MBA1266 Should You Be Using a Chat Bot on Your Site?

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Right?

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Right.

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Discover is accepted at 99% of places that take credit cards nationwide, based on the February 2025 Nielsen report.

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Hey O welcome to the Hundred Dollar MBA show where business skills get built every day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar mba, a complete business training and community online. And in today's episode we will discuss should you use a chatbot on your website? Chatbots have become all the rage recently. So many people are creating apps and pieces of software you can install on your site that automate the interaction between you and your customers. But is it useful? Does it work? Are people ready to speak to bots and not an actual human being in a chat message? I'll be totally honest, when chatbots started to come on the scene about a couple years ago, I was a little skeptical. Maybe it's just my nature, but there is use for some chatbots in some situations to help your customers and it's not an all or nothing thing. You can use some bots in combination with real people. It's a good way to get some information about your customers so you can serve them properly and save your customer service team some time asking them some standard questions. It's also a great way to give them the content they're looking for so they can really get the information they need so they can convert into a customer. We'll talk more about that and more in today's episode. I'll give you some recommendations of what you can look into if you want to get started with chatbots and how to use them. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. There are an endless number of chatbot software that you can install right on your site, but they're not all created equal, they don't all serve the same purpose. And if not used properly, they can be incredibly annoying for your visitors. Now the whole idea about having a chatbot, having a bot on your site is to have some sort of AI, some artificial intelligence that will ask questions for your customer to serve them with the right information. Now in my opinion, some of the best chatbots out there are the ones that are not totally automated, where you can actually have somebody jump in and continue the conversation. This is a good hybrid between real chat and automated chat. A good example of this is Intercom. Intercom is probably the beast when it comes to website communication with your customers. We use Intercom we've had for years and they have chatbots that are part of their normal chat. So instead of a customer just saying, hey, I have a question, and then automatically somebody, a real person on the other side would answer, hey, how can I help you? There are a series of questions that you can actually ask them before they get to an agent, before they get to somebody on customer service. Question questions like what industry are you in? Or what type of customer? Giving them some options. Are you a developer? Are you a shop owner? Even questions like what's your budget? The customer on the site will answer two or three questions and it'll allow the customer service agent to jump in and give them the right information, understand who they're talking to before they talk to them. Now the other thing that these bots can do is they can serve up information that's relevant, like a tutorial, like a help tutorial or a blog post or something they can download that can help them learn more about their needs and how they're addressed with your product. One of the up and coming sort of automated chats or automated messaging or communication with your customer apps is Right Message. Right Message is a new product that I learned recently that's really been growing quite quickly. A friend of the show, Brennan Dunn, who's given a guest teacher episode here on the show, is one of the founders of Right Message. And, and it's a really cool app to give people the right content to show them the right opt ins. It's a way to customize your website to provide the right information and it's not seen as a chat, but more like a self serve service. This is like sort of automation for your website. So instead of having some sort of email automation, you would have some automation on your website where you give some choices of why you're visiting my website. You here are three choices based on those choices, you would serve them up with some information or a guide that can help them and then the next steps from there. And then the system would remember and not give them any information that's not relevant to them. I mean, this is very powerful stuff, in my opinion. I think all this stuff is great if you can make sure it's in the interest of the customer and the customer understands that this is not an actual person, that you're not deceiving them. And most of the credible apps that I'm mentioning today, Intercom, Right Message, do that pretty well. They say, you know, this is automated. I think the worst thing you can do is totally rely on bots and not have a way for them to reach out and speak to somebody on chat or via email. They may need some hand holding, they may have some specific questions or have a discussion they want to have. I do want to say that I would invest in one of the chatbots that do have a lot of experience that are really, really well built. The two that I mentioned today, Intercom and Right Message, are well built because if you buy one that's off the shelf, that's not really well built, that's some sort of offer on some sort of, you know, deal site, and you don't really do your homework with it, it could really serve your customers in a negative way. Giving them the wrong information, maybe even steering them in the wrong direction, making them feel like you don't really care about them and you just put up some sort of automated messaging service to kind of keep them quiet. In that case, it would be better to just have straight up human chat and have specific hours where it's like, hey, this is when you can send me a mess and I'll be around. And of course, Intercom is great for that as well. One of the other leaders in this area is Drift, and they're all in on this automated messaging service for your website and communicating with your customers in this way. They have this technology called LeadBots where when somebody comes on your website, you again are trying to qualify this lead, give them the right information and send them to the right person. I mean, right now, as I'm recording, I'm on their site and I see their bot just come up and ask me a question like, are you connecting with people on your website that are ready to buy? That's a question that I can easily answer yes or no. And again, Drift makes it super apparent that this is a bot. It says bot and the image of the avatar is a robot. And it will recognize the message I type and serve me up the right information. Now, I want to take a moment to say you have to know your audience. Your audience may be really receptive to this. They are really into technology, they love this stuff. But if your audience is not, and I'm talking about generalities here, most of your audience, you're going to have, you know, obviously people that will or will not like it. We're talking about generally the market you serve, the people you serve, are they into this? Are they going to feel comfortable talking to a bot? And of course, you could survey your audience. You can try it out for a bit, understand your audience and make sure you're helping them and not just putting another obstacle for them to learn more about you or get what they need.

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To wrap up today's episode, Chatbots are like anything new you bring into your business. It can help you. It could be a waste of time, it could be a deterrent. How you implement really matters. Choosing the right products, the ones I mentioned today are solid. Do a good job of being transparent and allows your customers still reach out and speak to a real human being. And it also bridges the gap. You don't have to go totally automated. You can get the right information, serve your customers and help your customer service team if you implement it right. And that's what it's all about. I don't like throwing the baby out with a bathwater saying, oh, chatbots, just a new fad. No There's a lot of value in there that you can use. Take what works for you and leave what doesn't. Thanks so much for listening to the $100 NBA show. If you love what you hear, hit subscribe right now so you get all your episodes automatically. As soon as we publish an episode, it will be downloaded to your device so it's ready for you to listen when you are ready. We're on every platform you can think of. Spotify, Stitcher Radio, Apple Podcasts, Himalaya Overcast. Just hit subscribe right now. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. The reason why I wanted to do this episode is because when I got into chatbots or sort of learn about it, I was like, there's so much out there, there's so many products. And I want to kind of just boil down to what's important here, what to what to look for and what to use it for. And also, you know, these are the players I really trust because I've used them, I've looked into them, I know the people behind them. And I don't want you to waste your time with things that may or may not help your business or may not put your business in the best light. So I hope that helps. Take a look at Intercom drift or write Message and see what works best for your website and of course, your audience. Thank you so much for listening. I'll check you in tomorrow's episode Free Ride Friday. I'll see you then. Take care. Of.

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