Andrew McCauley explains four reasons businesses use chatbots: handle customer service 24/7, automate repetitive tasks like onboarding, collect customer data for marketing, and guide people through sales stages. One client cut phone staffing costs by automating common questions.
Okay, you've seen chatbots, you've thought about them, but what is the purpose of a chatbot? Well, hey, I'm Andrew McCauley and I'm here to tell you that there are four main purposes that I know of that I really like about why you need to have a chatbot. Firstly, customer service and support. Chatbots are one of the greatest tools in our business, in the modern day business, to help your business enable customer support and customer service. Chatbots take the pressure of having all these people and staff members answering the phones on a continual basis. I'll give you an example. We had a client of ours who had three people that they were paying on a full time basis to answer the phones and answer questions. And usually the questions were the same every single time. Different people asking the same question. Where are you located? What are your hours? And so on and so on. What they did was they employed a chatbot to help with that service problem. And what it did was it eliminated at least one person from the full time position. Now, is that a good thing when we're eliminating jobs? Yes and no. At least what we do know is that the consistency of the answers was 100% the same every time because the chatbot was giving the same answer all the time. Here's the other cool thing about that, is that that chatbot was on 24 7. It didn't stop it. It was always working and delivering customer service, answers and solutions to people asking questions. Especially in this day and age when we all live around the clock, 24 hours a day, people are asking us weird things in the middle of the night. Our chatbot was still able to do that. So there's number one, number two was to eliminate repetitive tasks. Now, just like the problem in number one, there are lots of businesses out there who do a lot of the same sort of stuff. Whether it's onboarding a customer, whether it's delivering an ebook or a product that they purchased, whether it's showing them a video that they need to do, a chatbot can actually do that for you as well. Think about this. If you've got the time to eliminate a repetitive task where you don't have to do it anymore, and let's face it, if you're a small business, you're probably doing a lot of these tasks yourself. And some of them, I dare say, are probably falling along the wayside and you're not doing them properly, a chatbot picks up that piece where you left it off and make sure that it's getting done every Single time. So what you're doing is you're eliminating the need for you or that person in your business to do that sort of stuff manually. A chatbot can do it as well and probably do it even better for you as well. Number three, one of my favorite favorites of all time, which not many people talk about, is it builds a database. A chatbot helps you build a database. The tools that we've got to use today in chatbot world lets us collect data and information. In fact, we can find out all sorts of information about our customers who are using the chatbot Facebook. If we're using a chatbot, through Facebook, they give us certain amounts of information. But when we ask the customer for information, such as maybe their phone number or how much they spend at a restaurant, or their favorite color or all sorts of things, we can extract that data and collect it and use it and serve it back to them later in a conversation style so that we're having that conversation with people. But the cool thing is we're building that database. We're collecting their name and their email address, maybe their phone number, and we can use that through other forms of marketing as well. Because chatbots are not just designed to be the only part of marketing. They're designed to integrate with your email marketing platforms, your telephone, and your text messaging platforms. There's all sorts of wonderful ways that you can reach out to your customer. Chatbots are a great way to introduce people, get them and their data from the chatbot, and then use other forms of messaging to connect with them as well. So that's number three. And number four is the customer journey. We all know that our customers go on a certain journey. When they come to us, maybe they're at the awareness stage where they're not sure who you are or what you do. A chatbot can help explain what you do. It can show videos and images and graphs and all that sort of thing. It lets them know exactly what's going on with your business. And as that customer gets more familiar with your business, you might take them through the consideration stage, or then you might take them to the decision stage. So your chatbot knows exactly where each person is individually. The thing I like about chatbots is it's the conversation that you can have you having it with one to many, but it feels like it's a one to one conversation. So your customers are going through it feeling like you're just talking to them, which you are on a chatbot, but you're not having to spend all that time doing it. Because it's all automated. So that's the other, the fourth purpose of why we want to have a chatbot. So there you go. Let's let me recap. Customer support is number one. Eliminate repetitive tasks is number two. Build a database number three, and take people on a customer journey that's designed for them. I'm Andrew McCauley. I'm looking forward to seeing you on another video about chatbots very, very soon.
