Today, digital is everywhere. We live in an age where every aspect of our daily lives is linked to an interface, an application or a website. From online shopping to home delivery, from streaming services to video conferencing meetings, everything today is linked to the internet and a smartphone or computer screen.
Despite this, digitization is one of the main challenges that remain for the majority of the world’s economies. Indeed, there are still significant gaps for many services, including public services. Although things are improving through the years, there is still a lot of room for improvement. But this is also true for private companies. To become more competitive and increase their competitive advantage in their market, they need to better exploit the benefits of digitalization.
This means, for example, a stronger and more adapted use of technologies and tools already developed, which allow them to gain in reactivity and in quality of service to their customers. Among these tools, we are going to look at chatbots and see how any economic organization can make money by simply relying on them.
What is a chatbot: some simple technical elements to better understand
Should I use a Facebook Messenger chatbot or ChatGPT chatbot? Should you just put a chatbot at the disposal of your users? Before answering these questions, here are some technical elements to explain what a chatbot is. A chatbot is a computer robot programmed to be able to exchange and inform in the best possible way the people who request it. This robot intervenes autonomously after being set up and provides the necessary information to visitors and customers who engage in a conversation with it. From a knowledge base and pre-established conversation scenarios, chatbots can guide their interlocutors. They will offer to guide them to the appropriate resource content, suggest a contact adapted to their needs or provide a clear and simple answer to a clearly identified problem.
If the robot can learn by itself, the main chatbots deployed today do not exploit artificial intelligence as one can imagine it when hearing about ChatGPT. The most common chatbots, but already very powerful, work in the following way: to a question A corresponds an answer A. If the user validates that the answer given is the one expected or sought, the scenario is validated and confirms the chatbot in its operation. Conversely, if it is not validated, the chatbot learns that it has misidentified the question or that an answer is missing in the scenarios it has programmed. Thus, the bots compile information on the feedback they receive from users. This data is then used to improve them. Some of this data is directly taken into account by the algorithms that run the bots.
But what are the benefits that companies can get from these digital devices?
Sales and marketing advantage: how to make money with a chatbot like Facebook Messenger?
A chatbot is never a gadget. You should not provide your prospects or customers with a tool that will be trivial and will not have any tangible added value for a brand and its products or services. A chatbot must allow you to do a real job before or instead of a human intervention. Its action must be targeted and lead to the achievement of commercial or marketing objectives established beforehand.
The objectives, whatever their nature, are numerous. It can be to obtain a commercial lead by making a user interested in the services or products presented fill out a personal information form. The chatbot can also be used to advance or finalize the qualification of a marketing lead, by obtaining, through its exchange with him, information on his needs or on the place where he is in his buying process.
The chatbot can also be used to guide the user in his online purchase process, by presenting itself as a decision support tool. This is especially true for configurable products, sometimes technical and complex, with multiple variants.
By fulfilling these different missions, the chatbot works to produce value, to make the commercial aspect work, either in the upstream phase of prospecting and identifying potential customers, or in the pure marketing phase by promoting sales.
If this is more obvious when their intervention is directly linked to online commerce, chatbots participate, in all cases, directly or indirectly, to the increase of the sales revenues and the growth of the companies that mobilize them. By playing the role of a salesperson available 24/7 online, it allows to earn money, without having to pay a salary.
Be careful, this does not mean that the chabot, however sophisticated and intelligent it may be, will be able to cover all the needs of a company. A human commercial action will always be necessary at some point of the purchase process on the one hand, and an exploitation, even automated, of the data collected by the chatbot, will be essential on the other hand.
Thus, from Facebook Messenger to ChatGPT, it will be necessary to establish beforehand the reasons for their use, their objectives, their settings and their positioning in the commercial and marketing processes of any organization mobilizing them.
Agencies with expertise in these technologies are now able to provide advice and technical added value to these tools in order to make the most of their capabilities. Chatbots are powerful tools that need to be handled with method and precision to get the most out of them. Neglecting these aspects would be an unnecessary expense and an inevitable disappointment.