Companies integrate various strategies to improve business relationships, and one of the most useful tools is the integration of an effective customer relationship management system. This helps them stay connected to their customers while streamlining processes and improving profitability.
At the frontline of any business is a sales team that deals with customers on a regular basis. And with the integration of a CRM system, even a startup team can reap the huge benefits of utilizing one. However, there is one caveat: this can only work if you address the current issues facing a traditional system.
Providing customer support is one of the most resource-heavy departments in a company. Employees in this department spend their entire shifts attending customer concerns through phone calls, chats, and emails.
When the business thrives, the company will find itself in a kind of conundrum where a larger customer base would need more employees to attend to their issues. The company, in turn, would need more money to spend on employee salaries, health insurance, and operational costs.
If you are utilizing a poorly designed CRM system, this can cause slow response times, adding more problems to your business process. Keep in mind that employees can only work as efficiently and as quickly as their tools allow it. To solve these problems, you need to integrate automation into your CRM system, and the way to do this is to add chatbots in the equation.
A chatbot is a simple automated service that can be implemented into specific areas of the sales and marketing funnel to address the problems experienced in a flawed CRM system. They can be used to instantly respond to clients’ queries and help solve the issues they are experiencing with your product or service.
The integration of chatbots can dramatically improve your business process, providing a more seamless experience through better response times. This also opens doors for scalable tactics that would eventually result in lower resource costs.
With the rapidly changing strategies in how we handle customer support, businesses are evolving by using various digital channels. While many still prefer doing their business over the phone, there are skyrocketing requests coming from non-voice channels such as live chats, email, SMS, and social media. This is no surprise since messenger apps are the preferred means communications nowadays, and this is the same for support services.
Apart from the general advantages, here are a few more key chatbot benefits:
Better conversation tracking
Chatbots are a timely solution that addresses the flaws of a traditional CRM system across different industries. They provide a more seamless interaction by responding faster to simple queries, giving more accurate answers through a more advanced AI.
They can also be linked to social media and remember previous conversations for better tracking.
Automated lead qualification
Through personalized messages, chatbots can assist customers through the ‘buyer’s journey’ using the information they receive.
A bot can ask the necessary questions, persuade a potential customer, and generate a lead automatically. They can be programmed to ensure the conversation is steered in the right direction for higher conversion rates.
Content accessibility tool
Not all customers will have the ability to read, so chatbots with a voice feature can help those who are visually challenged to have access to useful content about the company and its line of business.
Chatbots are indeed the future of CRM. With a more advanced AI to provide a more interactive and ‘human’ experience, they will be effectively removing the grunt work from employees to allow them to focus on more important work that needs a more human touch.
