Small Businesses, Big Wins: How To Succeed Using Chatbots

You might think that chatbots are for large businesses, but that is not quite true. Smaller businesses can use chatbots as well for multiple purposes. Here, we want to discuss some examples of using chatbots in small businesses. 

Small businesses are defined differently all over the world. Here, we will set the threshold at 500 employees. We know that 500 employees is quite a lot, but that is a common approach to defining small businesses in the US. The less, the better, though. We want to prove that small companies can benefit from chatbots.

Customer Support in Small Businesses

One of the major advantages of chatbots is the ability to make customer support easier, cheaper and more effective. Chatbots can answer any standard questions and redirect clients to human support team members for the more complicated ones. More advanced chatbots can handle complex inquiries as well. Bots are also often integrated with CRM systems, which makes them even more useful. Integrated, they can leverage the information they get from a CRM and feed more information into it.

A small business can get a custom or off-the-shelf chatbot solution just for customer support. Notable outcomes include faster ticket processing, greater customer satisfaction, reduced working hours, and savings. This use case is a very common reason to get a chatbot.

For example, Integratec, a small HR software company with more than 50 employees, reports using Tidio chatbots. Among other things, that helped the business in creating a support system that is available 24/7. 

Analysis and Reporting

Chatbots are very good at analyzing the data they manage and providing insights. They can easily process huge amounts of information about customer interactions and make suggestions based on that. While it is rarely the primary feature of a chatbot, it is a very good use of the technology.

Digitrips, a small travel company with 100 advisors, reports using Freshworks and its AI advisor Freddy AI Copilot. It is not fair to call Freddy just a chatbot, but it is an AI, which makes it eligible for a place on this list. After the pandemic, Digitrips had a lot more clients as traveling became possible again. Freshworks assisted in query redirection while Freddy produced recaps of customer interactions. Such recaps — a type of analysis — helped Digitrips advisors in their interaction with the clients. After starting to use Freddy, Digitrips boasts 99% client satisfaction with the chat.

Lead Generation for Small Businesses

Lead generation is a natural application for chatbots. If they are located on your website, they interact with the visitors. That process can involve screening and generating leads through simple questions and recommendations. 

Integratec, for example, reports that Tidio chatbots engaged over 25% of the website visitors, with leads increasing by 25%. The chatbots were also capable of other things, including the analysis of the customer interactions. Overall, Integratec is proudly presented on the Tidio website as a success story.

…there was around a 25% increase in qualified leads from our website chat.

Roberto Coindreau, Director General at Integratec

Automation

Chatbots can automate a lot of things. That includes answering FAQs, managing stock, processing orders, making schedules with reminders, marketing, and much more. For instance, chatbots can automate gathering feedback from customers. It is a very important step in client interaction, and chatbots can make it simple and non-intrusive. The bot will automatically store the information and analyze it, providing meaningful insights into customer interactions. 

As another example, Digitrips used Freshworks AI to automate the way tickets were prioritized and directed to the company’s agents. That must have contributed to the customer satisfaction rate because tickets were solved faster and better. Overall, automating tasks is an important part of chatbot use.

Content Creation 

Chatbots like ChatGPT can produce a lot of content very quickly. There are some pitfalls; in particular, bots are known to imagine sources that do not exist and create information that is not true. However, in general, chatbots can provide you with text and even images, which could be very useful. Naturally, it is better to pay a specialist to create your content. There are ethical concerns in substituting people for bots in this area. But at times, chatbots for content creation are the solution.

Look at SisterLove. It is a non-profit, which might disqualify it from being a small business in some cases. However, we still want to use this example because SisterLove reports using Zapier and ChatGPT for content creation. And SisterLove does need the help! It has less than 50 employees, with the digital marketing team consisting of just one person. The company has an important mission: it fights HIV and the reproductive oppression of women. By generating content with the help of ChatGPT, SisterLove improved its ranking in organic search. 

In Conclusion

Small businesses are very important for the economy, but they are rarely spoken about. It was difficult to find success stories of smaller companies. However, such stories do exist! And they should inspire you to try out chatbots and employ many of their useful features.