I ‘Bot’ That: How innovative bots are helping online businesses optimize their operations

• Today, chatbots are making their presence felt across the entire business value chain.
• They are enhancing customer support by helping customers explore products and services in a more seamless fashion.
• New-age bots are redefining critical aspects such as customer engagement, sales, marketing, and profitability for businesses in the online realm, writes Neha Kulwal, Country Manager- Admitad India.

There is one thing that you commonly find when you go online. There, right in the corner of your screen. Unobtrusive, for all intents and purposes, and yet somehow drawing your attention to itself. Yes, you guessed it right: a chat screen. The window that pops up as soon as you visit the landing page of a website, asking you about what it can help you with.

Most online businesses today have some chat feature or another that was initially handled by human teams. This function has since been taken over by chatbots that are making their presence felt across the entire business value chain. To begin with, they are enhancing customer support by helping customers explore products and services in a more seamless fashion. Chatbots are also used to provide answers to frequently-asked after-sales queries and redirecting buyers to the most relevant means of grievance redressal.

Of late, however, new-age bots are going a step ahead and redefining critical aspects such as customer engagement, sales, marketing, and profitability for businesses in the online realm.

Botting it up: How Samsung used chatbots to drive higher customer engagement and better leads

Take, for instance, the Twitter chatbot deployed by Samsung in Australia and Canada. Aimed at helping users familiarise themselves with its new 4K UHD TV technology, the chatbot addressed customer queries around the new technology. More importantly, the brand used the chatbot as a means to engage prospective buyers by identifying their areas of interest (sports, movies, gaming, and TV) and inviting them to start interacting with the bot for enhanced end-user experiences and personalised product recommendations. Samsung received a high engagement rate, with 89% of the participants following through with the chatbot experience. It also drastically reduced the cost per lead for the brand, bringing it down to barely 25% of what its marketing endeavours typically cost.

A study in analytics: How the Qlik Insight Bot is helping businesses use data to optimise operations

Chatbots, however, are just the tip of the iceberg as far as the ongoing ‘bot revolution’ is concerned. Another prominent example of how bots are helping drive better outcomes for businesses is the Qlik Insight Bot that is built on top of the open API framework and Associative Engine® from Qlik, a domain-leading data integration platform. The mobile bot leverages AI-driven analytics and Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities to identify conversational patterns over time and facilitate more customised data analytics experiences. This allows business users to make their data queries using conversational chat-based prompts and get the relevant insights into important business questions by simply asking questions on chat. Such an insight-driven approach to analytics allows companies to empower their employees with data at the point of need, thus helping them make more accurate decisions to drive profitability and improve business performance.

Messenger bots: Helping online promoters and brands to drive better revenues

Innovative bots with advanced capabilities are also providing online businesses with a unique opportunity to engage with users to communicate their value propositions and promote their offerings for better lead generation and conversion. Telegram, for instance, has introduced a bot that allows uploaded text to be automatically converted into machine voice. This facilitates another layer of engagement, enabling brands to convert prospective customers into buyers – by targeting them at the platforms where they spend the most time.

There are several interesting developments on the publisher side as well. New-age tools, such as Admitad Bot, are also being integrated into Telegram to add more value to the digital marketing value chain. Using these tools, for instance, online publishers – such as bloggers, social media influencers, YouTubers, and podcasters – can improve their profitability by seamlessly creating deep links to the best affiliate campaigns. These links are designed for robust functionality across multiple traffic sources and are handpicked from thousands of online offers from across the globe.

All publishers need to do to generate these deeplinks is adding the Bot in their Telegram app, login, choose an ad space from the options presented, and send the bot the website link for the relevant product. These chatbots can also intimate publishers when a product category is “hot”, along with providing information about the commission rates.
Such end-to-end support on messenger bots not only helps publishers augment business growth and profitability but also enables brands to maximise their consumer outreach and sale revenues. It also enables brands to achieve better CPA results for their marketing spending, as affiliate payouts are only released once the desired action (clickthrough, sale, etc.) has been completed.

Why is this important? Because online messaging apps have emerged as, arguably, the medium of choice for new-age consumers to interact and engage with each other in this digital-first age. Here are some statistics for scale: WhatsApp has more than 1.6 billion active users, while Facebook Messenger and WeChat have 1.3 billion and 1.1 billion users, respectively. Newer messaging apps are also finding great traction and adoption with users; Telegram had 200 million monthly active users by March 2018, while Hike claimed to have 100 million users in 2018.

The growing importance of messenger bots in the digital marketing value chain is further corroborated by recent performance statistics. As per the data analysed by Admitad India, advertisers drove sales to the tune of $10,000 through chat-based messengers during the first six months of 2019 alone. In a country that is rapidly moving online on the back of rapid digital adoption, this represents a unique and high-value affiliate marketing opportunity for brands.

If these aforementioned examples are anything to go by, the future will not just be digital – it will be driven by bots. Online businesses across sectors will need to stay ahead of this curve by integrating such bots into their existing processes to streamline and optimise their operations. Doing so is not just a matter of luxury anymore, but is rapidly becoming a critical business imperative.

-- This article has been written by Neha Kulwal, Country Manager, Admitad India