You have a great product idea and made it real. However, the limited team capacity, tight deadlines, and budget influence the quality of your customer service, marketing campaign efficiency, and sales.
The fix?
Delegate repeated processes to a chatbot. Imagine your team focusing on hot leads and new hypotheses generation when it answers FAQs, schedules demos, offers trials, shares lead magnets, etc. The rise in customer satisfaction, sales, lead conversions, and instant communication are just some of the chatbot SaaS benefits.
Intrigued?
Below, we have listed the top seven reasons to use chatbots to support your customer service, marketing, and sales.
But first, let's define what a chatbot SaaS is 👇
What is a Chatbot in SaaS?
Chatbots are programs that simulate a real person in text or speech conversations with your users. Thus, businesses provide potential clients with interactive, personalized experience on websites, messengers, or apps without hiring an army of managers.
You definitely interacted with them before. For example, after spending a few minutes on a website, you may see a small chat widget asking, "Hi 👋 How can I help you?" in the lower right corner of the screen.
That is a chatbot.
SaaS brands use it to grow business by automating marketing, sales, and support processes. For example, answer repeated queries, gather insights about clients' interests, recommend products, collect leads, send reminders, etc.
There are two types of chatbot platforms SaaS companies use:
- Rule-based chatbots work on pre-defined scenarios with no self-learning capabilities. They offer clients answer options in the form of buttons. Depending on this choice, the chatbot software launches one of the conversation flows that lead to the target action.
- AI-powered chatbots use natural language processing to understand what a customer types/says and respond to it most effectively. In addition, these advanced chatbots learn from each chat with users and generate a better response each time.
Sounds great. But why is this technology so popular among SaaS startups?
24/7 Customer Communication On Different Channels
Customers connect with brands via email, live chat, social media, and messengers. In addition, they expect almost instant replies. This factor plays a vital role in increasing conversion rates and fostering robust customer engagement.
Stats prove that replying to customer requests within five minutes increases conversion rates by 100X.
However, these numbers turn into a fantasy when you have 2-3 managers in your team.
The fix?
Hire a chatbot. It can simultaneously handle 80% of routine customer questions 24/7 on multiple channels. With no vacation, coffee, or sleep breaks, the chatbot will:
- answer simple queries like “How does the free 14-day trial work?”,
- recommend products, pricing plans,
- qualify user requests and rote them to relevant agents.
Here is an example of how it works:
Rich Info About Customer Interests and Behavior
The more you know about your audience, the more effectively you can sell to them. For example, information about current user issues can improve your new product launch; clients' pain points are great for personalizing marketing campaigns, etc.
High-quality chatbot platforms collect all this data and store it in customer profiles.
Here is how it works:
- A chatbot qualifies leads and collects data for your sales managers, such as contacts, team size, traffic, budget, and problems they want to solve with the help of your product.
- Launching a chatbot is only possible with information on pages people visit, time spent there, button/link clicks, exit attempts, etc. That is a perfect base for your target audience analytics research.
- Conversation history. You can enter the admin panel and analyze chats an exact client had with your brand.
Personalization of the Customer Experience
People love it when company managers remember details about them. Customer interaction personalization makes people feel seen and special.
80% of consumers are inclined to buy from a brand offering a tailored and unique experience.
One of the best methods to provide such an experience is a chatbot. It can precisely target the segments you need with the right offer at the right time and place.
Here are a few examples:
- Offer special discounts to visitors who visit your website using the Ads link.
- Help Pricing page visitors choose a plan that fits their needs with a quiz bot.
- Collect email subscribers with a specific lead magnet that complements the blog article content.
- Recommend products based on interests that new visitors share in a chat.
- Engage current users to buy add-ons based on the features they already use.
SaaS companies that excel at personalization earn 40% more than their competitors. How? Read below 👇
Conversion Growth at Each Step of the Customer Journey
Usually, businesses engage visitors with static forms, popups, and banners. But banner blindness and a boring list of fields lower the performance of your campaigns.
That's because most consumers want a dialogue with the brands. And the best way to provide it to each website visitor in terms of a small team is a chatbot.
Here are a few scenarios of how a chatbot can skyrocket your lead conversions:
Get more meeting requests.
Engage website visitors to start a free trial.
Increase the trial to paid conversion with a “Trial ends” reminder.
Share feature updates to grow repeated sales.
Thus, clients benefit from a smooth buying experience tailored to their specific needs, while companies increase the likelihood that prospects will convert.
Customer Satisfaction
Each of the before-mentioned benefits influences customer satisfaction. Stats prove that chatbots increase client happiness by up to 24%.
For example, SaaS users appreciate it for:
- High level of personalization. When programmed correctly, chatbots engage clients at the right time, place, and make offers that 100% match their interests.
- Reduced waiting times. Chatbots cut down the queue and reduce waiting times by solving customer issues simultaneously.
- Less room for error. Chatbots don't get distracted, have bad days, or forget important details compared to humans. It means clients always get the correct information at the right time.
Cutting Business Costs
Saving a budget is vital for a startup. Here are four ways a chatbot can help you:
- Save customer service agents time. You already know that chatbots are excellent at handling everyday customer questions. In such a way, you can slash client support costs by as much as 30%.
- Save sales managers time. Since the chatbot collects all the pre-qualification data for your sales, your agents are free from qualification calls and talking to tire-kickers.
- Increase return on ad spend. For instance, you run a Facebook ad that directs users to your product page. Once the user arrives, they're on their own to browse and hopefully convert. But a chatbot can guide them right down the sales funnel by presenting product features, answering FAQs, and engaging them to sign up.
- Save web developer's time. Usually, testing marketing hypotheses requires web developers' time (which is very expensive.) With a visual chatbot builder and templates, you can launch ideas in minutes.
Increased Team Effectiveness
So, how does a chatbot help a lean startup SaaS team achieve desired KPIs without cloning team members? Due to the never-sleeping multitasking nature, it can dramatically change your managers' routine tasks, allowing them to focus on the creative side.
Let's look at the metrics you can improve by hiring a chatbot 👇
- Automating customer service can bring you better First Response Time and Issue Resolution Time because the chatbot resolves most general queries. That reduces the number of tickets received by the CX team.
- The marketing team gets a better Client Engagement Rate, Lead Generation, and fast hypothesis testing. Thanks to a no-code builder, marketers don't need to wait for a web developer to launch marketing ideas.
- The sales team can improve the leads reply rate by sending personalized follow-ups to messengers, close deals faster with automated lead qualification, and even get more sales with chatbot product recommendations.
Conclusion
Adopting chatbots is a great solution to meet increasing customer requirements and reduce the cost spent on your CX, marketing, and sales teams. No-code builders let you replace tedious forms, FAQs, and banners with engaging chatbot conversations in minutes.
Define your business goals, choose the platform that meets your requirements, and start experimenting!
