What Is Chatbot Automation? [Benefits & Main Features]

It’s great to watch your business grow. 

But, at some point, the number of queries related to your products or services can become overwhelming for your customer service representatives. 

The same applies to your sales and lead generation teams. Acquiring new clients can be a driving force of your business but, without automating some tasks (especially the repetitive ones) it can significantly slow down. 

Luckily, there is a great solution to this problem that makes your sales, marketing, and customer service teams’ work more effective—

It’s called chatbot automation. 

In this article:

• What chatbot automation is
• Benefits of automated chatbots
• Industries that can get the most out of it
• Features to look out for 
• Best chatbot automation tools

To learn more about chatbot technology, its numerous capabilities and use cases, be sure to check out these articles:

• 9 Helpful Tips on Training a Chatbot: How to Train an AI?
• How to Use NLP Chatbots: A Quickstart Guide
• What Is Customer Service Automation? [Full Guide]

So, let’s start by answering the question—

What is chatbot automation?

Simply put, chatbot automation is a software used by businesses to hold live conversations with their customers in order to achieve assumed business goals.

Chatbots can be great allies in answering queries about your products, services, post sales support, or customer self-service. Thanks to their ability to deal with numerous queries at once, they can solve your clients’ problems without any interference from the support agents.

Automated chatbots can also be helpful in generating revenue and gathering valuable information about your customers. Your sales team can then use this data to lead the prospects further down the sales funnel.

As a result, an auto chatbot can help companies in many areas, including customer support, sales department, and marketing, just to name a few.

Read more: If you’re looking for more knowledge about chatbots in general and detailed descriptions of its different types, be sure to read our in-depth guide on what is a chatbot. 

And as automated chatbots can play many roles in your sales, marketing, or customer service strategies, it’s worth mentioning that there are also a few types of them:

• Customer service bots
• Lead generation bots
• Social media bots
• Companion bots
• FAQ chatbots

Now that you know what chatbot automation is, let’s discover how businesses can benefit from this solution.

Benefits of chatbot automation

So—

Conversational chatbots can increase clients’ satisfaction, improve customer onboarding process, and boost your sales. And their greatest advantage over humans is that they do it fast and are free of human errors. But is that all?

Of course not. 

Let’s dive into the details of what automated chat can bring to your company.

Lead generation support

Chatbot software can also be your great ally in increasing top of the funnel conversions. You can use automated chatbots to collect contact details, ask qualifying questions, or set up appointments with sales reps. 

What’s more, if your company is using an omnichannel marketing model, you can send customized messages to your potential clients. By doing this, you will not only get the opportunity to increase brand awareness, but also to promote your products and services. 

And thanks to ready-to-use chatbot templates offered by most providers, sending such messages adjusted to your potential customer needs is easier than ever. 

24/7 customer support

Chatbots, unlike humans, don’t get tired, sick, go on vacation or need to sleep. Once designed and launched, they will work for your clients 24/7, 365 days a year, with no breaks. They will support your clients at each step of their buying process every time, in every time zone to make the buying experience easy, fast, and smooth.

And, due to the fact that 28% of customers said that the quick checkout process is one of the main reasons to shop online, it makes a difference. 

What’s more, thanks to the machine learning process, AI chatbots can continuously learn and develop. Thanks to that, chatbot technologies are able to solve more complex problems and increase the quality of customer interactions. 

Handle multiple clients’ inquiries simultaneously

As the business grows, the number of customer questions grows with it. And no matter how great your customer support team is, it has its limitations. 

What makes the case more complicated is the fact that, if you want to provide a great customer experience, the wait times for your response to queries should be as short as possible. Sounds difficult, doesn’t it?

But thanks to chatbot automation, you can handle this situation with ease. Once designed, chatbot conversational workflows can address multiple queries at once, with minimal (or even zero) wait time. 

Bounce rates reduction

Minimal bounce rate is a dream of every digital marketer. But when it grows, it becomes a true nightmare. Not only for marketers, but also for your company’s revenue.

One of the main reasons for high bounce rates is the content that doesn’t meet your website visitors’ expectations. But you can get rid of this problem.

How?

Chatbot automation tools are able to gather and store a database of your visitors’ concerns and frequently asked questions about your products or services. And based on that knowledge, you can create the content people are looking for, which will help you increase conversion rates and minimize bounce rates. 

Streamlining online payment services

It can come as quite a surprise, but chatbots are also able to support money transactions. As an example, let’s take WeChat. They implemented a functionality that allows people to pay through the app in selected restaurants and shops.

Another big name, PayPal is also following this trend. Their chatbot allows companies to chat with clients about a product and offers the possibility to make payments directly via the chat. 

Read more: If you are wondering about handling online payments via bots, be sure to check out 9 Best Finance Chatbots for Your Services.

No risk of human error

Everyone makes mistakes, it’s written in human nature. And sometimes these mistakes can cost your business more than just money. 

But chatbots aren’t humans. 

If you design your chatbot well and in line with your customer needs, the risk of human error drops close to zero. Well-programmed and automated chatbots will collect valuable information about your clients or lead them to relevant helpdesk materials. Simply put, if designed well, they guarantee accuracy. 

As you can see, chatbot automation can optimize the effectiveness and efficiency of your marketing, support, and sales teams. Now, let’s discover which industries can benefit the most from implementing chatbot automation into their daily operations.

Which industries can benefit most from chatbot automation?

Chatbot automation is growing in popularity in many different industries as it brings a great change in the process of building customer relationships. It saves human agents a lot of time and effort while being a cost-effective solution to speed up numerous sales and marketing processes.

In this section, we’ll go through a few branches that take a handful out of automated chatbots—ecommerce, healthcare and real estate business.

Ecommerce

The ecommerce platforms sector is huge. According to SkyQquest Technology Consulting, the global ecommerce market was valued at over $14 trillion in 2021 and is expected to reach nearly $59 trillion by 2028.

But, to succeed in that field, companies need to put special emphasis on various elements like:

• Great ecommerce customer service
• Short response time
• Reducing the length of sales cycles
• Quick lead capture and qualification

And in optimizing all of the aforementioned elements, a chatbot technology can help you take your business to another level. 

How?

Thanks to the immediate response to your shoppers queries, you’ll not only improve the quality of your customer service, but also reduce the length of the sales cycles. Simply put, chatbots will help you serve your clients faster and more efficiently.

When it comes to accelerating lead capture and qualification process, chatbot automation can handle all the repetitive tasks like interviewing prospects to identify their needs, urgency, gather customer information, etc. 

Read more: Be sure to check out our case study about how chatbots helped to turn the cat travel bag idea into a $100k/year side business.

Healthcare

In the healthcare industry, chatbots are used to help patients, doctors, and other staff to better communicate with each other and to increase the overall quality of medical services. And it’s not only about scheduling appointments or collecting patients’ data and feedback.

Chatbots can also help with time-consuming paperwork and take care of administration stuff. But is that all?

No. 

They can do much more than this. Take a look at some examples of chatbots’ commitment in the healthcare business: 

• Assess symptoms 

Before scheduling a visit, chatbots can ask patients about their symptoms to find the best specialist for them. Or, in other cases, when a patient is too sick to even leave the bed, chatbot can, basing on the patient’s symptoms, suggest a treatment. 

• Take care of coverage and claims

If patients have some issues or questions regarding the coverage of the treatment, chatbots can guide them through all the paperwork. The same applies to fulfilling the forms for claims.

• Locate healthcare services

Besides assessing symptoms and scheduling the appointments, chatbots can help patients find medical services in their near vicinity. They can also present a varied option to commute to a chosen medical facility depending on the patient’s access to public transport, etc. 

• Mental health support

Chatbots can also provide mental health assistance 24/7. This support can include self-help tips, meditation and relaxation exercises, positive affirmations, chat with mental health experts, etc.

• Set vaccination reminders

While planning a trip, sometimes it’s required to get vaccines before visiting specific countries. Chatbots can alert patients when it’s time for vaccination and what kind of vaccines are required in certain countries. 

• Request prescription refills

With chatbots’ support, there is no need to set up an appointment with a doctor just to refill the prescription. Healthcare bots can help here, so patients can get their prescriptions refilled without even leaving their beds. 

Real estate

Real estate business is based on building trust between agencies and their clients. And one of the best ways to build such trust is to deliver with great customer service. But, despite the great job done by the agents and marketing teams, all of their effort may collapse because of human errors.

The mistakes that can cost agencies a lot of money include:

• Long response times
• Forgetting to make an appointment with potential clients
• Lack of follow-up messages after meeting with clients

Thankfully, similar to the healthcare services providers, real estate agencies can easily move the administrative responsibility from people to chatbots. Without having all these repetitive tasks in mind, they’ll be able to focus on delivering the greatest possible customer service, which leads to increased revenue.

Need proof?

According to the Customer Expectations Report prepared by Gladly, 72% of consumers are willing to pay more for products and services from a brand known to offer good customer service experiences.

Read more: If you’re running a real estate agency, check out the 9 Best Real Estate Chatbots & How to Use Them [Guide].

Chatbots are, in fact, versatile tools that can help you optimize many different processes in a wide range of industries. 

But, to make the most of chatbot automation potential, you need to choose proper tools. In the next section, we will discover what exactly you should look at while choosing the right automation software for your company.

Read more: Discover top real-life chatbot use cases that work from businesses from all around the world.

What features to look for in chatbot automation software?

There are many chatbot software providers on the market, so choosing the right one can be a tricky task. To make things easier, we’ve prepared some must-have features that will allow you to fully benefit from the chat automation. 

Easy customization

Chatbots were designed to make our lives easier. So, when choosing your tool, make sure that the provider offers a rich customization options, including:

• Ability to adjust the visual layout of a chatbot to your brandbook
• No coding skills required to create a chatbot for a website
• Numerous ready-to-use chatbot templates

This will enable you to match the tool to your ecommerce/business website and provide a great user experience to all the visitors. 

Self-learning capabilities

Chatbots are evolving at a fast pace. Thanks to machine learning and artificial intelligence, they are able to improve based on the recently handled conversations. These bots, just like people, can learn from their experiences, analyze customers’ behaviors, and adjust to them. 

What’s more, with time, automated chats become increasingly self-reliable when dealing with more complex issues without human intervention. Sounds like science fiction?

No, it’s the future happening before our eyes! 

Read more: If you want to stay on top of your competitors, you should keep an eye out for the latest AI trends.

Integration with third-party apps

Chatbots can give you a lot of valuable insights about your shoppers—their expectations towards your brand, buying habits, or feedback about your products/services just to name a few. 

But, to be able to make a full use of this information, you’ll need some third-party apps like,:

• CRM—to gather all the customer data in one, well-organized place
• Sales management tool—to qualify new leads and manage relationships with your prospects
• Google Sheets—to prepare data analysis

Live chat integration

Sometimes your clients require the help of support agents. This could be because their inquiry is too complex for a bot, or because of simple personal preferences of the customer.

In these cases, it’s important to give them the possibility to contact a human agent easily. This will ensure that shoppers receive a great customer experience, as well as make them feel understood and valued.

Read more: Take a look at the 24 essential live chat statistics to find out how your business can benefit from this solution. 

Multilingual capabilities

If you plan to expand your business in new, foreign markets, you have to ensure that your bots are able to serve people in their language. This ability will help you create valuable customer relationships and show them that you truly care about them. 

Multilingual chatbot will also help you in conquering foreign markets or connecting with clients from different countries. Thanks to that, you’ll be able to increase your revenue and expand your business. 

Your clients can reach out to you via many different communication channels. It can be Facebook Messenger, DM on Instagram, or email just to name a few. Managing all these inboxes separately can be a huge challenge, especially if you’re dealing with a large number of queries. 

Make sure that chatbot provider you want to use offers a multichannel inbox. Thanks to that, you’ll be able to manage all customer communications from one place, which makes the whole process much easier and more time-efficient. 

Chatbot automation: useful tools

As we’ve covered all the important information about chatbot automation and its benefits for different businesses, let’s talk about the best tools for implementing this solution. 

We’ve listed out three best chat automation tools that fully cover the aforementioned requirements, have years of experience on the market and a huge amount of satisfied clients. 

1. Tidio

Rating: 4.7/5 ⭐️(1,300+ reviews)

Tidio is an all-in-one customer service platform designed to leverage your customer support and help you generate more sales. The software offers conversational AI chatbots that use machine learning and NLP to provide top-notch support for your clients.

Thanks to intuitive drag-and-drop visual builder, you can customize your chatbots according to your needs. On top of that, you don’t have to know any coding language to do it!

Tidio will also help you to track abandoned carts, use conversational marketing, provide 24/7 customer support, and much more. Need social proof?

Check out our users’ reviews on G2 and try our chatbot automation software for free to see if it meets your expectations. 

Main features:

• More than 16 different chatbot triggers
• Drag-and-drop visual chatbot builder
• Chatbot analytics dashboards
• Over 37 ready-to-use chatbot templates
• NLP chatbots

Pricing:

• Free version available
• Communicator ($19/mo/operator)
• Chatbots ($39/mo)
• Tidio+ (from $289/mo)

Read more: If you’re considering using Tidio as your chatbot automation tool, be sure to see how to get started the best with Tidio chatbots. Discover what else you can get from our tool and how to easily start your journey with chatbots. 

2. Zendesk

Rating: 4.3/5 ⭐️(5,400+ reviews)

This software allows you to monitor, manage and respond to website visitors while on the go. Zendesk is used by companies of all sizes to personalize shopping experience and increase customer satisfaction. 

It includes a ticketing system, CRM, custom forms, automated workflows, and auto-responder functionality to reduce your response time to minimum. 

Pros:

• Cross-channel support
• CRM
• Chatbot analytics
• Over 1,000+ supported integrations, i.e Shopify, Jira, Slack, and more

Cons:

• Steep learning curve
• Some users reported bugs while using the software

Pricing:

• Free trial available
• Suite Team ($49/ agent/mo)
• Suite Growth ($79/agent/mo)
• Suite Professional ($99/agent/mo)

3. Drift

Rating: 4.4/5 ⭐️(820+ reviews)

This automated chat platform can provide assistance to your customer success and sales reps. With AI-powered chatbots on board, it can be your great ally in providing your shoppers with a personalized user experience. 

Drift also offers email automation functionality that can help you onboard new clients and expand your marketing campaigns. Moreover, it allows you to measure the NPS (Net Promoter Score) thanks to surveys sent to your website visitors. 

Pros:

• Multiple integrations, including Zapier, HubSpot, MailChimp, or Salesforce
• Real-time insights into website visitors needs and asks
• Mobile app available

Cons:

• Clients’ support only via chat
• Some reviewers had issues with the reporting features

Pricing:

• Premium ($2,500/mo paid annually)
• Advanced and Custom plans (contact sales)

Chatbot automation: key outtakes

Chatbot automation can help your business grow in many areas. It can boost your sales processes, customer service, and help you maintain sales and marketing consistency. 

Thanks to artificial intelligence and natural language processing, chatbots can handle multiple customers at once, answer their questions 24/7, and analyze previous conversations to better serve your clients in the future. Also, they are free of human error in contrast to live agents. 

When it comes to lead generation, chatbots also can make a change. You can use them as virtual assistants for collecting information about potential customers, asking them qualifying questions, or setting up appointments with sales reps. Thanks to that, you’ll automate your client acquisition process and save a lot of time and effort of your sales team. 

So, If you’ve ever thought about automating sales, marketing, or customer support, be sure to check out what chatbots can do. Who knows, maybe chatbot is the missing piece of the puzzle that would boost your business?