Conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been one of the biggest buzzwords, and an expert-approved trend for 2019, but do you really understand what it means? If you don’t, don’t worry. Let’s get you started with a simple example.

Say you’re planning to book a room for your trip, wouldn’t it be great to skip through the part where you have to make a call to the hotel, go through the routine “huhs?” and “can you speak louder?” and just book it?

That’s exactly what Hatten Hotel did by with their chatbot, Luna, who could help you throughout the whole booking experience from search, exploring the rooms and facilities, to recommending promotions, and finally, making the reservation. This is Conversational AI at work – artificial intelligence which allows communication with apps, devices, and websites in our everyday language via text, media, touch, voice or gesture input.

Exploring Hatten Hotel’s room and facilities

Looking for promotions and deals

Booking a room

On one hand, you, the customer, had a smoother booking experience without having to fumble through the call and deal with possible language barriers, while the hotel staff can also better focus on other tasks, like attending to the guests who have arrived.

While Conversational AI can involve a broad range of technologies, let’s keep it simple and focus on talking about chatbots (a type of Conversational AI) in this article. Mostly recognized as a tool to improve customer service, chatbots have the potential to go beyond that and serve 3 different pillars of your enterprise: marketing, sales, and customer support.

We know it sounds difficult to imagine chatbots how chatbots can have these effects on your business so we’ve put together how Conversational AI technologies can revolutionize your sales, marketing, and customer service performance!

1. Marketing Automation

Conversational AI can help you grow your business by automating your marketing efforts. Think of the chatbot as your dedicated brand representative, available 24/7 to help you achieve the following.

• Blast specific message campaigns targeted to a particular client base, thus increasing your marketing reach.

• Create the most personalized marketing experience with your customers as your chatbot personalizes every interaction with dynamic content that changes according to your customer’s data and profile.

• Build a unique brand image in a crowded marketplace by having your chatbot bring your brand to life with a specified tone-of-voice and persona.

• Gather significant data on what your customers want, and track their complaints and feedback. It helps you understand what your customers are looking for to devise a more personalized service in the future.

2. Automated Sales Systems and Techniques

Engaging customers, providing them with a helpful, interactive interface, and implementing the latest "tech-niques" are all done for one ultimate purpose - sales. Conversational AI built for e-commerce can help you develop an automated sales system.

• Make more informed decisions with the real-time metrics about your inventory and order processes, all easily retrieved from your chatbot dashboard.

• Open up more sales channels to raise profits, such as the popular Facebook Messenger app, online store websites, and affiliate markets.

• Provide a seamless payment gateway within the chatbot so users don’t have to be routed out to another link/app/window to make their payments, increasing user retention rates and creating a smoother user experience for sales.

• Monitor user engagement, sales enquiries, and other relevant keywords through chat analytics to gather relevant data and craft more targeted sales strategies.

• Offer targeted recommendations for each user based on their previous chat history to increase chances of clinching the sale. Besides, with your AI chatbot’s great advice and sales techniques, it’ll be hard to say no ;)

3. A 'Smart'  Relationship Manager for Customer Service

In addition to marketing and sales, Conversational AI has, without any doubt, transformed the customer service aspect of business management. This is the most talked-about perk of Conversational AI. Chatbots are the now and future of an exemplary support system. Here’s how:

• Offering 24/7 error-free customer service with your chatbot. Your chatbot won’t suffer from Monday blues or overwork itself so your customers enjoy high quality customer service interaction every time, regardless of different time zones.

• Cutting the queues for your frontline support team by having your chatbot take over basic customer service offerings. Meanwhile, your team can focus on the more complex tasks that the bot cannot handle on its own.

• Lowers operational and labour costs with your one-time investment into a good AI chatbot.

• Craft a great user experience with almost instantaneous customer service and an easy-to-use chatbot interface.

We’ve covered quite a bit on how conversational AI can be used to support customer service, marketing, and sales operations in your business with the above, but what’s next? Well, the key thing would be to figure out your main business priorities, and the things you are looking to improve/address to hit those goals. Only then, it might be time to consider getting an AI chatbot, built and customized for your business needs.