Sales Chatbots in 2024: Top Use Cases & Best Practices

Vendors claim AI-driven sales chatbots can: 

• Reduce customer service costs up to 75%.
• Provide automation of customer queries up to 85%.
• Increase chart addition rates up to 2.5 times. 
• Help companies to reach a lead-to-conversion rate over 20%.
• Generate up to 4.5x Return on investment.

Despite these potential advantages, more than 40% of B2B and 55% of B2C businesses do not use chatbots to augment their sales effort. 

In this article, we first outline some of the potential use cases of sales chatbots in order to urge firms to embrace them. We will later provide best practices for deploying/using sales chatbots to ensure a smooth transition in your modernisation of sales activities.  

What are the top 4 sales chatbot use cases?

1. Answer frequently asked questions (FAQs) of customers

Before buying a product, customers repeatedly ask similar questions to learn about the features of the products. Answering such questions timely is important for maintaining customer engagement and boosting sales. 

Especially when a product is expensive or a non-consumable good that people often buy, customers’ concerns should be listened to and addressed.

Sales chatbots are perfect tools for providing quick and standardized answers for FAQs. By doing so you can increase sales and reduce customer service costs.

2. Automate customer service 24/7 

The eCommerce sector has an estimated $4 trillion in annual sales, which suggests more economic activity than the majority of G20 nations. One of the fundamentals of eCommerce is it allows people to buy products whenever they want. Therefore, companies must provide 24/7 support for their customers to remain competitive in this business.

Sales chatbots can interact with clients around-the-clock, thus enhancing conversational commerce. Their 24/7 availability is perhaps one reason behind them having an alleged 4.5x of ROI. 

If you want to learn more about eCommerce technologies you can read our Top 10 eCommerce Technologies with Applications & Examples article.  

3. Recommend products to customers

According to a PwC survey, 30% of consumers are willing to spend more for services/products  that are suggested to them. 

Additionally, because recommendation means that businesses can offer products that are appropriate close to  customers’ tastes and needs,  lead-to-conversion rates increase. Therefore, using AI-driven chatbots that can understand user intent will justify  your business putting a premium price on your products (for the sake of personalization) and boosting sales.

For instance, a tyre firm called CEAT began using a sales chatbot in 2021, that gave  clients recommendations (see Figure 2). CEAT achieved a 21% lead to conversion rate thanks to initiative.

Figure 2: Chatbot interacts with a customer to recommend a suitable tyre model. 

4. Gather and manage leads in real time

Sales chatbots can collect leads 24/7  by gathering information concerning:

• Contact details,
• Name,
• Size of the company (if it is a B2B business) and so on.

Then, sales chatbots can manage these leads and pass the critical ones to their human counterparts. Imagine a B2B business that is targeting companies with over 200 employees. A simple algorithm can solely focus on directing leads from companies that employ over 200 people, thereby augmenting your workforce.

What are the top 6 sales chatbot best practices?

Although we mentioned: 

• The 4.5x ROI of sales chatbot, 
• The 85% automation rate for customer queries
• And the enhanced sales, 

We are aware that chatbots can fail and damage brand reputation. However, by following  the following 6 best practices, it is possible to reduce the chance of chatbot failure. 

1. Know your customers (KYC)

One of the aims of deploying a sales chatbot is enhancing customer engagement with effective conversational commerce. To do this, companies have to be aware of their customers and design chatbots according to this information.

For instance, if you build a FAQ chatbot then you must know the top questions that are asked by your customers. 

Learn more about what KYC is and how it can be automated. 

2. Deploy it on messaging platforms and mobile apps

At least 1 billion individuals actively use messaging platforms, such as Facebook Messenger, WeChat, and WhatsApp. Additionally, by the end of 2022, mobile applications will account for almost 60% of eCommerce purchases, a number that has been steadily rising.

Businesses should be accessible on the platforms where their current customers are. Because of this, AIMultiple generally advises businesses to install chatbots on messaging channels and mobile apps before websites.

Note that regardless of the cause, if your clients prefer to actually use your website to make a majority of purchase, it might be more efficient to deploy chatbot on your website. This is the reason why, you should know your unique customers.

To learn more about WhatsApp chatbots you can read our WhatsApp Chatbots: Benefits, Use Cases & 4 Steps to Build One article.

3. Give your sales chatbot a character

For your brand equity it is advisable to load a character to your sales chatbot. For instance, it is more engaging for people if the chatbot has a name. Also, AIMultiple recommends that your chatbot should have the following personal interaction style that aligns with your brand image:

• Level of formality: Is the language used in your ads formal? If yes, then it is reasonable to design your sales chatbot in a way that mimics your advertising tone. 
• Word counts of answers: Allow your chatbot to keep conversations as short and simple as possible. A best practice is programming it to pose questions that warrant binary “Yes/No” answers. . 
• Target population: If you target gen Z or the rock community as your targeted audience it is beneficial to design a chatbot character that uses their jargons. 

4. Introduce buttons to enhance UX

People like comfort while purchasing goods. This is the reason why they prefer eCommerce in the first place. To provide a better customer experience you can add buttons that can be the answer of their potential questions.

Also, AIMultiple recommends that sales chatbots have a button for directing customers to checkout to reduce cart abandonment rate (see Figure 3). 

Figure 3: An example of a button that directs checkout.

5. Have a direct a human button

No matter the reason, some people might prefer to talk with humans. Or other times, the chatbot is simply incapable of handling some situations. To cope with such scenarios, your chatbots should have the capability to direct users to human reps whenever needed. 

6. Benefit from chatbot analytics

As a first best practice, we mentioned that you need to know your customers for building a successful chatbot. Using chatbot analytics, ensures that your business automatically keeps informed regarding your customers’ needs because the algorithms constantly keep feeding it information. 

Moreover, chatbot analytics as followings help your company to assess your chatbots success: 

• Bounce rate,
• Total users,
• New users,
• Engaged users etc.

You can read our Top 14 Chatbot Best Practices That Increase Your ROI article if you need more tips regarding chatbot deployment.

If you are searching for a chatbot company that can support your conversational commerce initiative you can read our 50+ Chatbot Companies To Deploy Conversational AI article.

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