Guest Blog: How to Personalize Your Chatbots for Customer Journey Tracking & Provide a Better Experience

This week we feature an article by Catalin Corzini who shares information about how chatbots can provide a better experience and how to customize the customer journey when using chatbots. – Shep Hyken

We cannot escape the future. As we move towards big data and artificial intelligence, chatbots seem to be leading the way towards a more automated future. However, what people don’t realize is that it’s not only easy to start building a chatbot, but it has become a necessity for those who wish to maintain growth in a company. In this article, I’ll show you how you can harness the power of chatbots for your enhanced conversion rate optimization.

The Rise of Chatbots

Believe it or not, the chatbot has been around for a while now. It was in 1966 where Eliza, the first chatbot created by Joseph Weizenbaum, was first seen.

In 2010, the boys over at Apple released Siri that astounded the world because for the first time you had a super-commercial chatbot/personal assistant that was so easy to have the mass market adapt to.

Later, Google and Amazon were following suit capitalizing on the market demand of chatbots. Shortly, there were websites and businesses take advantage of the myriad of functionality that chatbots were providing to customers.

Chatbots have made artificial intelligence accessible to even the smallest of enterprises online, and it is no surprise that they are changing the landscape of digital marketing.

Uses of Chatbots

Chatbots have risen to prominence in almost every sector that needs to maintain a customer service front or any industry that maintains a database that would boost the customer experience if users had easy access to it.

It’s estimated that by 2022, the banking and healthcare sector will make savings of up to $8 billion with chatbot usage. That’s not all; there are numerous businesses that have been reporting claims of not only higher savings, but better revenue due to higher CTR and engagement from their customers. AI chatbots have been used in online retail websites as well as in healthcare, financial institutions and even in the government.

The Winnie Chatbot has even gotten a CTR of 72 percent after its appearance on the Facebook Messenger platform.  Next Insurance was able to increase its rate of earnings 35-fold by good marketing and making their chatbot focus on small business owners.

 How You Can Utilize Chatbots to Guide Your Customers

There are indeed a lot of ways that you can harness the power of artificial intelligence in getting a chatbot that will maximize your efficiency, save on resources and provide a better customer experience.

 A Personalized Guide to Help Out Your Customers

Imagine this scenario and I’m sure it’s happened to you before – a customer is on a landing page or website, and he does not know where to start.

A bot can efficiently guide your customer through the website or through the products and services that you have.

Here’s one fact that you need to remember: 

People love personalization. People love personalization so much that 71 percent of people will only like advertising that is customized for them. 

In application, it’s simple. You can use chatbots to provide a personalized experience for your customers, and this will, in turn, lead to better conversion rates. Bots can ask your potential customers questions that will fine-tune their experience with your site.

In retail, it’s the equivalent of having a merchandiser speaking with a customer and ensuring that they are getting what they need out of them.

You can easily program a bot to ask a series of questions and given how the customer responds; it can use this data to provide a varied number of outputs that make sure that customers are being given personalized services.

Another way of doing this is to have a persistent messenger bot at the bottom of the screen that tells the customer what to do or where to go to find things.

Tracking Buying Psychology

Bots retain information and in the world of sales, information is definitely powerful. Imagine a bot being an advanced cookie that can even track your customers’ buying behavior and export this information for future purposes such as retargeting.

The great thing about this sort of data is that you don’t even have to ask your customer directly, but phrase questions in such a conversational way.

Instantaneous Customer Service

This is one of the biggest uses of chatbots as of the moment. Instead of having your customer stay on hold for such a long time, you can get a bot to answer basic customer queries.

You can then connect your bot to one of your databases so that an employee does not have to manually input data to provide to the customer. Instead, it’s an automated process.

Say goodbye to waiting times for a customer’s queries to be answered.

 Lead Qualification

Lead qualification can be an absolute pain but the good news about chatbots is that you can integrate a lead qualification function in them. While you’re in the process of guiding them through your web property, you can insert a few questions that can help qualify what sort of lead you’re tracking.

Even basic functionality such as tracking how many pages the user has visited can help qualify if a lead is “hot” or if you get your bot to ask if a user is comfortable with a particular pricing model that would be even better.      

Using and Harnessing the Information That You Have

One of the most important things that most digital marketers often forget is that there is so much information that can be absorbed through a proper chatbot system.

This information should be harnessed in providing for a more intuitive customer experience.

Bots can provide valuable insights to a lot of things and if you were to take the data that you have gathered from your bots emphasizes a form of machine learning so to speak.

You can use the bulk of this conversation data to derive actionable insights as to how you provide a better form of customer service.

If you aren’t using chatbots yet, I suggest you do. The future is definitely automation.

Catalin Corzini is the founder of Ecommerce Platforms and Web App Meister. He’s a design enthusiast and loves matcha, and is uber passionate about blockchain technology and travel.

For more articles from Shep Hyken and his guest contributors go to customerserviceblog.com.

Read Shep’s latest Forbes Article: Five Ways Comcast Creates A World-Class Customer Experience