Years ago when I first started building websites, I didn't have any idea how to make website chatbot programs. I had no idea that making such programs would even be possible. And, even if I did, I had no idea how to make them run reliably, efficiently, and error-free. Well, those were all just a few months ago. Since then, many advancements in the field have made building chat bots much easier.
Nowadays a ChatBot is a program created specifically to automatically chat with a user, and deliver useful human-powered feedback, either from the user's response or some other preset response. This was definitely not that hard, as long as you missed it, as with the example above, you could easily think of it as a small business answering some basic live chat queries. Say, for instance, a customer wanted to place a special order, but they didn't give their name or address. Before you could help them out, you had to have some way to associate a name with an address. Therefore, the very first Chat Bots were programmed to automatically generate a random name and address for every customer.
Well, small businesses have now moved on to the age-old problem of website chat bot inquiries. Customers frequently don't provide their names and addresses, because they are afraid of being spam. To solve this problem, today's chat bots can also search for dental practice keywords, in order to try and find dental practice clients. This eliminates the need for a human receptionist and makes the bot even more efficient. Also, by using the keyword search feature, the bot can suggest relevant questions based on the keywords given by the customer.
For instance, if "dentist in London" is the keyword used by customers, the website chat bot will search for all dental practices in that city, and suggest relevant queries based on the words used. As an example, it might suggest "Dentist Smithfield", "alore Dental Clinic", etc. This is very helpful, especially for small practices, because these keywords are not often used by potential customers. However, if we use the example above, we can see that using the word "Smithfield" could potentially bring in a lot of competitors, all of whom may be advertising in the exact same way. So, the bot suggests "Dentist Smithfield London", in order to filter out the results and make our website chat bot a lot more efficient.
Another use of a website chat bot is to attract new, paying customers. If a website visitor is interested in your services, he/she may click on the "buy" or "sign up" button. This will usually take him/her to the sales page of your website, and if the customer is interested, he/she may provide some information about himself/herself. As a result, you'll have the opportunity to offer him a newsletter subscription, which he/she can use to learn about all the services that you're offering. This way, you will have a new customer, who can be converted into a paying customer.
A website chat bot can also help with making appointments. If a website visitor is already logged on to the website but searching for a particular service, the bot will automatically add the relevant information to the end of the website chat log. This will be useful to the website visitor, since he/she won't have to enter his/her details again, just to look for the details of an existing appointment. And, this way the bot can also indicate if the customer needs to make another appointment to be attended to.
A website chat bot can be helpful for a dental practice in many other ways as well. For example, it might be able to detect errors made during the process of taking X-rays or creating dental records. The data given by the chatbot will be authentic, since it has been taken from real patients, and the dental practice will know exactly what has been done right and wrong. However, this kind of knowledge will not be transferable, if the customer decides to switch to another practice. The chatbot will have stored the data in its database and will be able to recognize the problem after a while.
In a nutshell, the use of a website chat bot for small businesses will definitely bring them lots of benefits. The introduction of this technology to the dental industry will bring the convenience of real customers, without the inconvenience of having to talk to them. The new procedures and treatments will become more effective, thanks to the help of the chat bot, and all this can be achieved in a very short period of time. These are the main reasons why small businesses should consider getting a chat bot, in order to provide their customers with the best possible service. It is already proven that such systems do help, so it should come as no surprise that more offices will get their own now.