Does your small business have a marketing or traffic funnel that it's struggling to manage? Then, perhaps, it's time to invest in some form of automation technology. From generating leads to addressing inquiries, modern chatbots have evolved to the point that they are now capable of handling a variety of different customer interactions. In this episode, Gene Marks and Jon Aidunkonis, along with special guest Arvell Craig, discuss how small business owners can use all this new chatbot technology to their advantage.

Executive Summary
0:39—Today's Topic: How Can Chatbots Help My Small Business?

2:29—A chatbot is essentially any software or program that can respond to inquiries in a friendly, human-like manner.

4:33—Chatbots allow your business to quickly engage with a larger audience without sacrificing the individual attention given to each customer.

7:04—While a chatbot can never fully replace your business's customer service department, it can function as a “decision tree" to help your customers pinpoint their exact needs before they have access a live representative.

12:25—Not only can a chatbot can be programmed to respond through a variety of different mediums, but it can also be programmed to recognize your customers' intentions based on the specific platforms they accessed.

15:33—Chatbots can significantly boost the amount of leads that your business generates if you program them to handle customer interactions during off-peak business hours.

16:15—The average price of a chatbot can range anywhere between $500 - $2,5000 per month.
Links

Chatbot Funnels
How to Build Chatbots

Transcript
Jon: Hello, and welcome back to the Small Biz Ahead podcast. My name is Jon Aidukonis with The Hartford. I'm here with Gene Marks from The Marks Group.

Gene: Hello, hello.

Jon: And Arvell Craig, who's here to talk to us about automation and chatbots. Arvell, how are you?

Arvell: I am doing wonderful. Thank you. How are you?

Jon: Awesome. Great, thanks. Thanks for joining us today. So maybe we can jump right in, and if you want to tell us a little bit about your business and then we can get right into talking about what a chatbot is.

Gene: What the heck, a chatbot, we all want to know. We know, right Jon? You know what it is, but we're going to learn a little bit more. Go ahead, Arvell.

Arvell: Yes, thank you. No, I'm so excited to be here and I appreciate you guys for inviting me to talk, and talk to your audience about my favorite topic, which is chatbots. The company that I'm with, that I started, is called Chatbot Funnels. What we do, we use chatbot to help small businesses who have a marketing funnel, or a sales funnel, or some kind of process where they're taking leads to capture them, talk to them online, and then hopefully book a meeting and make a sale. We use chatbot technology, and we'll get into it more, to help them to expedite that process. And we do a little bit of training, a little bit of teaching as well, those who want to learn and do it themselves.

Gene: Let's talk a little bit about chatbots. Now here's my experience with chatbots, right? So I have a little dog who's a foster, very sick little dog, and we have all these drugs that we buy for the dog on CVS. So I am constantly getting text messages from CVS saying that Lavender's prescription is... By the way, her name is Lavender. I did not name the dog lavender, that was my wife. But anyway, so we get these little texts saying the prescription is due, and then I respond back, "Sure, please renew." And then I'll get another text back, "You've ran out of renewals, can we contact your vet?" And I'll say, "Sure,