What is a Chatbot for Website?
At ubisend, we build all sorts of chatbots.
There have been many factors that recently fuelled the chatbot adoption growth. Our latest research showed 35% of consumers want more companies using chatbots to answer their questions.
But, chatbots where?
We have built them on a wide variety of platforms, from Facebook Messenger to WeChat and Telegram.
In this article, I want to focus on a unique kind of chatbots; web bots.
Why are they unique? What is the appeal of a web bot? What are the downsides of using them? We will answer all of these questions below!
What is a chatbot for website?
This is an easy one, let's get it out of the way.
A chatbot for website is a chatbot that lives on your website, as opposed to a third party platform such a Facebook Messenger, WeChat, or Telegram.
It interacts with your website's visitors, most commonly via a text interface. The purpose of a chatbot on your website can vary. You could deploy a chatbot that helps your visitors find information about your product, helps your visitors by answering their questions, offer upsell options and more.
We have most commonly been building chatbots for ecommerce websites. They are a wonderful tool to increase sales.
Just another integrated channel
Before we move on to the pros & cons, I want to make this point clear.
The very root of our company can be found in ubiquity (thus, ubisend!). We have always prided ourselves in building chatbots across all the available channels.
This is one of our unique advantages over our competition. We can do multichannel.
What does that have to do with a chatbot for website?
Deploying chatbots on a website is, for us, just leveraging another channel.
> Learn more about the power of ubiquitous chatbots.
Pros of using a chatbot for your website
As you can imagine, there is a whole bunch of pros for using a chatbot for your website. Depending on the business you run, we could hop on a call today and I could list you 10 (try me).
For now, though, let's keep it contained to four main pros.
Easy integrations
A chatbot on your website can easily integrate with different third parties already present on your website.
As we touched on previously, it is, for instance, easy to integrate your ecommerce solution through your chatbot to deliver a brand new experience to your users.
We wrote about Shopify chatbots, which are a perfect example of ecommerce integrations.
With a single click, any Shopify shop owner can integrate a chatbot that lives on their site and offers 24/7 help to its visitors.
If you are interested, I recommend reading our in-depth article about it.
Your users are already there
One of the hardest things to do as a website owner is to grow traffic. It takes a lot of hard work to build an audience of readers, a digital presence, a brand people recognise.
Why, then, send these hard earned visitors away to another channel when they are already right there?
With a chatbot for website, you leverage the presence of your visitors at the moment when they are the most engaged with what you have to offer: when they're on your site!
It's right there to help
There is something about not finding what I am looking for on a confusing website that sends shivers down my spine.
Then, there is frantically looking for the help button.
Then, it is being confronted with a contact form with zero indication of when I will get a response to my request.
brrr...
As your chatbot lives on your website, it is right there to help. All the time. Your visitors will thank you for it. Once again, your user is right there. Don't send them away and make them jump through hoops to find an answer about your product.
Offer on-site help through an intelligent chatbot that will never let you down (or sleep, or drink too much).
It makes sense to the user
This is, to me, the biggest pro of using a chatbot live on your website: it makes sense to your users.
It makes sense to have someone (something) there, helping them.
It makes sense in their customer journey to be able to ask their questions right there and then.
It makes sense for them to get an answer almost instantly.
The user has a massive ego. Why should they have to wait for you to answer their questions about your product they might want to buy with their money.
Ludacris.
Con of using a chatbot for website
Of course, I need to address a pretty obvious con to deploying a chatbot on your website. Although I definitely don't think it comes even close to evening out the pros, it needs to be mentioned.
Once your visitor is gone, your chatbot has lost contact with them.
This makes sense. The chatbot lives on your website. Once your visitor decides to move on and changes website, you have no way of staying in touch with them.
No way? Sure there is a way, capture data!
Part of each of the web bots we have deployed includes at least one data capture method. The point at which the data is collected may different depending on the build, but we always add one.
Capturing something about the user (email address, name, Facebook ID, phone number, etc.) allows you to keep the conversation going.
I hope this short article gave you a good overview of what is possbile with a chatbot on your site. Think of where an automated artificially intelligent robot could help you. Found it? Great, get in touch.
