What business outcomes am I hoping to achieve with a bot?

When planning your chatbot, you need to strike a balance between customer and business objectives in order to build a comprehensive strategy. Having a clear goal will help you manage expectations of the bot, set performance targets, and create benchmarks.

Do not embark on a bot initiative unless it clearly supports one or more core business objectives. Some good examples are: reducing operational costs, driving revenue, and increasing customer satisfaction or retention:

1. Bots that reduce costs

Offering your customers a 24/7 support channel powered by bots is far less expensive than one powered by human agents. If you’re considering extending your hours, you’ll have much to gain by doing it with a bot.

2. Bots that drive revenue

Chatbots can proactively alert customers to personalized sales and discount opportunities, engaging visitors and increasing upsells. They can also qualify customers and book product demos.

3. Bots that increase customer satisfaction and retention

Since chatbots can handle a virtually unlimited amount of transactions, customers no longer need to wait in line just to get a simple question answered. Instead of waiting to connect to an agent, customers get a quicker resolution from their chatbot, on their terms. Quicker answers mean happier customers, and consistently happy customers mean higher customer retention.

Depending on your corporate goals, you may find that you need multiple bots with different responses, interfaces, and functionality.

Lastly, determine the needs of other departments in your organizations before building a bot to ensure a cohesive strategy. You don’t want the bot to be working in a silo.