Oh my dog, are people still going on about chatbots, you ask? Yes, yes we are. If you have thus far ignored everything about chatbots, I congratulate you for being here. And if you’re on the fence about using chatbots, this article is perfect for you.
So go ahead, check out these 5 signs to see if you should have chatbots on your website. Keep in mind how many of the symptoms match your situation – I will provide a free diagnosis at the end.
New to chatbots? Learn the basics right here.
Sign 1:
You’re forcing website visitors to do the heavy lifting
This one might as well be called the website from the 2000s -syndrome. These sites have an item in the navigation labeled “Contact Us”, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
The problem is that that page is the only place to contact your business. What’s more, you’re asking the website visitor (the prospect and your potential customer) to do all the work.
First they need to find the page and the contact information. They need to wonder which person / department / office they should contact. They need to pick up their phone, write an email, send a fax, or what have you.
In the worst case, the information is outdated. Contacting you should be extremely easy, so please don’t put a burden on the buyers and leave them wondering if you’ll ever get back to them or not.
Sign 2:
The most interactive element on your current website is a traditional contact form
You’re still making the customer do all the work. A lot of work, in fact – often too much. Wonder why the form isn’t getting you any leads?
Ask a friend (who isn’t an expert in your field) to try and fill out the contact form. Did they have to think, or worse yet, did they have to google something? Did they leave an open text field empty because they didn’t know what to type?
Contact forms are not always a bad thing to have, but you need to make sure that filling the form takes no more than 10 seconds. Too often forms have around 10 fields with no pre-filled information or alternatives.
And then there’s the open text field… WTF am I supposed to type here??!
Who knows.
Chatbots are a great alternative to contact forms. There are at least five types of forms that chatbots can outperform.
Sign 3:
You don’t have a dedicated customer service team
One of the main benefits of using chatbots is the partial automation of customer service. It’s ok to not have a team for it, but that’s not an ok excuse to leave customers hanging.
Our experience working with hundreds of teams across industries has taught us that the vast majority of service enquiries revolve around the same 3-5 topics. This observation stresses the potential benefit of using chatbots.
Help website visitors find answers by themselves. If you can handle 80% of incoming questions automatically with bots, answering the phone or email for the remaining 20% doesn’t feel like a huge thing.
On top of that, you will be able to provide a better experience to the customers who actually need your personal assistance. So, put some well-designed chatbots on your website and you’ll be good to go without a dedicated customer service team.
Sign 4:
Your customers are active 24/7 – or you are serving a global customer base
Let’s be honest here: no field exists where at least one of these wouldn’t be true.
It’s time to face the fact that your (potential) customers inhabit pretty much every corner of the space-time continuum, and they expect to get answers and service regardless of their coordinates.
If you’re still strictly only available during local office hours, implementing chatbots can bring enormous advantages in customer service, lead generation, and sales. Bots are great in the way that once you’ve put in the initial work, they require very little maintenance. And they work 24/7 without causing you any legal trouble.
Again, chatbots will take you a long way when you don’t have around the clock customer service – and even if you do!
Sign 5:
You’re not getting as many leads from the website as you want
Every B2B marketing and sales team wants more leads (we are no exception). Whether you’re a seasoned pro or a rising talent, you have likely sacrificed a few grey hairs for the lead generation problem.
Sure, you can do content marketing, advertise, and drive more traffic to your website. These are valuable marketing activities, but do they help? Perhaps the problem isn’t your content or monthly traffic, but rather what happens – or doesn’t happen – on the website.
Another cruel fact coming up: if you leave it completely up to the prospects to handle their own conversion, they most likely won’t bother. Chatbots and their conversational elements are a critical part of a successful conversion strategy. Often an effective way to get more leads is to give people enough opportunities to convert.
Simple as that.
