How Chatbots Can Influence the Customer Experience on Websites
Websites have always been the visiting card for businesses on the Internet. However, in the last decade, the modality in which people would discover a business's website has changed drastically with the invention of search engines.
People would go to Google or Yahoo! and type in keywords to find the business that they were looking for. However, with the advent of social media, it quickly changed as people would follow the business they would like on Facebook, for example, or they would come across ads on social media platforms, click its link and visit the website.
Similarly, the digital advertising landscape has also changed how people find websites. Increasing amount of demographic and psychographic data allows for targeted digital advertising to drive users to a business' website.
In the modern day and age, with the invention of artificial intelligence and many other advanced tools, websites can offer a much more comprehensive customer experience as it is still the forefront of a business's digital identity. So business owners and marketers need to go above and beyond to not just meet their customers' expectations but also delight them in the process.
Countless reports on online user behavior suggest that customers prioritize speed and accessibility. They prioritize the ease of navigation on the website and even search engines like Google prioritize websites which perform well in that regard. Therefore, businesses can deploy different third-party tools to ensure that their websites are performing well and chatbots happen to be one of those tools.
How do chatbots help?
A chatbot can be very effective in terms of helping users navigate a website since it presents a conversational interface to help users discover the content they are looking for. As opposed to browsing through search results or the pages within your website, a chatbot can function as a concierge where it can easily connect the user with the content or the product/service that they are looking for.
Challenges of chatbots
A common challenge that users face while designing a chatbot is deciding on the customer journey they should build. An easy solution to this problem is to use Google Analytics. When you can go into Google Analytics, you can easily discover the pages that users are looking at the most. And you can also see what kind of questions they're asking in terms of the keywords that they are searching for.
So that gives you a lot of insight in terms of understanding what users are looking for. While building a chatbot to respond to 100 different questions will cost a lot of time and money, it does not necessarily mean it will be effective.
On the other hand, you would only need to optimize for the 20 questions that are being asked by users to provide utility to the large majority of your website visitors.
Alternative to Forms
Most businesses traditionally use forms on their websites to collect their customers or prospects contact information. However, the problem with using forms is that they are usually presented in popups which may be distracting for the visitor.
A chatbot is capable of collecting the same information but unlike a form it does not block a page or block a view of the web page and they do not disrupt the flow of the customer experience.
Another advantage to using chatbots is that they are capable of asking following up questions that forms would have to collect over several fields. Large forms suffer from low conversion rates, especially if there are a lot of required fields in order for a visitor to be registered as a lead.
For a website that attracts high urgency website visitors, like a plumber for example, it may not be a big issue. For example, if you were looking for a plumbing solution and need something fixed at your home as soon as possible, you wouldn't mind filling out three or four extra fields on a form. But when you are looking for, say, something that's not as urgent for you, for example, a solar installation company, a long form with several fields would make you hesitate.
That being said, a true advantage with chatbots is that it can ask people two questions and people can fill that out. But even if they don't answer the follow up questions at the time, it will still be storing those initial two inputs, which is usually the person's contact information.
Quizzes, Campaigns & Giveaways
Websites as a channel can offer quizzes, product surveys and small games to offer customers discounts, coupons and other free giveaways. Traditionally these would be accomplished using a form via some sort of third party plugin, but chatbots are also capable of executing similar campaigns. In fact, if your website is using Messenger chatbots, you can also program in a referral component to your contest.
This way, as opposed to emailing their friends and family, visitors can forward your contest over Messenger and create a viral effect for your campaign. As opposed to email, Messenger offers a more seamless and personalized social experience.
Increasing Your Website “Stickiness”
Whenever a visitor comes to your website, you want to make sure that they just don't come the one time - you want to make sure that they visit over and over again. Most marketers refer to this as stickiness.
A chatbot on your website can provide varying degrees of personalization on the browsing experience such as:
- Greeting the customer by name.
- Making article recommendations.
- Recommending products based on previous purchase history.
While these sections are usually present in a website’s design, the benefit of a conversational interface is that the user doesn't have to scroll to enjoy the experience. It helps create a sophisticated and personalized outlook which will delight users.
A high frequency of returning website visitors will not only help grow your business but also increase your search rankings as high stickiness indicates a favorable user experience.
Conclusion
While user experience is something that is difficult to quantify, chatbots can help business owners collect data and analytics to better understand their users’ needs and at the same time gauge the performance of their bot.
