What Is Your Chatbot Strategy?

Recently, Facebook has enabled Bots to be used on their Messenger app. With over 1 billion of people using Facebook and messenger to communicate with friends, it is not surprising to see why Facebook has decided to allow chatbots to be used on their platform. With the right chatbot strategy in place, every business should experiment with chatbots, especially on the Facebook platform, since millions of people are all using this platform.

There is a lot of hype surrounding chatbots and they are quickly becoming a standard part of any digital marketing strategy. When setup correctly, chatbots can help customers answer questions and fulfill a range of tasks.

What are the benefits of building a chatbot?

Millions of people use chat apps and I believe it has surpassed that of social media. We don’t SMS anymore, we use FB Messenger, WeChat, What’sApp, or I use Slack in my business to chat with customers, and so on. Hence, chatbots offer a more practical way to reach your audience.

In theory, they were created to provide a seamless customer experience, allowing customers to get answers through the applications they already use the most.

This is why you should consider using chatbots for your business. The right chatbot strategy should help you:

• Find and secure leads
• Simplify your customer’s purchasing experience
• Increase customer satisfaction through better customer experience
• Enables you to distribute relevant content via relevant chat apps
• Deliver targeted content based on your customer’s feedback and interests
• With the use of A.I (artificial intelligence) your chat apps become more dynamic

How do you use chatbots as part of your marketing strategy to generate leads?

Although this is a fairly new concept for many business owners, in the last 2 months, I’ve come across a few companies to date that use them regularly. In terms of their chatbot strategy, I’ve experienced both the bad and the good of chatbots. Here is my experience.

Negative Experience

The first example I want to share with you is how the use of chatbots can negatively impact your customer experience.

Early this year, my sister and I attended a marketing conference. It was a very engaging conference and we got a lot of value from it. The presenters were young guys who embraced new ways of doing things, so their approach to pitching at the conference was slightly different than what we’re normally used to.

As far as I was concerned, the conference answered a lot of questions I had and I was ready to ‘buy from them’ there and then.

They had me at hello!

However, towards the end of the conference, they told us they will not be pitching, and only people who are interested in buying their services can connect with them as “friends” on Facebook.

So both my sister and I befriended them on Facebook.

Two days passed and I remember it was the weekend, which meant my sister and I were enjoying a coffee together, doing family things. As we were chatting, we both received THE SAME message on our messenger apps.

The message was sent by the conference presenter, who created a group, invited a third party person whom we haven’t met, and asked us to book a call with that person who wasn’t at the conference, but who is going to give us a free marketing strategy session.

We received the same message on both of our phones. Although the message was meant to be a personal message from the presenter, it was clear they used a robot to reach out to us, which just made the whole experience, well, look cheap. Basically, they didn’t make us feel special.

And because I was caught off guard, focused on enjoying my espresso with my sister, my interest in actually talking with these people very quickly waned.

They lost me when the bot said hello!

This came across very creepy. I don’t recommend using chatbots as a way to replace your personal messenger chats with people, because it is just way too creepy.

Positive Experience

On this occasion I’m browsing through my Facebook news feed at night, before bedtime, as you do, and a HubSpot Ad pops up. It was well targeted because it was inviting me to register for a conference in Melbourne which was due to start within 5 days. Great way to use scarcity to get registrations, because I was hooked!

So I clicked on “Register Now” button.

Then, the FB messenger opened with a welcome message and then it asked me for my name. I typed it in.

Then it asked me for my address, which I typed in.

Then it asked me for my email address, which I gladly handed over.

And lastly, it confirmed my registration and gave me a link to put it into my calendar.

Done.

Instead of asking me to complete a form, Hubspot used a chatbot to get my details.

I knew it was a robot chatting with me and not a real person. And I was OK with that!

In Conclusion

Whatever tools you decide to use, whether it’s a software as a service tool or a chatbot app, the strategy you employ will make or break the tool. You have to remember that you are a person, who is running your business and people do business with other people. No technology can replace this.

Your business or your brand is what attracts your customers to buy from you.

Chatbot apps are there just to mimic conversations with people in order to interact with your customers. Because they are fairly new, using chatbots will give you strategic advantage over your competitors.

Do have a chatbot strategy in place for your business because chatbots are NOT a replacement for your business and marketing strategy.

Chatbots – Use with care.

If you need help designing your chatbot strategy, please contact us here.