customers. As per Business Insider, 80% of businesses will be using chatbots by 2020. Chatbots are important to improve customer experience and are deployed across business functions to improve performance.
You can find chatbots use cases and examples across all industries and business functions such as customer service, sales, marketing or even for internal process automation.
Here are the key use cases of how customers are getting the most out of chatbots
Source: Drift
The chart shows how chatbots have transformed the communication landscape between businesses and customers. From streamlining the activities and boosting productivity to increased customer engagement, the following use cases will prove to leverage chatbots worthy for your business.
Top chatbots use cases and examples
Along with impacting personal lives, AI powered chatbots are also transforming the way businesses communicate with their customers and prospects. Let us walk through the transformed alleys across different business functions and industries.
Here are 9 major categories and their use cases about how chatbots can be implemented into your business.
Customer service
Business Insider reports say 67% of consumers worldwide used a chatbot for customer support. Businesses are making their way into the digital era by implementing the customer service chatbots on websites, apps, social media to help customers and drive engagement.
Customer service is one of the important business functions where chatbots have a great impact. With AI chatbots, businesses can save customer support costs and improve the key productivity metrics such as first response time and enhance the customer service experience.
Here are three important chatbot examples and use cases for customer support:
1.Online support
Today’s customers are really growing impatient. They generally prefer the website to reach out to your business and expect an instant response. Even the slightest waiting time can lead to frustration and increasing the bounce rate.
The State of Chatbots report says, 55% of respondents say they would most enjoy getting an instant response and answers to simple questions from a chatbot.
What kind of queries do people ask on the website for customer support?
- To know about products and services
- Technical support
- Billing and pricing information
- Enquire about orders and shipping
You can automate the customer service process to deliver real time support. You can train bot with FAQs and business information to engage customers, thus reducing the number of support requests. Conversational bots in FinTech are widely used for customer service as chatbots can resolve a basic issue or query instantly. Chatbots deliver faster response, handle multiple requests simultaneously and they are easily scalable.
Source: Chatbots Magazine
Bank of America introduced an AI-driven virtual financial assistant called Erica. The bot Erica efficiently handled the customer service queries in various ways such as:
- Providing credit report updates
- Facilitating bill payments
- Helping customers with simple transactions
- Providing personalized and proactive insights
Erica has surpassed 6,000,000 users and has serviced over 35,000,000 customer service requests.
2. In-app support
Most of the mobile apps typically have some kind of support FAQs built within the app. Having a bot to handle those FAQs enhances user engagement. Chatbot application enables businesses to send notifications to keep customers updated.
- AI chatbots help to provide quick and easy resolutions to customer issues
- You can provide personalized support anytime, anywhere to create a better user experience by bolstering engagement and retention
Let us take the example of Duolingo, the popular language learning app that took an interesting approach. When the app users requested a way to practice conversation, Duolingo built a native chatbot inside the app to help users learn conversational skills and practice what they learned.
In order to match various personalities and learning styles, Duolingo also created various language tutoring bots with different personalities to engage them anytime, with any character they choose. This resolved a major user pain point and made learning through the app more exciting
3. IT helpdesk
Artificial Intelligence (AI) made its way to accelerate the efficiency of the internal workforce productivity across the enterprise. Chatbots are self-learning software systems that analyze human language without any human assistance. They can help your IT helpdesk to boost your team productivity and drive efficiency.
How does IT helpdesk bot function?
- It analyzes the service request made by the user
- Identifies the request and takes action accordingly
- Raise support tickets for employee service agents
Sales
Chatbot application not only improves the customer service experience but also improves customer loyalty, brand reputation as well as the revenue generation. Optimizing customer support with bots can leverage the data collected from the customers, generate reports automatically and help lead generation.
Here are the key use cases of sales bots:
4. Lead generation
Chatbots are programmed with a preset questionnaire, which is followed while conversing with the website visitors and customers for lead generation. When the visitors are qualified into potential leads, they are directed to the next level in the sales funnel.
How do chatbot application help in lead generation?
- Segment your audience – Bots enables you to identify the product interests, likes dislikes of visitors & customers and segment them based on their response.
- Qualify leads – Bots use the sales questionnaire to convert your website visitors into potential prospects and send them to the right sales representative for further follow up.
- Hybrid chatbot – Most of the businesses do not automate chat. The best way is to correctly balance the bot support for simple queries and human support for complex issues.
Health Tap, the leading technology company delivering a suite of connected health apps, had implemented bot to answer health-related questions.
It assures accurate virtual care by immediate access to the right doctors. It also helps doctors or clinics looking to pre-screen their appointment
5. Lead nurturing
HubSpot reveals that 74% of companies consider lead nurturing to be their top priority. Businesses that try to contact potential customers within an hour of receiving queries are nearly 7 times as likely to have meaningful conversations with key decision makers compared to businesses that try to contact prospects even an hour later.
If you want your qualified leads to end up with making a sale, you need to nurture them based on their journey. Apparently, nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than those who buy immediately.
In the e-commerce business, chatbot engages the customers by:
- Giving personalized recommendations
- Suggesting combo offers
- Offer discount coupons to improve sales conversions
6. Appointment booking
One important chatbot use case that is widely used for scheduling appointments for hospitality, health care, and personal services. With bots, visitors can can book their appointments right inside the messenger instantly without any human assistance. Leveraging chatbots to automate appointment booking help businesses to reduce the sales cycle and followups to qualify the leads.
Main features of appointment bot comprise of:
- Allow visitors to self schedule
- Collect additional information such as name, email and phone number
- Inform the account executives about new meeting requests
7. Online orders
Ubisend report says,1 in 5 consumers would consider purchasing goods and services from a chatbot. Be it food, electronics or apparel chatbots are prompt in handling online orders.
Chatbots for e-commerce brands are specially designed to:
- Assist customer during their purchasing journey and help them to make a quick decision
- Chatbots offer buyers product recommendations and guide them in their buying journey
- Provide real time customer support to all the FAQs.
H&M, the renowned clothing brand built a chatbot that asks users questions about their style and offers photo options for users to choose. From the collected information the bot creates a fashion profile of an individual user to make clothing suggestions and help in the direct purchases.
Marketing
Chatbots are making serious waves in the marketing sphere.
The messenger marketing ecosystem has changed for many businesses using chatbots, but the goal remains the same for all i.e. instant and convenient service. Outgrow says 80% of businesses are expected to have some sort of chatbot automation by 2020
The below marketing use cases have proved to businesses with meaningful conversations and generate revenue.
8. Customer engagement
Customers prefer prompt actions delivered by chatbots fueled with artificial intelligence for better customer engagement.
Chatbots can engage with your customers with immediate responses and increase customer satisfaction, which makes them happy to retain with your brand. Forrester says, we have already stepped into the era of automated and strategic customer service.
How do AI bots improve customer engagement?
- Chatbots are best for customers who expect an instant response, typically less than 30 seconds.
- AI bots are active 24×7 to engage customers to handle information based questions and reduce support tickets.
- Chatbots are easily scalable during the busy hours to engage customers and deliver better customer experience.
Let’s see how Emirates Vacations deployed chatbots for boosting customer engagement.
Considering the average CTR for display ads is as low as 0.35%, Emirates Vacations built a chatbot within its display ads. The company targeted different visuals and bot sequences based on the page someone’s browsing. The engagement rates improved by 87% compared to the click through ads.
Pro tips:
- Focus on the goal of the user
- Use relevant messages according to customers journey
9. News
Browsing multiple portals for news updates is really time consuming. With chatbots, you save time by getting curated news and headlines right inside your messenger
Many popular news portals and television networks introduced chatbot services. Chatbots inform about breaking news and recommend top stories to read. CNN was one of the first news businesses to build a bot on Facebook Messenger platform.
By using the CNN bot, you can choose to read the top stories topic. When you choose the stories you like, the bot gets smarter about your preferences and what you want to read.
10. Product recommendations
Amazon.com is a prime example of a brand that implements product recommendations and does it so well that it generates 35% of its revenue through its recommendation engine.
If you want your customers to proceed to the final stage of the sales funnel, it is vital to clarify their queries, understand their preferences, guide them and recommend them the best option accordingly in their buying journey.
How do bots give product suggestions?
- With chatbots, you can track your customer journey to their interests, preferences, and needs. Based on those elements you can recommend products or services they are looking for.
E-commerce, fashion and beauty industry are where product recommendations are much needed.
Chatbot technology has given a new makeover to the beauty industry. Bloom Avenue’s Olivia, Facebook Messenger bot is the best example. Olivia is a user-facing chatbot that asks a series of skin related questions, and then recommend the right skincare products for each user.
Social media
Isn’t it vital we believe to engage with customers where they are?
With an increase in messenger platforms for business, one of the most important channels is social. As per the Business Insider report, consumers choose the main four social networks — Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
Chatbots significantly boost user engagement on these popular social websites and communicate with customers through live chat platforms like Facebook Messenger. Chatbots Magazine says, “Chatbots are taking over social media marketing as they allow consumers to engage with them in terms of customer service, and transactional engagements”.
Lyft accepts ride requests via chat Facebook Messenger and Slack. The chatbot helps you to know the current location of your driver and show you a picture of the license plate and car model.
Messaging Apps
Conversational commerce is more preferred over traditional ways. With the ever increasing popularity of messaging, chatbots are now the center of business messaging. This concept encourages buyers to be more ready and willing than ever to shop online with bots.
The global chatbot market is expected to reach $1.23 billion by 2025 with a compounding annual growth rate of 24.3%. Every business has its own competitive pace. If you are an e-commerce business you have to stay ahead by tracking competitor’s activity to see how they’re reaching their customers.
Here are two main reasons why your business should deploy chatbot.
- Messaging apps are widely used – Business Insider report says, consumers prefer using the main four messaging apps — Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, WeChat, Viber.
Source: Business Insider
- Customers prefer to shop with messaging apps – Apart from chatting messenger apps are also used for shopping. 47% of users are open to purchasing items through a bot. The figure shows that customers prefer chatbots as the best way to interact with businesses.
BookMyShow, the leading Indian online ticketing platform, has integrated WhatsApp for Business to notify its customers about tickets and upcoming movies.
“WhatsApp has definitely become a preferred mode of communication for millions of people in our country and we could identify tremendous value in making it a default ticket confirmation channel,” said Ravdeep Chawla, Head of Product, BookMyShow.
Human resources
Like every superhero has some special power for the workforce of the future, that power could be chatbots – What do you think?
Human Capital Trends report found that only 17% of global HR executives are ready to manage a workforce with people, robots, and AI working side by side.
Recruitment is an important part of HR activity. With bot solution, it can be handled seamlessly. Mya, the AI recruiting assistant, for example, manages large candidate pools, giving FirstJob recruiters and hiring managers more time to focus on interviews and closing offers.
How does Mya do that?
- Mya can chat to many candidates simultaneously via SMS, Facebook, Skype, email, or chat
- It asks prescreen questions, responds to FAQs, delivers application progress updates, gives tips and guidance, sends alert to the candidates, and administers assessments & challenges
- It provides vital information for recruiters and managers, ranking candidates on factors like experience, recent activity, engagement, and other metrics.
Personal services
Chatbots can also help you streamline your personal services such as fitness, diet, health or day to day activities. Every fitness goal requires a different set of workout plan and nutrition diet to be followed. Bots can help you in achieving your desired goal be it losing fat, building muscle or improving endurance.
Research shows that participants who used the chatbot were 26% more likely to meet or exceed personal fitness goals
Much like personal trainers, chatbots provide personalized workout and diet recommendations based on the data entered by users like their height, weight, fitness goals, etc.
Voice chatbots
Voice recognition technology continues to improve in accuracy, and advanced services are getting added to it.
Why voice bots are gaining popularity?
- Text can be monotonous at times while voice bots engage customers with automated, intelligence based communication.
- Voice enabled bot, you can provide reliable data insights to your customers. It also helps in giving correct real-time information.
- Voice bots offer new opportunities for personalization that reduces problems faced while dealing with customer requirements.
User retention
Chatbot application help to improve user retention by handling customer service issues timely and efficiently. After communicating with a bot 34% of customers returned to the business within 30 days
AI bots can automate repetitive business tasks to enhance their customer service and support processes, automate simple payments, increase user engagement and brand awareness, streamline social media activity and improve user retention.
Chatbots use cases: what the future holds?
AI powered chatbots augment the customer experience without replacing it. Bots have been used widely for customer service and sales. With bots becoming smarter, there will be new avenues where we can see more chatbot use cases for customer communication, internal process in startups as well as enterprise.
However, it is assumed that the use cases of chatbots will grow even more that it will
- Be as efficient as human support by using predictive and sentiment analysis.
- Be able to provide solutions to complex queries without escalating for human assistance.
