Live Chats and Chatbots For Startups to Bring Your Business Up
Launching a startup is a brave step, considering how difficult it might get. There are so many things to take care of: budget, personnel, planning, sales, research, etc. Sometimes you wish that it could be just a little bit easier.
Luckily, there are ways to take off some pressure. Maybe chatbots can’t solve every problem, but like any artificial intelligence, they can automate tiresome processes and bring positive outcomes. In this blog post, we are going to explore some of the most common challenges of startups and discover how chatbots can help solve some of them.
The most common startup challenges
Around 21,5% of startups fail in the first year of operating, and the number grows dramatically over time. Down below you can see the infographic illustrating the most common reasons for failure according to Statista.
Statistics on reasons for startup failures. Source: Statista
As a start-up itself, at 13Chats we broke down popular startup challenges and would like to share with you.
Financial limitations
According to CBInsights, it is one of the most common reasons startups fail, causing 38% of new businesses to leave the market. There are two major ways finance management can ruin a startup: you spend more than you receive and do not secure the funding. Too low prices, wrong allocation of money, lack of marketing can cause a quick shutdown.
Lack of market understanding
Before rolling out a startup, you have to do research, both for yourself and the investors. It should be a thorough and ongoing process that does not end after the first steps of a startup launch. Unfortunately, around 35% of startups do not realize that and fail due to a lack of market demand. You have to always track what is trending on the market and check whether your research is intact with reality.
Hiring right people
The team is the essence of every startup: teammates who are passionate about the idea, ready to learn as they go, and know how to distribute their resources to manage to do tasks on time and not burn out within a month. Unfortunately, it is not that easy to find this type of person and spot them among all the incoming CVs and recommendations.
Winning customer trust
Customers are hesitant to give money to an emerging business, especially when it comes to high prices. They are likely to trust big companies with years of experience and certainty that they will not shut down within a year. It is difficult to break the stigma about startups and win customers over when many established competitors are out there.
Always be there for your customers!
Set up a live chat with 13Chats, create your flows, and automate to stay in touch with your contacts non-stop.
Time management and productivity
Startups never have enough people and there are always too many tasks. As a result, teams and founders burn out and many tasks are neglected, such as marketing or hiring. It is difficult to find time for everything and keep up the same productivity rates throughout the years.
There is no one ultimate solution for every startup. Otherwise, they all would have already succeeded, right? However, we as a startup find that starting simple, moving around, and sticking to your goal is the best way to do it. Use low-budget tools, automate and go out and talk to people in conferences, meetups, hackathons, and summits in the meanwhile to find your teammates and investors. One of the accessible automation tools is chatbots.
How chatbots can benefit startups
Chatbots are a small part of the solution to many problems. They can be extremely beneficial to new small businesses considering that they have many benefits that startups need, for instance:
Effortless trust-building
Since you have a new business, customers are less likely to trust you on a whim. They will need answers, reassurance, and just an extra little marketing push. Chatbots are a great way to build trust with no effort: they can answer questions about the company and the team, communicate values and vision, give an overview of the products, tell more about shipping and tracking, payment options, etc. If you can provide all this information, customers will understand that you are a fully operational company and will be less hesitant to make a purchase.
By manifesting your mission and goal in the first message of your chatbot you highlight your desire to serve the customers in the best way possible.
A bot that clearly states the brand’s mission. Source: Botmakers
Higher customer satisfaction
Customer satisfaction plays a huge role in whether customers will be ready to work with you and whether they will keep coming back for more. Chatbots can boost customer satisfaction in several ways.
- Firstly, chatbots work 24/7. It means that you can serve customers whenever they want and need. People who love to shop at night will highly appreciate the effort and are less likely to turn to your competitors.
- Secondly, chatbots can be multilingual. If you want to expand to an international market, it would be nice to support different languages because customers feel cared about if you do so.
- Thirdly, AI cannot make mistakes or be influenced by mood swings. Your customers will enjoy the same high level of customer service, friendliness, and readiness to help, no matter if it is a bad day, bad weather, or the end of the shift.
- Lastly, people like to interact with bots. They are allowed to be funnier than sales reps or customer service and send cute pictures of dogs. Chatbots are also quite new to the market and people still did not lose the fun of talking to artificial intelligence.
Customer trends tracking
Chatbots are a great and easy way to ongoing research and improvements. By analyzing questions asked within chatbots, you can understand what preferences customers have, what new products they would like to order, what questions are the most popular, etc. Based on that, you can add new products, offer more diversity in colors, sizes, or available plans, for example, or enrich the FAQ section or simplify some processes.
It is also a good idea to ask for reviews within a bot or ask to rate the services provided from 1 to 10 in order to track the customers’ overall satisfaction.
A bot that collects customer feedback. Source: Surveybot
Less human resources needed
A chatbot is a robot that can serve numerous customers at once and resolve easy and common problems without human assistance. You do not need big customer service teams because the majority of inquiries will be managed by a bot, people will only get involved when big issues arise which does not happen often.
So you can avoid long hiring processes — it takes up to 6 months to hire a new startup employee — and paychecks to the huge teams. Moreover, there is no need for two shifts of support for night customers or those from other countries which significantly cuts costs.
Increase in sales
Modern chatbots offer a lot of functionality — they can even help customers to find the perfect product by analyzing their search history or offering a small questionnaire about customers’ preferences. Basically, they are like more informed assistants which help customers to navigate the business or choose among the huge offer.
If you are not able to add shopping assistant functionality, chatbots will be an extra push towards sales anyways: they provide personalized experience and imitate interaction with real humans. They can also capture leads and forward the contact to a real sales representative.
By clearly specifying what your chatbot can help the customer with, you ensure that the person will find all the needed information which increases the chances of converting them into customers.
A bot that simplifies the buyer journey. Source: Botmakers
Saving money
As we have mentioned, financial issues are the major reason why startups fail. There are many ways to deal with this problem and chatbots are one of them.
Chatbots is an accessible tool that automates your business. It reduces costs and generates profits by:
- Not having to hire more personnel for customer service, especially for night shift or with the knowledge of foreign languages
- Providing cost-effective customer problems and satisfaction analysis
- Generating more returning customers with the help of better customer satisfaction
- Giving you more free time for business development rather than business maintenance
- Generating more sales
- Offering more operating hours
Saving time
Chatbots significantly reduce time spent on boring but essential routines. You can skip on answering easy questions about website navigation, prices, or shipping, or creating orders and focus on your business goals, expansions and funding instead.
By allowing customers to place, modify and complete their orders through a chatbot, you significantly simplify the purchasing process which reduces the percentage of uncompleted purchases.
A bot that quickly places an order. Source
Use 13Chats to build a chatbot for your startup
We have been a startup once and we know the struggle. We offer accessible, low-effort solutions with the use of AI and customizable templates that will increase your sales and productivity, boost customer satisfaction levels, and free you of burdensome routines. Our bots are up and running 24/7 and you can choose as much functionality as you want, be it as simple as a FAQ kind of bot or as complicated as a shopping assistant model.
With 13Chats, you can ease up the following startup challenges:
- Finance: through the accessibility of the tool, better sales, and more time for networking and looking for funding opportunities
- Market misunderstanding: through finding customers’ preferences through chatbot inquiries
- Hiring the right people: you can avoid a big chunk of hiring altogether because chatbots allow staff reduction in customer service and sales reps (it does not mean that you can get rid of them altogether though, people still need human assistance)
- Winning customer trust: through answering their questions as fast and full as possible
- Time management: through significant reduction of routine processes
Conclusion
There are numerous challenges that you can face as a startup including financial limitations, poor market understanding, creating a team of strong professionals, and establishing a loyal relationship with customers. However, technology can come to the rescue. By incorporating chatbots and live chats, you can better analyze customer habits, boost the level of services provided, increase sales and spend fewer resources on communication.
Are you looking for a perfect chatbot and live chat solution? 13Chats might be exactly what you need! We provide vast chatbot and live chat creation functionality, so you could turn more leads into customers. Book a call with us, and we’ll profoundly analyze your business in order to offer the best-fitting technological solution to your needs.
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