You’ve built the perfect website for your business. You’ve set up contact forms to make sure visitors who are interested in your product can submit their contact details, enabling your sales team to follow up. However, you’re not getting the number of leads you expected, and the leads you are getting don’t always have the information your sales reps need to progress.

It takes valuable sales time to sort through leads, weeding out the irrelevant ones and then scoring them before passing them to your sales team. What was supposed to save you time, improve your sales process and increase your conversion rate is just another time-waster.

What you need is an automated tool that starts conversations with prospects while they’re visiting your website, gives them the information they need and asks relevant questions that help qualify them for your sales team.

What you need, is a chatbot.

What is a chatbot?

A chatbot or sales bot is a program that uses text, and occasionally voice, to conduct conversations in a friendly, human-like manner.

The use of chatbots has its origins in customer support, where busy teams found that some frequent or common issues could easily be dealt with without the need for human intervention. They also worked as a frontline support qualification tool, making it easy to sort new support tickets with a few questions before a human agent would step in.

It wasn’t long before salespeople saw the potential in using chatbots to increase customer engagement, automate lead scoring, and save salespeople valuable time.

Are chatbots good?

As you consider automating your customer service experience, here’s a list of the pros and cons of chatbots that you should take into account.

Pros

  1. 1. Faster customer service
    It is no secret that chatbots provide faster replies as well as a quicker resolution to the customer.
    This reduces the waiting delay, and the customer hence receives quicker service, thus improving his overall experience.
  3. 2. Higher customer satisfaction
    With quick resolutions to queries, chatbots have recorded a higher satisfaction of service when interacting with customers.It is not a 100% success rate, but the numbers are certainly promising for companies to explore further with chatbots.
  4. 3. Reduced cost of human resources
    Handling individual customer queries on a large scale requires huge manpower, and that brings its costs along with.With chatbots, a single bot instance can handle multiple instances of human interactions and hence reduces the need for manpower substantially.
  5. 4. Plenty of applications in different industries
    Chatbots have lots of applications in many industries if we dig deep into it and understand the scope.
    Hence it is a good option for companies to have their own chatbot to handle the customers as well as use chatbots for many other varied applications.
  6. 5. Appealing to younger generations
    Younger generations prefer texting over talking on the phone. Companies using chatbots are able to leverage this better and connect with new-age customers more effectively.

Cons

  1. 1. Can resolve only a limited number of queries
    One of the major drawbacks of chatbots is the number of queries it can resolve. At a certain point in time, it will have to connect to an actual human to resolve the issues.
    They also have limited replies and solutions which can leave a customer unsatisfied.
  2. 2. Unable to provide all the solutions
    Some customers are unable to find the solution that they want and neither are able to connect to a human executive since they did not input the right command.This can result in a bad experience for the customer, and the company could lose customers as well as revenue due to an incompetent chatbot.
  3. 3. The more complex, the higher the cost
    Chatbots come in a variety of shapes and sizes, and their cost also varies accordingly.It is imperative to understand that a well-designed chatbot that can handle more tasks than others will also cost higher. So this pushes the investment of the company for the chatbot further.
  4. 4. Not suitable for all
    Chatbots are effective in many industries and for varied applications, but they cannot handle all of them.
    Now, there are certain services like hospitals, fire brigades, and the police that require immediate responses. In such cases, investment in chatbots might not yield any sustainable advantage.
  5. 5. Not entirely accurate
    Essentially, chatbots are machines. They will make mistakes and sometimes even provide wrong solutions to the customers. So companies have to be wary of it and work on improving their chatbots further to avoid such incidents.
Ultimately, there are things that chatbots can do that

Should I get a chatbot?

humans can’t do. But the opposite is also true. A chatbot can assist customers only to a certain extent, after which it is time for a human to take over. A chatbot needs to be worked upon to make it understand as to when to pull the plug on its replies and connect the customer to the human customer care representative. On the other hand, it can’t display a level of empathy and understanding that a human can, nor can it grow and adapt to different situations through experiences.

At the end of the day, it is still up to you, to decide if you want to implement a chatbot, stick to having the human feel, or even do a combination of both.