AI Chatbots are a common feature nowadays, and when running a D2C business, they become quite important. Through such chatbots, you can serve your customers across the world without needing significant investments in customer support executives and other employees. Moreover, they are faster and make fewer errors which also contributes to their rapid growth and adoption.
If you are a D2C business owner exploring AI chatbots for customer support, you are at the right place. In this article, we will discuss the benefits of using AI chatbots, some use cases for D2C customer support, and how you can improve engagement and conversions using AI chatbots.
Benefits of Using AI Chatbots
1. 24/7 Availability
Unlike customer support teams, which can be available in some time zones during the day, AI chatbots can be available across different time zones every day. This makes them a much better choice for D2C businesses that operate in different countries and have limited budgets for customer support. Regardless of when your customers want support, these AI chatbots will always be there to help them and improve the customer support experience for everyone.
2. Cost-Effective
AI chatbots can reduce operational costs significantly through automation and reduce the need for customer support staff. You can train AI chatbots on your enterprise data, and provide them regular data updates, and they can serve a large number of clients from a single source. Though the initial investments can be high, they can prove cost-effective in the long run and a great investment for any D2C business.
3. Speed and Efficiency
Speed and efficiency is are known benefit of using AI technologies. With chatbots, you can serve customers faster and provide them with shorter waiting times and accurate information, as the data sources are already up-to-date. They can provide real-time responses and handle chats with many customers and visitors at once, providing awesome value for money and efficiency. Apart from that, automation also reduces the chances of errors and, increases efficiency, and streamlines the customer support experience.
Having known about the benefits of AI chatbots, you might be wondering where they can be helpful for D2C businesses. So, let’s take a look at the next section, where we discuss use cases for AI chatbots.
Use Cases for AI Chatbots in D2C Customer Support
1. Customer Inquiries and Support
AI chatbots can be used by D2C businesses to serve customers around the clock. You can feed data about your products and services to such chatbots, and they can solve common customer inquiries around the products and offer first-level support to customers regarding your products. Such AI chatbots can have decision trees and other NLP processing techniques that can help them understand the queries better, and also take appropriate decisions whether to involve L2-L3 customer support for some queries and how to handle them.
2. Booking and Reservations
If you are a D2C brand that has some bookings and reservations to manage, it is best to have AI chatbots in this part. Such AI chatbots can be accessed by customers to find appropriate bookings and free spots based on their preferences much faster. Moreover, these chatbots can also help them send reminders about upcoming reservations and increase engagement with potential customers.
You can also offload booking cancellation and other management parts to AI chatbots and provide a much better customer experience when it comes to managing bookings and customers for your D2C business.
3. Order Tracking and Updates
Another awesome use case for AI chatbots is order tracking and updates. In this, your customers can interact with AI chatbots and provide them an order ID, based on that the chatbots will fetch real-time data for the orders and send updates/notifications to your customers. This way, customers can always know about their orders, and you don’t need a dedicated team that sends out order updates manually or serves such requests from customers.
Moreover, you can also use AI chatbots to send new order notifications to customers if they have an existing chat with the bots. Customers can also manage their orders through an AI chatbot and change things like delivery timings or addresses from the chat instead of going to the web or mobile app.
Engaging and converting customers is always a big issue when building and scaling businesses, but do you know you can do this through AI chatbots, too? In the next section, we will focus on how to enhance engagements and conversions in D2C customer support using AI chatbots.
How to Enhance Engagements and Conversions in D2C Customer Support Using AI Chatbots?
1. Personalized Interactions
Personalized interactions have always increased engagement, and this is true with AI chatbots, too. Use customer data from CRM and past interactions to create customized chats and interactions for each customer. By doing this, you can increase engagement with customers and build trust, which is highly important when scaling and converting leads to clients.
2. Faster Response Times
Having a capable chatbot that can serve multiple customers without introducing any delays is important. Today, humans don’t like to wait for anything, and that goes for customer support, too. When you let customers wait for a long time, and give slow replies it causes discomfort and gives out a bad impression of your D2C brand. Instead, you should focus on providing faster response times for your chatbots by getting the appropriate hardware and infrastructure.
3. Multilingual Support
When you have a global customer base, it is important to have multilingual support in your chatbots so that customers can be at ease when interacting with them. This will also increase engagement and help customers solve their queries better without spending too much time thinking and translating to different languages.
4. Feedback Collection and Analysis
One of the most important things that you can do to improve engagement and conversions of your D2C customer support chatbots is to collect and analyze feedback. Your chatbot should ask for feedback at the end of every chat session, and store it in a proper way so you can do various analysis to understand chatbot behaviour. Having such feedback collection and analysis is important as it can help you improve your chatbots over time so that they are more helpful to customers.
Final Word
Coming to an end, there are a lot of other ways to improve conversions and enhance engagements with your customers through AI chatbots, but the few discussed here, will always bring the most impact. If you are looking to reduce operational costs and improve your customer support experience, you should definitely try out AI chatbots for your D2C businesses.
Author: Harikrishna Kundariya
Harikrishna Kundariya, is a marketer, developer, IoT, Cloud & AWS savvy, co-founder, and Director of eSparkBiz, a Software Development Company. His 14+ years of experience enables him to provide digital solutions to new start-ups based on IoT and SaaS applications.