If you run a small business, you know how important your website is to your business. It defines your business, your brand identity, and most importantly drives sales for your business. The reliability of websites for online purchasing of goods and services is expected to be continued by 53% of consumers post-pandemic, according to a UN Survey.
Greater dependency on websites has forced businesses to build a great user experience. Free customer support chat has proven to be a great upgrade for user experience and customer satisfaction on websites. The result? You can service customers while you sleep and get back to running your day-to-day operations with ease.
What is free customer support chat?
Large organizations have used chatbots to the full potential for their customer services, sales & marketing, and human resources. As a small business owner, you may be hesitant - after all, you want to be sure if you’re making the right decision. As many small business owners don’t feel confident with relying on technology, it is important to note that trusting chatbots can significantly improve your customer engagement, take away the burden of customer service, foster customer retention, and overall help increase your team’s productivity.
1. Convenient 24x7 customer service:
Unlike big corporations, you may not have a whole team for customer service, but a chatbot can work as your smart customer service with zero wait time and 24x7 serviceability! With the shrinking of user attention span, it is the best way to keep them interested in your business.
It serves as an interactive version of FAQs, helpdesk, and query resolution. The adoption of chatbots can reduce human error and customer issues can be resolved quickly compared to traditional customer service systems.
2. Business growth
Since you may be wearing many hats, chatbots for small businesses serve as a great channel to acquire new leads and increase conversions (with lower bounce rates due to instant user engagement via the chatbot). It can help you improve some of the most important processes like sales and marketing for your business.
Changing times have only proved to shrink a user’s attention span and thus a chatbot can retain these users by providing instant assistance. Research from Harvard Business Review shows, that even if you wait just five minutes to respond after a lead first reaches out, there’s a 10x decrease in your odds of actually getting in touch with that lead. After 10 minutes, there’s a 400% decrease in your odds of qualifying that lead. With the help of a chatbot for small businesses, the chances of maintaining engagement with users and potential leads are higher, ultimately helping you keep users on the website and easily navigate to explore your products/services.
3. Personalization
Today, personalization is more important than ever, it drives customer acquisition and more importantly - retention. Personalization has proven to increase brand loyalty and improve customer satisfaction, it’s what makes your customers feel valued and heard. Consumers want you to reflect your brand personality at each step of your interaction with them and this is a great way to add it to your automation efforts!
Wondering why personalization is important? 80% of customers are more likely to purchase a product or avail of a service from a brand that offers them personalized experiences. 90% of customers find personalized experiences appealing. 72% of customers only engage with marketing messages that are customized and contextualized to their specific interests and desires.
Chatbots for small businesses sometimes come with additional features of templated conversations for you to choose from and further improve upon them where they see fit. You can also choose the look and feel of these to match the branding of their site.
4. Cost-efficiency
If you own a small business, you may be a one-person army or a small group. Hiring a customer service representative can be costly and would demand you to invest your time in training. On the other hand, chatbots are programmed to improve their interactions throughout time and the best part is - you don't have to spend too much time or resources to help them improve and understand your customers.
Contrary to popular belief, a chatbot for small businesses is affordable for small businesses and can be easy to implement. Instead of spending on R&D, there are many companies that offer the solution with easy customizations.
5. Continuous room for improvement
The best way to improve your products/services is to collect feedback and understand common questions/concerns directly from customers. This is where your chatbot will help you collect feedback and store common queries to refine your product. It almost acts like a subtle survey too!
It also helps interconnect different departments/product lines by utilizing the data in a unified manner. This is also applicable for a single process cycle - it essentially helps access data from the lead’s first engagement to sales (and even further with review/feedback).
6. Guide the customer throughout their journey
Chatbots for small businesses have proven to increase engagement with your customers. It single-handedly works for all the stages of the buyer journey - from awareness, consideration, decision, and further with renewal! From having a doubt about the usage of the product to an inquiry about shipment, it can handle it all.
As chatbots learn and get smarter over time, it benefits your business by shifting from answering generic questions to making decision influencing comments over time. Instead of just being a chatbot, it becomes a sales assistant equivalent. It can also help facilitate purchasing. Essentially, it will help with awareness, consideration, and eventually the decision stage too.
7. Increase business productivity
With a limited number of employees and your day-to-day hustle, running a small business requires an extensive investment of time, with limited resources. A chatbot will significantly reduce the number of emails and calls your team receives regarding frequently asked questions, inquiries about your service, or hours of operation.
It also provides data that helps you prepare and plan your sales and marketing strategies efficiently without compromising your customer service.
According to Salesforce, 40% of companies that have between one and 10 employees use chatbots, making this group the most frequent users. But why? The existence of chatbots for small businesses revolutionizes day-to-day operations for small business owners like you and thus there has been a growing demand for chatbots amongst entrepreneurs who are looking to optimize their efficiency. Incorporating this in your business’s website will also ensure you are up-to-date with technological advancements and making the best use of them.
We highly recommend Amy, the customer service bot with human superpowers, ready to meet the needs of small business owners like you.
Why Amy?
Amy is the perfect free customer chat solution for any small business owner. Amy doesn't need vacation days to Hawaii, or take sick days, she's always eager to learn, and won't be tempted by another job offer because she's A ROBOT - but she's also powered by human superpowers. Best of both worlds. Amy is never in a bad mood and can help you service your clients 24/7. The best part? Her experience in helping your customers gets better in time. Just like a real human, the more she learns, the better she is at troubleshooting or making the perfect suggestions for your customers.
Amy empowers small business owners like you to go about their day-to-day operations with more flexibility and assurance that their customers are taken care of. After installing Amy, gain peace of mind that up to 80% of your customer inquiries are taken care of. At the end of the day, this means fewer late nights responding to customers and answering commonly asked questions.
With just the click of a button, view your admin portal to gather important insights from your customers to visualize customer behavior and feedback. The result is the ability to improve your services and products without the need to manually track your inbox history. Sign up for Amy’s email list down below for the chance to win a personalized prize!