Chatbots have been on the scene for ages, though they have only managed to establish more widespread credibility in the last couple of years. Prior to 2020, bots were already recovering from their rocky start. Though, it was the COVID-19 pandemic that made the final push for use and adoption. After chatbots, on the web and messaging apps alike, saved many businesses in the time of crisis, the nay-sayers and skeptics were left with very little ammunition. 

It’s not only that chatbots are becoming more common; their application is becoming ever more clever and creative. 

Although their first application was generally revered to customer support, most recently, we have seen chatbots make a difference across all stages of the customer journey. Better yet, we have seen them do wonders across all departments. 

So, if you are considering adding chatbots to your array of business communication channels or are simply curious to understand more about how can conversational automation help businesses excel and improve across all departments, this article addresses a variety of chatbot use cases is just for you. 

What are the Advantages of Chatbots in Business?

Before we dive into the use cases, it’s interesting to examine the possible benefits your business can reap from the chatbot application. The top “selling points” for chatbots include: 

• Cost Savings: Chatbots are just another form of automation, and automation is always about making things more efficient. The main driver behind chatbot adoption is the fact that they help to reduce operating costs significantly. 
• Automation: Speaking of… Yes, chatbots might seem like chatty-good-for-nothings on the surface. However, they are potent data processing automation machines with friendly faces.
• Availability: Another key element is that, regardless of the use case, bots make your business more available. For instance, they allow you to offer non-stop support, data collection, or qualification. 
• Comfort: In this day and age, messaging and chatting is the most spread form of communication. It feels comfy both on desktop and mobile. So much so, that some people actually feel more comfortable chatting to a bot than talking to humans. 

What are Top Chatbots Use Cases across an Organization?

Now that we established some of the advantages you can get from using chatbots for business, let’s take a look at the different conversation automation use cases.

Chatbot Use Cases in Marketing & Sales

One of the strongest and recently most explored sides of chatbots is their marketing and sales prowess. Since marketing and sales work so closely together, we will group their chatbot use cases under one section. 

Lead Generation

Chatbots have proven to be a fun and interactive substitute for the good-old-and-hated-online forms and CTA buttons. Offering great results organically as well as in conversational advertising.

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For example, a marketing growth agency Arora, substituted traditional landing pages for bots as part of their PPC campaigns, improving and conversion and thus driving the advertising costs down by 30%. 

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Using chatbots for lead generation can give you a great competitive advantage. 

Lead Qualification/Scoring

Chatbots allow you to collect and assess information in real-time meaning you can qualify a lead on the go and personalize their journey from the very beginning. 

What empowers any lead qualification bot are integrations! For instance, your bot conversations can feed directly into Salesforce or any other CRM tool. 

Lead Nurture

Lead not sales-ready? Well, they probably need time and little persuasion. Chatbots can be powerful nurture allies, especially if you are running a bot on a messaging app like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger bot. 

Messaging app bots provide you with continuity that a web bot usually lacks. On the other hand, once someone opts in for your WhatsApp messages, you are free to send notifications and engage in conversations on a long-term basis. 

Quotes & Pricing

Thanks to their ability to process data on the spot, bots are great at offering personalized quotes and pricing details instantly. 

Demos & Meeting Reservation

Chatbots don’t have to be able to do everything to be useful. Sometimes a single function is all you need to streamline your business processes. 

One of such singular yet potent chatbot use cases is using conversational assistants to book meetings or make reservations. The concept works well for any industry, whether you have a SaaS business or a restaurant. 

Product Recommendations

Another great way to leverage chatbots is by using them to recommend products based on past searches or purchases.

Transactions & Purchases

Besides the data collection, processing, and giving out advice, modern bots can also easily process transactions. In other words, your customers don’t even have to exit the chat to finalize their purchase. 

Chatbot Use Cases in Customer Support

We couldn't talk about chatbot use cases and skip customer support!

Answering FAQs

Of course, the most basic use of chatbots is answering the most frequently asked questions. Having a bot to take care of the common queries takes the pressure off your human agents and allows them to focus on customers or leads with more complex questions and issues. 

Customer Onboarding

Does your product have a bit of a learning curve? Then create a virtual assistant to help your customers through it. Seamlessly request the necessary information and offer guidance on the spot.

Customer Assistance 

Bots are a great way to help your customers make the most of your product. 

For stance, Plum, an employee benefits platform that provides group medical cover for businesses, used a WhatsApp bot to streamline and simplify their claim submission process. 

Thanks to the automation use case, they were able to slash the claim resolution time by 60%.

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Collecting Feedback & Running Surveys

Feedback and surveys are essential to maintaining a healthy relationship with your customer base. Chatbots are great at collecting such data because, once again, chatting with a bot it’s friendlier and easier than filling out a form. 

You can easily run a quick web survey for web visitors:

Or, ask for feedback via WhatsApp:

Refunds & Complaints Processing

Refunds and complaints are sensitive subjects. When it comes down to it, the best thing you can do for your business is to resolve the issue as quickly and as smoothly as possible. Bots can help you do just that. 

Bot-to-Human Support

One of the best ways to use chatbots in customer support is to let them assess the queries and either:

• Answer them if they fall in the routine questions category
• Collect key data and pass the query to a human agent if the issue at hand is more complex

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Chatbot Use Cases for HR and Recruitment

Last but not least is the use of chatbots to streamline internal communication within a company. 

Recruitment (Job Application)

Tired of sifting through hundreds of applications, of which 90% are not even relevant? Save your recruitment team time and have a bot do the initial screening!

You can just use a job application template or build your own recruitment chatbot from scratch.

Employee Onboarding

New employees have to deal with and process huge amounts of information in a very short period of time. Having an all-knowing and always-available virtual assistant in their corner is bound to make their initiation much easier. 

The bot can collect employee data and offer information on the company culture, team roles, duties, tools, etc. 

Employee Evaluation

Need to give your employees 360 assessment to calculate the bonuses? A chatbot can do just that!

Vacation Requests

Sometimes, all that’s needed to make a difference is a chatbot use case as simple as requesting and booking time off. 

Conclusion

There are many ways chatbots can bring value to your company. From marketing to HR, bots have the power to automate in a very human way. This article offers some of the most common use cases. Though, there is no limit to creativity!

Try building your first bot today with a template!