Why is customer satisfaction so important for my business? How does it even help in taking my business forward in the competition? How can happy customers benefit my business?

These are a few questions that will pop up in your mind every time you would hear of customer satisfaction. You can’t afford to make your clients unhappy. As the happier they are, the better your business goes!

So, what is Customer Satisfaction?

Making customers merely satisfied is what every business generally does. Your business should stand out from others. And for this, you need to make your consumers happy.

You have to devise a strategy for building relationships and making your customers feel valued. Your clients should feel important from the first interaction with your business and throughout their journey. It is not just about resolving queries, it’s about the relationship you form with them!

Creating memorable experiences for your clients takes more than a “one size fits all” strategy. Rather than giving the same services to all, write down the requirements of every consumer, and work accordingly. Happy Customers will stick around with your business for a longer time, give honest feedback, and are most likely to refer your services to others.

Tips for Creating Happy Customers

If you happen to be a start-up, an established business, or a small business, keeping your users happy should be your foremost priority. Don’t wait for them to come up with complaints or queries, reach out to them personally. Try your best to proactively build relationships with your consumers.

1. Educate Your Customer Support Team

The more educated your support team, the better they deal with your customers. Support agents are the frontline people who communicate with your customers. They are the most important elements of your business and it is they who lay the impression of how well your services are performing.

So, it is essential to train your support team and give them proper knowledge and updates about your products/services. This way, your support agents would be able to carry out the tasks themselves rather than passing it on to others.

Also, your business can thus form a good bond with customers.

2. Avoid Escalating The Problems

Escalation is not a good experience. You should encourage customer executives to take ownership of problems. They should try to resolve the problems by themselves rather than involving a new support person to fix it.

Solving the problems and not escalating them further gives a sense of good customer service to the users.

Be ready to resolve your clients’ problems effectively and on time.

3. Figure Out the Customers’ Needs Well!

Customers often come up with problems. Just answering their basic queries might not always be helpful.

Sometimes your support agents might provide a common suggestion to a customer’s problem. This can’t always be useful in resolving the actual problem faced by them.

So, always put the effort to understand what your customers actually need. And then provide the ultimate solution to them.

4. Deal Personally When Possible

Giving “personal service” is the “synergy” of good customer support. Your customers should feel like they are doing business with a professional company. Emphasize on making human conversations rather than automated replies.

The concept is simple. However, it is incredibly valuable!

When customers get better services, they feel free to share their feedback and buy more products.

You can use your customers’ names to address them, drop a simple text/email to ask them about their experience, and ask them casual questions like- “How was your day?” “How have you been?” This ensures that they are not talking to “Customer Support Robot” and can freely share their problems and feedback.

A point to note, personal touch is not easy in all businesses. Understand your audience well and choose when and where you can make your or your team available to your customers.

5. Cut-down Wait Times

Customers hate waiting!

If your company fails to provide the highest levels of service, your clients won’t hang back to find a better company. Train your staff well to eliminate or manage the wait times.

For general user problems, keep a readymade questionnaire to offer with the products.

Be quick and serve your customers efficiently to make them happy.

6. Show Your Customers That You Care

There’s no better way to convince your customers than to show that you care for them. Resolve their issues in less time, serve them with the best products, and stay in touch with them.

You can show them that they are important for you by sending them a follow-up mail, every time you solve their problem.

A satisfied customer makes more purchases and refers your products and services to others as well.

7. Exceed Your Customers’ Expectations

Your customers hold both implicit and explicit expectations for the products and services they receive. It is better to be transparent with them.

9 out of 10 consumers avoid purchasing from brands that lack transparency.

Your business should focus on removing the consumers’ uncertainty about common issues. Let them know what your standards are and serve them in a better way.

By doing more than you promised, your business can create a sense of being reliable and trustworthy to your customers. For instance, if Amazon delivers a product in three days, they give their buyers time of five days. So, when the product arrives earlier than expected, customers feel happy.

This way, you will never disappoint them and they’ll get a reason to praise your services too.

8. Empower Your Support Agents

By empowering your agents, you connect to your company’s mission. Your support agents should have enough knowledge to handle a customer and resolve their queries.

Keep your support team updated about any new features, updates, or products. This way the support executives will be able to deal with the clients themselves without escalating their problems or keeping them in pending.

Empower agents to show more empathy towards your customers.

9. Handle Feedback Politely

Reinforce the positive feedback and be tactful with the negative ones.

Even if your customers leave negative feedback, take it as a learning lesson, and thank them. Note down the suggestions they leave and tell them that you will work and improve on it.

Your consumer’s complaints will highlight the problems with your products, services, and internal processes. You can investigate and improve to get a better response next time.

About 45% of customers withdraw their negative evaluations of a company in light of an apology.

Besides assuring the buyers for better performance, also apologize for the products or services that couldn’t stand their expectations.

Handling Difficult Customers With Ease

Difficult customers are inevitable. As a support executive, you get to meet a number of difficult customers. It is thus imperative for your team to know how to effectively resolve consumer conflicts and deal patiently with them.

Customers expect businesses to provide them good services. Even a single mistake from your side can make them impatient and sometimes angry.

To build a positive reputation, it is important to have well-trained staff who can handle difficult customers and resolve their complaints in no time.

So, how can you deal with them?

Here are some tips to deal with difficult and unhappy customers:

1. Listen to Them!
   
   Never try to argue with an angry customer. Even if you know that they are wrong, listen to them. A good listener always listens before concluding.
   
   Put yourself in your customers’ shoes and echo the source of their frustration. Allow them to speak their heart out and do not interrupt them with what is right or wrong. Let them feel that they are heard and then engage them in a conversation.
   
   The better your service, the happier is your customer!
2. Know When To Give In
   
   If it is apparent that calming down a rude client is going to take long and might still result negatively, draw a compromise. This will give you more time to deal with a difficult buyer and do better for them with time.
3. Respond As If All Your Clients Are Watching
   
   Sometimes the customer might become verbally abusive. However, this is the time when you don’t have to lose your cool and stay calm. Despite being rude and unhelpful, think about the situation.
   
   Making an unhappy customer more unhappy isn’t worth it. So, try imagining that your conversation is being listened to by hundreds of other customers as well. Stay calm and don’t take the words personally, rather deal with the situation in a professional manner.
   
   About 1 out of every 26 customers complain and it entirely depends on you how well you deal with it.

Summing Up!

Customer satisfaction is vital for a successful business. Always listen to what your consumers say and try to provide them even more. By making them happy, your business can earn more referrals and also retain them for a longer time.

A highly satisfied customer refers your products to at least six other people. That means if you treat one customer well, you might get six more. Interacting personally with them and listening to them every time (if they are happy or disappointed) leaves a positive experience.

Even if you cannot make your customers happy, try not to return them unsatisfied.

Are you confused about how to grow your business?🤔

Well, building a strong customer base is the best you can do! The value of your customers is an essential asset for your companies’ growth. So, focus on how to gain new customers while retaining the old ones.

Whether you are a small business or a big one, your company should always devote itself to attract new customers. The acquisition of new clients is the number one growth factor for your business. Just like the other parts of the business, it’s just about using your strategies more smartly.70% of organizations that used a formal process to manage strategy have performed better than their peers.

It is all about framing your strategies and executing them well! The following 3 step approach will delve into:

• How to conduct better market research
• Targeting your audience and their needs
• How to increase sales by focusing on your existing customers

1. Use Your Existing Customer Base

Your current customers are extremely imperative for your business. If you are not leveraging your existing clients, you are missing a simple, low-cost source of earning new customers. They have already made purchases from your company, so, providing them with good experience can benefit your business in the long run.

Here’s how you can get more for your business from your existing customers.

Ask for referrals

Referrals are one of the easiest ways to get new customers. Referral customers tend to make more purchases with time and also become a source of additional referrals. So, how do you find referrals?

You cannot just sit back and wait for your current clients to refer your services/products to their friends, family, or colleagues. You have to take the charge and implement strategies to solicit referrals from your satisfied buyers.

One of the easiest ways of doing this is by talking to your clients. You can ask them if they know of anyone who could be benefited from your services. You can offer them a commission on earning you a referral, provide them an on-site form, or send a follow-up email asking for a referral after they have made a purchase.

72% of consumers share a positive experience with 6 or more people. Remember your existing customers are your greatest supporters!

Continue expanding your network

Focus on growing your network. Besides relying on your existing network, look at expanding it. Personal connections with your current clients are the lifeblood of business. To give your customers a personalized experience, engage face-to-face with them. Always approach networking with a serving attitude. Think of how you can help your customers rather than the benefits you can get.

You can expand your network in an old-fashioned way- attend networking events, join organizations, and form partnerships. This way you can communicate with others in your network and introduce them to your services or products.

Re-connect with the former customers

Even if your old customers haven’t done business with you in a while, they can be approached to make purchases again. Rather than working on new clients, consider going back to some of your old customers. Go through your buyers list regularly and after some time (probably some months or a year), try reaching them again. Give them discounts or offers via email/phone, and try to resolve the issues which they faced earlier before contacting them.

You can also win back your existing customers by giving them irresistible offers and discounts.

Maintain excellent customer support and service

A customer contacting your support team for their first purchase is as crucial as the customer who contacts you for their tenth purchase. Your support team should treat every client with equal respect and resolve their issues on time.

Do not forget that word of mouth is an incredibly powerful resource. If a buyer is happy with your services, they will recommend it to at least three other people. Thus, leading to increased sales and referrals. You should also focus on making it easy for your customers to share information about your products.

Create some room for your customers to share their feedback through web apps or mobile apps. You can also encourage them to share product images to show their reviews.

2. Find New Markets

Even if you have earned a loyal customer base, new customers are the key to scale your business for the longer term. You need to be sure that your business is always relevant and is working to invite new clients.

The influx of different clients keeps your services solid and helps you improve your products. It’s time that you come up with some innovative ways to market your business. And for this you need to be aware of these simple things:

Identify your customer

Who is your ideal client?
“Everyone!”

Well, you need to correct this statement. You cannot impress everyone with your services. You should know about your ideal clients and emphasize on serving them better. Your ideal client is a person who has a problem that your products can resolve easily. They are on the lookout for your service and are ready to purchase your products.

Always identify what kind of people you are looking to attract. Without a composite of your ideal client, you would not know where to start seeking. Have a clear view of who you want to target. Note down what kind of services/products will make those types of people happy, sad, satisfied, or relieved. Then narrow down your focus to your ideal client.

Overstating your market will not help you to develop viable targeted plans for attracting new customers. Hence, work for your ideal clients and not for everyone.

Discover where your customers exist

Discovering new customers should be an essential part of your strategy. After all, even if you have an outstanding product/service and can’t survive without getting consumers. Right?

So, find out those places where your clients are more active. You can find them on various social media platforms (like Quora, Facebook, etc.) and online communities. Create a message to send to these online customers. You can also find potential clients offline at different conventions and conferences related to your industry.

Create content to attract an audience

Create content via webinars, blog posts, and also physically interact with people and tell them how your services can benefit them. Eventually, the followers will turn into your paying customers.Through good content, you can connect with your clients and build a stronger relationship. You can capture their attention and improve your brand recall with great content strategies. So, if you create content organically, you can automatically gain a new audience.

Partner up with other businesses

Team up with businesses that offer complementary services and have a similar customer base. Such businesses that are not directly competitive can offer you the opportunity to take advantage of synergy.

Strategize how you can target each other’s audience and nurture simultaneously. Bonding with other business owners or clients helps you create a strong customer base. Search for the organizations your ideal customer might support and approach them about creating a partnership. For instance, if you run a sports bar, you can partner with a camping store to add some offers for free appetizers.

Observe your competitors

Observing what your competitors do can be a helpful strategy to grow your business. If you notice your competitors, you can understand the source of their website traffic. Also, you could find out new techniques to get customers to your website.

By watching your competitors carefully, you can discover the markets/places where your ideal clients are present.

Participate in community events

To run your business, you need to make an impact on the community you serve. Most people support independent businesses in their communities. Take part in the charities or organizations and convey the message of how your services can serve the people better. Get a list of events that your potential clients are interested in and embrace the opportunity to promote your brand face to face.

You can also participate in virtual events taking place. Communities can get you great leads and you can work on turning these leads into permanent customers.

For instance, you join a Facebook community. If you spend enough time and provide it with value, the community will repay with 10x benefits to your business. Also, the community people will support your comments.

This way, you earn the trust of people in the community. Now, whenever the time is right, you can promote your service/product. The community will support it too!

3. Make Your Product/Service Better

Customers are always impressed by brands that work to enhance their products/services with time. Both small and big businesses should focus on meeting their clients’ expectations and resolving their issues in the least possible time.

If you are a small team, your main focus might be on the growth of your company. You may not have time to proactively reach out to all the people. So, you can emphasize on turning your services/products better.

Exceed expectations

Work on improving your customers’ experience and providing them with more than what they have actually asked for. This way they will remain satisfied and give positive feedback to others.

To retain your customers and convince them, you should emphasize to under-promise and over-deliver. For instance, if your product takes a week to be delivered, tell them it will take 2 weeks to reach them. If a product can last up to 10 years, claim that it will last for only 8 years.

This way your business will never be at the risk of breaking the promises and a trust bond will be formed eventually.

Increase scope of product/service

How do you make improvements to your existing products?

Improving your products means making meaningful changes. These modifications should be made to benefit existing customers and also to attract new clients.

First, consider these three questions -

1. What do people say they need?
2. What people actually need!
3. What are your clients ready to pay for?

These questions need to be asked at every stage of your product to help you validate the addition of new features. Adding new features can be a bit risky. You have to be sure that those will be valued by your ideal customers.

You can always ask your customers before making any changes to the products! These modifications should be made to benefit existing customers and also to attract new clients.

Improve the existing features

Every business focuses on improving its products to give the best services to its users. You can make changes to the existing features of the products anytime. However, there are 3 ways you can make changes to your products-

1. Deliberate Improvements: to make the features better in ways that will be appreciated by current users.
2. Adoption Improvements: to make features better even for those people who aren’t using it yet. You can get new people to use it!
3. Frequency Improvements: to target the users who use a feature but not for enough number of times.

Try to continuously improve your products and make them better with time. The more you understand your users' needs and work on them, the more people will start using your products with time.

For building a solid customer base, you need to understand what kind of audience you are looking for and then make a move for the same. Always focus on helping people rather than looking for your benefits.

Expand your networking areas, re-contact your old customers, place yourself in the position of your customers, and serve what they are looking for!

To make your clients happy, you need to fit in their shoes and know what they desire from your service/products.

We believe that customer happiness is the secret of a successful business. Customer satisfaction might be a more main-stream term than customer happiness. However, the word “satisfaction” in the Oxford dictionary means “fulfilment of one’s expectations”. While to make your customers happy, you have to offer them more than they expected for.

Customer satisfaction means you have met the basic expectations of your customer. It is when you cover that extra mile to offer a memorable experience, that’s when you can say that you have successfully achieved your customers’ happiness.

If your customers are “only satisfied”, they are more likely to switch to your competitors whenever they get a better deal. So, focus on creating a positive, unique, and remarkable experience for your customers to attain customer happiness in the long run.

Customers who are happy instead of being merely satisfied, develop brand loyalty, and refer your services to other people as well. They are more likely to stay with your brand and speak highly of it to others.

So, how do you get your customers happy?

Customer Satisfaction

You cannot grow your business without the approval of your customers. So, it’s super imperative to hear out your customers’ complaints and improve their experience accordingly.

Few common complaints your service team can encounter are:

• Unavailability of the product.
• Issues remain unresolved on the first call.
• New product or feature requests or queries.
• Poor product or service.
• Functionality related queries.

The first step to ensure that your customers return happy is not to take these as questions but as an opportunity to make your customers happy. This is a touchpoint between you, your business, and your customer. So, rather than providing canned or generic responses, try to personalise the replies you give to your customers.

You should be honest while communicating with your customers and speak naturally. Also, train your employees to resolve every customers’ issue as soon as possible and speak to them in a friendly manner to form an emotional connection with them.

This is the investment you can do to create a helpful customer experience and that’s how your services can stand out.

Prioritising your customer’s satisfaction is likely to do more than just blessing your business with happy customers. It will also enhance your company’s reputation, ensure your teams are performing well in the market, and increase buyer retention.

Accelerate Customer Success

Your business is successful as long as your customer is successful. It is those who go that extra mile that actually achieves customer happiness. To be number one in the market, your business needs to have effective communication and issue-resolving techniques.

In a world where customers have innumerable purchase options, you need to be different from others. Most businesses that take care of post-delivery services are the ones whom customers remember and refer further. To enhance the post-sales interaction, you should give them an appropriate amount of time to use your products or services and then ask them the questions related to their purchase.

Making casual contacts with your customers, asking them for feedback, and resolving their issues in time, will help establish a good relationship between you two.

Also, most people make a purchase but are not so aware of using the product in the manner it should be used because they don’t have complete knowledge. In this case, you can provide your customers with ready-made knowledge-based documentation, addressing all the possible use cases of the product.

Customer success comes when your customer gets everything they want and more.

Customer success basically focuses on working proactively with each of your customers. Customer success metrics result in customer retention, product usage, good revenue, lifetime value, and customer loyalty.

Attain Customer Empowerment

Giving customers what they ask for and returning them satisfied is what every business does. Then how is your business any different?

Apart from giving your customers good services and fulfilling their requirements, focus on giving them more. Help your customers get visibility by writing down about the services you’ve given previously, customer reviews, and customer success stories. By sharing knowledge of best practices with your customers, you assure them that you provide the best of what they are seeking.

Here are three ways to empower your customers:

• Give them an optimised experience of the service they are interested in.
• Help them save time by briefing them through brand websites, tutorial videos, FAQs, or discussion forums.
• Listen to their concern and always ask for their feedback.

Build Trust. Get Loyalty

Customers are the biggest assets for any business. Simply acquiring them isn’t enough. You need to retain your customers and form a trusted bond with them.

How can you gain your customers’ trust?

A clearly written and highlighted refund policy gives your customers confidence, security, and trust that they will receive the exact ordered product, and if they are not pleased with it, they can return it hassle-free.

Secondly, try to grow your business on social media. Businesses that are active socially have more chances of attracting new customers. By being socially active, you can promote brand awareness and brand loyalty, generate leads, and reach an audience on a larger scale.

To retain your customers and convince them, you should emphasise to under-promise and over-deliver. For instance, if your product takes a week to be shipped, tell them that it will take 2 weeks to reach them. If a product can last up to 10 years, claim that it will last for only 8 years.

This way your business will never be at the risk of breaking the promises and a trust bond will be formed eventually.

Give your customers a secure experience by concealing their personal information and grant them flexible options (like- opting out anytime they wish to).

Lastly, you can do a detailed study about how your competitors deal with gaining trust from their customers and include it in your strategies.

By focusing on customers’ trust, you are not just delighting them, you are building their trust, over-time. Thus, you can establish better work ethics, improve your business’s reputation, and provide something worthy to your customers as well.

About 90% of trusted customers are likely to purchase the services again. And about 60% of loyal customers make more frequent purchases from the company.

Results of Customer Happiness

In a nutshell, customer happiness is the customer’s attitude towards your services and products, the way they perceive it.

A satisfied customer might switch the brands but a happy customer returns to the same brand and shows complete loyalty towards it. They further refer your services through social media or in-person and indirectly help your business to grow.

Loyal customers are 5x as likely to repurchase and forgive. They are ready to try new offerings even at higher prices. So, why follow the basic old ways of just satisfying your customers?

This time try to make them happy.

Your business is successful if your customers’ are successful. You can practice these simple hacks to retain your customers and gain their loyalty in the long run:

• Retention is fickle if the desired service is lacking. Provide your customers with the best services.
• Do not ever reply late to your customers. Be it thanking them, resolving their issues, or telling them about your services, always respond on time.
• Invest heavily in customer service teams to give the best experiences to your customers.
• Personalise the texts, emails, and even the way of communication with your customers.
• Always appreciate your customers. Send them thank you notes or offer discounts to your new customers. Even something as simple as recognition can speak volumes.
• Ask for their feedback every time they make a purchase. And keep in touch with your customers.

The harder you try to retain your customer, the better bond you form with them.

Focus on the most effective services you can provide to your customers for a better experience.

Next time leave no stone unturned in making your customers happy!

There's no doubt that technology is growing fast, and people are adapting more quickly than ever before. Talk about any generation, the kids, teenagers or adults, almost everyone is caught up with a device. While there's no doubt that all sectors are leaping to become better, the education industry is no exception.

Yes, technology is making education better, and one such technology is chatbots. So, what is a chatbot, anyway? In a nutshell, it's a software that allows for a messaging style or conversational interface that simulates human interaction.

How can we rise to the occasion and use chatbots in education? Let's start with the why.

It's a Fresh Experience 🤩

We all know that youngsters tend to adapt faster to the latest technologies and are excited by new forms of learning. While to no one's surprise, students (at all levels) do use some form of messaging service to communicate with each other and, occasionally, with their teachers.

These may include Google Classrooms, and other class management systems which allows them to build a better understanding of the subject, favouring the learning process.

With chatbots, this process can be replicated on a large scale, empowering students to discuss any topic with an "expert", ask queries, and help validate their understanding of different topics.

While distractions will always play a part when students have access to such technologies, the trick is to keep them engaged with value-centric learning material, which is often easier said than done.

An easy-to-reach Mentor that's always available 👩🏻‍💼

One of the hardest parts of teaching is reaching out to every student. Also, research shows that an average teacher manages 45 students, and at times, it's hard for the teacher to reach out to each of them individually.

This is where chatbots can play a role. Employing chatbots to become mentors and study partners of students of all levels, we could help them understand and develop each topic at their own pace.

This approach will help students to get into a knowledge-hungry mode. It will also encourage them to share what they learned, creating a positive exchange of knowledge.

Plus, there are always a few kids who need more attention than others. For them, having someone to reach out to at all times can be a real game-changer. With chatbots, they can go back and forth as much as they like until the idea is clear.

It's time to make it easier for them to finish their assignments, meet deadlines and stay updated about important events.

Time saver for Teachers ⏳

If you are a teacher, think about the repeating questions you get every day; the time spent on supervising classwork, homework, assignments and more.

There are a lot of activities that eat up time for a teacher.  Chatbots can come to teacher's aid, reduce workload and save time.

Create bots that can do repetitive tasks. Collect the data to learn the progress of each student. Create reports for parents. Use the data with other apps in the workplace to generate a 360-degree view of the entire academia.

The new time can be spent on research or future course material or to connect with the entire class on a personal level.

It's time to check out, what are some of the direct use cases of chatbots in education.

To state, the sky is the limit.  Still, to give you a broad sense of understanding, here are a few handy ideas to start from.

Administrative assistant

The administrative staff at an institution go through a lot of repetitive tasks. Whether it be the student admission process, visitor management, fees or scholarship related questions or new changes in operations, they have to repeat their work process over and over.

A bot can easily handle 90% of these questions with ready-made answers. It is easy to create and maintain. Guide the staff or student to right resources without the need for real human interaction.

If you can create one chatbot to address each of the problems mentioned above, the work-efficiency will be top-notch.

Course selector

Prospective students may able to browse through the courses listed on an educational institution's website. Yet, they will still have questions before they can make a decision. Their questions can be related to fees, scholarship availability, duration of the course or the impact of the course on their careers and more.

Answering each and everyone is a hurdle. To make the enrollment smooth, use a chatbot that makes it easier to get the answers to common questions. There will be questions, that cannot be answered by the chatbot.

Such questions can be directed to the right person, and you can get back to the student via email. A course selector bot will be helpful to both the student and the staff.

Mini-tutor

Chatbots are useful assistants to teachers. No, they cannot replace teachers. It can function as their virtual assistant to explain common concepts interactively.

Making an interactive chatbot to teach a complex concept is far better than putting the content in a slide-show. Slide-shows or web pages and even books are one-dimensional.

Sharing content using interaction is two-dimensional and more appealing to students. The idea is to break apart complex concepts that can be digested easily by the students.

Please remember that you cannot use a chatbot to teach just any subject or concept. Pick out concepts that are taught systematically every year. If those concepts can be converted into a conversation, then you can successfully create a mini-tutor.

Interactive Quizzes

Quizzes are like exams that validate the knowledge of a student, and yet it does not give you the feel of writing an actual exam. They are meant to be a fun way to test students.

It's easy to hard code quiz material inside a conversation. Every time, the student hits the wrong answer, the chatbot will tell them so.

We even have customers who have created interactive quiz chatbots to engage their users and capture their interest. It's simple to create, and teachers can easily see all the answers attempted by the students.

Student-Parent Feedback

In every institution or organization, feedback is critical to growth and management. The tough part is to capture honest and regular feedback at the right intervals.

Most often, it is the lack of a proper framework to collect and measure feedback that is lacking. Chatbots can come to the rescue there as well. The first step is to find clear and concise questions that need to be asked about a course or the performance of a teacher. Refrain from asking too many questions.

Add them to a chatbot and also collect the profile of the student or parent who fills it in. Since it's a conversation, they are more likely to complete the chat and give you all the details.

Introduce these chatbots at the right intervals. They can fill it up anywhere, on any device, at any time at their convenience.

Once the data is collected, it can be aggregated to see the bigger picture and make better decisions powered by data.

It's the best time to try chatbots 👍

"Every business is a technology business", a mantra for the concluded decade. And this applies to the educational industry as well. As you are reading this post, already a wide range of industries have adapted to chatbots, the list includes automotive, telecom, and finance companies.

As you are reading this blog, both enterprises and startups alike are taking the next step, adopting smart services like chatbots into their organizations. And a similar trend is being followed in education as well.

Chatbots in education is way more than a piece of software as they not only facilitate student's learning process but also assist teachers by easing out their teaching processes. That's why, in the coming decade, educational chatbots will play a more significant role in the learning cycle.

"Better early, than late."

Wrapping Up 🤗

The younger generations are typically among the first to embrace new tech, and recent trends are showing a massive move towards the chatbot adaptation only.

Traditionally, the educational sector is a bit slower than the rest to adapt to new technology. Still, industry leaders have recognized the value of chatbots as a cost-effective, simple way to engage more students and streamline their processes.

Students (or teachers) can interact with a chatbot and get a response in seconds, eliminating the need for traditional email accounts or online portals. This is why the adaptation is way quicker than you'd probably expect.

A chatbot is very flexible towards its application, and it acts more than just a tool. It improves access to education by its unique way of interaction. It is neutral and unbiased. It does not consider the resources, timing, background or demographic of the student.

With a chatbot building platforms like Collect.chat, you can deploy chatbots on all your channels with a single click.

Now it's your time to share thoughts on how chatbots in education would transform the industry. Let us know what you think in the comment section below.

You could have the best-looking website in the world, but if it's not driving traffic, you might as well go offline.

Think of it as people who visit the gym, get personal tours, but never sign up!

Or as people who window-shop at the mall, all day every day

Or worse, people who enter a restaurant, browse through the menu for 20 minutes straight, and then decide to leave.

You get the drift right?

Experiencing a low website conversion rate is essentially a bundle of paradoxes:

1. You experience slower sales even with moderate-to-high customer traffic.

2. You get fewer leads despite investing millions in setting a customer care team.

3. You're constantly barraged by negative feedback on various platforms despite doing your best to stay digitally active and financially afloat.

4. Your user abandons cart at the last moment and never returns despite spending hours browsing on the website.

In a nutshell, no matter what you do, you can't get the numbers on your side. We'll tell you why. It is possible that your website is engulfed in deep-rooted problems in the way it is functioning and more importantly, how users are perceiving it.

So let's look at the top-10 factors that are causing your website to experience consistently dropping conversion rates and what you can do about it:

1. You're Making An Offer That Visitors Are Refusing

Making the right first impression in the website business can make all the difference. Your homepage in this case becomes the 'face of your brand.' If there's too much chaos, your user will never face you again (pun intended). For instance, greeting the users with long and complex sentences, using crammed up content, putting up outdated images and unbearably slow-loading videos etc. can leave them confused, frustrated, and angry.

Simply, if the users don't understand "What's in it for them?," they'll never visit your website again.

A Case Study Worth Considering

Hunter Branch, a digital marketing consultant, boosted SEO traffic for one of his clients by 600% in just 24 months! Sounds hard to believe, right? Here's one of the things he did to enhance traffic from a content perspective:

1. He started conducting an in-depth audit of the available content on the website by using Google Analytics and Google Search Console. The results were astounding! He found that out of hundreds of blogs, only ten were driving sufficient traffic. Surprisingly, he unpublished 90% of all the written content.
2. He then focused on revamping and republishing the ones that had immense potential but weren't driving too much traffic. Using long-tail keywords and adding more relevant, insight-driven content helped at this stage.
3. The remaining blogs that couldn't be salvagedA  were kept unpublished to be used for future reference and had 301 redirects to the homepage or other value-driven content  assets.

The end-result: Only 30 blogs survived the audit but were generating more traffic than ever!

Let's look at another example.

Story-Telling At Its Best: Airbnb

Notice how the brand uses:

• A personalised story-telling technique and uses conversational content to engage users.
• Crystal clear images and full-bleed videos that transport the user into a different world instantly and effectively.
• Icons, minimal content, and a clean navigation layout for a stellar user experience.

Biggest Takeaway: People are hardwired to hearing visually-driven stories, so make sure yours is a beautiful, resonating, and SEO-driven one.

2. Your Web Presence On Mobile Is Making Users Immobile

If given a chance, which of the two websites shown above would you like to view? The mobile-optimized one or the standard one? No brownie points for guessing which one would lead to better conversion rates.

Let's take another example: Tell us when was the last time you switched on your laptop to visit Amazon.com to buy those speakers you've been eyeing for ages? We'd say never, right?

Users today are increasingly browsing websites and social media platforms on-the-go. Even with their restricted mobile data connections, they expect a fast-loading website that's optimized for the smartphone of today.

If your users are busy scrolling from left to right and zooming in and out to read the content, chances are they'll never return again.

Plus, you'll lose out on organic search rankings which will definitely plummet your conversion rate to the lowest possible numbers. So make your website mobile-friendly to stay relevant in the user's mind.

3. Your Website is Unreachable - Quite Literally

A website that doesn't offer users the opportunity to reach out to the brand in a logical and clear way is like a hotel which does not have a reception area or a help desk. Unthinkable, correct?

Let's take a look at a bad and a good example of using CTA strategically and effectively.

Here's a bad example where the CTA gets lost in the background:

Below, we have a good example where the CTA clearly stands out:

Biggest Takeaway: A 'Contact Us' form no longer qualifies as a dynamic CTA strategy. In fact, it is outrageously generic. The need of the hour is to insert innovative features such as live chat, Call-To-Action (CTA) buttons etc. in your website which empowers users to reach to you anytime, anywhere, and as easily as possible.

4. You're Not Driving Traffic From Different Sources

If you're only focusing on getting users via direct means, it may take ages for you to reach your target conversion rate.

Don't get us wrong, getting direct traffic is great. However, your website traffic also comprises of other integral factors such as number of pages clicked, time spent on each section, number of visitors basis the time/day, among other things that need to be tracked and consistently worked upon.

Plus, remember that apart from the direct traffic (when people type out the URL in the address bar to visit your website), you can use indirect marketing means such as email, social media posts, referrals, paid search, organic search etc. to drive more footfall to your website. Whatever be the case, the end-goal must be engage your users, prevent bounce rates/cart abandonment, and ultimately boost conversion rates to an optimum level.

Handy tip: You can track the volume of direct traffic on Google Analytics. When it comes to driving direct and indirect traffic, make sure to align your branding and marketing strategies with your ideal target audience so that they become loyal customers and raving fans of the brand!

5. Users Literally Lose Their Way On Your Website

Poor navigation that's layered and complex or worse, does not have a navigational structure at all - like the one shown below - can leave your users high-and-dry:

Believe it or not, this is a real website that doesn't segregate its content into a neatly-structured navigation. To top it off, the content font is barely legible, and the unrestricted use of colors is enough to give anyone a headache.

In comparison, the following example by Kiehl clearly outlines a clean navigation structure (even though it comprises of a mega menu) and allows for a seamless user experience - the ultimate goal of every business, right?

Biggest Takeaway: You can experiment a little and get creative by using the hamburger menu and neatly laying out options for the user. Plus, you should ensure that your navigation is responsive and laid out as clearly and simply as possible.

Three simple questions to ask yourself when brainstorming on navigation ideas from the user's perspective include:

• What's the starting point for the user when they come to your landing page
• Where will they want to go next?
• Which sections did they visit in the past?

6. Your Websites is Forever in the 'Buffering' Status

More than 47% customers today expect a website to load in 2 seconds or less! Additionally, a staggering 79% of customers would prefer not returning to a site with a poor  loading time.

There are two things that annoy users to no end. One, involves a slow-loading webpage and two, when Starbucks runs out of the customer's favorite spiced pumpkin latte drink. While we can't do anything about the latter, we can certainly help with the former.

Before we get into the specifics, it is important to understand the importance of having a website that loads quickly and gives instant results. Recently, the Google webmaster team declared that they would start ranking websites based on the page loading time.

Case in point: If you want your website to top the list of Google search engine rankings, you need to accelerate your website's loading speed. Adding further proof, data suggests even a second's delay in page load time can result:

• 11% reduced page views
• 16% lowered user satisfaction
• 7% loss in conversions

Let's take Walmart's case for example. The global brand enhanced their site speed and reaped the following benefits (as shown in the image):

The end-result: It was seen that visitors who converted received pages that loaded two times faster as opposed to those who did not convert. Need we say more?

In terms of steps you can take, there are numerous ways to optimize your website's speed time, some of which include:

• Compressing and optimizing your content and images.
• Placing JavaScript and CSS in external files.
• Enabling HTTP keep-alive response headers.
• Evaluating your plug-ins.

7. Your Landing Page Has Too Many Pop Ups

From auto-playing multimedia videos and gifs to annoying pop ups ads that literally scare the users away, using too many pop ups can act as a total buzz kill for any website.

Users don't need overbearing theme songs, unnecessary animations, flashy advertising, etc. to understand the brand better. It's the era of minimalism and this aesthetic approach works beautifully for websites as well.

That said, brands that use the pop-up feature sparingly and effectively can use this feature to their advantage as shown below:

Instead of placing the pop-up in your face, the brand - Pipcorn -  conveniently places it in the bottom-right corner, making it feel authoritative and inviting for the users.

Another brand, Brunomagli uses colorful visuals and crisp copy and delivers on the pop up usage effectively and interestingly:

8. Internal Linking is Absent or Vaguely Inserted

Using internal links to your advantage requires a certain level of mastery and comes in handy if your Google rankings are going down. You want to make sure that you're not overdoing it while budging the users to relevant content.

Plus, you've to ensure that the users get directed to the appropriate pages on your website to improve organic rankings and you want to empower users to feel satisfied and happy as opposed to feeling exhausted and confused when they leave your website.

To achieve this, there are three important things to keep in mind:

1. The end-goal should be to improve a visitor's user experience.
2. You can try to update old articles with new links. Additionally, for every new article, try to link it to at least 3 old articles.
3. It is critical that you link the most sensible anchor text instead of highlighting vague phrases to the pages with the highest conversion rates:

9. Your Conversion Tracking Game Is Weak

Believe us when we say that conversion tracking is actually an art and a science. If your SEO rankings are dropping, Google Analytics might be a good place to start. Fill out the form as demonstrated below and let the data-crunching begin:

After all, if you're not setting the right parameters to track your conversion rate, you'll never understand where you're going wrong. In the case of website, the trick lies in getting your numbers, data, and analytics in place to drive high traffic and leverage high conversion rates. Plus, remember that all your marketing and branding efforts can be based on this one crucial element.

Handy tip: Google Analytics offers multiple conversion segments for you to pick and choose from such as: Effect of PPC on Organic Search Traffic, Effect of Organic Search on PPC, Effect of Social Media on Organic Search, Effect of Email on Direct Traffic etc.

Final Thoughts: The Most Important Takeaway For Today

All things said and done, if you're not embracing the above mentioned strategies, your conversion rates will forever remain on the lower or non-existent end.

But, if you don't know how and where to begin, we suggest start you start by investing your time, energy, and resources into integrating a conversion tool can be on the site that can help:

• Measure the conversions accurately.
• Attract the right audience, at the right time, in the right frequency.
• Improve the website's functionality and usability based on the user's requirements and feedback provide.

In our humble opinion, the best way to achieve this is by having humane yet intuitive conversations.

We all know that the evolving chatbots of today are more than capable of:

• Driving engaging conversions.
• Allowing your website to enjoy an ever-growing traffic through iterative improvements.
• Offering valuable insights into genuine vs uninterested buyers.
• Providing a holistic perspective of where your business is and where it is heading from a user's view point as well as from the marketing perspective.

We'll leave you now with enough food for thought. Take your time and rethink your conversion optimization strategy with informed decision-making and data-driven website optimization strategies highlighted above to guide you on your website conversion journey. All the best and Godspeed!

Being in business today is tough. It’s no longer enough to meet your client’s expectations; you must exceed them. If they’re surfing the web at three in the morning with a burning question about your business, they expect you to answer it.

Regular business hours don’t mean much in the online society we live in. What does count is that if your company can’t provide the client with the answers they want, someone else will! But, before you start looking for staff to work the graveyard shift, there’s an easy answer –chatbots.

With a well-designed chatbot in place, clients can get simple queries answered in seconds,24/7. The customer gets the answers that they need at a time convenient to them. There’s no need for them to disappear off to a competitor’s site. It’s good news for the business as well. The chatbot can handle those annoying, repetitive queries while employees focus on other tasks.

The key here is that the chatbot must be well-designed. It must operate flawlessly—ideally, the person on the other end should believe that they’re dealing with a human.

Getting a Well-Designed Chatbot

Having a chatbot designed used to be quite an expensive process. When chatbots first came about, it required some serious coding skills to get them to work flawlessly. That kind of experience and skillset came at a high cost, putting chatbots out of reach for smaller enterprises.

Fortunately, that’s changed over the last few years. Hiring someone to design the perfect - chatbot is still pricey. But you don’t have to hire a designer. Our platform walks you through the process step by step.

You don’t have to worry about the backend programming at all – we’ll handle all that. All you need to do is to pick the template best suited to your needs and follow the instructions. You get to focus on what you want the chatbot to be able to do.

We’ll handle all the other bits in between.

What are the markings of a great chatbot?

A chatbot should always be designed with the end-user in mind. You want the user experience to be as pleasant as possible. Here are some of the things that define a great chatbot.

Make it Human-friendly

Do choose an avatar for your chatbot that is appealing. It can be a real human or it can be your brand logo or mascot. Make the experience more authentic by considering the way the bot asks and answers questions. Your tone should always be professional, but keep in mind that this is a conversation. Do ensure that natural language is used and try to inject some personality into the answers.

Give it a Personality

Remember that language gives personality. The style of conversation you use will define the character of your business and team itself. It's okay to say that "This is a chatbot". Sometimes pretending to be a human can backfire raise the expectations and backfire. The chatbot will have its own way of interacting and people are used to it by now. Adding delays between messages is not going to solve the real problem, which is customer interaction and data collection.

Keep the Conversation simple

Take a linear approach to designing your conversations. If you introduce a lot of branching or jumping between messages, it can ultimately lead to user dissatisfaction. It's more important for the chatbot to be "easy-to-use" than being intelligent. The bot will not be able to address all the issues or questions that your potential customer may have. But as long as you keep them engaged, you get the opportunity to grab their contact information and get back to them later.

Less typing, More clicking

If you design a chatbot that asks the user to type a lot, then that generally leads to lower completion rates. The more space you give the user to type a question, the more intelligent your chatbot should be. And yet, you may be far from getting the data that you needed. You should move away from the traditional approach of text-based questions to the more interactive questions like multi-choices, range sliders, feedback widgets etc. This gives a more vibrant effect to the chatbot and enhances the UX. Users can simply click and choose their answers. You also get the added benefit of getting a structured response. Structured answers help smoothen the integration process with other tools in your workflow.

Let it match your Brand

Everything about the bot should match your brand image, from the personality of the bot to the colours you choose for the text. You must consider your brand throughout each step. Take the example pic below.

Ignoring what the bot is saying for now, what kind of company do you think that this bot is representing? Would you think it was a traditional company? Or perhaps something a little more fun and funky?

Chances are you’d think the company was unconventional. This would work well in a non- traditional industry. It would fit for a trendy “new kid on the block” with a client base who is less conventional.

Would it work as well for a traditional insurance company with a more conservative client base? Would you consider the company staid and reliable? There is nothing wrong with the colour purple as such, but it’s not going to work in every instance. Purple typically conveys wealth and power. It’s also a colour usually favoured by women.

If you’re dealing with a conservative customer base consisting mostly of men, it could be perceived as too jarring. Let’s compare that with a bot created by our software. You’ll see what we came up within the image below.

We’ve stuck with a more traditional blue and white palette here. Both men and women like blues and greens. They’re as close to gender neutral as you’ll get.

What about other Colors?

You should choose colours that work for your brand. Here are some other examples to consider:

Red: Is an energetic colour that’s very emotional. It promotes a sense of urgency. Whether it would work well in a chatbot is somewhat questionable. It might be seen as the equivalent of shouting at your audience.

Green: This is another excellent colour selection for a bot. It is a relaxing colour that appeals to both men and women. It’s also unusual in this setting and so could seem fresh and new.

Orange: Orange is also somewhat emotional, but it’s not as in your face as red. A pale orange could make a useful accent colour for a bot. It’s fresh and original and good for promoting sales. It doesn’t have the drama that red does so that it could work well.

Black: At first glance, black might seem a little boring. After all, it’s not even a colour. That said, it also very elegant and seemed sumptuous. This might work well for an exclusive, luxe brand.

Yellow: This sunshine colour is perfect for a brand that’s all about joy. It’s an unusual colour to choose for a bot, and that might be the very reason it could work for your brand. These are just some ideas to get you started.

If you’d like to learn even more about the different meanings of colours, check out this infographic from Design Advisor.

Final Notes

When it comes to creating the perfect chatbot, there are a lot of variables to consider, which is why we’ve tried to simplify the process as much as possible: we’ll handle the coding, while you focus on choosing the perfect design elements. Matching your design to your target audience’s expectations is essential for getting the most mileage out of your new chatbot.

How often is it that you get website visitors, but none of them wants to buy your products or services? Or maybe you notice that your web traffic is growing, you are getting more click-through rates, but you can't seem to be making those sales.

Get our drift? We're talking conversion here.

And if you don't pay attention to that, your whole business could sink like a ship.

There's more to conversion rate optimisation - it's the bread and butter of digital marketers. To understand how conversions work and what you can do to address the issues, let's dive into them below.

What is Conversion?

A conversion happens when a visitor on your website decides to take an affirmative action (such as filling up a survey or feedback form, signing up for newsletters, etc.) which ends up resulting in the purchase of your product. The process begins even before your visitor is on your website, starting from the ads you post online and your website pages that show up on search engine result pages when visitors look up a product or specific services.

And once they land on your website through those channels, the whole workflow starts from navigating from your landing page to arriving at the final checkout window through a series of sequential events. Or in short, a conversion is when your site visitor does what you want or performs the intended action (or set of actions) you expected.

What is Conversion Rate Optimisation?

Let's say you've got web traffic of up to 20,000 visitors a month and a 100  of them end up buying your products. Your conversion rate would be 20,000 divided by 1,000 for the month, which gives you 2% (that is a small number for a marketer). conversion rate optimisation (CRO) is a series of tweaks you make to your website and its various elements to make that 2% conversion rate to higher numbers.

This could mean changing the style of your web-forms, revamping the visual designs of your landing pages, or even fostering more customer engagement through the addition of chatbots into your sales funnel.

The Different Stages of Conversions (or the Sales Funnel)

You may be asking how exactly chatbots make a difference. To understand that, let's map out the different stages of the sales funnel.

Awareness

This is when your visitor lands up on your website or social media page. They have no info about the product and are just looking around. In short, it's the top of your sales funnel, which we dub as the first interaction. This is the moment where you get a chance to grab their attention, inform, and leave them feeling good enough about the visit to come back again. A chatbot here can ask questions and attend customer queries. And if the process goes smoothly, you might even get your customer's email.

Interest

Moving to the second stage, where you ideally want to nurture your subscribers and not push your products onto them. This is where your chatbots feed them more and more content, educating them about the benefits (not features) and how it can make their lives easier. You have to focus on their problems, how to solve them and be very subtle about how your product does that (and yes, chatbots excel at this). The goal is to gather more information and data about your customers at this stage and profile them (not necessarily make a sale).

Evaluation

At this stage, your customer keeps tabs on regular updates and uses the info you send via newsletters. They follow your blog, read what you post, and they keep returning for more content. This is where chatbots can perform an educational role by sharing with them links to relevant content, offers, and free educational resources to inform and educate your customers. But this stage only happens after your "lead nurturing" is well underway.

Commitment

Now your customer finally decides to click and sign up for a free trial of your product. Maybe they've already tried out your ebooks, resources, and now want to test the real thing. Adding a chatbot here can help collect feedback from your customers and learn what made them decide the first step towards the purchase. A chatbot can ask specific questions and give you insights into your inbound marketing, such as what's working and what's not. As you collect more data through these interactions, you'll learn what your customers want and gather insights that help you improve your services.

Sales

Congratulations! Your customer finally decides to make the actual purchase. And this is when you truly appreciate the advantage your chatbots bring. Once your customer likes the trial and buys the product, you've built a solid relationship. There's a higher chance that your customer will return for future purchases, and you'll get to know that through user and experience feedback (data from your customer which chatbots consistently collect and analyse).

10 Ways Chatbots Impact Your Conversion Rates

Now that you understand how chatbots fit into your sales funnel, the big question is - do they work? Do they deliver on their promised conversational capabilities, and can they change the game completely?

The answer is - Yes! They help you increase conversion, and they're changing the world. There are a ton of users using messaging and social media apps these days. Regular apps are becoming a thing of the past since chatbots are taking over customer interactions and engagement.

Of course, building a great chatbot is not enough. Knowing how and where to use them effectively is what helps a chatbot unleash its true potential.
If you're serious about making more sales, here are ten ways to use them to optimise your conversion rates.

1. Customise conversations with your audience

Every visitor is unique and arrives at your website through different marketing channels. Some may come from your online ads while the rest may arrive at your site from your Facebook page or social media outlets. Depending on where you get your users from, you can load up custom chatbots which interact with them. Custom chatbots can say the right lines depending on where your user comes from thus delivering a more personalised experience.

2. Embed them In blogs

Your customers are bound to land on your blog, medium articles, or website content eventually. You can embed chatbots in these places and automatically trigger them whenever a user reads or hovers over certain sections of your content. This is an ideal way to collect personalised opinions and find out what's going through the mind of the user and how/what made them view that post or piece of content.

3. Interview and help your leads

When a lead is browsing through various channels, you can deploy chatbots at the appropriate locations and collect more data. For example, if a person is browsing your blog, a chatbot can pop up and invite them to sign up for your mailing list. Another instance where you can optimise your CRO rate is letting your chatbot interview leads who stay on your pages for quite some time. These bots can ask a few questions and redirect them to sales pages or promotional offers depending on how they answer. You can even interview your leads further and identify at what stage of the sales funnel they're in. Using that info, you can redesign or optimise your site elements and see how you can convert your leads into deals better.

4. Connect with your sales team

Sometimes you lose leads when your sales team gets intrusive. You can set up a chatbot at different stages of the sales funnel and optimise them so that they appear or get triggered when certain visitor criteria are met. Users will have the option to close them if they don't need help and when they want answers to more in-depth questions besides the ones your bots are designed to answer, they can be connected directly to your sales team. Based on the type of visitors and answers to questions, you can also profile your users and redesign your marketing strategy based on the data and insights received.

You'll discover things which never crossed your mind about your customers this way. You can even segment your target audience into different groups and run A/B split testing on them by designing the elements of your website differently. For every use-case, chatbots will give you precise results and dig deeper into the consumer landscape. This method lets you know how well you're doing when you're "testing the waters" with new approaches.

5. Engage more website visitors

The following is a behaviour commonly seen among website visitors. .They browse a website and then close the tab or move onto something else. There is a small window of opportunity to grab their attention. By positioning your chatbots at the right locations, you can invite and engage your visitors. You can host mini polls on your website, make the bot give suggestions whenever users are viewing items or products on your website. For example, if you're selling T-shirts online and the visitor is browsing, the bot could ask questions like what colours do they prefer and what designs/artwork do they like. In this way, you discover and learn more about your users' preferences and tastes while they're browsing. It's all about setting the right triggers.

6. Interact in the language they speak

Not all your visitors are from the U.S. or speak English. You can use chatbots to connect with clients in their local languages and get translated conversations of the chat transcripts. Different chatbots can be deployed for different countries and optimised further to make interactions more personal.

According to Itai Leibowitz, Product Manager of Facebook's Messenger Platform, "Businesses that take people's messaging behaviours and preferences into account are the ones that tend to see the most success."

7. Integrate with other tools

The chatbot alone can only create conversations and give you the data. You need to define a framework and decide how to use the conversational data that is coming towards you. For this, you have to integrate your chatbot inside your sales funnel so that you can see the information in a stretch in your analytics tool. Seamless integrations act a path for data to be accumulated over time, giving you a clearer picture of what's happening with your online business. Chatting has become native to customers around the world. That is one activity people spend a lot of time in.  So adding conversations to your sales funnel is the next best thing you can do.

8. Improve your webpages and offerings

Using chatbots, clubbed with the power of data analytics, you can collect raw data, clean it up, and discover how to improve your existing products and services. From reducing bounce rates to optimising your site better, you can redesign your products, landing pages, and anything else related to your marketing strategy based on your customers' wants (urgency, not needs), thus leading to more sales.

9. Experiment with different conversation styles

If you're optimising your conversion rates, it's a good idea to optimise your chatbot experiences too. You can change your conversation style and make your chatbots friendlier, interactive, and engaging by customising or redefining their scripts. Just as there are various ways to pitch a product, there are multiple ways to talk to your audience. You never know what will work better. This will help you redefine your brand's tone, voice, and customer outlook by redefining your chatbot experience.

10. Automate, Automate

In today's modern world, customers want chatbots. You can use chatbots to automate your drip campaigns and help them book services, requests, and read the latest content. You can book meetings and schedule appointments via the bot. You now possess the arsenal to optimise every conversion through meaningful conversations and automate micro/macro tasks at every step of the sales funnel using them.

These are just a few tricks that you can pull from your sleeve to push your conversion rate from 2% to 15% and beyond! Don't believe us? Here's what Nick Sudhas from Elite LASIK Marketing had to say about acquiring leads and converting them using these bots.

The entire process of getting a lead, educating them, sending them in the right direction and then closing the winning deal is a time-consuming task. Automated conversations can help you keep the thought process of your customers in check as they move through this cycle.  These days, chatbots are changing the game for B2B businesses. They are heavily used to bump up their CRO.

Start taking advantage of chatbots today and make your business goals a reality.

Quick wit, unparalleled intellect, and deadpan humour are all the 'good' human-like qualities we associate with AI chatbots, seen only in Hollywood movies and, of course, the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

But, this seemingly smart AI machine, is far from achieving the Pulitzer one day (contrary to what Kris Hammond, Chief Scientist at Narrative Science may say). First things first, if you're not familiar with the concept of a chatbot, let's make it simpler for you.

A chatbot, essentially, is an automated text-based virtual assistant. Think about Google Assistant or Siri. If experience is anything to go by, AI chatbots have been known to be exacting as they are calculating, inaccurate as they are data-driven, and dumb as they are disruptive (in both senses of the word).

Don't believe us? Let's look at the reality that's shaping our future as AI chatbots are making virtual inroads into our daily lives. The following points will put some things into perspective.

AI Chatbots: Super-villain or Superhero 🤔

Most virtually-intelligent machines spin an apocalyptic tale, which may hold some truth to it. And no, we're not talking about the world ending in a dramatic fashion. The 'apocalypse' we're referring to entails the multi-dimensional problems AI chatbots pose today. Let's look at the other half of the coin for a change.

AI Chatbot Challenges:

• Extensive and Expensive Training for Formulaic Tasks
  
  This one's a no-brainer. Truly productive and useful AI-type chatbots require months of training, utmost care, complex resources, and tremendous monetary investment. So, if you're looking to leverage the expertise of an AI chatbot, you may have your work cut out for you. Case in point, Facebook's pilot "Project M" where human intervention was required 70% of the times, a number that's not impressive at all, considering it's the brain-child of a tech-giant.
  
  Another point worth mentioning is how the wrong dataset can negatively alter your customer experience. We know that only once the chatbot is deployed that it can be used to test the waters. So, if the wrong dataset is used to train the bot, then all the effort taken will go down the drain. How so? One, because the bot will have to be retrained, thus requiring more effort and greater investment. Two, the customers would have lost their trust and patience in your product leading to permanent damage to your branding and customer experience.
  
• Inaccurate Content, Incorrect Context
  
  They say you can take a horse to the water, but you can't make it drink, and this saying applies beautifully to AI chatbots as well. Being programmed to respond to 'specific' keywords, they don't have the superpower of 'reading between the lines'.
  
  Plus, despite trillions and trillions of bits of data ingestion and intensive efforts, there are high chances that an AI chatbot will give you a dumb answer (for lack of a better term) in response to your query and will fail to understand the context entirely. Additionally, any attempts at sarcasm or metaphorical references will go in vain, so don't even bother. Naturally, this gives rise to an enraged and frustrating user experience, which can prove to be fatal for any brand.
• Limited Applications In Every Sense of the Word
  
  Whether it's the scope, area, or application, an AI chatbot's information bank is limited. This leads to generic responses and unsatisfied users. Some of the major misgivings users face when conversing with a 'stupid' bot include (but are not limited to):
  
  -> Illogical or inappropriate responses.
  -> Convoluted answers.
  -> Unnatural, artificial, and inauthentic responses.
  -> Repetition of responses for different questions.
  -> Inability to recognise the user's expectations, wants, and intent.
• Mass Appeal or Going Niche (The Chicken-Egg Problem)
  
  Another major concern is the ongoing battle between catering to the masses or embracing a niche audience. Popular AI chatbots like Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant cater to a general audience. As you may have guessed, this comes with some obvious shortcomings:
  
  One, it's hard to take the 'sophisticated' approach when developing them. If they're not easily understood, they're not really a viable option.
  
  Two, by extension, their 'intelligence' becomes limiting for all the stakeholders involved, especially for the audience at large. This makes sense since these chatbots are developed based on a decision-tree logic where the chatbot's response is triggered depending on fixed keywords from the customers.
  
  Three, going niche would mean a restricted audience and limited appeal which isn't a wise decision, financial or otherwise (at least at this stage of chatbot maturity). All in all, the advent of AI chatbot emerges as a bit of a catch-22 situation, don't you agree? So, what are our options? We have one word for you: UX.

Why  UX > AI for Chatbots

Imagine this. Say your brand strategy requires you to

• Humanize your brand and differentiate from your competition
• Converse one-on-one with your customers on a global scale
• Enhance user engagement 3X and widen your target audience
• Create meaningful conversations and result-driven outcomes
• Address customer concerns without any delay
• Deliver a “personalized” experience where the customer feels truly valued
• Undertake feedback-driven tools such as surveys etc.  

In such scenarios, you may wonder whether these objectives are truly attainable? We say, yes. By way of an intuitive, conversational chatbot expertly designed with exceptional UX features. A productive UX design that entertains and engages with all your customers all the time. Simply put, at Collect.chat, great UX is not only about creating a “chat window,” it’s also about insightful writing, technical investment, and continuous iterations.

We've embraced the most simplistic and obvious route to create a bot that embodies your brand's traits and feels human. This ethos has driven us to our collective invention, the "Collect.chat bot." Our chatbots can qualify and convert your visitors into customers by engaging them in conversations rather than dull, boring forms. Are you intrigued yet? Here’s a snapshot of our chatbot below

Let's understand how our rule-based chatbots can not only compete with the AI counterparts but outperform them as well.

Our working principle

Our transactional chatbot pre-defines the conversation by considering all possible conversation cases to create a "smart conversation flow."

This translates into meaningful, detailed exchanges that are universal, prompt, personalised, and humanising. Following are the key characteristics of such bots:

1. Simplified, Organic, Casual UX
   
   Our team of intuitive designers work towards understanding user behaviour and how each conversation would be scripted, which leads to an enhanced UX. This ultimately contributes to smart and naturalistic chat flows providing answers that are neither dumb nor vague. Caution: On the contrary, they may be fun, seamless, or downright real.
   
2. Easy-to-Use
   
   This chatbot can be easily implemented in three quick steps by a professional or a novice. All you have to do is simply follow these steps
   
   -> Use the drag-and-drop style bot-builder to add relevant questions and customise.
   -> Install and share the bot using HTML code, a Wordpress plugin, Blog posts, or Links.
   -> Get instant notifications via email, Collect.chat dashboard, and Zapier/API callbacks
   
   Voila, you're done!
   
3. Conversational, Proactive, and Multi-Purpose Interface
   
   Using this user-friendly technology, you can build email lists, generate leads, schedule appointments, leverage guidance on products/services, collect feedback, and draft surveys among other things.
   
4. Integrative and Intuitive Technology
   
   If your bot is created without having the dual ability to integrate with other tools and automate tedious tasks, it is rather pointless. With our Zapier’s “Catch Hook” integration, you can connect Collect.chat with hundreds of apps in your workflow like Salesforce, Freshdesk, Google sheets, Slack - that too, without any complex coding! The process is straight forward. Collect.chat collects responses from the visitor and triggers an event into Zapier via webhooks. From there, Zapier pushes the data to the app of your choice. A win-win for all.
   
5. Customise Away
   
   You can use Collect.chat in different ways and forms. It all depends on your current needs. Some examples include using it as a widget, embedding it in your website's content, using it to make interactive blogs, or making conversational landing pages.
   
   (A honest confession: In instances where the bot fails to handle the task/concern at hand, it simply redirects the enquiry to a human via email or chat. One way or another, our escalation workflow mechanism in place ensures that the issue is addressed as promptly and as humanly, or in this case as virtually as possible.)

AI or Transactional Chatbots: A Reality Check

We aren't particularly an anti-AI chatbot lot. We are aware that AI chatbots come with a sense of novelty and have emerged as a Herculean task for innovators and developers alike, confirmed by the fact that in the case of chatbots, words do all the talking and working. It is this central idea that encouraged us onto the path 'less-travelled' of birthing a 'bot brain' that actually works. Taking a bite of the reality sandwich, we have arrived at our journey with pretty-much three-fold objectives:

1. To innovate rule-based chatbots that double up as conversational digital personalities, ones that answer user questions with 'smart' answers, every single time.
   
2. To bridge the ever-widening gap between the audience' expectations and the chatbot’s capabilities by way of intuitive and personalised chat flows.
   
3. To link customer intent with bot action and everything in between with real conversations.

With all that said, it's up to you to decide what type of bot you should create for your use-case. Always, the best place to start is with transactional bots since they allow you to go into deployment and test the waters very quickly. Getting active feedback from your users is the best way to improve your bot. Within a week or month, you should be able to understand if you need an AI solution or will a transactional bot solve your problems. If you are wondering where to start with transactional bots, please watch this Quick Start video right here

Over at Collect.chat we ship chatbots. You can also call them conversational agents. We developed the platform with the aim to help anyone make a chatbot through simple drag and drop messages. After launching the product, the first thing we did was to create a Quick Start video to help users navigate the dashboard. That was coupled with a series of help docs and mini video tutorials.

Things went well. Most users were able to make chatbots in less than 30 minutes and deploy them to their websites. All it took was a copy-paste of the snippet code. Then we wanted to see what sort of chatbots our users created. Just a natural curiosity! This is where things started to get interesting.

Inside our team, we had discussed all the possible ways users can structure the conversation. How small changes can create a huge impact on the conversation and increase the output and more. We expected our users to pick up the cues naturally and make them as beautiful as possible. These expectations went south. To put it simply, not all our users had that brilliant imagination that we expected them to have.

But this was expected. After all, chatbots were new in the market. Most of them had heard of them, but only a handful had interacted with actual chatbots to understand to nuances of what makes a great conversation. Scripting a conversation is still an art in itself. This realisation led us to make templates for our customers. We took domain by domain; figured out the pain points and tailor-made chatbots using our platform to solve their problems. Plus we made it so that anyone can use it out-of-the-box.

An example is more powerful than precept.
- Aesops

This is an old proverb and very true to our times. Giving out a lot of advice or material on how to build a conversational agent is not very helpful. This is why I am sharing these examples to give you an idea of what is possible using Collect.chat. We will be looking at chatbot examples in the following domains:

• Education
• Startups
• Real-Estate
• Consulting
• Banking
• Hospitality
• Travel and Tourism
• Recruitment
• Digital Marketing
• Non Profits

Make your Education portals more interactive

When you run an educational institution, you are going to have a lot of inquiries from concerned parents and students on the courses you provide, the fees you charge and more. The questions are always the same. They have a repetitive nature and most of them do not bother visiting the FAQ section to get the answers. Information must be made available in an instant and if the bot cannot answer their queries, you are notified of the same via email and you can follow up the conversation from your inbox.

Grab this chatbot from here.

If you are a Startup, you can't miss a single lead

Setting up a website is the first thing you do when you are launching a startup of your own. Then you spend your dime on marketing to bring in a lot of traffic. It may be Google ads or Facebook marketing or cold-email campaigns. All your focus goes to getting the word out about your product or service. But what happens when a prospect actually visits your website. A majority of your traffic leaves the website without taking any action. This where you need to up your game. Having a proactive chatbot can change things around.

Grab this chatbot from here.

Learn what your Real-estate prospects are looking for

Real-estate is a tough business. Only the fiercest can survive and you to pull in all your arsenal, if you are hoping to make some conversions. The first step is to impress the customer and understand what they are looking for in a humane manner. That's exactly what this chatbot is trying to do. It gives you a glimpse into what type of buyers, you are attracting and what in particular they are looking for. Every agent has their niche. This bot will act as your assistant to help you understand and improve your opportunities.

Grab this chatbot from here.

Do a Pre-consultation to save you time

Every single visitor on the site can be a potential customer. And you won't like just to sit there and watch the opportunity pass by, would you? If you are in the consulting or service industry, you know how true this can be. Time is of the essence in this sector. You need to be able to interact with all your visitors and grab the data to figure out if your offering is a match for their problems. But how can you do it at scale? Having a chatbot to do the pre-consultation can save you many hours of work and get you the right leads at the right time.

Grab this bot from here.

Make it easy for Customers to reach you

As a bank or financial organisation, you may be offering multiple services. Each one will have its own internal department. Not all services can be automated. However, when it comes to learning what a particular user is looking for, the chatbot can come to your aid. In the above example, we are showing an insurance assistant that can cater to the need of someone who is looking for an insurance or assist someone who already has booked a scheme with you. This automation helps you to direct all genuine queries to your the concerned department right away. The same strategy can be applied across other services you offer.

Grab this bot from here.

Make Dining the best experience possible

The first impression matters, especially in the Hotel and Restaurant business. From the moment someone enters your hotel until they leave your premises, you have to ensure that they get the best possible service. This gives you repeating business. How can you give your users the same experience online? Giving them a form to order from may work to get the job done. If you were to replace those boring forms with a chatbot like the above you can make it aesthetically more pleasing and enjoyable. When customers love how you treat them, they will definitely make the recommendations to your place.

Grab this bot from here.

Be ready to greet your Visitors 24x7

"To travel is to live", this is the expectation with which travellers approach a travel service like yours. The old times were good when travellers could actually connect with a person, who would then explain the marvels that they could see on the trip. But times have changed. With the bulk of inquiries coming in, it is not humanly possible to answer every call. So what do you do? Use a travel booking tool like the one above. This will ask when they are coming, how many are coming, ask about their expectations and hand them over to you. Now all you got to do is hand over the right promotional material to these aspiring travellers.

Grab this bot from here.

Filter-out the finest Candidate for the job

When you post the availability of job, you get a ton of applications. Going through the resume of each one is hard. You can solve step one of hiring through this bot and save a lot of time. Do a prescreening of candidates who are interested. Ask them the right questions before you decide to call them. Filter through the submissions from the chatbot to understand who would be the right match for your organisation. Now you won't have to rely on a single page resume to make your decisions.

Grab this bot from here.

Add a lead magnet to your Digital presence

Digital marketing is a vast field and as a marketer, it is important to show your experience in your domain. It takes more than a portfolio to convince your prospects. Well, that's where you can use a chatbot like ours. Make your website more conversational and make every visitor feel he/she is welcomed. Get to know their pain points and give away content that might solve their issues. Route the data to your digital tools and gather as much data as possible on the visitor that you just had. Re-engage them using email campaigns and ads. Once you get their contact details, 50% of the work is done.

Grab this bot from here.

Accepting Donation should be a memorable experience

"If you ask nicely, you may get it", This is how it is in the world of charity. People are good at heart, by default, but you need to know "how-to-ask" to get them to spend their money. The chatbot in this example is trying to do that. It's sending a clear message about what the issue is and how someone can help those in need. This is more powerful than a random phone call to ask for a donation. You can also use chatbots to ask for volunteers at Non-Profits or NGOs. Ditch those static forms, be more human using our conversational chatbots.

Grab this bot from here.

I hope with these 10 examples, you get an inspiration to make a chatbot of your own. If you need more, you can visit our templates page.

The world of marketing and sales has reached a saturation point. There are plenty of options for customers to choose from. The margin of difference between competitors is growing lesser and lesser. The buying decision is decided by the experience the customer receives. Every user journey from the point they enter into business to the point they exit has to be exquisite. The expectations are much higher. Also, providing such an experience is no longer possible with human effort alone. You require automation and intelligence to back you up. One of the driving forces in the automation space has been chatbots. Chatbots have changed the landscape of customer communication. They have progressed from being a buzzword into a functional tool that every marketer is trying to learn,  understand and implement for their clients.

Here, I am sharing some of the insights and trends on chatbots that we have seen from our end based on the data that we have been collecting for the past year. We will also look at the reports from leading publications on the same matter. Tech giants like IBM, Facebook, Google and other leading corporates are increasingly promoting the use of these conversational agents. We can call them chatbots, virtual assistants,  conversational interfaces or simply automated chat. The effect they have on your business is enormous. They make your websites come alive. They start to engage your online audience, makes their experience interactive and most importantly they help you to capture data on your website visitors and convert them. There are many advantages benefits to having a chatbot.

• They cut down Operational Costs 💰
  
  Per year there are a reported 265 Billion Customer Requests. Businesses spent nearly $1.3 trillion to service these requests. Using Chatbots can help you save upto 30% of this.
  
  
• Chatbots empowers your Team 💪
  
  Chatbots will not entirely replace humans. Rather they will become the first-level support that filters a customer request and save you time.
  
  
• They boost your Brand Outlook 🙌
  
  The visual interaction offers a friendly experience and ensures a healthy rapport with your customer base spread across the world.
  
  
• It’s easier than making an App 💁‍♀️
  
  In the productivity category, chatbots outperform apps in all aspects of functionality and is more cost-effective.
  
  
• Millennials love Chatbots 👫
  
  The speed of communication and ease of use has given a sweet spot for chatbots in the Millennial audience compared to legacy tools.
  

Countries Obsessed with Chatbots

The above infographic is based on our own data from Aug 2017 to Jan 2019.  Our platform provides chatbots for websites. Therefore you are looking at countries who are engaging customers through the chatbot interfaces on their sites. As expected United States made it to the top of the list. There is much interest coming from India, the country with the second highest number of internet users. Enterprises are confident about the impact of chatbots, and they are harnessing the power that chatbots hold. The fact that our chatbots can be translated into any language meant Germany got third place. Closely following the UK and Brazil in the list, we had Spain, France, Canada, Italy, Australia and also the United Arab Emirates with a similar share.

BTW, if you are interested in jobs in United Arab Emirates, try Jooble.

Industries Profiting from Chatbots

Moving on we are looking at the different verticals where chatbots are performing well. One of the primary use cases of chatbots today is in lead-generation. It is common knowledge that lead-generation capability is the most sought after necessity in the real estate industry. If there are no leads, you don't have anybody to sell to. It is as simple as that. This explains why we have many customers from this industry, using our chatbot solution.

Next, we have the travel industry. Here the chatbots have been very useful in fastening the process of answering and filtering through travel bookings. Their 24x7 presence on the site makes sure that all of the leads coming in are attended. The education industry saw more wide applications. From getting students to engage in online courses to communicating with parents who are interested in admitting their children to an institution, the automated bots came quite handy. In the healthcare industry, health professionals and clinics are able to efficiently manage their bookings with the aid of the conversational interfaces. Finally, we saw an increase in the number of financial institutions adopting chatbots for pre-assessment and consultation with their prospects.

Insights for the Future

For the next five years, we have many predictions on how chatbots will change the world. These reports come from major publications who foresee the rise of chatbots. The above infographic sums it up nicely and here are the references for each year: 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024

Chatbots have found their rightful place. From being sceptical of intelligence and automation, people are rapidly embracing chatbots as the next big change to grow in the web. One of the reasons they have been able to earn their seat in this crowded space is because there was no learning curve for the users involved. Platforms like ours made it easy for non-tech folk to rip out a chatbot in under an hour and the end users were already accustomed to messaging for conveying information. Bots took this to the next step. Let's see how far we will go in the near future.

Originally published here.

One of the most underrated ways to capture leads is interactive quizzes. There are a couple of reasons why quizzes give you guaranteed results. People have an innate desire to test their knowledge and also compare themselves with what others know. It is also interesting that users would like always to share the results of the quiz that they had with others. This gives you an opportunity to extend the range of your marketing efforts for free. When you design a questionnaire or a conversation you can segment your users depending on how they interact. You get an insight on to what kind of customers or clients are interested in your product. Accordingly, you can make modifications to your marketing messages.

But yet, they are not explored in great detail. Let's see how you can get some results.

The Three Phases

In every business, there are three phases in a customer journey.

First, there is the Discovery phase. At this stage the potential customer has is showing specific symptoms of a problem they are facing and you have the cure. They start searching for a particular product or a service, and your business qualifies for this. This is where you spend money on marketing and make these customers aware that your business solution is the right match for the problem that they are having.

Then comes the Shortlisting face. At this moment the customer has realised that they need some help to solve the problem. They start doing their research on what are the options that are available for them. In this phase, it is your responsibility to convince the customer that you are the right choice.

Finally, you have the Delivery phase. This is where are you have to bring the customer over, onboard them and give them a satisfying experience. From start to finish, you have to provide them with the best you have to offer and make sure either they come back or refer future customers for you.

In each of these phases, you can use an interactive approach to educate the customer and win them over. You could design a conversation that catches their interest during the discovery phase and decides if the client is the right match for your product or service. Moving on into the shortlisting phase, again you can design another automated conversation to convince them why you are service excels over the others.  Also, after you have delivered your service, you can ask for their feedbacks using the same strategy. One tool, but multiple ways to use it to your advantage!

Customer Story

Nick Sudhaus from Convo360, has been using interactive quizzes to capture late from his website in this article we are going to say the strategies that he adopted. LASIK surgery is a form of surgical procedure that corrects eye-vision through laser treatment. This is a form of medical treatment which is not covered by medical insurance in the US. Hence it is considered as an optional treatment and customers will have to pay it out of their pocket.

Many users look forward to this treatment. Also, there are plenty of professional LASIK centres that provide the same service. However, these LASIK centres have a tough time getting customers and convincing them that this safety and cost-effectiveness of the procedure. Customers are attracted to this because it keeps them free of but cancers and spectacles. It restores their natural vision and gives them much self-confidence. That's is where Nick comes in and helps out.

Nick uses the chatbots of Collect.chat and prepares a questionnaire which essentially interacts with the user online. Nick creates a "Save Money" calculator using our chatbots. Then he sends out the chatbot to whoever is interested in the procedure. Once the user has a conversation with the chatbot they will only see the results, which is the amount of money that they will be saving, by providing their phone number or email address. That there is the catch. This method has proved to be a highly effective method to consistently supply a stream of leads for his clients.

Why Interactive Conversations?

Earlier Nick used to run many email campaigns and also run SMS campaigns to a general audience. He did not find them to be very fruitful. He also observed that these LASIK centres did not have enough staff to respond to incoming queries. That's when he decided that he must use a virtual assistant to solve this problem. He also noticed that if there is a delay in responding to an enquiry from the customer, then the chances of that lead going cold is very high. With the chatbots from Collect.chat, Nick was able to provide quick answers to all the enquiries that were coming in. The chatbot struck a good balance between grabbing the attention of the user on the website and not being intrusive at the same time. Compared to the pop-up or overlay methods for email capture,  he found that the user experience was more pleasant and engaging.

The chatbot did three things for Nick.

1. It caught the attention of a potential client and engaged them.
2. After the client starts the conversation with the chatbot and the bot is able to learn their issues and ask for their contact information.
3. Then this lead is filtered out by the chatbot and sent to Nick's team. They, in turn, will manage the consultation between the client and the LASIK centre.

Through the use of these interactive conversations, Nick has seen an increase of about 20 percentage in his overall revenue. He further goes on to say:

We switched from Typeform to Collect.chat as our primary lead generation tool since the implementation is not only more user-friendly, but we can achieve higher conversion rates as well.

- Nick

So if you want to achieve the same results with quizzes and interactive conversations, then try making one today with our chatbots. It's time to #BeConversational

For websites around the world, making sure people visit their site is not necessarily a problem, but converting the visitors by making them take action is difficult. This is where landing pages come into effect. Landing pages are known to have a high conversion rate, but using chatbots as landing pages have proven to be more effective, which is why a study says that more than 80% brands will be using chatbots for customer interaction by 2020.

A landing page is a webpage which is used for the purpose of a marketing campaign. When a user clicks on an ad or a post of yours, you want them directed to this:

Call it a destination page if you want, it is a page where website visitors land when they reach your site from different sources.

There is only one focus for which a landing page is used - CTA. Abbreviated as Call to Action, the purpose of a landing page is to convert people as either subscribers to your email newsletter or lead capture using a CTA button. In fact, a chatbot workflow is in such a way that it guides the user on getting basic information about the products, how the products are delivered, benefits of using the products, including showing them the next set of steps that they can take.

How is a landing page different from a web page? It is different from other pages because it allows you to capture the information of visitors, usually their email ID (along with their names of course). Also, there are no distractions since your visitors can get to know everything that they want to from a single point. And having a chatbot on your landing page is the best way to increase conversion rates because of the focused-experience that it gives to its visitors. If you don't believe us, you can see the results for yourself.

Why is a Landing Page so Important?

After clicking on your offer (usually an ad), if your customer is not redirected to a landing page which shows the next step of action to take, like passing information or asking to make a purchase, you tend to lose out on a lot. Since you have paid a lot of money for these online ads, it becomes imperative that you convert these leads so that you can nurture them and finally bring into your fold as a paying customer.

While the conversion rate of a landing page has been quite high when compared with a regular web page, it helps to observe that customers these days are bombarded with landing pages thus rendering it difficult to capture the undivided attention of your customers which does require a magic wand at times. This is where chatbots have been a life saver which when used as an alternative to web forms, you can not only make lead capture a breeze, but you can also improve conversion rates and increase your engagement.

While it might look like a significant business process shift to stop using lead forms and instead use chatbots, it is not. Setting up a chatbot is extremely simple and it does not even need coding experience and can be done in a few minutes if you find out the right tool to use. Let us reiterate this for you, there is no need to change your current workflow at all. It can stay the same, the bot replaces the form while the rest works as it did earlier.

A landing page helps drive your brand name among potential customers, improves SEO, drives traffic to your website and helps introduce viewers to your Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other social media handles. Landing page is critical when you are launching a product or service as it becomes essential to create a buzz around your offer. A pre-launch landing page can be the soul to your marketing efforts by helping you collect a lot of email subscribers.

Chatbots vs Humans, what works better?

Zion Market Research’s latest report says that the global chatbot market is expected to reach 2,166.8 million USD by 2024. This is because people who are comfortable with technology would rather use such options as the results are quick and there is no hassle which is not the case when you deal with human beings. One more reason why people prefer chatbots over humans is that there are no wait times.

Imagine a far-fetched scenario like this, each potential customer has to wait for a live chat executive before they can pass their contact details and get any other information on the chatbot- based landing page. This is not an ideal situation at all. Chatbots render such scenarios null with its varied set of features and functionalities.

Let's see two simple steps to use chatbots effectively on for increasing landing page conversions.

• Use chatbots as a welcome widget to greet all of your customers. This is the goto method for visitor engagement and learning what your users are after. Users can choose to close the widget after the conversation is done and go through the remaining landing page at their own pace.

• The second method might sound bold, but you can be assured that it gives you guaranteed results. Forget about the hassle of making a landing page, hiring a designer, a copywriter or even buying a template. Make the landing page content entirely on the chatbot. In fact, you can use it to send across your message correctly and even ratify if your ad campaigns are targeted towards the right audience. Not only does this step give you instant feedback, but you also get to convert the leads much more comfortable as well.

Statistics on chatbots that show its importance and prevalence

• The average conversion rate of a landing page is 2-3% while it is 3-4x for a chatbot-based landing page
• A Connecting with Consumers’ report says that more than 83% of online shoppers require assistance to complete a purchase. In such a scenario, chatbots can provide support like a sales-person in a retail store. In fact, you can direct the customers directly to a chatbot landing page where they can make their purchase decision, browse products, check out prices and more from there itself.
• Research from InsideSales says that if you respond to a lead after 5 minutes, there’s a 10x decrease in getting in touch with that lead.
• State of Chatbots 2018 research says that consumers feel chatbots are 35% better at addressing customer issues and questions

What are the added benefits of having Chatbots on Landing Pages?

Increase in user engagement: Using a chatbot to get information from a customer is an entertaining affair as the average customer would be intrigued at how automatic answers spit out based on inputs from them. It helps your customer to get all information without having to get on a call with a CS executive. It keeps them hooked too, something that a customer service executive might not necessarily be able to do. This not only helps increase the conversion rate, but the customer gets to know your offerings better.

Better lead nurturing: Businesses can use the information that chatbots collect about the customer and use personalized messaging to help customers along the ‘buyer’s journey’. Chatbots help generates higher conversion rates by making sure the conversation is steered in the right direction.

You can also narrow down on your customers (read save time by disallowing leads that don’t match) by using chatbots to identify relevant KPIs like budget, resources, timeline, project size and so on of the customer. It is important that you word it well lest you annoy the customers, use A/B testing to see how different copies work.

Personalized communication with the user: As we have been bearing witness, the digital marketing space is getting constricted with each passing day. Users are immune to ‘hacks’ that most businesses employ, which is why the need to create something that is personalized becomes all the more important to clear the clutter. With chatbots, you can also interact with customers based on where they are coming from. This kind of personalization can help make the conversation as interactive and useful for the customer as possible by asking relevant questions.

Differentiate yourself from your competitors: With every business latching on to the landing page bandwagon, it is necessary that you need to stand out from your competitors with a different and attractive offer. You can provide incredible offers on your chatbot to your visitors and even educate them about your product. Using a vanilla landing page might just help with capturing lead information, but using a chatbot page allows you to do so much more, a clear-cut differentiation that customers will love because of the benefits associated with it.

Advanced customer interaction: A chatbot as a landing page can do so many things that a landing page cannot even think of. A chatbot landing page does not facilitate passive customer interaction, it completely takes hold of the entire conversation and directs the customer to talk about any issue that is relevant to them. The best thing about chatbots as a landing page is that you can even direct them to your social media handles which you can use to build an online community for your customers. All of this will make the customer feel as if you are many notches ahead of your competitors when it comes to serving them.

Conversational interface: Trust us when we say that a customer is not at all expecting to enter into a conversation when they end up on your landing page. With a chatbot’s unique conversational interface, the customer is able to choose his way through the conversation. This helps with qualification of the lead for the business while the customer is also given as much information as possible from a single point of contact without having to go to different pages of the website. When information is provided under the request of the user, there is little distraction for them, thus helping in better user engagement.

EndNote

Chatbots can change the way you work with landing pages and the way customers perceive your brand. A survey by Facebook says that customers are 50% more likely to buy from a brand after chatting with them, let it be with a CS executive or a machine.

Most brands do not have the resources and budget to employ multiple people who can chat with their customers to solve their queries. This is where chatbots play a super important role by eliminating overheads, being able to respond to many customers simultaneously, and capture lead information and so on. As a landing page, chatbots are the ultimate tool that can change your game completely. They can track consumer behaviour by monitoring the data of the users, segment them and more.

Remember that the technology is still new although its adoption has been rapid, the tool is only going to get more powerful over the days. You should understand that the best chatbots are still being made, and when it happens, it is going to change the entire gamut of landing pages including its perception and functionality. Take advantage of the platform and use it to the fullest so that when you have more highly functional chatbots in existence, you can make full use of it.

By 2025, the total amount of data in the world will reach a staggering 163 zettabytes (ZB) as per IDC research reports. With data growing at an exponential rate, we need platforms like Datahut to collect this data and make more sense out of it. Datahut was founded in 2015 with a mission to democratise web data. Tony and his team are working towards a future where people with no coding skills are able to leverage the use of internets data to make critical business decisions.

And lately, Datahut has started getting more clients from their website by adding a chatbot. They shifted from a live chat tool towards the chatbot solution and is reportedly getting 5 times better results.

The Art of Web Scraping

To simply state it, web scraping means to extract data from a website. But it's the way data extraction is done and the reports it generates that ultimately decides the value of scraping. You may have access to an extensive array of data about your competitors, but that doesn't give you the necessary edge over them. The trick is to figure out, what's important and having the information as quickly as possible. Extracting data at scale from multiple websites on a regular basis is a tough task - especially for non-techies. Datahut is solving this specific problem.

There are plenty of things you can automate with web scraping. Below we have made a list of a few of the use-cases. Once you go through, you will understand how web scraping is being used. You may already know businesses that have created a service out of the following applications. Who knows? Maybe you will find a use-case of your own.

• Build a custom news feed service by aggregating from the websites you read news from.
• Get a list of jobs posted on various career platforms and compare the salary packages being offered.
• Compare the price of a product from what is offered on various e-commerce sites.
• Use the pricing information from your competitors to set a competitive price for your product.
• Know where and when customers are mentioning about you online.
• Also, understand the customer sentiment and feedback of your competitors.
• Get the best prices for hotels and flights using the aggregation technique.
• Get insights into the strategies used by Competitors for SEO and Social Media.

A Strong Player

There is a big reason, the team at Collect.chat admires Datahut. That's because, just like Collect.chat, Datahut is also a bootstrapped company. It's not easy to be a bootstrapped player in the B2B segment of the data extraction business. But they have pulled it through. This is evident of the quality of service they provide and the 49-member strong team that they have.

Datahut caters to a large number of customers including Boston Consulting Group, Workday, L.E.K Consulting and more. Their sweet spot is in the e-commerce industry. If you are an e-commerce player, then you may know how hard it is to set up the prices of the products you sell. You need to cross-reference the prices of similar products and change it to maximise profit. The volatility in prices very high and hence it is necessary to have a service where you can monitor these fluctuations at ease. Datahut can do that and doesn't require you to have any coding knowledge. Their service model is to provide Data as a Service (DaaS).

What I loved about Collect.chat is the simplicity of the bot builder interface. I could build my bots in minutes with Collect.chat where as other platforms took hours of python coding to get it right. The support from the Collect.chat team was amazing and I highly recommend them.

- Tony, Founder of Datahut

After Using the Chatbot

The team at Datahut uses our chatbot solution on their landing pages and inside their blog. Their primary use-case is in lead generation. Earlier they were using a Live chat plugin to interact with their visitors. But the dilemma was that they couldn't attend to their audience coming from the other part of the world during the night. That was also the time that they had most of the traffic to their website. The number of conversions was hardly 3 to 4 per week.

Then they heard about our product after someone referred it to them. The change was instant. Now every week, they are getting 15-20 conversions on the chatbot. That's almost a 5 times increase! The other significant advantage in Tony's words is:

The bot first approach to customer interaction saves a lot of time. When using the Live chat tool, I had to be on the alert all the time. But now I can qualify them, before making the first connection. I leave the link to my calendar and my leads will arrange a meeting from there. So it's all working smoothly.

Switch from Live Chat to Bot-First

Live chat support is expensive and requires more human-resources. In effect, you are wasting your most precious resource, time! It should be reserved for you paid customers to give them a better experience. As for your website visitors who are curious to know about your business, you should leave the job to chatbots, just like how Datahut has done it.

It's time to have a bot-first approach for your website to convert leads. Here is how you can start.

Companies around the world find it difficult to generate leads and since it has a direct connection in ringing the cash registers, the process of generating leads cannot be slighted. While most businesses buy random email lists or hire companies that give them qualified leads, nothing works like having your potential clients come to you. In this time and age when there are a million companies that want a share of the pie, if you don’t have a clear-cut strategy to attract a stream of clients, you are in for a tough ride.

According to a study by Demand Metric Research Corporation, the three most commonly used B2B lead generation strategies are email marketing, event marketing and content marketing and most of the companies are not happy with the results either. But there is another method that is getting popular by the day because of its advantages and its ability to handle highly specialized tasks- chatbots (also called as lead bots). Think of lead bots as a self-service option where your leads can interact with your brand without any human intervention.

There was a time when marketing was dominated by SEO, SEM and the likes. Now, there is a huge drift towards content marketing and it obviously works, which is why in a study conducted by Content Marketing Institute, more than 91 percent of B2B marketers are in  various stages of employing it. Once you lure your potential customers in, the next step is towards collecting the lead’s information, which is where lead bots work like magic.

How do Lead Bots work?

A conversation with a lead bot works the same way you see a mind map structured. There are specific directions taken and each destination takes a particular route. Alexa, Siri, Echo Dot, etc, all of these are lead bots too. Based on the questions that you ask, there are pre-fed answers which is delivered in a conversational tone. The best part about this is that the potential lead feels as if they are in conversation with someone from your team which is why the conversions of a lead through a lead bot is usually higher.

Here is a quick demo of lead bot for a digital marketer who wants to convert his website visitors by offering a service.

Benefits of using Lead Bots

Lead bots are the ultimate marketing tool because it engages with your potential leads in the form of conversations. Even when your employees are not at the office, your leads can converse with your lead bot which will advise them on their next course of action based on their message prompts.

Here are some of the benefits associated with using lead bots for your business:

• They are operational 24*7 and 365 days and are therefore ready to talk to your customers always.
• A lead bot can simultaneously handle any amount of requests, there is no need to increase the capacity or create more number of templates.
• Lead bots can keep track of data, trends and metrics thus helping you create processes and predict trends
• You can integrate lead bots on all web platforms, whether it is native HTML, WordPress, Shopify, Wix, WooCommerce and more.
• It saves you a lot of overheads by helping you keep the number of support staff on your rolls to a bare minimum.

Here are some Use-Cases for Lead Bots

• If you are an event management company, you can let your visitors get more information about you including price, packages and more.
• Give the opportunity for people to interact and enquire about the type of courses you offer if you have an education consultancy and use the lead’s information to pitch more products.
• Drive visitors from your mobile app’s visitor to the playstore using a chatbot. Makes it easy to guide users to the right channel with almost zero effort.
• Get feedback from patrons who dine from your restaurant. Use the feedback to offer even better services to them.
• Use chatbots to make it easier for your e-commerce site visitors to make a purchase decision and also let them browse your products without having to rely on erratic internet speeds.

There are many more possibilities of how we could use lead bots, only if you could let your imagination run wild. If you can build a service around lead bots that a lot of people will be dying to use, you are gold!

Things to Consider before using Lead Bots

The very first thing that you need to have before you start to employ lead bots for your business is this- belief in lead bots. Yes, it is understandable that the negative implications are there if any issues crop up because a human is not responding on the other end. But do not worry, the bot doesn’t create its own set of responses that has nothing to do with your business.

Here are the most important steps that you need to consider when getting started.

Define the Use Case

While there are a lot of interesting use cases when it comes to using lead bots, you need to be clear about the reason behind using them. Is it to increase the number of visitors to your website? Is it to solve customer service issues? Is it to capture leads? Once you are clear about its objective, only then do you need to go and implement the next step since you will be able to visualize when you have a specific goal in mind.

Channels to Use

You need to create different bots for different channels like your Twitter page, Facebook page, Website and more. Why? Because your potential lead’s knowledge about you depends on the platform they choose to visit you. The one with the most awareness about your offering are visitors on your website which is why it is important to create a lead bot for your website. In fact, you should be creating more than one bot if you have different purposes of using them. For example, a customer service lead bots’ content will be different from the one that will be used as a lead magnet.

Define a Content Strategy

The kind of content that goes into the bot will define the experience a visitor will have with your business. This is something you need to keep in mind and make sure that each question goes through several iterations and makes business sense. Think about the objective of your customers in visiting your site, this way you can predict the kind of questions that they will have and use it to frame them. Use the help of all stakeholders to draft questions that can be found relevant.

Collect Lead Information

No matter the kind of interaction that happens with the bot, the final step should be collecting information from the leads, including name, email ID, phone number and so on. Nurturing these leads and bringing them into your fold as a customer over time is what a business needs to do.  

Using Lead Bots to Increase your Business Engagement

In the future, we can even see websites and apps being replaced with bots. Bots reply instantly while it might take a lot of time for websites and apps to even load. They completely change how users interact with your brand.

You can build an email list with lead bots by setting up a bot to record user information. Companies can give better offers since it gets real insights on what customers prefer by understanding the most used keywords.

Once you configure your chatbot, the costs to keep it running are extremely low and the advantages that it offers is extremely high and it helps you save a lot of money. Also, a chatbot is always going to treat customers in the same way as it does not have to undergo mood swings since they are always bound by rules, something that we humans are not immune to.

Chatbots have the capability to automate tasks, thus saving time and being more productive for each of the stakeholders. The reason for the incredible popularity of Chatbots is thanks to the proliferation of messenger apps and its consumption.

Why your Business should use Lead Bots as well?

Lead bots have been proven as the go-to method which yields the highest number of conversions through its conversational interface. While the only disadvantage with a lead bot is that it might be disappointing for users who come to you looking for a human to interact with. In fact, you can navigate through this problem by using a message prompt on the bot itself where a user can ask for a human being to talk to.

Chatbots might not be the ideal option for all kinds of businesses, but its functional prowess is unmatched as a service for customer service, lead qualification and so on. The best part about lead bots is that you can keep the conversation flowing 24*7 without any human intervention. If you can understand the psyche of the customer deeply, you can draft content, including questions and the subsequent answers coming out perfectly well where the user might even think they are talking with a real human because the conversation sounds so real.

Every business thrives when it has the ability to generate and collect leads. Collect.chat has been able to solve this problem. You can start converting your visitors to qualified leads with absolutely zero effort thanks to our solution. It is no wonder that more than 80% of businesses wants to use leadbots by 2020, according to a survey by Oracle.

This review was written by one of our customers, Ibrahim MT from Hidile who has been using our chatbot solution for their clients for the past one year. We have taken the liberty to repost it on our blog with his permission.

Over at Hidile, me and my team ship websites and apps on a weekly basis for our clients. One of the standard requirements has been to add a sales funnel to tap into the website traffic on their site. I have been recommending the use of chatbots for this purpose and today I am going to review a Chatbot plugin that I have been using for some time.

Automated chatbots are here to save the day

Looking to convert leads from your website traffic? If you do, then your search is finally over. Meet Collect.chat. It is a chatbot builder tool that lets you build chatbots for your website and integrate them with your website easily.

Generally, any business owner needs to handle customers using live chat assistance with the help of humans. Even though humans add the necessary touch, it is not possible to provide 24/7 service. It becomes tougher for startups that have access to a limited budget. Assigning agents only makes it harder for them to run their business smoothly.

Collect.chat enables these businesses to find an alternative and give them the ability to interact and engage with them. With Collect.chat, you can create an engaging chatbot that will function the way you want. You will be not only able to interact with them but also able to collect more information if you want too. Undoubtedly, it also helps in lead generation.

Getting started

To get started, you need to go to Collect.chat and register a free account there. Once done, you will be welcomed in a well-designed dashboard. It will ask you to watch an intro video, which in my view is an excellent way to teach the customers on how the app functions.

If you are using WordPress, you can quickly install it either by going to their official WordPress page or from the dashboard.

The dashboard is the centre of your activities. Here you can create new bots, improve scripts and embed them on your website. Everything can be done in one place which makes it a very user-friendly dashboard. Let’s have a look below.

The five sections in the dashboard include the following.

1. Bots
2. Builder
3. Settings
4. Reports
5. Responses

Each of these sections solves a unique problem. Let’s go through them below.

Bots: This is where you can add new bots. You can create as many bots as you can. During the bots creation process, you need to add the domain for which you are creating the chatbot.

You can click on “edit” button, you will be redirected to the Builder page.

Builder: This is where all the magic happens. There are three steps to build a successful bot. They are preview, script and publish. Each of these steps gives you complete control over how your chatbot looks, behaves and reacts. You can choose an avatar, colour, widget button text, and even the widget position.

Settings: The settings section is where you can customise the settings of your bot. You can change the user experience, user targeting notification, integration, translation, tracking and do some neat modifications.

Undoubtedly, you get full control of your bot. You can even integrate the bot into a custom solution.

Reports: This is where you can see all the numbers. It breaks down the data into metrics, insights, and funnel where each one of them offers more control on what you want to see.

Responses: Last, but not the least, is the responses. Here all the visitor's responses are stored. The responses are stored with a timestamp and can be exported then and there. It also tells you from which page on the site you received the response.

Making it live

I am impressed with what it has to offer. Once your bot is set up correctly, you can copy the script and then paste it into the Collect.chat dashboard.

Go to Settings > Collect.chat and then paste the script there. You can also choose to show the chatbot on whichever page you need. There are four options to choose from.

Features in a nutshell

Collect.chat comes with many features. To get a grasp of what it has to offer, let’s skim through the top ones.

• Powerful ChatBot builder
• Analytics
• Proper integration
• Translation supported
• Third party solutions supported
• Easy to use and setup
• Custom bot creation
• Full customisation.
• Powerful visualisation.

Should you pick it?

Collect.chat is an excellent chatbot solution for business who are looking to automate a visitor’s interaction. It has an easy installation, creation and integration process which makes it a great choice over other solutions on the market. You can also try it for free and then choose to buy its paid version which offers more features and functionality.

I just wanted to share my honest review on the plugin. The team at Collect.chat has helped me make countless chatbots for my clients, and I am delighted with their service.

You can also create a bot for your WordPress website. See how.