Lower The Cost To Run Your Service Business And Improve Your Customer Service

Everyone running a service business knows there's a dizzying array of customer inquiries and complaints to deal with. But what if there was a way to automate that job? Hence the need for chatbots! ! In this article, we're going to explore what a service business is, how chatbots can revolutionize your service business, and how to get a chatbot. Let's roll!

Table of Contents

• What Is a Service Business?
• What Issues Does a Service Business Face?
• What Is a Chatbot?
• Chatbot Use Cases for Your Service Business
• How to Get a Chatbot?
• Conclusion

What Is a Service Business?

First things first – let's define what we mean by «service business». In short, any business that provides a service (as opposed to selling a physical product) can be considered a service business. We counted 7 types of service businesses. Here they are (with examples):

• Personal services — self-defense instructor, pet sitting, adventure tours, personal chef, used-car inspection
• Business services — private accountant, business plan writer, business consultant
• Marketing and sales — public relations agency, copywriting service, welcoming service
• Home services — handyman services, pool services, lawn care, house sitting, home decorating
• Computers and technology — computer repair, website design
• Children's services — child care, children's fitness, computer training for kids, tutoring
• Event services — photography, family-history video, mobile DJ, event planning

And even more! Think about booking a flight or hotel, ordering food, requesting a ride, healthcare services, customer support, and so on. These businesses require a lot of communication to keep things running smoothly, which can often be a drain on time and resources.

What Issues Does a Service Business Face?

One of the biggest headaches for service businesses is dealing with high volumes of customer inquiries. This can be a real challenge when your customer service team is already stretched thin or working remotely. And this can be a disaster if you don't have such a team and do everything yourself.

Customers expect instant responses on social media and other platforms and often complain about delayed or unsatisfactory responses. That's where chatbots come in.

What Is a Chatbot?

In a nutshell, a chatbot is a program that interacts with users through text conversations. This technology is revolutionizing the way that you can handle customer inquiries and complaints.

Chatbots can deal with routine queries, answer frequently asked questions, provide troubleshooting suggestions, and even personalize conversations based on users' preferences. Hmm, sounds like, in some cases, a chatbot can replace a costly human. Right?

Chatbot Use Cases for Your Service Business

The coolest thing is that with a chatbot you can answer customer questions 24 hours a day. Most of the questions, as a rule, do not differ in variety, so you can get by with a simple rule-based chatbot. In case a  customer asks for something that the chatbot does not know, enable live chat so that a human agent could help. Do not be lazy to replenish the database of questions and answers with new information to make your chatbot smarter and able to give more detailed answers and explanations.

Another scenario for using a bot in a service business is scheduling appointments and managing bookings. It will be faster than email and more convenient than phone calls (especially if you don't have assistants to answer calls).

Along the way, the chatbot will generate a customer list that you can use for email marketing and sales — yes, keep in mind that your customer list is a real treasure since it contains the people that already trust you.

Chatbots are great for collecting feedback and complaints. Thus you will have valuable information on how to improve your service and get an opportunity to calm down unhappy customers before they share their experience online on social media.

Also, chatbots can help your customers place an order and pay for it. Convenient if you sell your services on a prepaid basis.

Finally, chatbots can inform your customers about new offers from time to time, or simply remind them of you. This scenario will perfectly fit into communication with customers through social networks and instant messengers.

In general, a chatbot can perform any task that comes down to communicating with a client. Thanks to Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies, a chatbot can keep the conversation going even if it doesn't go according to your expectations.

How to Get a Chatbot?

The best way to implement a chatbot into your business is to create one and deploy it on your channels using TruVISIBILITY's Chat application. This is a no-code visual builder, and therefore it allows you to design the chatbot's workflow without a line of code. With our Chat application, you can build not only rule-based chatbots but also AI-driven ones that  are able to understand «free text» — the text a customer types. How smart your chatbot will be is up to you!

The process of building a chatbot includes 5 steps:

1. Define the purpose of your chatbot. Do you want it just to answer frequently asked questions or help your customers with scheduling appointments?
2. Come up with your chatbot's character. What type of person will it be?
3. Design your chatbot's conversational flow. How will the entire conversation unfold?
4. Test your chatbot. Does everything work as it should?
5. Deploy your chatbot. Social channels, certain webpages, entire websites, etc. 

Out of these five steps, the designing of a conversational flow is the most complicated one, as it requires you to study your target audience and be aware of its so-called pain points, or persistent problems.

Also: How to Design an Engaging Chatbot Conversation

Conclusion

Modern life is fast. Nobody wants to wait. And your customers too. They want quick responses to their inquiries and hate when their complaints are left unanswered. For a small service business with limited resources, it's hard to keep a customer support team. And it's even harder to handle all the customer communication on your own shoulders. That's why a little bit of robot help will be appropriate.

Register a freemium TruVISIBILITY account and get unlimited access to fully functional marketing software free of cost!

As your business grows, you only pay for what you use without any contract. A freemium TruVISIBILITY account allows you to:

• Create a chatbot that can conduct up to 100 conversations per month
• Launch email blasts, start drip campaign, etc with 1000 free emails sent monthly
• Send 1000 SMS texts per month
• Build 1 website including a blog
• 1 GB of storage usage
• 1 SSL certificate
• Unlimited API usage

The pricing is based on usage over the free monthly allotment. Thus it is extremely affordable for small to medium businesses. You can adjust the number of conversations your chatbots can have, the number of emails and SMS that can be sent per month, the number of websites you can deploy, and the capacity of your cloud storage. Simple and flexible!