Consumers want to access information quickly and easily. Businesses want to maximize their time at work. That’s why more companies now use chatbots in manufacturing.
In today’s fast-paced and ever-evolving market, chatbots are a highly effective tool for saving time, reducing costs, and growing your customer base. Chatbot chats can resolve the conversation from beginning to end, making them a positive addition to your customer service strategy and tool with many benefits. They reduce frustrations, improve efficiency, and help deliver a positive user experience that results in revenue generation.
Keep reading to learn how to use chatbots in manufacturing to attract and keep customers.
Key Takeaways
- Chatbots are digital robots that use artificial intelligence, natural language processing, machine learning, and automated rules to simulate human communication.
- Consumers and businesses benefit from chatbots, which include assets such as streamlining processes, driving engagement, and delivering powerful insights for future planning.
- Manufacturing companies can use chatbots to provide customer service, recommend relevant products, and help with website navigation for a positive user experience.
What Exactly Are Chatbots?
Chatbots are essentially digital robots that simulate human interactions, enabling people to communicate with a machine akin to having a conversation with a real person. Computers use the following to achieve this technology:
- Artificial intelligence: Systems developed to mimic humans’ intellectual processes.
- Natural-language processing: A computer’s ability to recognize conversational spoken words.
- Machine learning: Algorithms to better understand a person’s behavior and provide more accurate information.
- Automated rules: Criteria that allow actions to be automated.
Chatbots can answer questions with single-line responses or provide custom answers based on user behavior. Some chatbots are task-oriented, and their purpose is to complete one function. These bots often function in service and support roles, like hours of operation or order tracking. They’re pretty basic and the most common of all chatbots.
Other chatbots are data-driven and consumer-oriented. These highly sophisticated bots provide a custom user experience through predictive intelligence. These conversational chatbots can offer recommendations and anticipate future needs by learning user behavior and profiles. More than data monitoring, such chatbots can begin conversations and engage people with back-and-forth interactions.
Chances are you’ve used a chatbot at some point, even if you didn’t realize the company representative you were engaging with was a robot. If you’ve ever asked Amazon’s Alexa to play a certain song or enlisted a digital assistant’s help to answer your questions, you’ve encountered a chatbot. They’re everywhere, not just in the manufacturing industry but peppered throughout our daily lives. They simplify processes, ease our frustrations, and expedite responses for an improved user experience that generates customer loyalty and drives sales.
The following video explains chatbots in further detail, describes how they work, and provides real-world examples of chatbots in action:
Source: IBM Technology on YouTube
3 Benefits of Using Chatbots
Chatbots are an asset for customers as well as businesses. They offer numerous benefits that improve the customer experience and keep operations running smoothly. Here are three benefits of using chatbots in manufacturing.
1. Streamline Processes
Using a chatbot removes people from idle tasks that robots can assume, freeing them to focus on other duties that need human attention. This supplementation allows businesses to operate more efficiently, which increases productivity. Chatbots can also integrate with customer relationship management software to better understand customer needs and help prioritize production and product development.
Chatbots can communicate and negotiate with vendors to secure raw materials needed for project completion. AI technology can contact businesses, make purchase decisions, and locate cost-effective deals. Chatbots can also manage order fulfillment. From order status to tracking information, chatbots can manage the mundane details of order processing.
2. Offers Higher Engagement
Chatbots provide quick responses to consumer questions. Chatbots are so helpful that 62% of shoppers would rather use a customer service chatbot than wait for a human response. Because chatbots already have the information to answer various queries, workers don’t waste time looking up answers and confirming details. Chatbots minimize response time and allow your company to better serve more customers and engage with your audience.
The more interaction your manufacturing business has with your consumers, the better the relationship you can build with those people. Establishing good relationships is vital for growing customer loyalty, which is significant because existing customers are responsible for 65% of your sales.
Providing positive experiences to more users helps with brand marketing for manufacturing companies, as you create a trait that sets you apart from your competitors. It also helps in driving website traffic since you can program your chatbot to submit links to specific pages on your website that provide resources and answers that benefit your consumers.
3. Delivers Useful Insights
Chatbots aren’t just delivering answers. They’re gathering useful information that can help shape your marketing for manufacturers. Understanding the kinds of questions your audience is asking and the problems they’re trying to solve can reveal what to include in your content marketing for manufacturing companies. These insights can tell you what keywords to use, what topics to cover, how to design your website for ease of locating information and other SEO basics for manufacturing and industrial companies.
When you know what your audience needs, you can streamline your processes and customize information to deliver solutions that build trust and position you as a leader in your field. Knowing your audience helps keep you front of mind when your buyers are in the market for the solutions you provide, boosting sales and generating more revenue for continued success.
How to Use Chatbots in Manufacturing
Chatbots are a powerful tool for customer acquisition and retention. Here are three ways to use chatbots in manufacturing.
1. Provide Customer Service
Chatbots never eat or sleep, so they never need breaks. They’re constantly available, regardless of the time of day, global time zones, and day of the week. Such flexibility allows shoppers to engage at their convenience, putting them in the driver’s seat. Use trends and buyer behavior to identify which processes or products raise the most questions. Program your chatbots to answer those queries so customers can get their answers quickly and move through the sales funnel much faster.
2. Suggest Relevant Products
Chatbots can track users’ past purchases and identify trends that help predict what would interest your customers, allowing them to suggest specific products for particular buyers. When people see that they’re receiving relevant suggestions that meet their unique needs, they’re more likely to shop with you and even more inclined to convert. That’s how you can attract new customers and retain current ones.
3. Offer Website Navigation Assistance
When visitors come to your website, they want to find the answers quickly and easily. A chatbot can help guide them to the right web page, product description, or process explanation. In addition to minimizing frustrations and easing pain points, bots help keep people on your website longer and increase the likelihood that they’ll convert.
Maximize Chatbots in Manufacturing
Shanahan Strategy follows marketing trends in manufacturing companies to help industrial businesses create digital marketing and sales strategies that build an audience and drive sales.
Contact Shanahan Strategy today to learn how we can help you use chatbots for customer attraction and retention.
