Entrepreneurs today spend all their time in the office, working. They want to make their venture a success, reach the right customers and clients, build the right teams, and above all, see a return on their investment. However, the answer is not to simply work hard; you have to work smart to really achieve your goals. Thanks to voice-activated chatbots and virtual assistants (VAs), this is now possible.
What Are Virtual Assistants and Voice-Activated Chatbots?
Virtual assistants are people that help you with day-to-day tasks, remotely. While these have been around for years, new AI-powered versions have now appeared, allowing you to achieve the same levels of productivity while saving money. They are known as chatbots.
While these are not new to the tech world, the technology that powers them has improved significantly over the years, enabling them to undertake certain tasks as well, if not better than humans. Voice-activated chatbots offer the same services, but instead of typing in requests, you can simply voice them.
Because of their new abilities, chatbots can literally change your life. Here are 10 ways how:
1- Increasing Productivity
The idea behind chatbots is that they can maximize your productivity by taking on some of the more mundane and repetitive tasks with which you and your employees are faced. AI-powered virtual assistants allow you to link all aspects of your business. You can now ask your VA to email a colleague about a meeting or even update a specific section of your website through one interface.
Voice-activated chatbots, on the other hand, offer all the above, but with simple voice commands. You’ll no longer have to spend time searching for your phone or switching windows on your computer screen. Instead, you can simply say what you need done.
2- Automating Business Processes
Automating your business processes has never been easier thanks to the new and improved enterprise chatbots. Chatbots allow you to automate certain internal processes, such as arranging meetings, answering questions regarding payroll, scheduling time off, setting up reminders, and so on.
In addition to internal business processes, your chatbot can work as a lead generation and marketing campaign tool, a customer service interface, a payment tool, as well as a news and media content distribution tool, leaving you and your teams to focus on other tasks.
3- Cutting Costs
Nowadays, creating a chatbot, both text and voice-activated, doesn’t have to cost a fortune. In fact, there is a number of chatbot-building platforms out there that don’t require you to have any coding knowledge.
Chatbot, for example, is an awesome way to create a Facebook Messenger chatbot…for free. With it, you can create a chatbot that:
- Pushes personalized offers and promotions to your customers, on demand
- Takes orders directly from Facebook Messenger and posts
- Integrates with major payment systems
- Recognizes variations on your keywords and trigger phrases
Investing in a chatbot to help your teams and automate your various business processes is significantly cheaper than hiring new employees, or even doing it yourself.
4- Offering Your Teams a Helping Hand
Virtual assistants and voice-activated chatbots not only cut costs, they also take some of the load off your teams. A chatbot can help answer frequently asked IT questions, help your HR teams organize holiday leave and payroll, take on some customer care questions, up-sell and cross-sell to customers, and even push personalized offers to consumers.
5- Giving You More Spare Time
By implementing a virtual assistant or a voice-activated chatbot for any of the above, you’ll be freeing up some time in your calendar to focus on more essential tasks. While your assistant focuses on the easier, more mundane and repetitive aspects of your business, you can focus on revenue-generating activities that will allow your business to grow.
6- Managing Stress
Aside from offering you more time to spend on important business-related activities, your VA will give you a chance to repurpose time for yourself. In order for you to be as productive as possible, you need to be able to unwind, as well as spend time with your family and friends.
A voice-activated chatbot can also help you manage a stressful situation by cutting out the need for you to interact with a screen at any given time. You can organize yourself with simple voice commands while cooking, in the car, on your commute to work, or while writing up notes for a meeting.
7- Eliminating the Old Fashioned Funnel
While chatbots allow you to push customers through your sales funnel more quickly, voice-activated ones may be changing the system altogether. Through simple voice commands, customers are now able to search, browse, and make purchases without even looking at a device.
As the technology continues to grow, more consumers will expect actionable services as outputs. Having a voice-activated chatbot will offer a more seamless interaction between your brand and your audience.
8- Identifying Issues and Opportunities
Companies today are still very regimented. Most have a similar structure with various departments and job descriptions. While this is a good way for teams to stay organized, it may also make it difficult for you to identify any issues that arise.
VAs and voice-activated chatbots can be used to alert you when a problem occurs. For example, if you’re a web development company, your chatbot could alert you if one of your clients’ websites is down. On the other hand, if you are a marketing company managing various social media platforms, you could receive notifications when negative reviews are submitted.
The same goes for opportunities. You could set up alerts that tell you about market fluctuations so that you can adapt your pricing strategy. You could also set up alerts for when your company makes a sale or gets mentioned on social media. The alerts you choose will depend on your company’s aims and objectives.
9- Focusing on Quality SEO
Voice-activated chatbots, in particular, are expected to change the way we do our SEO. When a customer makes a voice search, assistants such as Apple’s Siri pull up information from the top-rated websites with the least noise (i.e., broken links and incorrect information).
With this in mind, it’s more important than ever that your online listings and websites are accurate and optimized to perfection. Make sure you prioritize the right keywords and consider voice search terms, as well as text-based ones, in order to capitalize on these new search methods.
10- Gathering Valuable Data
AI-powered virtual assistants and voice-activated chatbots automatically capture data. Chatbots can analyze huge volumes of data quickly while providing real-time effective use of it.
While analyzing this data is still tricky due to the sheer mound of it and the fact that people communicate in different ways, this opens up a whole new world of opportunities for businesses to better understand their customers, thus optimizing their processes for higher success rates.
Finally…
Despite not having scratched the surface of the capabilities that these devices have in store, we do know that virtual assistants and voice-activated chatbots are here to stay. Implementing one into your internal and external operations will offer you all the benefits outlined above, and more in the very near future.