Customers are more intentional today and will only purchase from companies that prioritize them throughout the sales process. So, for companies to get customers to buy their services or products, they have to sway them with excellent customer service and personalized communication.
But how do you achieve this without using multiple channels? The best conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI) driven technology every sales professional needs: sales chatbots.
Sales chatbots master potential customers' behaviors through machine and language learning capabilities. They generate relevant and personalized product responses or suggestions in human language—these build better customer experiences, which lead to more sales. A recent study showed that around 58 percent of customers are willing to pay more for excellent customer service.
Chatbot solutions can also be integrated with WhatsApp or any other social messaging service. With a Chatbot using WhatsApp, you can use powerful messaging and media sharing capabilities to create the ideal support chat to reach out to your customers in any market easily.
By the way, if you are curious about AI's impact on sales, this article takes a deep dive into the ways that AI is changing the sales landscape.
Here are the specific ways chatbots can help you drive sales:
1. Ensure a Good First Impression
First impressions matter. Make a good one, and you might just gain loyal customers. Make a bad one, and you might just drive your prospective customers away. Companies that have sales chatbots make an excellent impression. That tells a customer a critical thing: that the company cares for its customers.
Make sure you automate your sales chatbot with a warm welcome message. That might just be the first message a potential customer gets from your brand. You need to make sure it ticks off all the right boxes.
You need to consider a few factors to ensure a good welcome message. First, your message shouldn't have to sound automated. For example, you could start with a greeting and then follow this up with a chatbot introduction, like in the example below:
You could even follow it up with an emoji. But this depends on your branding. You have to ensure that your welcome message matches your audience and the way you want to be perceived. For instance, if you’re a company that caters to a B2B audience and wants to be perceived as a serious and trustworthy company, your chatbot’s welcome message shouldn’t be too playful.
You have to communicate in plain language, whichever tone you choose so any user can understand. If users cannot understand you, converting your web visitors into leads will be difficult. You could use plain language software to help you achieve this.
You could also program your sales chatbot to address users by name in your welcome message. Personalized conversations show your effort and interest in the user. Some chatbot platforms, like Facebook Messenger, automatically import publicly available users' basic data to personalize messages. They include name, email address, and purchase history.
Next, you can include your brand's resources and products in your welcome message. This will help users know if you can assist them from the start. It will also ensure you nurture only quality leads looking for the exact products you offer, making it easy to achieve your sales goals and business growth.
As a last tip, make sure you don’t forget to match the look of your chatbot with your website’s appearance. So, if your website has a more industrial web design, you can’t have a chatbot with flowers as its background, for example. If your site has a fun web design, don’t have a chatbot that looks boring. It’s all part of the branding and making good first impressions.
2. Maintain 24/7 Customer Engagement
One of the best features of a sales chatbot agency is its 24/7 service. That allows them to provide a seamless customer engagement experience. People love convenience, so if they can log on to your chatbot service at the most convenient time, even if it’s beyond business hours, and still get help, they are more likely to make a purchase.
Finally, sales chatbots can process several customer questions in the same time frame. As a result, they inform and nurture great customer relationships with multiple paying customers, which means more sales for you.
3. Answer Customers’ Questions Quickly
Of course, we cannot discuss how AI-powered chatbots help customize your sales funnel conversion rates without discussing their fast customer service. By resolving sales queries quickly, you save your users’ time. That betters your customer journey and speeds up purchasing decisions, boosting your brand’s sales.
For instance, in the example below, the company looking to set up a FAQs page gets this information instantly.
These chatbots can also give you valuable data you can use to increase sales. For instance, a sales chatbot can place a user’s interest in a specific product based on their queries. So, the chatbot provides data about the product or makes alternative recommendations through cross-selling or upselling.
This chatbot conversation on Telecom's site is an excellent example of how you can use a chatbot to upsell.
Ensure you consult your sales and customer service teams for accurate details when building your FAQs for your chatbot since they interact the most with customers. Note that the effectiveness is heavily reliant on your chatbot software platform.
4. Give Reminders to Complete Purchases
Users might have forgotten or lost interest in your product, leading to high cart abandonment rates. You can use chatbots to send automated cart abandonment alerts or email notifications to regain users' interest and drive more sales.
First, they can ask if the user has questions about the product. That reminds the customer to finish checking out their orders. Sales chatbots have the user data advantage for cases where users lose interest. So they can identify specific user interests that they can target to drive more sales for you.
In case the customer does not respond, you can retarget them when they access the website next. You can send personalized discounts, limited offers, and coupon codes, as shown in the example below.
As long as your chatbot doesn't keep spamming the user every time, sales chatbots are the way to go to motivate users to complete their purchases.
5. Optimize Your Conversion Rate
You can also optimize your conversion rate through the precision, speed, and effectiveness of sales chatbots. One way sales chatbots do this is by ensuring ease of use. With chatbots, communication with your qualified leads is made easy.
It runs like an instant messaging app with faster response times, making it easy for qualifying leads to learn and connect with your brand, raising your conversion rates. Other features, like button responses, also ease the communication process. As a result, you can easily nurture them from the lead generation stage to closing the sale through conversation.
If your conversion rates are low, you need feedback on where you are going wrong, which you can collect through sales chat window pop-ups. Then, by resolving the reason, you can improve your conversion rates.
For example, you can program sales chatbots to pop up quick surveys when web visitors leave your site with our purchasing. The chatbot can provide multiple button options, as shown in the example below.
Even without asking for feedback, sales chatbots allow you to get details from leads that enable you to offer a personalized customer experience, which equals higher conversion rates. For instance, you can use chatbots to direct them to sales pages that will interest them based on their conversations with the bots.
Finally, you can use sales chatbots to automate processes throughout your conversion funnel to boost conversion rates. For example, you can run drip campaigns or even book meetings.
6. Increase Sales Agents’ Productivity
Sales chatbots take care of repetitive tasks like replying to FAQs, customer support, and generating leads, saving sales agents time. This allows agents to focus on other areas, in this case, sales. As a result, employee productivity increases in that arena.
From the data, custom chatbots collect during the customer chat, sales teams can also identify quality leads to pursue and convert into customers. That helps simplify the sales agents' work. By streamlining your sales agents’ workload, you reduce their stress. If you consider that a high workload is the primary cause of workplace stress, then that’s a lot of stress you’re reducing for them.
So what if they’re less stressed? When employees are less stressed, they are happier and more motivated to work. That can mean an increase in conversion rates, leading to workplace satisfaction.
Simply put, sales chatbots help keep sales agents productive and happy at work, which can translate to more sales for the company.
Ready to supercharge your sales efforts? Discover the power of sales productivity tools in our informative guide.
Transform Your Sales Process with AI-Driven Chatbots and Boost Customer Satisfaction
The sales and marketing world has moved towards a more customer-centric approach. The best way to ensure your customers feel and appreciate this is through excellent customer service and effective communication. Thanks to AI technology, all this is easily achievable through sales chatbots.
As discussed above, sales chatbots help you automate warm welcome messages, maintain 24/7 customer relationships, and optimize your conversion rate. In addition, they can answer customers’ questions quickly, send reminders to complete purchases to customers, and increase your sales agent’s productivity. All of these help you grow your company’s sales.
In other words, it’s time to integrate AI-driven chatbots into your lead generation, conversion, and sales processes.
Want to stay ahead of the curve? Read our insightful article on "The Future of AI in Sales: What Changed and What’s Next."
