If you don’t have a chatbot on your website in 2024, you are hurting your site’s potential. And you don’t even have a good excuse anymore!
Let’s get into the meat on why all websites should have chatbots.
Reasons to Add a Chatbot to Your Website
Adding a chatbot to your website helps your business, as well as the customers who visit your site.
We’re going to go over 5 benefits of chatbots for your business, and 5 benefits of chatbots for your website visitors.
Benefits of Chatbots for Your Business
Let’s review some important benefits of chatbots for your business to show you why you should put a chatbot on your site, no matter what you’re doing.
No increase to your workload
Chatbots are automated, which means they’re working in the background while you focus on your business.
Not only do they not increase your workload, they actually decrease it by saving your time dealing with tire-kickers or answering commonly asked questions over and over again.
They’re able to handle most sales and support queries without you ever lifting a finger. If anything needs escalated, they can be sent to you when necessary.
No additions to employees or payroll
You won’t have to spend any money to hire a new employee, put them on payroll, or pay to train them.
Never worry about employee or freelancer turnover, neglect, or malice again.
They work 24/7
Another bonus chatbots have over employees and freelancers is that they don’t get sick, don’t complain, and work on your site all day and night.
One day of a having a chatbot working 24 hours is equivalent to having to pay for 3 employees to work an 8 hour shift every day!
Highly scalable
While a live chat agent can typically only handle between 2 – 4 chats simultaneously (hopefully without error), chatbots can handle hundreds or thousands of chats at the same time!
So instead of having to hire more and more employees and take on more cost as your website traffic grows, your chatbot handles all chats simultaneously.
Extremely affordable
Typically, DIY chatbot building software charges around $50 – $100 per month for a single chatbot, and you’ll have to build it, set it up, and manage it yourself. And most of them don’t even use AI and aren’t trained on your business and products!
Consider if you were hiring live chat agents: In the United States, minimum wage is around $7/hr, with shifts typically lasting 8 hours (plus breaks and a lunch hour). A single day’s shift for this minimum wage worker costs $56 before any other taxes, fees, insurance costs, etc.
Let’s say you want to hire a freelancer from out of the country, like the Philippines or India. Not only are they not going to be native English-speakers, you’ll be paying $200+ per month for sub-par support service, not to mention training, onboarding, and turnover. Even if they work 12 hour days, that’s still just a single person, with 12 unmanned chat hours.
If you use a chatbot company like Chatmatico, you are paying around the same price as DIY chatbot competitors for a completely done-for-you system that you don’t even have to touch! You get a dedicated account manager who does everything for you.
Benefits of Chatbots for Your Website Visitors
Your website visitors will appreciate having a chat working for them on your site as well. Here’s some chatbot perks your users will enjoy.
No waiting for live agents
If your live agent is not on the website or not available, the visitor will have to wait for their response.
In the meantime, they could have already moved on to one of your competitors! We live in the age of instant gratification, so people want what they want instantly, which leads into our next point.
Instant responses
Studies show that the average wait time for a live agent to respond is around 1 minute. However, those studies are done by live chat companies so are most likely riddled with biases to promote their product.
If you have ever had to use a live chat before, you know that is almost never the case! Chatbots provide instant, accurate responses. And if the issue can’t be resolved by chat, then it can be escalated through support tickets, phone calls, or emails.
Speaks your language
No matter what language your customers use, your chatbot can speak it (as long as it isn’t some hidden tribe language lost to history…).
If you work in an area where your customers speak a few different languages (think businesses in Texas serving English and Spanish-speaking people), you don’t need to worry about hiring a live chat agent who speaks like a perfect native in multiple languages.
Easy website navigation
With a proper chatbot setup, your website visitors can use it to navigate to any pages they want on your site. They simply ask a question, and the bot can provide a detailed answer as well as a link with more information.
The visitor can even ask follow up questions to get more details.
Most knowledgeable about products and services
Forget cookie-cutter responses or copy-and-paste answers, properly trained AI chatbots can go into great detail about products and services provided by the company.
Instead of paying an Indian $5 a day to copy and paste responses from your FAQ page, use a chatbot that will help the visitor even more.
Industry Use-cases for Chatbots
Every type of company can use a chatbot and benefit from it. Let’s go over just a few industries that can turn a cheap chatbot into increasing revenue for their businesses.
Restaurants
Your chatbot can be trained on every item on your menu, and can help recommend great food choices to your website visitors who are unsure of what they want. Maybe they’re looking for a vegan-friendly option, or some non-alcoholic drinks.
A restaurant chatbot can showcase your menu, events, locations, answer FAQs, and so much more.
Local Service-based Businesses
Service-based businesses like roofing contractors, HVAC installers, flooring companies, and more can use chatbots to help generate leads and showcase their products.
When a visitor goes to your site, your chatbot will call out to them for their information and how they can help (just like a salesperson).
After the potential customer tells the chatbot what they need, it can automatically get sent to your email or your sales team for an immediate follow up to close the deal or finalize appointment setups.
Online Stores / Ecommerce
Typically, online stores have tons of products and specific information to cover. Having an ecommerce chatbot that knows every bit of detail on your stock can go a long way in getting that product in front of the visitor.
You can even have your bot offer out promotions and discounts in exchange for their email address to build your email list and grow your revenue.
Chatbots can go on most ecommerce platforms like WordPress, Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, and more.
Marketing Agencies
All marketing agencies and website developers should be promoting the use of chatbots to their clients, and should use it for themselves as well.
Having a chatbot on your marketing company website can help answer any potential customer objections, get more leads, and help to even sell them on putting a chatbot on their site.
Using a company like Chatmatico can even white-label the chatbots to your brand (along with white-label pricing) so that you can resell to customers. With ‘Powered by [Your Brand]’ on your client’s chatbots, you can turn your customers into a great referral source.
And with Chatmatico, the entire process is done completely for you, so you don’t have to do any extra work.
Conclusion
Hopefully now you can see why all websites should have chatbots, and have a grasp of some powerful ways to use them, no matter your industry.
If you’re interested in a completely done-for-you chatbot program, please reach out to me and let’s see what we can do!
