8 Sales Chatbot Strategies That Hook Customers
Are you missing leads? Is your customer base stagnating? Instead of revamping your strategy, it may be time to get a little help from some digital friends.
You don’t need to invest your time and money into building your own chatbot to take advantage of AI in customer service. Today’s pre-built solutions are a cost-effective option that yield results for small and big businesses alike.
How does a chatbot increase sales?
A sales chatbot can quickly qualify leads by offering help and learning the visitor’s sales funnel position. By offering instant, personalized assistance, you can connect with your site visitors and forward hot, interested leads to your agents for follow-up.
How exactly do you set this up? Here are a few key strategies for using a chatbot for sales:
- Give personalized welcome messages
- Stop customers from leaving
- Reduce cart abandonment rate
- Answer frequently asked questions
- Communicate in multiple languages
- Help customers track their orders
- Collect feedback
- Keep your team motivated
1
Give personalized welcome messages
If sales assistants welcome customers in physical stores, why not do this online?
A proactive chatbot helps break the ice with a personalized message, making it easier for the customer to either engage at that moment, or return to the chat at a later time.
Whether your visitor is a new or returning customer, you can write multiple messages and scripts tailored to their experience. Here are some examples:
For new customers:
- “Thanks for checking out (website name)! I’m around if you have any questions or just want to chat.”
- “Hey there, welcome! If you get stuck or need a quick answer, hit me up. I’ll be around :)”
- “Haven’t seen you here before! Want a quick tour of (website name)? I’d love to be your guide. Click on one of the page options below to get started.”
For returning customers:
- “Welcome back, (customer name)! You know the drill, I’m around if you need help. Let’s chat when you get a chance!”
- “Good to see you again :) Want to check out our newest products? There’s a few things I think you’ll like: (URL)”
- “Hi (customer name)! How’ve you been? Is there anything you need help with?”
Omega Bank adds subtle personalization by addressing returning customers by name:
It may seem simple, but it can help make your business appear more approachable and available.
2
Stop customers from leaving
According to Forrester’s “ Raising the Bar ” survey, 1 in 5 Generation Z customers will abandon a product or service if the live chat response time is too slow.
At the same time, tech-savvy Generation Z shoppers are more likely to engage with new platforms like chatbots and other digital assistants.
Chatbots satisfy young shoppers’ expectations by being a click away. This means your sales chatbot is always the first point of contact for all new incoming requests, which helps significantly cut response times and engage customers before they consider leaving.
Sales chatbots also make great promoters, which can hook customers into taking advantage of deals. If you’re having a sale or just updated your site with new products, use a chatbot to communicate these offers in a proactive message.
For customers that open chatbot messages, make them feel like they’re in on a secret by offering them a discount code.
You can tailor these discounts or messages to the page they’re browsing to further personalize the experience. Little details like this can make customers stay and help set you apart from the competition.
3
Reduce cart abandonment rate
Adding items to a shopping cart and abandoning it in the middle of a store is super rude. But adding items to an online cart and then closing the page is the norm nowadays.
Why is that? According to Barilliance , customers are most likely to abandon their shopping cart after seeing unexpected shipping costs.
If you offer free shipping when a customer spends a certain amount, or have a “buy now, pay later” payment option, then use a chatbot to communicate that. Sometimes a shopper just needs a little incentive.
A second big culprit of cart abandonment are people shopping around for deals. Get your customer’s attention with a chatbot message like,
“Hey! We’ve got some new promotions going on that are too good to pass up. Let’s chat!”
Your chatbot can then keep your customer’s interest by talking about sales or by answering questions about the product, shipping, payment security, etc. When a unique issue arises, chatbots can forward the chat to your team.
4
Answer frequently asked questions
Live chat is a double-edged sword: it’s faster than phone and email, but agents are quickly overloaded.
It would be a shame to lose a sale just because the wait time is taking longer than usual. A chatbot can take a load off your team by tackling the simple questions customers may have.
For example, you can use Userlike’s AI Chatbot and Smart FAQ to instantly answer common questions. Both pull answers from a central knowledge base so the information stays consistent.
The Smart FAQ is an intelligent self-service option that will also help reduce repetitive chat inquiries. It attempts to answer the visitor’s question even as they’re typing and learns from every conversation to improve its accuracy.
According to SuperOffice, 40% of consumers actually prefer self-service over human contact. What’s more, in our consumer chatbot perceptions survey , customers said they would rather speak to a chatbot immediately than wait for a human agent. For a lot of customers, talking to a chatbot or using an intelligent FAQ page appears to be the better, more ideal option.
5
Communicate in multiple languages
For businesses with a global reach, it’s easy to just make your company language English and expect customers to be okay with it. It’s spoken worldwide, right?
Imagine how much more comfortable a customer would feel if they knew they could contact you in their native language. AI and chatbots make this possible.
Companies like Unbabel offer multilingual chat integrations that let you respond in your customer’s language in real time. Inbound messages are translated into the respondent’s preferred language, and replies are automatically translated after hitting send.
According to Common Sense Advisory Research, 74% of customers said they were more likely to make a second purchase if post-sales support was offered in their native language.
Take a look at your analytics to see where most of your customers are from. Chances are you only need to offer a few core languages like German, French and Spanish.
6
Help customers track their orders
Don’t leave your customers hanging after they click “Purchase.” Give them peace of mind about their orders by offering a chatbot that can help with all tracking and returning purposes.
The chatbot builder service called, wait for it, ChatBot, offers easy-to-use pre-made chatbot platforms, such as a Package Tracking Bot.
Sure, customers can click a tracking number link in their email to check their shipment status. But why make them dependent on a third party website?
If there are issues with the shipment, or if the customer needs to reroute or cancel the order, then a chatbot can forward the request to one of your agents.
This shows that you’re still assuming responsibility and not forgetting the customer after the transaction is complete.
7
Collect feedback
Reviews = sales. G2 reported that research shows 72% of customers won’t take action until they’ve read reviews.
In addition, 92% of B2B buyers are more likely to make a purchase after reading trusted reviews.
However, the truth is that customers rarely leave reviews when they’re satisfied. And when they do, it’s likely just star ratings and generic remarks like, “Works great!” or “Love it.”
Negative reviews aren’t always a bad thing, and the New York Times says people pay more attention to them because they highlight what could go wrong. People want to feel secure in their decision-making process.
For reviews to be helpful and trustworthy, they should come from customers who have definitely bought from you.
A winning combo solution is to connect your bot to your email. By giving it access to the emails of customers who have made a purchase, you can use your chatbot to draft and send emails asking for star ratings and reviews.
ChatBot has a Zapier integration with Gmail that lets a bot create and send an email. Using a pre-drafted script, a chatbot can send an email some time after the customer receives their order to ask for a rating and review.
Since writing reviews takes time, make it easier for your customer by offering a few pre-written texts or prompts they can use to quickly draft a response:
“We love reviews, but we know they take time to write. Here are a few quick questions you can choose to answer. Feel free to respond to as many or as few as you like!”
- Is the quality as expected?
- Are you happy with your purchase?
- What are two things you like about your purchase?
- What are two things you don’t like about your purchase?
- Would you recommend this product?
You can then publish these results directly to your website under their respective products. Potential customers will appreciate the reviews, and you’ll gain insight into how existing customers feel about your products.
8
Keep your team motivated
It’s not easy getting rejected on a daily basis. Spending a lot of time and energy on answering questions from interested visitors only to get a “no” in the end can be frustrating.
To save your team the pain, you can use a sales chatbot to analyze potential and existing customers and filter valuable leads. This prevents your agents from speaking to every person who sends a chat, and lets them focus on genuinely interested customers the chatbot finds.
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Read moreFor example, Whisbi offers several chatbot solutions that independently qualify leads without forms and route conversations based on the rules you set. If the customer meets all the requirements, a chatbot sends them your way.
Even the most resilient sales team needs results as motivation to keep moving forward. A chatbot helps everyone invest their time well.
Five best sales chatbot integrations
Besides the chatbot solutions mentioned above, here are a few more integrations we recommend:
- Userlike’s AI Automation Hub: Use your business knowledge to power multiple AI modules that all learn from each other. The AI Chatbot, Smart FAQ and Contact Form Suggestions are connected to the same centralized knowledge base and improve its accuracy from all customer interactions.
- Salesmachine: This software helps you stop wasting time on unqualified leads by scoring new and existing customers based on their company info and product use. With clear health scores, you can increase trial conversions and upsell your product to the right customers.
- Kiwi - Tableau-Slack integration: Kiwi keeps track of your data and lets you share tableau reports with colleagues over Slack. This makes it easier for the team to spot issues and collaborate on data-driven decision-making.
- Copper - CRM for GSuite: If your company uses G Suite, Copper CRM will keep your team updated on customer data from the comfort of their inbox. It lets you manage past interactions, schedule events and follow-up on tasks all within Gmail.
- Dealbot by Pipedrive: Dealbot keeps your team in the loop every time someone makes a deal. The crucial details of every won deal automatically appear in a designated Slack channel. We use this integration at Userlike so that no win goes uncelebrated.
The best sales AI chatbot for every industry
Intelligent sales chatbots are no longer just for enterprise businesses. Userlike offers an affordable, rare combination of sophisticated AI features and customer messaging software.
Our AI chatbot can be used as a proactive first contact for customers, as backup for your agents or to answer requests received outside of service hours. It can even pick up conversations where customers left off — a perk not every chatbot platform provides.
Most chatbots “reset” once you leave the website, but customers can see their previous conversation with the AI chatbot before deciding to continue it or start a new one.
Within the chat, you can display button options and carousels to help customers quickly find what they’re looking for. In-chat media also makes it easier to send important documents - such as insurance applications and invoices - or a catalog of your products.
You’ll gain more customers by proactively approaching them with an AI chatbot that’s not only easy for customers to use, but simple for your company to implement.
Sign up for our free 14-day trial to get an impression of Userlike’s AI Automation Hub. If you like what you see, we’d be more than happy to set up a call to discuss our AI features to see if it’s a good fit for your business.
