What A Bot Can Do For Your Business

Perhaps you have seen the videos of pets riding robotic vacuums and are left wondering what a bot can do for your business. Perhaps you have already invested in wearable technology for your health or smart home devices for personal reasons. Artificial intelligence can also assist you in business.

We provided answers about chatbots in our post “Getting Started With A Chatbot For Business.” However, bots can do much more than deliver customer service. They can be a valuable tool for marketers.

More and more customers are messaging businesses—instead of calling—to get appointments, information, rebates, refunds, and replacements for products; to make purchases or renew services; and to express their dissatisfaction. Increased use of mobile phones by consumers and greater use of messaging apps and chatbots by sales people and service providers both play a role in this shift. Messaging is a win for your business and your marketing department when it makes you stand out from the crowd.

Artificial intelligence is perfect for handling simple automated tasks. Examples include
• Generating monthly reports from a standard spreadsheet
• Invoicing
• Paying recurring bills
• Providing data and patterns to help you determine the best placement and timing of ads
• Testing the best wording (and colors, fonts, and graphics) for ads

Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers reported the following uses of AI in her report on 2017’s Internet Trends:
• Instacart personalizes online shopping and found customers were “8x more likely to buy when prompted with ‘Buy it again’ option” and “85% of in-store replacements [for Instacart] are based on algorithmic recommendations.”
• Lowe’s guides in-store shoppers to products on its shelves with augmented reality
• Stitch Fix creates new computer-generated products based on “product attributes + customer feedback + data science/testing”

What a bot can do for your business is not limited to these examples. You can also use a bot to nurture leads for you. Program your bot to send one message to a new site visitor and a different message to someone who already knows and likes you (based on how many times they have visited). Use your bot to send educational content to those who opt-in to your newsletter and product information to those who repeatedly ask questions. Let your bot do the sorting and categorizing of your visitors’ behaviors so you can see the bigger picture and get a good idea of who might be a good prospect.

Bot use is still in its infancy in the marketing world but you can get started right now with a chatbot for your customer service. Give Tate Design a call at 610.725.0702 or e-mail us at [email protected].