How to Sell More with the Help of Chatbots?

Chatbots are revolutionizing the global eCommerce and service industry to unprecedented extents. They are leveraged to offer borderline support, product recommendations, and highly brilliant guided shopping experiences.

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What can a chatbot do?

Show product recommendations and reviews in the chat window
Offer shopping facilities in the chat windows
Make suggestions regarding payments
And take the customers from one point to another effortlessly

But can it help you sell more? If the answer is yes, then how to sell more with the help of chatbots?

Here, we discuss the answers at length, learn about their advantages, and much more.

What Does Selling With Chatbot Mean?

Selling with chatbots implies a scenario where chatbots guide your customers or visitors just like a physical salesperson. They recommend products, discuss their pros and cons and help the customers make the purchase. Sales chatbots can also show applicable discounts and discuss the best payment modes as well.

For example, take a look at how Saphora’s chatbot interacts with customers:

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The sales chatbots can be considered salespersons are working in a brick-and-mortar store. As human salespersons, sales chatbots start interacting with customers right when they enter your online store. They help them during online shopping sessions and enhance the experiential quality of your online store.

For example, see how Mastercard’s Facebook Messenger can deliver exceptional insights to customers:

Source

As the entire interaction happens right inside the chatbox, the customers don’t have to switch from one window to another. On top of that, they don’t have to browse through tens of product pages to find the right one. So, chatbot software is a valuable addition to your sales team that uplifts the entire customer experience and adds to business growth.

5 Benefits Your Business Gains From the Use of Chatbot

1- Reduces Operator Burnout

Chatbots can effortlessly and tirelessly take over the burden of your sales reps and support task force. They can offer automated answers for FAQs and repetitive queries without getting tired. The bots can also gather initial or contextual intelligence for further support or sales queries.

The sales bots can also be programmed to send messages to the on-field sales reps and delivery operators to keep the stress away.

2- Improves Customer Engagement on Your Website

Online chatbots are available 24×7 and can offer quick query resolution by automating the responses. In addition, they can learn from previous customer interactions and provide better personalization and recommendations based on their data analytical capabilities.

Sales bots can also identify and leverage cross-selling and up-selling by showing more relevant products.

So, your customers feel as if they are with their “personal shopper” and get to enjoy the VIP service.

3- Never Misses Out on Support Opportunities

The agent-based support comes with drawbacks, such as agents not being available on time or busy lines. You might also miss some urgent queries when your support staff is on a festive holiday.

On the other hand, an online chatbot never takes off, never sleeps, never gets tired, and never makes errors. Its functionalities and capabilities stem from its code and AI/ML architecture. So, it is an ideal and invincible support agent that you can always count on no matter what.

4- Reduces Your Support Cost

The latest stats indicate that by 2022 chatbots will save as much as $8 billion for businesses. Further, IBM reports that chatbots can save up to $14 per customer service call. We can safely say that the stats are not far-fetched, with highly streamlined abilities and superhuman capabilities.

Conversational AI or customer support chatbots can offer essential support, which forms a significant portion of the support work. They can also dig through the historical customer data and present responses based on their learnings. Chatbots can also be trained to look for similar support instances and take cues.

Your support costs are significantly lowered as you pay for all these functionalities once (depending on your subscriptions).

5- Helps you Reduces Cart Abandonment

Cart abandonment happens because:

Shoppers were just browsing
They were unable to get the desired assistance at the right time
They didn’t see the products they were looking for

Based on your reading, you can easily conclude that sales chatbots can tackle all these situations and much more.

Using chatbots for sales allows you to address cart abandonment in various ways, such as:

Taking customers back to shopping by sending texts, reminders, and alerts
Sending product purchase nudges, such as “last item alerts, ” “prices slashed,” etc.
Offering enticing cross-selling and up-selling opportunities

Up next, we discuss some chatbot use cases in sales.

Chatbot Use Case in Sales

1- Automated Sales Tasks

You can use a standalone sales bot to automate the different sales processes, such as:

Generate and qualify leads
Offering personalized recommendations
Replacing web forms with engaging chat with the customer
Gathering CRM data from your CRM software
Calls and meetings scheduling

All these tasks consume a lot of time and effort when done manually. On the other hand, a bot can get it done effortlessly over and over, all the while enhancing its learning and data processing capabilities.

2- Augment Sale Team Capabilities

You can add an intelligent sales assistant to your sales team to augment its capabilities, such as automated segmentation of the sales team. This will allow you to set better task priorities and streamline your escalation procedures as well.

In real-time, sales chatbots can connect leads with your sales reps and simplify inquiries and quotation processes. You can also add innovative capabilities, like allowing your customers to make direct calls from the Live Chat widget.

3- Smart Scaling

Scaling remains a manual process regardless of the technology and software innovation. As a result, most enterprise stakeholders must take manual scaling decisions from data analytics or manual analysis (traditional ecosystems).

However, scaling is one of the fantastic sales chatbot use cases, whereby you can use an intelligent AI bot for:

Creating sales opportunities
Drive your sales team efforts with actionable data
Make your lead generation strategy diverse
Improve sales efficiency

You can achieve all of these intelligent scaling benefits without increasing the headcount in your eCommerce enterprise.

4- Sales Process AutomationAI-augmented

Like the sales tasks at your enterprise, you can leverage the sales chatbots to automate your sales processes. First, Chatbots can collect information about your potential consumers via personalized conversations. Later, it can automatically organize this data as per your segmentation needs.

Further, sales bots can feed your CRM automatically with the information gathered during customer interactions. This data serves as an essential information resource for your sales task force.

5- Customer Insights

Chatbots for sales effectively collect, organize, process, and make sense of random customer data. You might think this job can be done by many customer tools. However, only chatbots can be trained and adapted to make the process better and more valuable with the passing of time.

They can gather customer insights during chats, query resolutions, shopping interactions, and even the customer’s browsing behavior. These insights “educate you about your customers” and tell you how to sell more products online.

Hence, using a chatbot for sales will allow you to make the most of your customer data while boosting your brand equity via excellent customer service.

How to Increase Customer Sales & Service Using Chatbot

1- Provide Support 24x7x365 Days

You can identify your money-making opportunities by increasing your UP-TIME for customer support and query resolution. Customers can get instant product recommendations based on their requirements and shopping history. In addition, they can get instant solutions for basic queries and self-service resources for solving easy problems themselves.

Chatbots can handle complex sales processes and multi-step inquiries as well. In addition, they can connect with external software and offer various cross-selling and up-selling opportunities with their deep knowledge of your brand offerings.

Further, the chatbots never sleep, never take a holiday, never fall sick and never go offline. So, you can make money with chatbots even after your sales reps have clocked out!

2- Guide Prospects to the Best Product Recommendations

Chatbots come with ML/AI-augmented capabilities, such as:

In-depth understanding of your brand offerings
Always remembering the personal aspects of a customer’s shopping
Always ready with customer insights
Speed and Accuracy

So, the bots can make better and more enticing product recommendations. They don’t need to scroll through tens of product pages or catalogs to pick the best finds for your customer. They have it all “right inside their brains”!

Further, they can come up with ingenious ways to make add-on recommendations, such as:

Conditioners with shampoo, or Oil, conditioner, and shampoo bundles, Or annual subscriptions at a lesser price, or even add-on service at discounts with a yearly subscription.

So, when it comes to sales chatbots, you don’t have to teach them how to sell more products online!

3- Capture Market-Qualified Leads for Your Business

Any procurement team cannot entertain every individual landing on your web pages. It might not be able to convert them even after capturing. Hence, the chances of them ending in your sales funnel are slim.

On the other hand, a chatbot never misses an opportunity. It is always available and vigilant to help and guide your website visitors right when they land!

They proactively collect the visitors’ demographic, contact, and behavior information and share this with your marketing team. This facilitates a smooth entry of leads into your sales funnel, and your sales team can focus on the qualified leads.

4- Engage With Prospects When They Show Exit-Intent

The exit-intent bot focuses on customers that are about to exit.

For example:

A website visitor moving the cursor swiftly towards the top right corner as if he is going to close the window
A customer taking too long to make the payment after populating the cart
A customer being inactive for a present limit of time and might have an intention of stopping doing business

The ML-based chatbots can also dig through the comments, reviews, feedback, and chat history. They can scan the text for trigger words indicating customer dissatisfaction. Then, the insights are shared with your sales reps to target such customers better.

5- Send Welcome Messages With Discounts to Boost Engagement

You can leverage AI chatbots to deliver personalized greetings to boost customer engagement. Chatbots for sales can also present customized offers and discounts to improve your customer onboarding process.

Even if you have a new customer or a potential customer, the chatbots can make welcome offers curated based on:

Browsing history
Source (social media, ads, references, or direct visiting)
Proactive queries

Hence, chatbots can boost customer engagement on multiple levels and convert prospects into loyal brand advocates.

6- Resolve Frequently Asked Questions

Chatbots can offer automated and swift replies to frequently asked queries. You can link them to your knowledge base, and they can present canned responses to your customers for repetitive questions.

With their AI capabilities, they can learn and adapt during their life and present more humanized and well-formed responses to diverse queries.

They can also gather your support staff’s initial customer data and contextual information. Thus, they can save time, effort, and cost while boosting workplace productivity and support efficiency.