How to Choose the Optimum Chatbot Triggers

Customers today expect customer service from your business at any hour of the day or night. Eighty percent of customers now consider the experience a company provides to be as important as its products and services. And 66% expect a company to understand their needs and expectations.

With a smart chatbot strategy, your company can do just that. Using chat—and chatbots—to communicate with customers has been gaining traction fast. Chatbots, inserted strategically in the customer journey, help brands increase customer engagement, brand loyalty, provide support and service through an ultra-convenient channel, and grow revenue through a wide variety of methods.

What Are Proactive Chat Triggers?

Proactive chat triggers are chat interactions that are triggered by a customer’s actions. For example, when a potential customer spends more than a couple of minutes looking at the same product page, a chatbot pop ups and ask if they’d like to see more information about the item.

Other examples of proactive chat triggers include:

• A customer navigates away from the checkout page before paying for items in their cart. A chatbot could remind them they have items in the cart and/or ask if they need help choosing a payment option.

• A customer visits the pages of two or more similar products. This could trigger the chatbot to ask the visitor whether they would like to see more models of the item to help them narrow their choice.

• A customer visits a website for the second time. The chatbot might respond with a message like, “Welcome back!”

• A visitor comes to the website while a live agent is on duty and able to take questions. If the customer is inactive for a few minutes, the chatbot might ask whether the visitor would like to chat with an agent.

Key Benefits of Proactive Chat Triggers

Proactive chat triggers offer numerous ways to increase your brand’s customer service. No matter what time of the day or night your customers will be able to inquire about something to do with your business. What’s more, they’ll get an instant response based on what they are currently doing.

Here are some of the key benefits you can enable with proactive chat triggers:

Improve Customer Engagement Rate

Conversational chatbots improve customer engagement rates significantly. You can get the most out of them when you choose optimum triggers including:

• Welcoming new and return visitors when they come to your website.

• Asking visitors to sign up for your newsletter or connect on social media before they navigate to another site.

• Calling attention to the chatbot and pointing out what exactly the bot can help the customer do or learn.

Higher Sales Conversion

Everyone wants better customer engagement. A higher sales conversion, however, is the ultimate goal—one that the right chatbot triggers can help deliver by gently nudging visitors toward your products and services. Here are some examples of triggers that might help a chatbot increase your sales conversion rate:

• The shopper has come to your site from a competitor’s website.

• The shopper lives in an area where your business has local brick-and-mortar stores.

• The shopper puts something into their cart but later decides to remove it.

Reduce Cart Abandonment Rate

Cart abandonment is the bane of all ecommerce sites. Overall, more than 88% of online shoppers abandon their orders before purchasing. Whether you have a store that sells consumer electronics (88.49% of carts are abandoned) or automotive items (96.88% of carts are abandoned), solving this critical business challenge is a priority for any online brand.

Chatbot triggers can help you to reduce your cart abandonment rate by responding to:

• A person trying to leave your site while they have items in their cart.

• A person navigating away from your payment page without providing payment information.

• A person adding more than one of the same item to their cart.

How to Choose the Right Proactive Chat Trigger

How do you determine which chatbot triggers are the right ones to take advantage of? Ultimately, you will need to do some research and testing to find the optimum chatbot triggers for your business. Those that work for an insurance agency might likely not be right for an automotive store. Chat triggers that work wonders for an apparel company might fall flat for a business that sells construction materials.

Here are some common use cases to jump-start your strategizing:

Upsell and Increase Sales Conversions

You own a business that sells posters. When someone adds an 18x24-inch poster to their shopping cart, it triggers your chatbot to ask whether they want to add a frame to their order.

The shopper hadn’t really thought about it until now, but getting a frame makes sense. Congratulations, your chatbot trigger just gave you another sale.

Prevent Cart Abandonment

It’s a familiar story: The shopper put several things in their cart, but for some unknown reason they’re leaving your site without actually buying the products. That action triggers your chatbot to say something like, “It looks like you left some items in your shopping cart! Get a 10% discount if you check out within the next five minutes.”

The combination of saving money and facing a time limit both incentivizes and puts a gentle pressure on the customer toward completing the purchase.

Re-engage Repeat Visitors

Repeat visitors are second only to repeat buyers. When someone visits your site frequently, they are demonstrating a clear and significant  interest in what you sell. Something, however, prevents them from clicking “buy now” and becoming a full-fledged customer.

Repeat visitors could trigger chatbot messages like:

• Save 10% and get free shipping today only!

• Have you seen our new arrivals? Click here. They’re amazing.

• We’ve updated our website. Let us show you how ordering is easier than ever.

Responding to these chat triggers makes your brand appear friendly, you improve customer engagement, primes customers for purchase.

Answering Support Queries

People often have a lot of questions before they buy items online. Effective chatbot triggers can look for signs of hesitancy: clicking on a lot of products without adding anything to the cart, moving between multiple ecommerce stores, backing away from payment pages at the last minute.

These triggers give your chatbot opportunities to ask the visitor whether they have questions. Answering a few simple support queries could move them closer to conversion. It could also engage your customers and give them a better connection to your brand.

Make Your Chatbot More Effective with Clickatell

Making your chatbot more effective can take time, research, and testing. A trusted and experienced partner can make all the difference.

Clickatell makes it easy to design and deliver these seamless engagements—with no technical experience needed. Our Chat Desk is one of the most advanced digital contact solutions in the world. It relies on conversational technology to help provide customer support through a mix of Chat and live agent interactions through a mix of Chat and live agent interactions. Our drag-and-drop visual tool, Clickatell Chat Flow, simplifies the process of rolling out seamless cross-channel customer journeys from one that requires weeks or months and pulls on many resources across your company, to one that can be designed and deployed by a non-technical business user with no long lead times. And, our chat commerce solution helps customers not just engage, but also safely and efficiently make purchases within chat channels, including chat apps.

Reach out to our team to see how action-based triggers and the messages can convert more visitors into buyers for your company.