Chat Widgets and Chatbots for Small Businesses

In 2019, just bringing a lot of traffic to your website and waiting for people to engage on their own won’t work any longer.

If you are not able to engage the people who are visiting your website and not filling out the opt-in forms, more traffic won’t mean more revenue for you, instead, it will increase the costs of running the website. Wouldn’t it be great to chat with your website visitors using a chat widget (such as LiveChat, Crisp, etc) or a chatbot (Facebook Messanger, Skype, etc)?

I am assuming you would agree that having a conversation with someone on a website is far convenient than 1. filling out the “Contact Us” form, 2. submitting it and then 3. waiting for the follow-up emails to come through.

If you are already using a chat widget on your website, that’s great. You are already one-step ahead of most of your competitors. But how many times do you observe that if you are not responding in realtime, lot of people won’t engage with you anymore.

Wouldn’t it be great to build your own chatbot and let it take care of some of the marketing and even sales when you step away from the keyboard or while you are sleeping?

I say the answer has to be “Yes.” You have to have a chatbot version of your website. Even if you have a website with a lot of high-value content, pretty pictures, animations and videos, it is still a passive tool for engaging people.

A chat widget can give a human touch to your website and can give a personal touch to every interaction someone has with your brand through your website. And it is fantastic that you are using a chat widget to interact with your audience. But unless you have an army of support staff ready to chat with the website visitors at every hour of the day, you need to start using chatbots.

There are several use cases for using chatbots in marketing, sales and customer support. But just building a chatbot and training it on very basic stuff such as frequently-asked-questions (FAQs), product catalogs, contact info, business hours can be a great start.

And let me tell you that we are not very far from the point when chatbots will start selling on behalf of humans and people will start expecting that as well.

There are several tools available in the market that allow you to easily build your own chatbots. MobileMonkey is one of the good tools out there. It is focused on building Facebook Messanger based chatbots.

If you are a little bit more tech-savvy and can deal with little more complexity, you can also use Google DialogueFlow to build bots on all kinds of chat platforms such as Skype, Telegram, WeChat, WhatsApp etc.