Leveraging chatbots is an efficient way to automate your customer interactions. Let’s discuss a few noteworthy strategies that can help you engage a relevant audience and close a chatbot conversation.
You are the most authentic source of information for your target audience. Whether your audience wants to explore the solutions you offer or wish to make the most of them, they reach out to you with their queries and concerns.
To build a strong bond with your audience, it’s important that you’re always available when they need you. You should cater to their concerns at your earliest and answer questions in their minds.
However, addressing hundreds of queries on a daily basis can be an overwhelming experience. It’s where chatbots come into play and help you converse with your audience with ease.
Leveraging chatbots the right way enables you to generate quality leads for your business and ensure lasting customer relationships. However, many struggle to close a chatbot conversation properly.
This article will talk about the proven strategies to conclude a chatbot conversion and convince your target audience to consider the intended action.
So, without further ado, let’s dive in.
Benefits of Using Chatbots
Before we talk about the strategies that help you effectively close a chatbot conversation, let’s talk about a few of the benefits of using chatbots.
1. Quick Response Time
The time you take to respond to the queries of your target audience dictates the level of engagement you acknowledge.
No one likes to wait in a queue for their turn. Everyone thinks that their queries or concerns are important and wants you to address them on priority.
A chatbot helps you speed up your response time and enables you to address multiple customer queries simultaneously.
Responding in a timely manner enhances customer interactions with your business. It complements your ability to generate quality leads for the sales funnel and improve customer retention.
2. Useful Audience Insights
A chatbot helps you collect useful customer insights. You can train your chatbots to inquire about the necessary information that you can leverage to devise personalized targeting strategies.
Based on the information encompassing your customers’ demographic and psychographic characteristics, you can create different buyer personas and tailor your marketing strategies.
Use it as an opportunity to keep an eye on the changing needs and preferences of the intended audience.
You can also ask for information that can help you tailor your solutions to what interests your target audience.
3. Enhanced Engagement
Why wait for your audience to reach out to you when you can engage them preemptively?
With a chatbot, you can engage your audience the moment they land on your website. You can send compelling messages that convince your visitors to consider certain actions.
Since it can be difficult for people to initiate a conversation, a chatbot helps you break the ice and start conversing with your target audience.
4. Lead Generation
There are a lot of times when people find it difficult to choose products or services that best serve their needs. Your product offerings can confuse them, and they may end up not making any decisions due to the fear of making a bad purchase.
Chatbots help you recommend fitting solutions to your target audience based on the information you have about them. They can also help you engage potential customers attempting to exit the website by offering them exclusive deals or discounts.
For example, you’re exploring an e-commerce store selling leather jackets and are looking for a good bargain. The chatbot can recommend products currently available at a discount to convince you to consider making a purchase.
5. Omnichannel Presence
People may prefer different channels of communication to reach out to you or interact with your brand. So, we can say that having an active presence on multiple channels enhances your ability to engage the intended audience.
However, interacting with your target audience through multiple platforms isn’t easy. It may require you to onboard an army of representatives.
Chatbot integration isn’t limited to your website only. There are a variety of social media apps or communication channels that provide you with the ability to leverage chatbots and engage your audience through different platforms.
6. Personalized Customer Support
Waiting in line for a customer service representative to resolve your query can be excruciating. Your customers may leave disappointed and never return to you for support.
Unending wait in the queue for a customer service representative to cater to your concerns is one of the major reasons why many prefer interacting with bots over humans.
Around 64% of businesses claim that chatbots help them offer a personalized support experience to their customers.
Chatbots serve as facilitators to your team of support representatives. They help reduce their workload, enabling them to focus on high-value tasks or deliverables and focus on creating stellar customer retention strategies.
Strategies to Successfully Close Chatbot Conversations
Now that we have talked about the key benefits of leveraging chatbots, let’s explore the strategies through which you can effectively close bot conversations.
1. Show Gratitude
You should always thank your audience for reaching out to you with their queries and concerns before closing a conversation.
Your audience could have chosen not to interact with you and consider other alternatives in your respective industry.
So, you should appreciate that they got in touch with you and asked you the questions they had in mind. Plus, you should let them know that you appreciate their decision.
It helps you build a strong emotional connection with your target audience. As a result, your prospects are more likely to consider what you offer.
2. Be Available
The core objective of interacting with your audience is to facilitate their access to useful information. Your prospects interact with you because they seek answers to certain questions.
By the end of a chatbot conversation, you must ensure that you’ve successfully provided them with access to useful information. However, this may not be as easy as it sounds.
Even when the conversation lasts long, you may still not be able to satisfy your audience. Sometimes, your prospects end up staying and asking more questions. Other times, they may choose to leave without saying anything further.
At the end of a conversation, tell them that they can come back to you anytime they want and if they have any unanswered questions. It ensures your audience that you’re always available for them in their time of need.
3. Personalize Your Closing
The way you conclude a conversation should not be generic. You should personalize your closing messages or statements to the needs or goals of your target audience.
You can’t just thank them and wish them a great day ahead. You should understand their desires and close the conversation accordingly.
For example, suppose someone visits your e-commerce site and asks about returning certain products. In this situation, you can cater to their queries and conclude the conversation by sending them the link to your returns or exchange policy page.
You can leverage AI-powered personalization and enable your bots to understand the intent behind your audience's queries and tailor the responses to different scenarios.
4. Conclude With a Call to Action
Adding a call to action at the end of your conversation can help you get optimal results from interactions with your audience. The call to action may vary depending on the subject of the conversation.
For example, a fitting call to action for people interested in your online meeting solutions is asking them to schedule a demo. You can also consider going a step further and offering a free trial.
Placing a call to action at the end of a conversation makes it more fruitful. It boosts your chances of acknowledging high conversion rates.
5. Leverage Social Proof
Sharing the success stories or the experiences of your happy customers also serves as an effective closing strategy.
People generally rely on the recommendations of others when in doubt. They look out for the experiences of others to decide whether or not to make a purchase.
At the end of a conversation, you can consider sharing a link through which your audience can explore the reviews and testimonials from your satisfied customers. However, the strategy does not fit all situations.
For example, when the intent of your audience’s query is informational, you should simply focus on answering their questions. They aren’t ready to make a purchase yet. So, there’s no point in sharing your customers’ experiences with them.
Leveraging social proof is best suited for situations when your audience is exploring different alternatives to find fitting solutions to their problems.
6. Probe for Further Queries
You may think that your audience has asked all questions in their minds. It may not be true in all cases. People can be forgetful about things. So, it’s best to remind them about it.
Before closing a conversation, you should ask your target audience if they have any further questions to ask. It may remind them about things they wanted to ask but forgot as the conversation went on.
It helps you establish a strong bond with your target audience. Your prospects see that you care and genuinely want to help them solve their problems.
7. Provide Additional Information
When interacting with your audience, you should try to provide as much information as you can to help them make up their mind.
Use the data from your past interactions to find information that may be useful to your audience and facilitate access to it even when your audience doesn’t ask for it.
For example, it may be an excellent strategy to engage an e-commerce audience by telling them that you offer free shipping on purchases over a certain amount in total.
Not everyone may ask for this information when interacting with you, but knowing such details can be a game changer.
E-commerce customers are generally concerned about shipping charges. As a matter of fact, 47% of people abandon their carts due to additional costs, such as shipping.
So, providing additional information or answering questions that people didn’t get to ask may help you close the deal and acknowledge a boost in your conversions.
8. Offer Special Deals or Discounts
One of the best ways to close a chatbot conversation when interacting with someone with a buying intent is to offer them special discounts.
For example, when your potential customer thanks you for your help and shows that they’re ready to make a purchase, you can share a discount code, allowing them to make their first purchase for 20% less.
It will motivate your potential customers to make the purchase right away and minimize the chances of you losing them.
You’re not the only one they may reach out to when looking for solutions that can solve their problems. There’s a high chance that they have or will interact with your competitors.
Offering them a discount when ending the conversation may give you an edge and help you outmaneuver your competition.
9. Ask for Feedback
Last but not least, you should ask for feedback before closing the conversation. It helps you identify the problem areas and makes it easier for you to improve the way you interact with your target audience.
Even when you are careful, there may be some conversations that lead to unpleasant customer experiences. Your prospects may not say much and silently leave with no chance of ever coming back.
You can prevent this from happening in the future by asking your audience to help you improve the way you interact with them.
It shows that you care about your customers and consistently strive to offer them a better conversational experience. They start seeing you as a brand they can rely on and share their concerns with you openly.
Final Thoughts
There you have it: the nine strategies that can help you effectively close a chatbot conversation. If you are considering leveraging chatbots for audience interactions, the recommendations in this article may help you offer a seamless conversational experience to your customers.
Chatbots help you automate customer inquiries and post-purchase support. The use of bots enables your customer success team to spend more time devising and implementing effective customer acquisition and retention strategies.
It encompasses a variety of benefits and helps you generate quality leads for your business. With the right set of strategies, you can engage your customers at any stage of the buyer’s journey and establish lasting relationships with them.
Syed Balkhi is the founder of WPBeginner, the largest free WordPress resource site. With over 10 years of experience, he’s the leading WordPress expert in the industry. You can learn more about Syed and his portfolio of companies by following him on his social media networks.