Chatbots in Marketing Strategy

Within digital marketing the use of chatbots is the trendy application. For many professionals in this area, after the invasion of apps in the business terrain to impulse sales, the use of chatbots is the next step in the evolution of the customer experience with the use of the internet in business.

Source: pxhere.com

As we know, chatbots are programs designed to imitate the conversation with people by using artificial intelligence algorithms; something that when used intelligently in companies can be effective in avoiding a bad experience with customer service, which no company wants to have, since frustrated users attempt against the brand and image that they want to project.

There are many sectors that have already implemented these conversation programs, integrating them into different platforms as a means of providing added value. For example, success can be seen in hotels such as Marriot, where users can make reservations, obtain recommendations about their destination or contact the customer service center through Slack, WeChat or Google Assistant. Banks and insurance companies are another example of companies that have incorporated virtual call centers for customer service, which answer directly to frequent questions such as balances and transactions, and also process service management and payments themselves.

Many sectors have already implemented these conversation programs, integrating them into different platforms as a means of providing added value. A successful example can be seen in hotels such as Marriot, where users can make reservations, obtain recommendations about their destination or contact the customer service center through Slack, WeChat or Google Assistant. Banks and insurance companies are another example of companies that have incorporated virtual call centers for customer service, which answer directly to frequent questions such as balances and transactions, and also process service management and payments themselves.

Source: pxhere.com.

Therefore chatbots are grouped according to their functionality into three groups, according to their purpose:

• Incentive sales: with this objective, the chatbot will guide the customer in the search, selection and purchase of a product or service.
• Generate content: in this case, the conversational model will facilitate access to periodic updates by sending alerts or personalized messages based on previous conversations held with the chatbot.
• Customer Service: For this purpose, chatbots will channel customer queries or complaints in order to expedite their requests.

On the other side, companies can optimize the user experience through the models called human in the loop, which involve a human-machine collaboration, so when the chatbot has some problem the human agent would intervene, and in this way the program learns and records that experience to apply it in the future.

But the use of chatbots is not something reserved for large companies, anyone who manages a small business or trade, has the ability to configure their own chatbot adapted to their needs and business strategy. Thanks to the emergence of platforms that integrate with social networks (such as Facebook or Telegram) have facilitated this without the need for great programming skills. And Google recently presented Chatbase, a free tool for the interpretation of results collected by chatbots, and which is necessary for their improvement.

In conclusion, chatbots are becoming a great tool for all those users who do not want to contact customer service and support centers to avoid uncomfortable calls or do not want to browse through different websites until they find the information they are looking for; in the same way, they become a valuable alternative for companies that cannot maintain a 24/7 customer service or want to improve the use of it by applying these innovations, generating an amount of valuable data that, well interpreted, means a greater benefit and improvement of the satisfaction generated to customers .

---

Thank you for reading me. Until the next post!

---

This post has been published previously in my other blog