When was the last time you spoke to a live chat which was actually live, responded instantly, and did not ask for your email id to get back to you ‘shortly’?
You know what I’m talking about but who’s to blame? The humans on the other side?
Not so fast.
Let’s face it, managing a live chat is way easier said than done. Setting up and monitoring engagement on your website, resolving audience queries and much more is a powerful way of building relations with existing and potential customers. Except, what’s the point if the live chat is not live, is tedious and is taking up most of your time?
Not to mention, the overhead costs that go into buying a live chat service and employing real humans to chat.
The good intentions of live human assistance were definitely there; from increasing customer engagement and satisfaction to driving sales but time and again the means have just failed to match up to the intent.
With chatbots, on the other hand, time, money, and energy that go into installing and maintaining a live chat interface on your website becomes irrelevant.
And while big and medium enterprises might find investing in a live one-on-one support tool feasible it just does not add up for moderately small businesses, e-commerce stores, professional influencers, bloggers etc.
Thanks to artificial intelligence, however, bots are getting better at the art of engagement, and the way we see them will soon replace live chat and virtual assistant services. A number of elements make chatbots a better alternative to popular live chat services:
Undoubtedly the biggest feather in a bots cap lies in its auto-magic powers. Bots with a little bit of training can chat on for hours without your help. The hours you would have otherwise spent sitting behind a PC and answering site visitors can now be put to other uses.
Answering frequently repetitive questions over and over again can get monotonous and taxing, something bots can handle with ease and flair.
Another key feature that makes personal conversational bots the best live chat tool for all-purpose websites is its 365x24x7 presence. Simply put, anyone anywhere anytime can have a conversation with your trained bot and get instant responses.
While one can always choose to pour time, money, and manpower into providing instant replies to website visitors, it’s just not ‘humanly’ possible to anticipate chats and be available at every visitors’ beck and call.
In contrast, chatbots are quick with their responses – they either know something or don’t and are quick to convey that. They make waiting on a live agent to reply or submit email ids a thing of the past.
When it boils down to actual chat skills, bots dominate even the best of virtual agents. With responses being pre-trained, they can engage countless visitors in conversation simultaneously.
So say, you have a number of chats coming in on your landing pages, instead of giving half-baked answers to keep your readers content, a bot optimizes engagement with each and every user.
Popular live chat services can cost anything from $12 to $106 /month/agent, but why should you have to pay to talk to the visitors on YOUR site?
Chatbots are a pocket-friendly alternative and are way cheaper than their human counterparts and if you can get your hands on a free and smart platform just like Bottr, you should be good to go.
Plus, don’t forget the wages going out your bank balance to hold up a customer support team. Your free chatbot won’t ask for money, ever.
If you’ve ever worked with live chat software you know that it comes with two-fold interfaces. One for the end-visitor: a chat box and the other, a dashboard cluttered with useful data, all live and past visitor activity and a variety of settings. Now your business can invest time and money in on-boarding sessions to get your support team used to the software and continue to set live chat working knowledge as a hiring criteria, but why over-complicate simple, efficient processes?
A chatbot on the other hand presents one clean, powerful, and unified interface where your visitor talks to your bot and the bot responds. Yet, you still have complete control of your bot in the same interface where you can train and make your bot smarter by the day.
Chat bots are already emerging as the next step in world innovation, everyone’s raging on about the gaps they’re filling for businesses and individuals alike. Most importantly, they’re driving user engagement, sales, customer support, and retention. Not to replace us humans but to help us and make our lives much much simpler.
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