3 Benefits of Using Chatbots on Your Website

They can give your customers a better experience without them having to pick up the phone.

If you want to solve your customers’ problems faster and even when nobody’s available, then chatbots could be your solution.

Chatbots are a chat feature on your website that visitors can talk or ask questions to — except they’re usually talking to a computer program, not another person. They might sound like they’re just scary robots coming to take over a customer service representative’s job. But if used correctly, they can be complementary to an all-star customer service team by making it easier for customers to find answers.

Some ways that a chatbot can help your customers include:

• Booking a reservation
• Checking the status of an order
• Finding the right number to call
• Paying a bill
• Scheduling a meeting

Many of those tasks don’t require a person to do it, and having a chatbot can help automate things while freeing up your customer service team for more pressing issues.

Here are just a few of the reasons why a chatbot can help you provide a better experience for current and potential customers.

Customers prefer them in many cases

A 2021 study from Solvvy, a chatbot company, showed that over half (55 percent) of respondents preferred talking to a chatbot right away over waiting for a real agent. Plus, 69 percent of users said they would “often or always” use a chatbot if it resolved their issue faster.

Great customer service doesn’t just have to encompass interactions with people. In many cases, people simply care about how well and quickly they’re treated — and it doesn’t always take another human to treat someone well and quickly.

Help is available around the clock

Chatbots also allow you the opportunity to help people when you’re closed or nobody’s available.

Whether it’s late at night or on the weekend, you never know when someone might have a question or need something solved. This is especially important when you work in a financial industry, for example, and someone needs to pay a bill immediately — but they’re having issues.

They could wander around the site aimlessly, wait hours on hold for someone, or talk to a chatbot that may be able to resolve their issue in just a few minutes.

They free up your time for other issues

When you have a chatbot on your site to help you with quick fixes, your team has time to help customers with more complicated issues.

If you don’t have a chatbot or infrastructure on your website that allows people to complete simple tasks like booking a meeting or making reservations on their own, then your desks, phones, or emails are probably clogging up pretty quickly.

Having that mechanism for people to solve problems quickly avoids that issue — so your team can focus on more complex issues that might require more of your time.