What Are The Benefits Of Adding A Chatbot To My Website?

Chatbots have been around for many years. In the early days, they were largely produced in attempts to pass the Turing test, but they just couldn’t approximate human communication with sufficient accuracy.

Since then, though, they’ve improved massively — and while it’s still fairly easy to tell when you’re dealing with a chatbot, it isn’t unheard of for someone who isn’t paying much attention (or doesn’t speak the language natively) to be fooled.

The level of quality on offer today makes chatbots extremely useful for business, and they’re particularly valuable in the online world. Additionally, they’re far more accessible than many think: you don’t need to run an enterprise-level operation to be able to implement a decent chatbot. But why exactly would you want to do that?

In this post, we’ll run through the central benefits of deploying website chatbots. This should help you understand why you should invest in this technology. Let’s get started.

You can provide 24/7 support

Customer support is a key consideration for every modern business (people expect companies to help them when they need assistance, of course), and sticking to conventional working hours won’t cut it given that people use the internet at all hours of the day (and night). You also need to factor in the prospect of visitors from overseas: due to varying time zones, it can be the middle of the day for a visitor to your website when it’s midnight for you.

Having a chatbot in place means that anyone who visits your website, regardless of when they arrive, can get some assistance. Chatbots can do basic things like check order progress and provide stock updates, all without requiring your involvement. That means you can sit back and relax, safe in the knowledge that your website is consistently welcoming.

You can reach a much wider audience

We just noted that a chatbot is great for overseas visitors because it can be live all the time, but that isn’t the only reason. Since global shipping and digital distribution are so common now, it’s normal for people to look everywhere for products and/or services: the only thing that can hold them back is needing to overcome language barriers.

Another great thing about chatbots is that they can operate in whatever languages you have libraries for. If you choose chatbot software you can populate with localised responses, you can serve a worldwide audience without having to become multilingual (though of course it will help you get better results if you do add to your understanding of language).

You can easily collect useful data

The more support queries you deal with, the more data you can draw from to glean valuable insights into everything from which questions you’re asked most frequently to what price points people tend to buy at. When you handle support issues manually, though, you need to carefully log the key details — and you can easily forget to go through this tedious process.

When you allow a chatbot to handle the bulk of your support exchanges, you can simply design that chatbot to categorize and store the questions people pose. It can then output relevant stats and snippets of information. If you want to know what they’re looking for, for instance, you can look through the list of mentioned products and/or services.

You can free up your time

Everything we’ve covered so far is truly useful, but the biggest benefit of implementing a chatbot is that it allows you to spend less time answering basic questions or carrying out simple actions. This isn’t about abandoning your site visitors. Quite the contrary, in fact: some of the time you free up can go towards dealing with issues too complex for chatbots to resolve, with the rest of the time being spent however you like. If you do it correctly, everyone benefits.

We’ve clearly and simply explained the benefits of chatbots, noting their value for businesses small and large alike. So, it’s over to you to introduce chatbots to your business and start benefiting from all the great things they offer.