The 8 Best Examples of Chatbot Ideas for Any Business
Chatbots have been around for a while — probably even longer than you thought. Back in 1966, they had no advanced bells and whistles and were only able to answer ridiculously primitive questions. Now, a couple of computing eternities later, chatbot quality has developed big time and they remind you of anything but a robot.
In fact, they have evolved so much, that not giving a bot a shot in your business would be a crime. If you’re still looking for inspiration, we’re inviting you for a walk-through of some interesting chatbot ideas and ways to apply a bot to your business.
Understanding different types of chatbot technology
If you’re new here, a chatbot is a software app that imitates human conversation and helps businesses improve customer service. To say more, Statista unveiled that over 64% of business owners tip their hats to chatbots for helping them personalize their user experience.
Most chatbot platforms allow integrating your chatbot into a messaging app to get closer to your audience in no time. They use the following types of chatbots:
Menu-based
Button or menu-based chatbots resemble applications and provide button-like options for users to choose from. With this type of chatbots, users don’t have to type their queries and can choose from the options given as buttons. This type of chatbot lets you control the conversation flow, however, it falls short when the user needs a button that your chatbot doesn’t include.
13Chats allows you to create a menu-based chatbot and add up to three buttons with or without links in one block. Feel free to fill each block with 10 quick replies and 10 product cards! Add images, files, and bundle them into your chat scenario.
Keyword-based
These chatbots are an extension of menu-based chatbots. They allow users to interact with your chatbot by typing questions and responses. These chatbots analyze the inquiry, find specific keywords in them, and create corresponding answers. This type of chatbot enables more natural conversations and more advanced input options.
13Chats provides an option to create auto-replies based on special triggers — aka keywords. Create custom triggers or use the default ones, build an entire message flow based on them or add them into your saved flows.
Contextual chatbots
This is the most advanced type of chatbot. These chatbots interact with users using machine learning and artificial Intelligence. Since these techniques are very advanced and get pricey quickly, contextual chatbots require larger investments than the two above.
Contextual chatbots rely not only on the keywords from the message but also on its context. These chatbots are able to remember conversation history, a user’s previous inquiries, and their preferences.
Using chatbots for any industries
A heartwarming prediction is that by 2022 chatbots will bring businesses up to $8 billion in savings. How? And that’s a beautiful question. Mainly because they are highly versatile and literally any vertical can find a way to include a chatbot into their business routine. And also chatbots can be called a universal helper because they:
- Provide 24/7 support — no matter when the visitor leaves their inquiry, a chatbot will answer the question or ask for the users’ contact details so that someone can get back to them as soon as possible.
- Relieve support team workload — while your chatbot is doing its thing, your operators can concentrate on more important requests and this way, boost their productivity.
- Improve customer experience — users send a question, get an answer. No one was rude, no one was on hold forever, no one was sent irrelevant information.
- Save costs — uh, here it is! With a chatbot, you can reduce spending on your support team which is quite exciting if you’re a startup, for example.
Even more ideas on our blog!
Read our blog and find more ready-to-use ideas to improve your chatbot, live chat, pop-up experience!
We only bring bright ideas!💡
Chatbot ideas
So here we start off with a scoop of chatbot ideas fished out of various industries. Prepare to get inspired and form your own message flows! 🙂
Educational chatbots
There has always been a need for educational chatbots. There are students with curriculum or schedule questions, parents curious about the teaching staff, students wondering about scholarship opportunities — the list goes on and on. To say more, in the time when education had to shift online dramatically fast, almost every educational institution had to bind to the new reality and travel online.
Why not think of a chatbot to add to your website? If organized wisely, chatbots can provide students with information like schedule details, professors’ names, school facilities, or even class reminders. Chatbots can also give instructions, answer basic information about fees and financial aid programs, give advice on how to resolve possible related issues, or alternatively act as personal tutors.
University of the People uses a chatbot to guide website visitors through the application process and helps identify whether the user is eligible to apply. One is also able to ask a question or choose their query from a bunch of offered by the chatbot.
Survey chatbots
If you’re doing online business, you need feedback. Take a closer look at survey bots to help you learn what your clients think of your service or product. Suggest answering several post-purchase questions to find out whether the customer is satisfied with the service and products they’ve ordered.
Alternatively, use a chatbot to understand customers’ needs if you want to fit into customer interests and demands with your future product.
Travel and Hospitality chatbots
Travel chatbots can cover so many communication purposes, a travel agent might not be able to sit still. Create a chatbot to provide users with information about travel destinations, booking assistance, and sightseeing options. Be sure to include information about the latest hot offers, guides, or client feedback — there are tons of chatbot ideas for a website.
This is a huge relief for your team because they can delegate some price/booking information questions to the chatbot and work with requests that need human interaction.
Hipmunk uses a chatbot to give users a hand with travel destinations, tickets, pricing, and much more.
HR and Recruiting chatbots
Although HR has ‘human’ in its name, this doesn’t mean this part of your business can’t make use of some artificial interaction. Using a chatbot will free up some of your HR team’s time from scheduling interviews, receiving CVs, and informing prospective hires about application dates.
Use chatbots for HR purposes to educate employees about payroll and policies, onboard new employees, answer FAQs, arrange meetings, and much more
Medical chatbots
The ongoing reality has taught us some valuable lessons — learning to find treatments online and decide which one is worth a shot is more prevalent than ever. Chatbots can become game-changers as they provide medical assistance or connect with health institutions.
Not to mention other, more usual options like setting up appointments, providing health information (all anonymously), finding pharmacies nearby, and providing mental support.
Florence Chat offers a chatbot that helps users keep track of their activity of choice.
Restaurant chatbots
Now that you’ve been reading this article for a while, you kind of get the idea of chatbots for business. They help to replace humans in some routine and repeated processes. Chatbots for restaurants are no different. Wouldn’t it be nice if you didn’t have to answer what’s on the menu today a hundred times?
Use the chatbot for this purpose as well as informing people about the specials, booking tables 24/7, setting up reservation reminders, accepting feedback — you name it.
Wingstop uses a chatbot for multiple goals, one of which is to place an order through the chatbot. What an option in the times when takeout is a must.
Financial chatbots
Time is money and chatbots know how to save time. Use a chatbot to provide bank account information, get a loan, process a payment, or display the balance on a card. Chatbots may come in handy if a customer is interested in stock prices, exchange rates, or tracking their investments.
Of course, no one banned simple human inquiries like refunds, subscription cancellations, or just financial advice.
eCommerce chatbots
Hello, online shopping. There hasn’t been a better time to start a chatbot than now if you sell goods online. Chatbots are easy to find on your page and can be scripted to lead to any page on your website.
With their help, you can upsell and cross sell, consult your visitors, help them make a choice, and thus close more sales. If your chatbot is able to remember users’ preferences, it will come up with recommendations based on what customers like. Knowing what your customers want and offering it to them is a sure way to improve your customer experience. Also use a chatbot to ask for billing or shipping information, order and delivery details, tracking orders, or canceling them.
This example of a florist’s shop shows how you can start selling through a chatbot — gather your offers, attach photos add useful links, attractive descriptions, and prices.
Final take
We can only guess the progress that the world of technology has in stores for us. However, one thing rings true: we have only scratched the surface of what chabots can do for you. 13Chats welcomes you to discover chatbot’s biggest beauties and implement your chat widget ideas together! Try 13Chats and happy chatbotting!
Our experience
13Chats has experience working with Marble teams in Finland. We met one of the co-owners at a conference, and we stayed connected. After a week of negotiation, we decided to proceed with our partnership and install a live chat on their website. After we installed our live chat, we increased the conversion rate on their website by 20%!
13Chats also got a chance to collaborate with SportPass, a company from the Czech Republic. We installed a live chat on their landing page and inside their personal account. This way we helped them decrease the time of the support team to reply to any issues related to the service.
Sure thing 13Chats was the first testing platform of the chatbot 😉 We created a chatbot for the biggest IT conference in Lisbon in 2019 to introduce our company to passers-by.
Over 100 event participants subscribed to our chatbot, 40 of which proceeded to book a 13Chats demo. We keep in touch with the rest of the subscribers. Check out how we do it and message 13Chats Facebook chatbot, see you there!
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