A bad experience sends customers to your competitors. Here are 10 ways online businesses can provide a better customer experience with chatbots, plus real examples and design tips.
Key takeaways:
- The stakes are high: 67% of customers have switched brands after a bad experience, and 37% share it on social media.
- Chatbots help: They answer instantly, route tasks, read sentiment and support customers 24/7 in many languages.
- Lower costs, more scale: Bots handle routine queries, so support scales without ballooning costs.
- Honesty wins: Brands like HelloFresh tell customers upfront that they are chatting with a bot.
- Design matters: Match the bot’s personality to your brand, onboard users well and build engagement loops.
A bad customer experience can quickly shrink a brand. It raises churn, limits revenue growth and fuels negative word of mouth. It also lowers your net promoter score and, in the end, sends business to your competitors. No brand should take that risk.
67% of customers say a bad experience with one brand led them to buy from another. After a bad experience, 37% say they will happily share negative feedback on social media. As we all know, that can snowball fast and leave brands in long-term “damage control” mode.
In truth, a poor customer experience has even wider consequences. Losing customers is what will force you to rethink your support strategy.
10 ways to provide a better customer experience with chatbots
1. Send relevant, helpful automated messages
Instead of making an employee reply to every enquiry, use AI-powered messages. This frees staff for the most critical tasks, while customers still get real-time, personal service.
2. Use chatbots to improve customer service
Chatbots give customers instant, personal help at any hour. As a result, your team can focus on complex issues that truly need a person.
3. Automate customer interactions
AI chatbots, automated emails and similar tools give customers immediate replies to their questions.
4. Respond quickly to customer queries
With automation, customers get fast answers to common FAQ-type questions. So they spend far less time waiting.
5. Automate tasks and processes
Chatbots do more than answer common questions instantly. They can also hand tasks to the right department. For example, if a customer has a technical issue, the chatbot can route them to the technical team or arrange a call back.
6. Monitor customer sentiment
Using a labelled dataset, chatbots can read users’ sentiment from unstructured text and tag it as positive, negative or neutral. They can then respond, or take action, based on the emotional tone of the message.
7. Use chatbots to improve retention
Let customers buy directly from the chat window, so they stay with your chatbot. Also keep improving your chatbots and giving customers more options. Your competitors are improving too, so you must keep moving.
8. Be upfront that customers are chatting with a bot
Customers are smart and can usually tell a chatbot from a person. So companies like HelloFresh have chatbots that say straight away that you are talking to a machine. This feels authentic. Customers chat comfortably with the bot, or ask for a human if their query is complex.
9. Remove language barriers
Advanced AI lets you install multilingual chatbots that detect the customer’s language and reply in it. This greatly improves the experience. You can choose one or many languages, depending on the region the chatbot serves.
10. Design the bot’s personality around your brand
Your bot’s design should reflect your brand voice and purpose. For instance, a bot on a children’s clothing website can be colourful and fun. A hospital’s bot, however, should be more formal. We cover design in more detail below.
Benefits of chatbots for businesses
AI chatbots give businesses many benefits. Chief among them, they cut the time to resolve each query, saving time, money and effort. They also make 24/7 support possible, which improves the customer experience. And you can install multilingual chatbots that integrate fully with your existing systems.
- Better engagement: Advances in AI let designers build machine learning chatbots that improve over time. These bots make users feel they are chatting with a person.
- Lower support costs: Using human agents for every small query is very expensive. Unless there is a major complaint, AI chatbots can usually resolve queries. So they reduce the cost of running your support team. For a full roadmap, read how to automate your customer service.
- More personal experiences: Human-like chatbots are very good at personal service. They understand the customer’s query, and even their mood, from keywords in their message. Then they reply to match and keep customers happy with prompt service.
- No language barriers: Multilingual bots identify the customer’s language and answer in it, which greatly improves the experience.
- Scalable support: Chatbots meet customer demand at scale, which makes them extremely useful. They help businesses in almost every industry scale their service and lift customer satisfaction.
Examples of businesses using chatbots successfully
Many companies across industries have used chatbots to boost their marketing, customer service and sales.
As noted, transparency matters. Companies like HelloFresh make clear their chatbot is a machine, which builds trust. Many other companies offer similarly authentic experiences, and that makes customers loyal. Loyal customers keep choosing you whenever they need your products or services. They also become brand ambassadors who spread the word about you.
Here are more companies that have used chatbots to grow leads and sales.
Domino’s Pizza
Domino’s has a chatbot on Messenger and on its website. The bot is called DOM, which fits the brand voice perfectly. Customers can place orders and customise their pizza in the same chat. The bot can also save and repeat orders and find your nearest store.
Ordering food online is nothing new, of course. But with Domino’s, you do not need to download or install an app. You can do everything on your phone.
Mountain Dew
Mountain Dew, which calls itself the official drink of gamers, is another classic example. It uses a chatbot to connect directly with customers, using advocacy and engagement to take its bot and brand to new heights.
The energy drink partnered with Twitch, the world’s leading live streaming platform, and a PC gaming rig maker. Their first joint chatbot, DEWbot, played a major role in wider promotions. In fact, it became so popular that Mountain Dew won the Shorty Award for best use of chatbots.
Many other companies have used chatbots successfully in sales and support. In general, it is always better for a chatbot to present itself as a bot rather than pretend to be human. This direct, honest approach wins customers’ trust and satisfaction.
How to create a successful chatbot
Being a chatbot is not easy, because customers judge bots harshly. They have been called boring, poor listeners, awkward conversationalists and, worst of all, ineffective. To be fair, there are many bad chatbots out there.
But that is not the bots’ fault, because humans build them. So let’s stop blaming bots and start designing ones that are helpful, engaging and fun. The good news is that it is much simpler than you might think. You do not need a specialist IT department, but you do need to put thought into the design. For a step-by-step approach, read how to build a great chatbot in a few simple steps.
Proper design
Your bot’s design depends on your brand voice and its purpose. A children’s clothing bot can be bright and playful, while a hospital bot should be formal. In short, its personality should fit its purpose.
User onboarding
An onboarding chatbot helps new users learn about your products. It answers questions about features and functions, and helps whenever users get stuck. These chatbots are usually AI-powered, so they improve over time.
Engagement loops
Engagement loops are design strategies that make the chatbot more interactive, so customers engage more in the conversation. This boosts retention and improves the experience. It also means less human involvement, which saves money.
Conclusion: why now is the perfect time to build a chatbot
As we have seen, well-designed chatbots bring many benefits. If you are waiting for the right moment to add chatbots to your marketing or customer care, don’t. Now is the perfect time to adopt this cutting-edge technology. Today, you can deploy chatbots without writing a single line of code.
With ready-to-use chatbots from companies like BotSpice, you can build and install a chatbot through a clear process, guided by the provider’s self-service instructions. So do not wait. Use this excellent technology to power up your online business strategy.
Simply research online for a chatbot that suits your purpose and integrate it with your existing systems. You will soon see more traffic on your website or online store and better feedback from happier customers. To start quickly, explore these easy-to-use chatbot templates for websites.