The Covid-19 pandemic is abruptly transfiguring the way people connect, communicate, and collaborate. For such scenarios, one powerful tool that helps in minimizing the social distance between businesses and customers is chatbots.
A chatbot is a software application designed for human-like conversation. There is no doubt that we will witness the rise of chatbots in the coming future.
Recently living the life whilst Covid-19 Outbreak has changed the way of living and seeing things differently. For instance, where working remotely was least of importance, nowadays it has become the new normal part of everyone’s life.
Chatbots have become advantageous for businesses to adapt to smaller workforces and can run work from home smoothly especially in these situations.
The chatbot technology uses customer data to personalize interactions, answering questions, and transferring requests to the right person. Machine learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) facilitates the bots to apprehend common phrases and words and collects information to fix the issues.
So, let’s find out that how businesses got affected by the Covid-19 and how chatbots are a solution in tough times and post-pandemic.
1. The impact of Covid-19 on businesses
Many businesses have seen a downfall amidst the Coronavirus pandemic. It has impacted many businesses around the globe in many ways. In these tough times, some of the companies started laying off their employees because of shortcomings in finances.
On the other hand, travel industries also have seen a decline due to travel restrictions. Not only companies are laying off and seeing a downfall but some of the businesses have shut down their offices and shops due to social distancing and lockdown effects.
Where many businesses have collided badly due to Covid-19, there are some businesses such as Ecommerce, Online grocery delivery, Cloud Computing, Streaming Gaming, Videoconferencing and collaboration still evolving and benefitting in times of pandemic.
During the time of crisis, businesses and companies that are operating offline are in a diabolical situation. So these businesses should start planning and making strategies like:
- How to operate business gracefully,
- How they can digitalize their sales, and
- How they can market their business
Even the companies that provide online delivery to their clients are under a lot of chaos of not managing things properly.
For instance, when online businesses receive an order and if a customer sends a message to complete their order. Meanwhile, the customers have to wait too long for confirmation from the business’s end.
And nobody likes to wait this long to order something. In today’s time, everyone believes in fast work. As the business is delivering a poor customer experience, eventually customers will start moving on to another service.
2. The Pandemic Effect on Online Shopping Business
Nowadays, people prefer online shopping instead of offline shopping. As online shopping saves a considerable amount of time and you receive products while sitting at home. Restaurants and fashion stores have also started no contact delivery at your doorstep in the pandemic.
The main reason is that people are avoiding public places due to the risk of Covid-19 and lockdown guidelines. So many people started shifting to digital platforms rather than regular shops. This transformation of shopping online instead of offline is changing people’s tastes and preferences in particular.
As more and more cities are imposing lockdown, non-essential businesses are being ordered to close and people are also ignoring public places. People are limiting their shopping but essential things are becoming new normal in these tough times.
So how can businesses overcome and survive in Covid-19 Outbreak?
The answer to the question is with the help of “CHATBOTS”.
Chatbots- Meeting the Demands of COVID-19 Era
Chatbots have been a functional tool for circulating health information in the Coronavirus crisis. The advancements in Natural Language Processing (NLP) have capacitated conversational AI technologies and broaden their lead reach. This leads to the tools like Google Home, Siri, and Alexa that are part of many peoples’ everyday lives.
Chatbots are becoming a powerful tool for businesses by making work easy and have revolutionized in these difficult times of the Outbreak. They can automatically process up almost 90% of transactions and improve around 60% of operational performance.
Here are the benefits of chatbots and how they are beneficial for businesses and companies post COVID-19 Outbreak.
1. Fast and On-Time Replies
Customers’ will more likely to engage in a business when they see that they have saved time and money. In a survey, it has found that nearly 58% of people believe that they would use chatbots AI, as customers don’t have to wait.
Chatbots reply to the questions like what’s the order status, locations, store hours, cancel the order, etc. instantly. Even a minute delay in reply can cost business tons of customers.
2. Providing 24*7 Automated Customer Support
Working from home, online shopping, takeaways all these has become new normal. Staying at home and doing all the chores have become flexible for many people. From shopping late at night to ordering food early in the morning, customers can access these apps whenever they want.
For these situations, chatbots are the ones who can have the visibility 24/7 to provide information and answering queries in no time.
Chatbots give the information through a Website or Messenger chatbot as well as can direct the potential customers to the next stage of the sales. Trying Zesno’s Chatbot will save you from losing any leads and minimize the operation cost.
3. Ability to Save Orders and Bookings
In this fast world, it has become vital importance to keep a track of customers. It is a difficult task and it even becomes difficult for a human to keep all the tracks. Chatbots are quick readers and can manage and save all your customers’ data securely. To provide a better experience to your customers, you can also add a tag to tabulate and divide your traffic quickly.
4. Chatbots Generate Leads
By not connecting personally with customers but connecting with customers, isn’t that great? Chatbots are the ones who will do this job and collects all the customer’s information in one go. This will eventually generate leads for your businesses.
With the help of conversational chatbots, businesses can use valuable information to send messages about programs or contests to nurture customer relationships.
5. Help in Burgeoning Brand’s Identity
Chatbots can help a brand in rising its identity in the market. By using the latest way of chatting with emojis, GIFs, videos, or images makes the conversation more delightful and entertaining. It would also be suggested that the voice of a bot can be more like a human to grab the attention of targeted audiences.
Conclusion: Chatbots on the Rise
From the above-mentioned points, it is a plausible thing to say that the rise of chatbots will continue in the future.
With the uncertainties in the pandemic that businesses have come across, the only solution to that is chatbots; they are essential for improving both business operations as well as customer experiences.
The trend of the usage of chatbots will continue as people are opting for more innovative ideas to set their business in this competitive and technological market. This way they can provide fast, seamless, and authentic customer service.