Chatbot For Small Business — 4 Business Challenges Every Small Business Struggles With (And How to Fix Them with A Chatbot)

From the initial business idea, to the website launch, to building a strong foundation from which to expand, a small business’s journey is eventful, to say the least. In most cases, it’s a journey with challenges at every turn, and multiple returns to the drawing board. In our process of helping small businesses with chatbot development, we’ve come across numerous business challenges that they struggle with. Let’s look at 4 of these challenges and see how small business chatbots can fix them.

1. The Hiring Challenge

Small business owners almost always operate on small budgets, which leaves them with no choice but to run tight ships. This is also why they need to hire talented people who can keep things running smoothly. Hiring happens to be one of the biggest challenges for start-ups and small businesses, because funds are always limited, and not having the right people on board can lead to a highly expensive employee turnover.

Chatbot Solution: When you’re running a small business, you need a core team of competent, efficient, and self-motivated professionals who can bring about positive results in their departments. And when it comes to customer support, online chatbots are your ideal choice. Building chatbots for websites is cheap, and can be expertly handled by a chatbot development platform. And once launched, the chatbot can become your most efficient employee, working round the clock, learning and improving with every customer interaction, and giving you valuable insights into what your customers want from your business. Plus, once added to your site, your chatbot isn’t going anywhere, and a nominal cost is all you have to foot even as your business grows.

2. The Lead Generation Challenge

You don’t have a business until you have people interested in your product or service. Small businesses often struggle with generating enough leads to keep their salespeople happy. Or in other words, they struggle with finding an adequate number of people who actually have a good chance of turning into paying customers. This presents marketing teams with a rather complex challenge — of generating high-quality leads, in high quantities. And of course, they must meet this challenge without running up huge costs.

Chatbot Solution: Focus on building the best chatbot for your requirements, and you’ll see a high return on investment in quick time. If generating leads is your primary requirement, create a chatbot with a dedicated lead generation template. This chatbot will already be programmed with ready-to-use scripts that have been tested for effectiveness with lead generation. When launched, it’ll interact with the existing traffic on your website, extracting quality leads from them that your sales team can then focus on converting into customers.

3. The Visitor Engagement Challenge

Here’s the thing — most of your customers won’t read what you write on your website. According to Chartbeat CEO Tony Haile, 55% of people who click a link to a business website, spend 15 seconds or less on a page. Present-day users don’t have the time to keep reading articles to find out how good your offering is. They want the answer — or want to know that they’re getting to the answer — within 15 seconds of arriving at your site. How do you manage that?

Chatbot Solution: Create a chatbot to retain the attention of visitors on your website, and offer a better experience than your competitor websites. The best chatbots for small business increase visitor engagement by identifying what visitors are interested in, and then pitching relevant products, services or offers. This encourages visitors to spend more time on your site and learn more about your business through actions they’re already interested in taking.

4. The Marketing Analysis Challenge

To avoid losing money on marketing campaigns that don’t work, businesses need to conduct marketing analysis on every strategy they implement. This is an area where owners of start-ups and small businesses are usually inexperienced. Further, if your business is new, there won’t be any historical data with which you can compare your current performance. So how do you identify which of your marketing campaigns are working and which ones aren’t?

Chatbot Solution: Building chatbots has a number of indirect benefits that small business owners tend to be unaware of. Marketing analysis is one of them. Connect your chatbot to your pay-per-click campaigns and you’ll be able to see what’s working and what you need to change. Going through the chat transcripts will show you where customers are coming from and what they’re saying. This in turn will help you assess whether your PPC campaign is attracting relevant customers, and whether you should improve your ads or your sales chat scripts in any way.

Building chatbots doesn’t guarantee your success as a small business. But you can definitely make many of your challenges a little easier to overcome by choosing to create a chatbot for your website. Learn more about small business chatbot development and success stories on my blog, or by getting in touch with me in personal message.