Every day small businesses spend countless hours responding to customer service inquiries on social media platforms. Some business owners even handle these inquiries themselves. It’s draining, time-consuming work that you could be spending on other aspects of business growth.

Now you can save yourself the trouble and use chatbots instead.

This article examines what a chatbot does and how it benefits small businesses.

What Is a Chatbot? 

In its simplest form, a chatbot is an app that simulates human conversation by text or voice to solve users’ queries on the spot. The chatbot is programmed in a way that it can be used in all domains, including customer service. 

Since the user is not required to perform tedious tasks like scrolling through contact lists or pressing numbers on their phone, it becomes easy to get help when they need it most. And since this interaction takes place over the channels people are already using (such as messaging apps), it feels natural and intuitive to the users.

Advantages of Chatbots 

Chatbots’ most apparent advantage over human agents is their ability to work every hour through the day and night without getting tired, frustrated, or grumpy. This way, no matter when people interact with your company, they will always get their answers on time.

Another advantage is the ability to remember and recall information. Like a human agent, chatbots can answer questions users ask in previous conversations and correctly guide them during the process (without having to restart from scratch).

Last but not least, chatbots are very good at solving an array of common issues by simply searching for keywords in users’ queries. They can provide answers to questions related to pricing, rates, policies, and procedures effortlessly.

The following are reasons why chatbots might be right for your company.

1. The competition level in your industry is high, and you need to meet customer demands to stay competitive.

2. You have enough resources to devote to implementing a chatbot into the customer service process.

3. You can handle high levels of customer service volume.

4. Your customers prefer to communicate via chat.

5. You need advanced knowledge about your company and services; you want to be able to answer common questions accurately, in real-time.

6. You want to provide an omni-channel experience for your customers (chat, voice, video, text, and email).

7. You need to automate certain parts of the customer service process – but you want to keep some tasks for your human employees – so they can provide a more personalized experience.

How much time has your business spent managing customer service on social media interactions? What did it entail?

You may be wasting up to four hours a week managing customer service on social media interactions. That’s up to 208 hours a year you could spend redoing tasks that only you can do or developing your business.

With the help of a chatbot, you’ll have more time to develop your business and still manage all of the incoming customer service inquiries.

Chatbots can be programmed to use keywords, so you don’t have to spend time typing back and forth with customers on social media. 

If you program your chatbot to recognize words like, “I want to make a reservation,” you can save yourself the time of replying with some helpful prompt like: “Reservations may be made by calling [your business phone number].” 

Also, chatbots help you solve customer problems you weren’t aware you were having. If you find a bug in your site, you can let the chatbot help you solve it by sending an automated message via direct message on Twitter. 

Chatbots are the wave of the future for customer service. They offer many advantages over human agents, including 24/7 availability and speed in answering questions without getting tired or frustrated. Artificial intelligence powers these chatbots, which means they do more than answer common queries. They can also find solutions to complex problems through machine learning capabilities that were previously impossible to create manually. Chatbots will be a game-changer for your business when coupled with AI.

Please contact our team of AI specialists at ViviScape at (574) 207-6511. Our team at ViviScape can help you integrate a chatbot into your marketing strategy and website. Your time is precious, and a chatbot will allow you more of it.