Welcome To The Jungle: Сhatbots for an A-Class Onboarding Experience
Whether you sell a physical or digital product or offer some sort of service, creating a high-quality onboarding experience will help you get more paying customers and significantly increase their loyalty.
In this article, we will explore the importance of user onboarding and how chatbots could help introduce your brand to customers in the best possible way.
What is user onboarding?
User onboarding is a process of welcoming new customers, introducing your products to them in all detail, and providing assistance with any questions that may arise along the way.
Companies include a service walkthrough to highlight the basic steps in starting out to use their product and eliminate possible difficulties. This way, users get in the situation of success, and companies pave their way to their users’ loyalty.
Grammarly takes users through the service by offering a demo doc with multiple mistakes and shows its features, UI patterns, points out hotspots. They suggest their users learn by doing, which is a perfect way to onboard and gear users with some experience at the same time.
A modal window on Grammarly which introduces the key features
Benefits of user onboarding
Good user onboarding provides some significant benefits to the business. However, having a human agent assisting new customers may turn out to be costly and not very effective. Thus, chatbots come to the rescue here as they can significantly improve the user onboarding experience
Increasing customer loyalty
According to statistics, 86% of customers would be more loyal to businesses that provide a high-quality onboarding experience and offer valuable educational content after the purchase. Thus, the investments in customer onboarding would pay off.
Responding to numerous people at once
Unfortunately, one person can respond only to a maximum of two people at once. Otherwise, they might make mistakes or burn out too quickly. Chatbots do not have this issue: they can speak to numerous customers simultaneously and never get them confused.
Moreover, they will probably answer faster because they do not have to look for an answer to copy or type their response. They are also more likely to find things faster. As a result, your customers will not have to wait for a customer service representative and, consequently, will be less likely to leave. You will definitely enjoy this benefit during the holiday and Black Friday season.
You may think — but chatbots cannot assist as well and accurately as humans do, they cannot resolve complicated issues. You will be right. And yet, around 80% of users usually ask the same questions that can be easily resolved by a chatbot. It is especially true for onboarding. So you can let the chatbot deal with easy inquiries and pass the 20% of complicated questions left to real humans.
Boosting retention rate
According to a recent report, 8 out of 10 respondents have experienced deleting the app after they couldn’t fully understand how to work with it correctly. The same goes for physical products, as 55% of respondents have experienced returning the item after they failed to understand the particularities of its usage. So, you don’t lose loyal customers by providing solid user onboarding and offering all the needed information.
Simplifying customer journey
Unfortunately, not everyone is tech-savvy. Some of the users still need assistance when it comes to navigating the website or making purchases online.
For this type of customer, onboarding chatbots have become a solution that saves them from the stress and frustration of the online shopping experience. Chatbots can’t solve, but it makes someone’s day so much better. It feels more personal and caring. Tech-savvy users can enjoy chatbots, too, since it is faster to get the product they need.
Operating 24/7
Some people like to shop during working hours to distract themselves, some prefer it as a way of relaxation after work and others calmly browse online shops at 4 am. If you tried to catch every type of customer at any time of day, you would either fall from the lack of sleep or have to hire extra people for night shifts. Chatbots are a cheap solution to our problem: they never get tired or angry, and a chatbot can quickly resolve days.
The 24/7 schedule is essential not only for people who like to shop at night for whatever reason. If you are operating internationally, you have to take care of different time zones. When it is the end of the working day in your country, the day just starts on the other continent. Do you want to leave visitors from other parts of the world without onboarding and lose your chance to win a loyal customer? Then such conversational marketing software as chatbots are the way.
However, make sure that the customers have the option to leave their request for the human agent, in case they have questions that can’t be solved by chatbots. This way, the real assistant will contact a customer as soon as possible.
Onboard with 13Chats!
Create inviting welcome messages for your new subscribers using our chatbot!
Best Chatbot Onboarding Tips to Try
As you can see, a well-tailored chatbot can leave an impression and significantly boost the quality of the first experience. However, how do you make a great chatbot?
We have got you covered here as well. Here are tips on how to create a chatbot, user onboarding best practices, and top conversational marketing examples to draw inspiration from.
Create a personalized welcome message
First things first, you will need a nice welcome message that will catch the attention of the user and explain what the chatbot can do. Usually, it consists of the greeting, introduction of the bot’s name, and a “What can I help you with today?”.
With 13Chats you can create a chatbot that will display personalized welcome messages with the person’s name. By using this option, you increase loyalty to your brand and establish a personal connection with the customer. See the example of a chatbot addressing the customer by their name down below.
Chatbot greeting a customer with a personalized message. Source: Tidio
Introduce your brand
Many users will not know what they need help with exactly. Therefore, it is better to leave some suggestions like “Take me to the women’s pants section” or “What are your payment options?”. Find out what your users ask about the most to understand what suggestions to create. Make them in the form of buttons as well so that users do not have to type the request themselves.
While creating chatbots in 13Chats, you can include links to the knowledge base into the message, so users would be able to find all the needed details about topics that interest them. 13Chats also has the option of adding a list of frequently asked questions.
The chatbot below does a great job offering multiple options on what it can help customers with. The options are based on the most popular user inquiries, so they would probably find what they need in this list.
Chatbot that offers various types of assistance. Source: Tidio
Use simple wording
A fun and engaging experience can quickly turn into a struggle if you decide to use lengthy sentences and unique words. Chatbots should speak like people, not like novels from the 19th century. That is the point of conversational marketing.
This is especially important if you are an international brand. People outside the English-speaking countries will just get upset about the language barrier and you do not want anyone to feel bad after interacting with your business. So keep it simple: use common words, avoid lengthy sentences with passive voice, and do not go above the eighth-grade reading level. You can check the latter in Grammarly or Readable.io.
The chatbot down below uses simple working and asks straightforward questions in order to guide customers throughout the shopping process and offer the best fitting options.
Chatbot that uses simple wording and asks straightforward questions. Source: Insights.jumper
Give your chatbot personality
Make your chatbot a reflection of your brand. You can be serious and knowledgeable, funny and sassy, or extra cute. Make these traits shine in your messages through formulations, slang words, meme references, or pictures or GIFs of cute animals. Also, get prepared for questions outside of your usual answer scope. Sometimes people just like to mess around and interact with bots so put some extra answers for “How are you?” in your chatbot’s script.
Keep in mind your audience though. If you are targeting elderly people, meme references from TikTok might not work very well.
H&M chatbot utilizes relevant emojis and slang words in order to reflect the fun and youthful brand’s identity.
Chatbot that reflects the joyful personality of a brand. Source: Freshdesk
Make it easy to connect with a real assistant
Some customers might not understand bots and want a real human being. Sometimes, people cannot find answers in the chatbot or have a specific question. Make sure that it is easy to request assistance from an actual person. Otherwise, you might end up with a frustrated customer.
The chatbot below gives customers a choice of whether they want to proceed with the order using the chatbot or need to talk with a human support representative.
Chatbot that provides the ability to connect the customer with a real assistant. Source: Socialmediaexaminer
Test and adapt
Writing a perfect chatbot on your first try is quite impossible, and it is okay. As long as you take criticism and are ready to improve, you are fine.
You can put a feedback form after the conversation to learn how satisfied your customers are. You can also gather feedback from your customer service team to understand what questions to add to the bot or whether you need to make the answers simpler.
Find the example of how you can collect customer feedback about their interaction with your chatbot down below.
Chatbot that collects feedback to improve the customer experience. Source: Intelliticks
Conclusion
Chatbots are a great way to engage with customers, onboard them, communicate with them 24/7, and make the shopping experience unforgettable. They also reduce the need for staff and can answer numerous customers at once, saving time and money.
However, you need to make an effort to make the chatbot helpful and engaging. Initiate the conversation, add the personality, and keep it simple to drive the best results.
If you need a chatbot to ensure an A-class onboarding experience, you can always turn to 13Chats. We offer very simple-to-create yet robust solutions to help you stay on top. Register with 13Chats today!
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