A Chatbot is My Newest Employee of the Month!

Chatbots are a type of chatbox but a chatbox isn’t necessarily a chatbot! A chatbox is that familiar box, typically in the lower right-hand corner of a businesses’ website, that enables the consumer to interact with the company via a text interface during or after hours. Chatboxes can be “staffed” by real agents, enabling you to obtain information you need from a real human being.

If there’s no human on the other side, you’re using a chatbot—a robotic or non-human interface that hopes to understand your natural language and provide the information you seek.

But those of us who’ve interacted with a chatbot before know the days of feeling like you’re having a conversation with a human are still not here. The typical chatbot conversation starts with the chatbot asking how they can help you, hoping and praying you’ll use a keyword the bot recognizes! Almost immediately, it’s clear that a bot using natural language processing can’t help you with your problem. At that point, the chatbot hands off the conversation to a live agent.

A live agent can be expensive. At the very least, it’s another full-time employee. While a company like American Express can afford to staff their chat platform, most small businesses, like medical practices, outsource their chat capability to third-party vendors.

Chatbox vs Chatbot

Chatbox vendors try to keep costs low, but knowledgeable live agents can be understandably expensive. We’re left with a conundrum: Live chat that can more ably answer an online visitor’s question but is potentially costly vs. a more economical chatbot that has a tough time answering questions.

The answer? A chatbot that specializes in one topic and limits the user to a finite number of choices to ultimately provide the answer they seek. By focusing on only one topic, we reduce the complexity of options provided to the consumer, increasing the likelihood they end up where they want.

Take for example, the chatbot I use.¹ Our chatbot doesn’t try to answer every question a user may have. It answers the one question everyone has: “How much does ‘it’ cost?” With “it” being any procedure or service we offer.

The chatbot won’t answer any questions other than price. However, when it comes to questions regarding price, it answers the question correctly every time! If s/he wants to know about the recovery process, the site visitor will have to read about it on one of our dedicated procedure pages. If s/he wants to know how to book a consult, hopefully they’ll notice our online booking tool under the “Contact” tab. If s/he wants to know about anything other than price, s/he will have to look elsewhere on our site. But if they want to know about cost, we’ve got them covered with either our streamlined—quick and dirty—chatbot or our Price Estimator² that offers more information like videos, before and after photos, or the ability to purchase non-surgical services online.

What do visitors prefer?

When our chatbot went live in September 2020, we immediately started collecting data. We wanted to know if most interactions came through our website submission form, Price Estimator, or chatbot. All three tools have one thing in common: their primary purpose is lead generation, so all three require contact information to work.

If the user wants to ask a question through our website submission form, they have to enter their name and email address. If they want to check pricing on our more elaborate Price Estimator, they have to either create an account with their email address or sign in using their Google or Facebook accounts. And with the pricing chatbot, they have to enter their name, email address, and ZIP code. No matter what, we capture their contact information for immediate follow up or add them to our email marketing database for future email marketing.³

So what did we find? The graphs highlight some important findings. An overwhelming majority of our leads came through the Price Estimator that has been on our site for years. It’s possible there’s more traffic to this page, one of the most popular on our site, because of the large number of links to this page in cyberspace over the years.

But notice an interesting evolution in the second figure. It’s evident that users are starting to use the pricing chatbot more. Users may be embracing the no-frills chatbot because they’re able to get an estimate sent to their inbox in fewer steps than the Price Estimator. The chatbot, which resides on our homepage, may also be better at capturing the visitor’s attention, compared to the “Get A Quote Now” call-to-action button⁴ that requires users to navigate to the Price Estimator. If this trend continues, the chatbot may overtake the Price Estimator as our strongest lead generation technique in the months to come.

Which is the best automated tool for lead generation?

A head-to-head comparison of the three lead capture techniques on our website ncludes the number of leads and subsequent consultations generated by those leads. By percentage, it would seem that the website submission form is our most productive in comparison to the Price Estimator and chatbot, in that we booked two consultations from only 18 inquiries. But generating leads and booking consults is a numbers game. The more leads, the more consults. And generating only two consults from the website submission form, regardless of the ratio of leads to consults, is woefully inadequate as a business model.

The consumer in this instant gratification-obsessed world is more likely to use a more automated option on our website, ie the Price Estimator or chatbot to get an instant quote.

Something to Chat About

It’s exciting to see online visitors’ relatively quick adoption of new technology like a pricing chatbot. And not only for us, but also for Netflix reality star Dr. Sheila Nazarian,⁵ whose chatbot generated 121 leads in its first 24 hours. Seeing so many new leads fill our sales funnel,⁶ thanks to our chatbot team member, gives me hope that as we exit this pandemic, the future of aesthetics will be stronger than ever.

1. www.realdrbae.com

2. www.realdrbae.com/pricing

3. https://modernaesthetics.com/articles/2019-may-june/how-an-email-database-can-power-your-practice?c4src=search:feed

4. https://modernaesthetics.com/articles/2018-sept-oct/get-to-know-your-potential-patients?c4src=search:feed

5. https://nazarianplasticsurgery.com/

6. https://modernaesthetics.com/articles/2017-nov-dec/loading-the-sales-funnel-through-price-transparency?c4src=search:feed