Get Your Chatbots to Work and Make Money

This is a Guest post originally shared by Amit Dua, CEO of Signity Solutions at YourStory.

"Monetizing AI chatbot is not only a possibility today, but it is also becoming a necessity. Companies need to understand what works for them and use it to their advantage."

A chatbot is the latest in the Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools, which is creating a buzz in corporate circles. Also known as talkbot, interactive agent or Artificial Conversational Entity, a chatbot is a computer program that can converse with humans using auditory or textual methods.

This computer program is designed by bot development companies to simulate human conversations between a human and a machine. And these days it is being extensively utilized in customer service, order placement, and customer acquisition, among other fields.  AI chatbots can reside on a chat app, a social media platform or even a website.

There are various types of chatbots. Some uses state-of-the-art Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems, while many others are simpler versions,  which can help customers search for information in a database by using a keyword search and pull replies. There are various popular chatbots existing in today’s market.

Social media portals like Facebook have customer service bot on brands’ pages where customers can search for items and place orders. Similarly, chatbots today can be accessed through virtual assistants like Amazons Alexa or Google Assistant to help people https://www.signitysolutions.com/chatbot-development/customer-care-bot-developmentmanage small tasks like playing a song.

The ultimate aim of any organization seeking to use chatbot app development for its operations is to maximize profits. AI Chatbots can help an organization effectively in leveraging sales, enhancing customer experience or streamlining customer service.

However, organizations need to monetize chatbots as a business model to derive value. It is essential for a business to plan for chatbot monetization strategically before taking up the services of bot development companies.

Chatbot Monetization:

 Thanks to best chatbot software tools, many organizations are finding it easy to develop chatbots for their business. To monetize them effectively is a different task altogether. While some make money with their chatbots, these stories are few and far between.  AI sales bot require repeat clients and a steady influx of them to sustain their growth.

Some of the ways chatbots can be monetized are as follows:

1. Understanding Customers

The first thing to consider while setting out to monetizing your AI chatbot is to understand your customer’s psychology. You have to utilize it to your advantage. You need to deliver what the customer desires when he is clicking on a chat.

Only then can a customer generate value for you. For a person looking at a career counseling service, when he clicks on to a job bot he needs valuable and actionable information that will urge him to move further in the value chain and book an appointment with the career counseling company.

2. Utilizing bots as a Service (BaaS)

Bot development companies have created bots so advanced that they are the most talked about technology today both in B2C and B2B environments. Bots can empower B2B businesses by handling difficult tasks, thereby increasing their productivity. It can replace the cloud and SaaS-based business software that most B2B organizations employ.

According to Forrester, the revenue from these software application services touched $33 billion in 2016. Their replacement by bots will spill most of this revenue into chatbots. Therefore, there is a high potential for BaaS (bots as a service) to be a business model for B2B companies.

As most of these companies are already familiar with the SaaS model, it will be a smooth transition into the bot version.

3. Putting chatbots as a Landing Page

A chatbot app development is not very different from a landing page development or designing. It is a call to action which urges the customers to delve deeper and talk to the company directly. It is like entering a website and searching for information, but more easily and interactively.

Such a call to action is natural and apparent to the customer, which increases the chance of monetization. Bot development services, thus help make the offering clear to the customer right at the beginning in a matter of seconds, and that is what is needed to get the customer’s interest piqued. Already, there are companies that transform websites into conversational chatbot experiences.

4. Some Other Strategies: 

There are many more strategies on monetizing AI chatbots for businesses. One of the common ones is to utilize the chatbot on Facebook for pushing an organization’s eCommerce agenda.

For example, Chatty-people, an AI-powered enterprise platform integrated Shopify into Facebook messenger, so customers can shop without even leaving Facebook.

Companies can use e-commerce-chatbot for generating sales leads through their websites and collaborate with complementary brands by having their chatbot be available on the other brand’s resources thereby leveraging both the brands.

Monetizing chatbots is not only a possibility today, but it is also becoming a necessity. Companies need to understand what works for them and use it to their advantage. Arguably the technology is still in its infancy but is disruptive enough to catch the attention of major corporations. The ultimate aim of these corporations in using the services of bot development companies is and will be to size up the real opportunities in business.

Varying degrees of chatbot monetization are on currently. However, merely deploying chatbot development platforms at points of contacts as an application of AI consulting will not be enough.

Organizations that proactively engage chatbots with customers would be the ones that can turn them into true agents of change. Backed with the relevant information, support, a chatbot with an articulated proposition can drive an organization to the next level.

Hire the best Chatbot Development Company!