Previously when the revolution of digital application and eCommerce had not yet stepped in the business interactions with the customer were only possible in physical presence mostly. The other medium was a Landline Telephone that often got picked up by a grumpy man with single-word answers to be expected. But that scenario has become much extinct now and customers are staying engaged with their favorite brands through multiple digital mediums. 

Honestly, there are so many efficient ways of reaching and engaging with the business it’s often becoming troublesome for the business to provide quick replies and engagement. Every business is having a website nowadays even if it’s not in an eCommerce structure. The website is serving the business with various advantages even if digital purchases are not enabled in the portal. The website serves as the best platform to provide all kinds of information related to your business and also lets the audience reach out with their queries. 

A customer support team is required for any middle-scale or large-scale business to take care of the website queries on a 24/7 basis. When calling facilities are enabled a more extended customer support team is required with multiple employees to handle several customer calls at the same time. This is one of the reasons why other modes of email and chat support are given immense importance nowadays as a single customer support executive is able to provide help to several potential customers at a rapid pace with enhanced efficiency. A large group of customers also prefer reaching out through non-voice processes and engaging through textual formats. For large companies, the customer queries submitted are in such a large quantity that modern technical aids like Chatbots are required to maintain a balanced atmosphere.

What are Chatbots

Chatbots can be described as software applications that are dedicatedly made with the purpose of having intelligent textual conversations. The messaging platforms that could have been responded to by a live human agent need to be handled by these Chatbots that enhance a conversation just like a human being. Chatbots are acting as modern customer service providers that are responsive all the time. Not all chatbots are equally powerful in understanding queries and providing ideal solutions. Thus the limited chatbots are online able to serve answers to the general inquiries in a robot type format and don’t have text personalization capabilities.

Chatbots requirement in social media account 

Businesses are understanding the power of social media nowadays and creating business accounts on popular social media platforms for various reasons connected to business growth. Several potential customers are reaching out to these reputed brands every minute to clarify their doubts about a product or service. The Chatbots will be up and running even when your entire staff goes to sleep. This means for the late-night purchasers or potential customers the chatbot would be at least present to provide excellent service and help them out. You might have already seen them on websites in the form of a pop-up trying to serve as your assistant or answer your queries. The prime examples of virtual assistants in this world are Alexa, Siri, and Google assistant, and similar examples also exist.

The sophisticated and highly functional Chatbots are created using advanced technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Understanding, and Natural Language processing. This allows the chatbots to possess a lot more capability than just offering basic replies to the customer on the other side. The integration of AI in chatbots lets them learn more from every conversation and implement it in future conversations. The other great capability of the chatbot lies in acting as an influencer in driving your customer towards making purchases through the digital platform. All the data that is already present in the public account of the user including the user’s wishlist for products, previous orders, and also the browsing trend on the website or the digital profile of the business.

Social Media Chatbots and their Advantages

A lot of customer engagement and interaction takes place through the Social Media Platforms and using a chatbot in the communication interface can easily scuttle a huge number of general queries while only passing the complicated ones to the human customer service executive. Chatbot creation and integration is not a simple process and should be handled by IT professionals like at Softgrid. In the Social Media Development service offered by Softgrid, the chatbot creation also gets included and smoothly gets integrated into the popular social media platforms. The prime advantages of implementing a Chatbot are mentioned below:

Promote the Ideal Product-  A properly built Chatbot remains deeply connected to the database of the website or the brand’s user base and this lets the chatbots provide personalized product suggestions to the potential customer at the other end of the chat portal. By quickly analyzing the customer’s preference through AI it becomes possible to suggest only the products that the person would like to purchase. A new range of products which have just arrived can be promoted very effectively through Chatbots. The advanced chatbots can be pre-set to promote a particular service or product based on the present need of the business. 

Crucial Information in terms of pop-ups- The Chatbots on the business profile can act as Pop-ups to notify the visitors about some crucial information or sales updates. This way they can be included in the marketing and advertising strategies as well. Whenever a customer approaches the social media chat portal, the Chatbot can immediately provide any kind of information following the first ‘Hello’.

Audience studying for the specific Niche- Various procedures can be implemented in the social media chatbots to directly learn about the expectations of the audience and the complexities they might be facing in the portal. The intense engagement that happens on the chat portals is witnessed to be highly beneficial to the business in terms of obtaining opinions. By the one-tap opinion selections, a huge chunk of data can be collected across a wide demographic that is going to be helpful in business growth. Utilizing the necessary changes obtained from the data can be implemented into the digital purchase platforms so that potential customers can have a smooth experience. 

Lead Generation and assistance towards Sales- If you visit a store in a shopping mall you will often be assisted by an executive who will make your purchase experience more accurate to the requirements. The same role can be played by Chatbots in assisting potential customers with sales. Several Chatbots have the capability of acting as an assistant through the digital store or the social media account listed products. The Social Media Development team at softgrid would suggest pampering the new visitors of your website or application with ‘First Time’ user coupons. Every audience member who interacts with the chatbot can turn into a potential lead with enhanced assistance. The chatbots being a technology software do not get tired of the persistent conversation and constantly provide new suggestions as specified by the potential customer.

Chatbot  Implementation Process at Softgrid 

Planning the top aim for Chatbot Deployment-  Analyze the customer engagement and customer support functionality in your organization for identifying the main purpose the chatbot will be having. The most common reason for Chatbot deployment is for the support it provides to the Customer Support team. The other common reasons are generating leads and assisting the audience with purchases and letting them know about the offers they might be looking for. 

Choosing the correct platforms for your business- First of all, this needs to be acknowledged that your business doesn’t need to be active on every social media platform even with mid-level popularity.  The Digital Marketing team at Softgrid will help you identify the most suitable platforms by researching the industry and product categories of your business.  In these busy platforms, your social media account will be integrated with an innovative chatbot that will fulfill all the necessities related to customer engagement. Softgrid Social Media Development team can smoothly handle the entire process of building and deploying an innovative, technologically advanced Chatbot. 

Taking help of the conversation directory and ‘support team’- A lot of insightful analysis is required of the existing conversations with visiting audience. Professionals of data analytics ask for access to such conversations and analyze a huge sample of data by use of advanced analytical technologies. 

Creating the chatbot with the ideal content- To integrate the chatbot with the most common questions and answers to be asked by the audience, first, these types of data need to be found.  This actually means predicting all the interaction scenarios that are going to occur in the conversations with the chatbot. As recommended by experts at softgrid, the initial analysis of chatbot content should be based on the FAQ and the most common queries that might arise.  Except for the customer support division, some marketing employees and sales division employees also have interactions with the customers and by taking their help the ideal content can be formulated by the social media experts. There are also many questions and queries that can be found on Google and query sites like Quora, Softgrid conducts thorough research before implementing the content into the chatbot software program. 

Branding and Adding personality to your Chatbot- The chatbots cannot be just present as a mundane software program, it needs to be given an identity so that audience can engage more comfortably with them.  A graphical representation of the chatbot is required along with an appropriate name that closely aligns with the brand image and category. The voice tone of the chatbot also needs to be set for shaping the reply contents in the ideal format. 

Conversational Trees and Visual Content- The Chatbot building is carried out using conversational trees that map out the interacting progress that will occur with a potential customer. The advanced chatbots make full utilization of the one-tap replies in which the customer has to choose the reply between the options and all possible options are present in the list. Customer satisfaction is always kept in focus while these Trees are spanned out in several layers. Social Media experts at Softgrid suggest entrepreneurs understand the importance of using visual content along with text so that the audience remains engaged in the conversation. 

Endnote on social media Chatbot use

Besides the process just mentioned above, there are more parameters that are given attention at leading social media account management firms. The lets the development teams take an integrated approach that includes customized buttons for direct purchases and multiple live testing sessions before chatbot deployment.  Some companies deploy a chatbot by claiming it as a human customer representative but the truth gets easily caught by the business audience on the other side. Experts at softgrid have analyzed the market and found that the honest bot approach is more suitable. Softgrid IT experts along with the in-house Social Networking Developers, monitor the chatbot operation and interaction after it gets deployed to identify the further growth sections.