January 29, 2021
A Chatbot Primer for healthcare companies
Chatbots, once a novelty, have become commonplace on websites and social media. We anticipate plenty of uses for medical device companies, hospitals, and physician practices.
There are two basic types of bots, transactional and conversational. Transactional bots lead customers through a set process step by step. Think diagnostic tree.
Whether it’s a burger menu – What do you want on it? - or a service question, they keep branching off until they stop –or it reaches a dead end, where it may implement a fallback option and escalate the issue for humans pick up.
Conversational chatbots use artificial intelligence and query knowledge databases to dig out answers. They sound and listen like humans and they’re more accurate and understand misspellings, grammar, and the vernacular, and they can grasp the context of chat. For example, “I turned on the power switch, but it’s still deader than a doorknob.” Your conversational chatbot understands that you need further diagnostic advice, not a mortuary or Home Depot.
Put your bot to work
A medical device company, for example, could harness a chatbot to answer common questions, assist with registration for a promotion or large meeting, educate customers and dealers, and pre-sell prospects.
To learn about real-life examples, read the case studies of 25 companies on GetJenny.com.
The bottomline on the bots
Chatbots for small businesses, built on an existing chatbot platform, can range from three-to-five thousand dollars. The larger the company and the degree of complexity can easily bump that up by a magnitude. If you need a custom Chatbot, expect to pay $25,000 to $30,000 and up.
On the revenue side, you may reduce your staffing costs by delaying the need for additional employees. That’s the basic math, but Comm100s Chatbot Calculator will refine your numbers.
Here are a few ideas –
- A reduced load on customer service
- Cover off times - evenings, weekends, and holidays – after the humans go home.
- Prevention of lost sales from customers not being able to get information fast enough
- Customer satisfaction. Speeds up the support and customer service process. Note that 47% of users expect an immediate response to Chatbot questions.
- Focuses your precious humans on higher-level issues related to support, sales, and customer service.
Chatbots by the numbers
The users of chatbots tend to be younger: 27% are 25- to 34, 29%, and 39% of consumers 39-to 44 %, says the Drift Report on Conversational Marketing.
And Marketing Dive predicts that by 2023, chatbots will drive more than $100 billion in sales, according to Azati.
Consumers prefer the bots over other digital communication, and in the first place, we still have real people answering questions on the phone!
Before you go further with your chatbot exploration, consider these basic pre-development questions from Aza.