The 10 Most Important Benefits Of Chatbots For Companies And Users

In the past, chatbots were a nice gimmick without any concrete benefit, but today they are an indispensable tool in the corporate world. Of course, developing and running a chatbot is a lot of work and requires a financial investment.

But there are many good reasons to choose a bot. In this article, you get a better understanding of the most important benefits of chatbots for companies and customers alike. Get the full picture and decide for yourself whether a bot is a worthwhile investment for your company!

Before we introduce you to the most important benefits of chatbots, you can read here what a chatbot is, how it works and more.

The 7 most important benefits of chatbots for your company

1. They give your company a face.

Chatbots can help you present your company to your customers by giving your company a face. For many users, the chatbot is the first touchpoint with your business, which can be much more personal than a conversation by mail or phone.

The personality of a chatbot has a huge influence on the user experience and is a decisive factor in how the user perceives the interaction. In order to develop a chatbot personality that fits your company, numerous factors, such as your brand identity, the tasks the bot is supposed to perform or the preferences of your target group, play a decisive role.

By the way: chatbots leave a lot of room for creativity to interpret the factors mentioned above. A good example is the chatbot Vroni from our client Dachstein Salzkammergut.

The choice of the name and the profile picture as well as the spelling and choice of words define the personality of the chatbot and thus represent the brand identity of the company in a creative way.

2. You are available – immediately.

In contrast to your traditional customer service, your chatbot is available around the clock. It supports your customers even on weekends and late at night. It is also not impressed by a high number of requests. A bot can easily process them all at the same time without ever being overworked.

And if there should be a question that your chatbot cannot answer, there is still the possibility that the users can be forwarded to a human employee. Outside of service hours, a message can be left for customer service to answer by email the next business day.

Within working hours, the user can be forwarded directly to the live chat. In this case, the chatbot can answer all standard customer service questions and thus relieve the customer service team of a lot of work. The complicated questions can be answered by a human employee.

At Onlim we call this the “Human Switch”, which means that every chatbot offers the option of handing over the conversation to a human employee via live chat. Here you can learn more about other functions of our chatbots.

3. They can increase your sales.

If you manage to get the right information and offers to your potential customers at the right time, you can significantly increase your chances of closing a sale.

A chatbot will help you do this. For example, a chatbot can proactively offer its help on your website and accompany the user on his way through the website or online shop. It can also advise and assist the user, for example, by helping him or her select a product or pointing out suitable offers.

A survey by Intercom came to the conclusion that companies were able to increase their sales by 67 percent with the help of a chatbot. According to the respondents, the following reasons are mainly responsible for it: 

1. The company is able to react faster to customer inquiries. On average, they can answer them three times faster.
2. In addition, chatbots have helped them to increase satisfaction with their customer service by 24 percent.

4. They lay the foundation for your conversational marketing strategy.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could communicate with your customers on equal terms instead of persuading them to fill out a contact form? This is exactly where chatbots come into play and start a dialogue with potential customers. They respond to customer questions and problems individually instead of following a fixed lead funnel filled with marketing materials.

Voice Bots are also an interesting channel for your conversational marketing strategy, which can be developed well on the basis of a bot. It takes the idea of dialog-based marketing one step further. Simply by taking the communication from the corporate website to the voice assistant. In this way, communication becomes even more similar to that of an everyday conversation.

The fact that this communication channel has become very popular is shown by numerous studies on voice assistants and smart speakers. Deloitte comes to the conclusion that the distribution of smart speakers will increase by 30 percent each year from 33.3 million in 2017 to 2022.

Already today, around two billion voice requests are made each week. An enormous potential that companies should take advantage of.

5. You can gain insights into customer behavior.

Another huge advantage of chatbots for businesses is the insight they can provide into customer behavior. You can derive valuable insights for your future business strategy from the questions, problems and popular products mentioned in the chatbot conversations.

For example, you can optimize your content strategy based on the questions and problems of your customers. You can analyze what exactly moves your customers and what problems they face. This enables you to create content that provides the right answers.

These insights are also useful for your product portfolio. For example, you can identify popular products in order to place them more prominently in your store. It is also possible that your users will ask for products that you do not have in your product portfolio yet. In this case, you can add the products to your assortment.

6. They have a wide range of possible applications.

Chatbots offer a wide range of applications and are not limited to one industry or use case. 

For example, common use cases are: 

• Customer Service: Answering FAQs, support in case of problems
• Marketing: Lead generation, product consulting, data collection, increase interaction
• Sales: Qualification of leads, support throughout the sales funnel
• IT Service Helpdesk: Support for internal or external service desk applications
• HR: Support in personnel development or onboarding

Let’s take a closer look at two of these examples to illustrate the potential of bots for the different use cases.

How chatbots can support the HR department

A chatbot can support your HR team in a variety of tasks. On the one hand, a bot can answer questions from applicants. These could be questions about an open position, ambiguities in the application process or questions about the agreed interview meeting. 

On the other hand, a chatbot can be used for employee training. Bots offer a good opportunity to make training content more interactive than conventional training programs. In addition, every employee can learn at his or her own pace. The same applies to the topic of onboarding. New employees can also be trained or accompanied by a chatbot.

Chatbot as a supplement to the intranet

A chatbot is not only a great help for the HR department. It can also support internal communication. For example, your chatbot can help you search through internal information, send push messages such as internal news or support simple office tasks. 

What appears to be the tasks of an intranet at first glance is rather a supplement to the intranet. Because both communication channels have one crucial difference: the communication strategy used. 

In the intranet, employees must actively search for information. In addition to the option of actively searching for content, a chatbot offers the option of sending content directly to employees.

7. They can be used in a variety of industries.

In addition to the wide range of possible applications, chatbots are used in a wide variety of industries. 

Here are some examples of chatbots from selected customers (the chatbots are in German): 

• Energy industry: Wienenergie uses its chatbot BotTina to answer customer questions about registration, deregistration and change of registration as well as questions about invoices or tariffs. BS Engery uses a bot for meter reading. Learn more about Onlim’s chatbot solution for energy providers.
• Tourism: In tourism chatbots are also popular. The region Serfaus-Fiss-Ladis offers its visitors further information on how to get there or the current weather conditions. Learn more about Onlim’s chatbot solution for tourism.

• Finance: At Hypo Tirol Bank, customers can ask the chatbot questions about online banking. Users can get information about topics such as card loss, account openings and about the different branches. Learn more about Onlim’s chatbot solution for financial institutions.

• Education: On the website of the University of Vienna students can clarify their questions about their student ID (u:card). Learn more about Onlim’s chatbot solution for educational institutions.

• E-Commerce: Another important industry for chatbots is e-commerce. For example, users of the Netto online shop can ask questions about the products via a chatbot. Learn more about Onlim’s chatbot solution for ecommerce.

• Undertaker: A chatbot can also be used for serious topics. For example, Bestattungen Wien offers further information around funerals with the help of a chatbot. Learn more about Onlim’s chatbot solution for all industries.

The 3 most important benefits of chatbots for your customers

Not only companies profit from the use of a chatbot. The benefits of chatbots for your customers are also worthwhile.

1. Chatbots provide immediate feedback.

You probably have experienced it yourself. You write an email to the customer service or wait an eternity in the queue of the telephone hotline. With a chatbot, unnecessary waiting times are avoided.

Users receive immediate feedback to their questions. Especially with simple questions about the company’s offers or the status of an order, it is often no longer necessary to talk to a human employee. The customer has thus solved his or her problem in a few minutes without having to wait for feedback. This not only relieves your customer service but also ensures greater customer satisfaction.

2. They make it possible to communicate via relevant channels.

We are all creatures of habit and prefer to use the communication channels we already know well. With a chatbot, companies can be present both on the website and on social networks. In this way, they can offer users the widest possible choice of contact options.

And users expect the same. A survey conducted by the Critical Channels of Choice Report concludes that 85 percent of the respondents expect companies to seamlessly connect different on- and offline channels. 

Until voice assistants are also among the preferred consumer channels, it is probably only a matter of time. One in three Germans already uses a voice assistant. Currently, the main use is for requests about current weather forecasts or music playback, but the fields of application are likely to expand further as usage increases.

Onlim’s Conversational AI solutions come with multichannel capability. This means they can be connected to websites, messenger services, your own apps, voice assistants or telephone bots, for example. Here you can learn more about our multichannel platform.

3. They help to search for information.

The information or product portfolio on a website can quickly become overwhelming. Often a user will have to search for a long time and click through a complex menu before finding the information they need. 

Compared to humans, chatbots are much better at dealing with a huge amount of information. Within seconds, they can search through a database for information they need and make it available to the user. This saves the user a lot of time and nerves when searching for information and provides a stress-free shopping experience.

Do you want to benefit from the benefits of chatbots?

If you would like to exploit the numerous benefits of chatbots yourself, we would be happy to help you plan and implement your bot. Contact us for a free consultation or download our chatbot whitepaper to learn more about the technology behind our Conversational AI solutions.