The importance of chat bots in 2020
Seamless customer experience is what everyone is after. From start to finish, each user journey has to be perfectly smooth; the expectations are only increasing and providing such an experience is no longer in the capacity of JUST HUMAN EFFORTS. This is where you need AUTOMATION and INTELLIGENCE to back your efforts.
Chatbots are one of the most significant developments in automation space. The customer service industry has been revolutionized, thanks to chatbots! Chatbots have changed the customer communication scenario. Starting with being a buzzword in the technology sector to a successful operational tool – chatbots are here and are considered the future of your business growth and customer service & management.
Let’s understand what a chatbot is, explore its technical dimension in the upcoming sections –
What is a chatbot?
Chatbots are computer programs that can have real conversations. A chat interface enables chatbots to communicate with users. Chatbots can be integrated with any messaging app. Chatbots understand written, and spoken text and interpret its meaning. The bot then checks relevant information and provides it to the users.
Why chatbots are important?
A chatbot is a powerful tool to facilitate the interaction between humans and machine. However, from a technical perspective, a chatbot is a representation of a basic question answering system leveraging NLP – Natural Language Processing.
Building responses in natural language to user questions is one of the most common examples of NLP. Chatbots business application for customer-facing goods has marked a rapid growth in recent times.
Chatbot technology in use:
Let’s look at the technologies used in developing chatbots. It directly affects the bots’ cost and power.
The two categories are:
- Command based chatbots
- AI-based chatbots
Command based chatbots: These chatbots rely on a set of pre-specified replies and heuristics. The bots answers use answer selection that matches the search queries. They can’t create new texts. Also, the questions they can answer are limited. They cannot perform functions outside of their program.
Machine Learning or AI chatbots: These bots are intelligent and can answer ambiguous questions. They generate replies from scratch using NLP – Natural Language Processing. These chatbots become smarter with time as they learn from past question-answer session leveraging
Both types have their baggage of advantages and disadvantages. Command based bots give precise answers but fail to assist beyond their structured programming. AI and Machine learning chatbots serves on a higher degree but requires a huge amount of learning data.
Why businesses need chatbots?
Because it’s a bot which works all day and night – 365 of the year and a few benefits mentioned below:
Benefits of Chatbots That Will Help Your Business Growth
- Scaling up operations: Chatbots don’t possess human-like limitations. They are machines. Human agents can handle 2-3 conversations at a time; chatbots do not have such an upper limit. By employing chatbot aid for your business, you add great potential to your task force. Business owners get the boost they need to enter the new markets.
- Handling and filtering customer queries: If a business seems to get a lot of queries/enquires from customers, then chatbots can handle this load and be the first point of contact for your support team. Chatbots can screen calls from customers and pass them through to human agents when required.
- Assisting customers in selecting products from a wide range: If you sell a variety of products with major and minor differences; your customers might need some assistance in choosing the right products for them. They often need and seek advice while buying an expensive item like smartphones or cams etc. Here, Chatbots can help customers getting their hands on the right products.
- Helper for keen buyers: Millennials look for details while buying things! Also, they prefer live chats to calls so, if your services/products are for millennials then equipping your customer service with chatbots will be a prudent investment.
- Actively marketing services through online channels The more interaction with customers, the more is the engagement and business growth. If you are using online mediums to interact with your customers, then chatbots can do this job for you effectively, consistently and simplify some tasks for you.
- Increase organisational efficiency: If your business seeing too many resources on backend processing, can install a chatbot business solution to automate everything rather than looking into everything and engaging workforce.
So, this is how, and in many other ways, chatbots truly empower your business and its processes.
Presence of chatbots:
Let’s take a quick look at the sectors where chatbots are actively used:
- Customer support
- Messaging apps
- Medical information
- Education
Considering the current scenario, chatbots are on the way to become an essential part of the business growth and the way of running business processes.
The chatbot technology through AI and Machine Learning is going to witness new horizons of technology advancement in the coming years.
Takeaway:
Chatbot technology is emerging; however, it is consistently developing to become a staple in many businesses, customer service, sales, and marketing operations, among other processes. Some great numbers have been estimated as a fact that technology is going to save millions of dollars in the coming years. It includes saving on human errors, affordable e-commerce, crispier business operations, and so on. A long way is ahead of us before we reach and utilize the peak of chatbot technology, but at the same time, people and businesses are using chatbot aid, and it’s a step forward in the right direction.