6 Niches That Benefit the Most From the Popularity of Chatbots

First, chatbots have taken over entire industries. From e-commerce and banking to education and healthcare, the number of globally productive enterprises that are now dominated by digital assistants showcases both multitude and variety. To them, these technical solutions are primarily a helping tool.

It’s a bit different with niches, though. Being mainly small but not always unique, companies that are trying to find the least crowded corners of the market are always on the lookout for competition. It’s exactly this competitiveness that drives them forward, urging them to improve, pivot, or modernize.

And, what are chatbots to them if not a powerful new leverage over constantly re-emerging rivals?

Let’s see how digital assistants offer a competitive advantage to niche businesses, and which niches can benefit from them the most.

Aren’t Chatbots a Privilege of Rich Tech Geeks?

Whenever a new piece of technology finds its fruitful application in the business world, the story is more or less the same – the solution that is supposed to help newcomers grow is available only to corporate giants, as they are the only ones with enough money and technical know-how to apply it.

Chatbots are revolutionary in this sense as well.

Just listen to SnatchBot’s mission: this Israel-based company is determined to make the creation of chatbots quick, easy, and cost-effective. All three factors combined are what makes digital assistants available not only to industry leaders, but also to startups and small businesses. It was about time.

This means that every entrepreneur mom can create a chatbot with this company’s platform, and apply it to the official Facebook page of her home-based business. With or without its catalogue of readymade bots, SnatchBot requires zero technical knowledge and none of your money whatsoever.

Deemed as the best chatbot platform on the market, SnatchBot can help you increase customer engagement, remove friction from customer journeys, make experiences delightfully personalized, and consequently acquire more customers, drive more sales, and get your grip around a higher ROI.

In the following niches, this has already been proved possible.

1. Food and Drinks, Diners and Pubs

Online ordering, food delivery, customer service, personalized menu recommendations, table booking – need we say more? In all niches that are in the food and drink business, these usually problematic everyday tasks can be automated. And when they are, they provide a fast and effortless experience.

The important thing about chatbots is that a single one can cover multiple channels of communication at the same time. Half of your customers are on Facebook, but the other half prefers using Viber? No problem, since a chatbot is available to both groups 24/7, wherever they are, across different devices.

2. Supermarkets and Grocery Shops

The same naturally applies to supermarkets and grocery shops. Even the local health food stores can build and employ a chatbot of their own, to enable online ordering and delivery or tips and advices. And since we didn’t mention it before, now is a good time to talk about another great use of chatbots.

Digital assistants are no strangers to marketing campaigns, especially when it comes to affiliate programs, discounts, and promotional events. When empowered with a smart algorithm, they can detect a tiniest worm of doubt and kill it with a coupon, a freebie, or some other type of incentive.

3. Apparel Retail and Gift Shops

Personalized recommendations are effective in all niches, since they kill two birds with one stone – they delight customers by custom-tailoring their experiences, and give companies an opportunity to cross-sell or up-sell their products and services. In brick-and-mortar stores, this is an assistant’s job.

In the online universe, however, good shopping assistants are somewhat hard to find. Since they require both a real-time communication tool and an intuitive CRM base, this type of service is usually expensive, slow and ineffective. Human agents can only cater to one customer in real time, after all.

No other solution is better at this than chatbots. With their integration with CRM systems being flexible and seamless, and with their algorithms being supported by machine learning (which allows them to learn from every interaction), they have individual customer preferences available at glance.

4. Stylists and Hair and Nail Salons

While personalized recommendations can contribute to success of professional beauty parlours as well, one benefit of chatbots is much more significant to stylists, hair and nail salons, and barber shops. Chatbots are not called digital assistants for no reason, as scheduling is one of their strongest suits.

But, besides being very effective at booking appointments, chatbots can help this niche with marketing and brand building as well. Think about a hair salon that uses it to entice new customers with a weekly hair care tips. Or, a fashion stylist who employs a chatbot to share top outfit suggestions for the day.  

5. Travel Firms and Airline Companies

Speaking of scheduling, another niche that comes to mind belongs to travel firms. Just like airline companies, they can use chatbots to pinpoint itineraries and send notifications and updates on the case progress. Want to know what’s the cheapest hotel room in London in March? Just ask a chatbot.

When it comes to time-sensitive queries such as this one, it’s important to note that the best chatbots are not only able to comb through a copious amount of data in real time, but also to understand human language in different contexts, all thanks to a little AI perk called natural language processing.  

6. Private Medical Practices

Appointment scheduling is of equal importance in private medical practices, but physicians, psychologists and medical advisers can use chatbots for yet another purpose. When allowed to access patients’ medical histories, a healthcare’s equivalent to CRM, they can provide personalized guidance.

And, not only that. If well-designed and trained, chatbots can detect common health problems using only symptoms that a patient has given them. Their use in this type of diagnostics is still in its early days, but it’s certain that someday soon, common diseases will be treated without medical experts.

Every business niche that overlaps with these is suitable for creative new applications of chatbots. As Oracle predicts that 80% of today’s companies will start using digital assistants by the end of 2020, the full integration of sophisticated technology and niche businesses is now a matter of when, not if.