Wondering how sales chatbots can help you grow your business? Well, you have come to the right place. In this deep dive, we will dig into every aspect of an AI sales chatbot - right from how they can boost sales to what features to look for in a chatbot for sales to some of the best practices while implementing a sales chatbot strategy.
Without further ado, let's jump into it right away.
What does a sales chatbot do?
Artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots have become an integral component of sales strategies. They are cost-effective, easy to implement, and highly efficient in driving productivity. An AI-powered chatbot for sales is a type of chatbot that utilizes conversational AI technology and sales force automation to facilitate self-service interactions between your company and prospects or potential customers. These conversational chatbots utilize natural language processing (NLP), machine learning, and knowledge base integration to function as digital agents, whether for collecting emails, providing personalized offers to customers, or prompting website visitors to make purchases thereby enhancing customer experience.
When combined with sales force automation software and a sales CRM, they can greatly enhance your company's sales experience. Chatbots can be valuable tools, but proper implementation and monitoring are necessary for a positive user experience. For certain companies, this involves streamlining their chatbot technology. For others, it involves familiarizing themselves with some recommended methods.
In general, three primary types of chatbots can be utilized for sales:
- Knowledge-based chatbots: These chatbots are designed to answer frequently asked customer questions and simple questions asked by customers, such as inquiring about the cost of a product. If the chatbot is unable to answer the query, it may transfer the customer to a sales rep.
- Decision tree chatbots: These chatbots engage in conversations with users to achieve specific objectives, such as collecting contact details or finalizing a purchase. These chatbots may also offer additional sources of information and recommend the next steps.
- Task-specific chatbots: The chatbots are specialized and designed for specific tasks. They are commonly used to assist customers with tasks such as account setup, book meetings, purchasing guidance, and product troubleshooting.
Some custom chatbots can perform all three tasks mentioned above, but it is not always advisable to assign excessive responsibility to a single bot, as we will discuss later on. One advantage of chatbots is that, depending on their complexity, they can be very cost-effective. If your company requires multiple chatbots, the number of bots, whether it is one, two, or three, will not significantly impact your tech stack budget.
This piece provides a comprehensive overview of the advantages of AI-powered sales chatbots, the key qualities of an effective chatbot, recommended chatbot practices, and the top chatbot currently accessible in the market.
Ways to boost sales with AI chatbots
Let's take a look at some of the ways sales bot can improve the customer journey by having a human-like conversation with prospects and customers:
Offer a seamless experience across channels
A chatbot can be added to various channels such as social media, websites, and messaging platforms to offer an omnichannel experience for buyers. This can also assist in monetizing your social media accounts, as clients will have the convenience of ordering through your bot without exiting the platform.
Another strategy that can be used is deploying chatbots to advertise your brand on different platforms, thus increasing your overall reach. Implementing these strategies can enhance your sales funnel by increasing brand awareness, generating more leads, and gathering customer data to analyze buying behaviors. Over time, it will assist you in developing more efficient campaigns.
Recover abandoned carts
Cart abandonment presents a significant challenge in the realm of online sales. A significant number of potential customers may disengage after initially being attracted to your website. One effective method to reduce this cart abandonment rate is by implementing a seller chatbot on your website, which can prevent potential customers from abandoning their purchases.
Sales chatbots can inquire about the reasons for cart abandonment from your website visitors. There is a possibility that the problem can be resolved efficiently and effectively to secure a sale. Additionally, your sales representatives can save valuable time by not having to complete this monotonous task. The bot can be triggered when the visitor's cursor moves off the page.
Why not address the abandoned cart issue earlier instead of waiting until the potential customer is about to leave? Sales chatbots offer live support to visitors by helping them select the appropriate products, addressing support queries, clarifying pricing details, and offering discounts. This enhances the shopping experience and encourages shoppers to finish their checkout process.
Generate more leads
Chatbots can assist businesses in generating qualified leads that can be directed to the sales team, thereby contributing to an increase in sales. They can be designed to identify warm leads, generate interest in your website visitors, and establish relationships with prospects.
The utilization of AI-powered chatbots results in the generation of high-quality leads. And this is where the sale of chatbots comes into play. Their instant response is faster than other service tools. This enables them to respond to customer inquiries quickly and utilize conversational AI to gather the contact information of potential customers.
Sales bots can utilize surveys, sign-up forms, and order phone calls. They can also provide greetings to your visitors and attend to your clients during your offline hours. By implementing this, your lead generation efforts will be automated, allowing your human agents to dedicate their time to more significant responsibilities.
Enhance marketing
Marketing teams can use chatbots to enhance the efficiency of promoting products and services. They are present throughout the entire customer journey. The process involves collecting customer information, offering personalized recommendations, and finalizing sales right from a chat box. Sales chatbots can contribute to your marketing efforts and increase conversion rates. Studies indicate that a significant number of business owners report a substantial return on investment (ROI) from chatbots with a minimal initial investment.
Reach out to clients proactively
There is no need to wait for your visitors to message you. Customers tend to have a more positive opinion of brands that provide proactive customer service. Chatbot technology can aid you in reaching out to your customers and politely inquire if they require any assistance. Some of them will likely reply, which creates an opportunity to establish a relationship with them. Additionally, they can initiate a conversation with your social media followers using messenger chatbots and guide them towards the promotions on your website.
Proactive communication involves welcome messages, notifications, updates, and general introductions. The primary objective of these messages is to encourage potential customers, provide pertinent information, shape their purchasing choices, and improve their buying experience.
Schedule appointments
Sales chatbots are particularly beneficial for service-based businesses, such as beauty salons, transportation companies, restaurants, and so on - i.e. businesses that rely on booking appointments for their sales.
Seller chatbot solutions provide an interactive and conversational experience to book appointments, resulting in increased client engagement. Customers can schedule appointments, choosing the time and duration of the meeting.
The chatbot for sales can send appointment notifications and reminders according to the prospect's time zone. This will ensure that the potential customer arrives on time for the meeting with your representative, preventing your salesperson from wasting time waiting.
24x7 customer support
24x7 customer support experience is of utmost importance when operating a global business. It is not feasible to rely solely on the customer support team. Chatbots are considered to be reliable in most cases. As these are AI-programmed bots, they provide uninterrupted service 24/7 without any breaks. Maintaining a constant presence is a reliable method for earning customers' trust.
Create customer and prospect profiles
Chatbot analytics provide valuable insights about your prospects. Analyzing the origin of prospects can aid in optimizing sales and marketing strategies by identifying the most effective channels. For instance, if the majority of your chatbot engagement comes from social media, but only a portion of your marketing efforts are focused on it, you may need to make some adjustments.
If you observe that the majority of chatbot cases escalated to live agents originate from your website, then it is recommended to have your representatives monitor that channel closely. Monitoring and analyzing all aspects of your sales helps to better understand and create more precise customer and prospect profiles.
Prioritize accounts
Sales teams utilize lead qualification methods to prioritize accounts and optimize sales outcomes, recognizing the limitations of personal attention for every potential customer. Chatbots can also aid sales teams in the process of sorting and managing opportunities.
A reliable chatbot not only assists in qualifying leads but also ensures that only essential conversations are forwarded to live agents. This results in your representatives dedicating their time to engaging with prospects who meet the qualifications, express interest, and are committed to addressing complex inquiries.
Including a chatbot at the start of your sales playbook is an important strategy to increase the productivity and effectiveness of your sales representatives.
Personalize product recommendations
Sending personalized product recommendations can effectively engage customers and enhance sales opportunities. Businesses can use AI sales chatbots to send product recommendations to customers based on their preferences and browsing activities across product pages. Customers may change their mind or forget items in the cart at the time of making a purchase. Sales chatbots can send reminders regarding the items that remain in the cart and thus nudge the prospect to complete the purchase.
Improve customer satisfaction
Ensuring customer satisfaction is essential for the growth and survival of any business. Customers are more likely to choose a business if they have positive interactions. Multilingual chatbots enable efficient communication and customized problem-solving, contributing to positive customer experiences. A prompt response contributes to customer satisfaction. Not only will they remain loyal, but they will also promote you to their friends and family.
Key features to look for in a chatbot for sales
Let's take a look at some of the key features that a sales chatbot must have to be effective:
Personalized greetings
Personalized welcome greetings are an effective method for engaging customers, regardless of whether they are new or returning. Businesses can create scripts that are engaging and target their customers. Automated greetings function similarly to how sales representatives greet customers in brick-and-mortar stores. Using this chatbot feature, businesses can send greeting messages instantly and without any delay.
Self-help and AI responses
A significant number of buyers seek self-help resources exclusively. Chatbots should proactively answer frequently asked questions. It results in decreased response times and enhanced customer engagement. Chatbots can provide customers with links to the self-help portal, offering solutions to their problems. AI chatbots can semantically understand what the customer is looking for and share relevant information available in the self-help portal thereby managing multiple customer conversations at the same time.
Smart routing to the sales team
The chatbot needs to have the ability to direct the conversation to the appropriate operator at the appropriate time. Routing chat to the appropriate operator or department enhances the delivery of a personalized experience. This ensures that customers' inquiries are effectively resolved. Unresolved queries should automatically be routed to different groups, such as accounts or sales, based on the set rules. By using this method, you can attract potential leads and strategize on converting them.
A personalized experience for the buyer
AI chatbot software can comprehend customer needs, gather data, and analyze behavior to generate tailored outcomes. This helps to ensure that the conversation and results are more dynamic and interesting, rather than simply following set codes and producing bland outcomes. A crucial aspect to consider is the chatbot script prompts, as it enables sales chatbots to engage in personalized conversations that resemble human interactions.
Advanced analytics & reporting
A chatbot with an independent reports and analytics section provides clear insights on performance metrics. By analyzing this data, one can gain insights into various aspects of chatbot performance, including valid and invalid chats, total chats, engagement rate, conversational behavior, and more. You have the opportunity to make improvements based on these metrics and create a better experience for your customers.
Data privacy & security
This is a critical aspect of utilizing a sales chatbot. A chatbot software should prioritize safety and security, ensuring no breaches occur. Chatbots gather various types of data from customers, including their names, email addresses, transaction details, and more. If used incorrectly, it can pose a significant danger to the business. The chatbot should incorporate security measures such as end-to-end encryption, authorization, and authentication, among others.
Support across all channels
What happens if your chatbot does not have this feature? You may miss out on potential leads from various channels. It is important to ensure that the chatbots being invested in have the capability to capture leads from various communication channels, such as Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, etc. which are largely used worldwide. This can assist in comprehending customer behavior and interests and can enhance sales and marketing strategies to provide a more optimal customer support experience.
Easily customizable
Chatbot customization is a useful feature that is recommended for every sales chatbot to have. This feature allows for customization of the chatbot to match the brand's tone. This feature enables users to customize the chatbot name (support, appointment, or sales bots), display name, add a display image, and place the bot on desired pages. This form of personalization enhances customer engagement and fosters trust. You should look for a chatbot that enables you to customize the theme and design of the chat widget.
Best practices for sales chatbot strategy
Let's take a look at a few strategies for getting the most out of your purchase:
Make sure your agents are available
Ideally, chatbots can handle most interactions, but it is important to have live agents available when needed. If we consider customer behavior in the current market, it becomes clear that they have a preference for having options. When live agents are unavailable, customers are generally unhappy with this lack of choice. According to industry reports, nearly half the customers become frustrated when they can't choose between a bot and a human—and even more frustrated when their issue can't be escalated without jumping through a lot of hoops. Providing an option where their queries can be automatically escalated to sales reps if the chatbot can't provide the answer can go a long way in mitigating that frustration.
Keep bot responsibilities simple
AI and chatbot technology have the potential to significantly transform the way your company engages with potential customers. However, it is important to maintain appropriate boundaries for your chatbot's responsibilities.
High-level chatbots typically can provide information, resolve minor problems, carry out transactions, and respond to inquiries from your knowledge base beyond regular business hours. Currently, chatbots can automate tasks directly from the chatbot widget. However, burdening single chatbots with a lot of different responsibilities can lead to a very cluttered experience for the customer. It is best practice to ensure there are different bots for different tasks.
Collect consumer data easily with conversational flows
Even when a customer comes in with an issue that requires escalation, your bot can still ensure a successful resolution for everyone involved. By collecting essential profile information in advance, the chatbot minimizes the need for customers to repeat themselves or spend unnecessary time providing basic details after the connection is made. If a prospect utilizes a bot, this information becomes even more essential. Providing basic contact information, such as a name and email, allows your team to have a confirmed lead for further communication.
Improve your bot with sales reports
Similar to other sales tools, regular maintenance, and assessment are necessary for your chatbot to ensure optimal performance. Many chatbots can generate analytics and usage reports. The reports can be utilized to assess the usage and effectiveness of your bots in problem-solving. If they are facing difficulties, it may be helpful to adjust the approach. Additionally, the chatbot's responses be improved by programming more detailed answers for commonly asked questions that often require a human representative. If the bot is not getting attention, you may consider adjusting the color or size of the widget.
Fixes are typically straightforward, but it is advisable to verify the data before implementing them.
Let the users know they are conversing with a bot
Building trust is an important aspect of the sales process, so it is crucial to maintain that trust by being honest. An industry report published recently highlighted how approximately half of individuals surveyed believe that it is not acceptable for a chatbot to impersonate a real human. Research suggests that individuals are often receptive to engaging with bots during the communication process and may even place a greater level of trust in them when disclosing sensitive information, contrary to the temptation of maintaining a solely personal approach. Maintain transparency with your potential customers and allow the bot to handle the communication.
FAQs about AI sales chatbot
Sales chatbots are an example of virtual assistants that can answer customer service inquiries, offer product suggestions, and interact with customers. They can handle simple and repetitive tasks that they have been designed to perform. These tasks involve order tracking, booking appointments, presenting offers, and other related activities. Let's look at some of the common questions about sales chatbots:
Can you explain how the chatbot operates for marketing and sales purposes?
Chatbots for marketing and sales attract the attention of website visitors and interact with them through conversations. This chat allows your business to engage with potential customers and encourage them to make a purchase. Sales chatbots can enhance the sales of your products by providing personalized and engaging interactions.
How much do chatbots increase sales?
Research has indicated that chatbots have the potential to significantly enhance sales by more than 67%.
What are the steps to create a chatbot strategy?
The seven steps to making a chatbot strategy are:
- Identify the objective you wish to accomplish with your sales chatbot.
- Select the most suitable chatbot for your business.
- Identify the main objectives of your visitors.
- Create conversational flows.
- Connect the chatbot with other platforms.
- Select the metrics and KPIs for evaluating your chatbot.
- Collect feedback and consistently enhance your bots.
How to get a sales chatbot for your business?
When creating a sales bot, it is important to carefully select the most suitable provider for your business. You can customize your chat widget, name your bot, and personalize your messages. Finish off by creating flows from scratch or by using chatbot templates available in the tool.
Chatden is a ChatGPT-powered AI chatbot platform that can help you boost your online sales and the best part is - you can get it for your business without any coding! With Chatden, your sales team can efficiently handle general inquiries, assess leads, and oversee conversations without the need for manual intervention in each interaction. Sign up for a no-commitment free trial and see the magic of Chatden for yourself.