Several industries are experiencing the next wave of change with conversational bots. Whether it is to help automate customer service activities, improve productivity, and enhance employee and customer engagement, AI-powered bots are powerful and sophisticated enough changing the landscape of enterprise ecosystem. Chatbots realize the promise of providing personalized and excellent customer service around the clock.
Chatbot Statistics
- Chatbots find various applications in different industry verticals. Chatbots have found wide applications in large enterprises as they enable better understanding of consumer behavior with the help of machine learning. Domains include Ecommerce, healthcare, and BFSI sectors
- Large enterprise segment is expected to register a CAGR of 24.2% over the forecast period.
- Bots for marketing segment is expected to witness the largest growth over the forecast period as these chatbots can connect the customers directly to service providers.
- The Asia Pacific market is projected to witness substantial growth over the next decade owing to various technological developments across major economies.
- Key participants in the chatbot industry include Baidu, Poncho, Kik, WeChat, Varo Money Inc., Babylon Health, ReplyYes, and SRI International.
Factors Driving the Growth of Chatbots:
Advances in AI
Technological advancements in Artificial Intelligence solutions have widened horizons for companies. Now, companies can predict customer behavior and pattern. Imaging a scenario where AI bot will update the cart and fill it with products purchased on regular basis. AI advances are empowering bots to understand customers better than before.
Focus on User Experience
User experience is at the crux of strategies today. Today’s savvy customers need support throughout the day, anytime and anywhere. It is important to support needs of the customers and resolve their issues. Chatbots have been intricately programmed to connect with customers on pain areas in a more humanized way, providing answers in an empathetic manner consistent with a brand’s values and culture.
Reduced development costs
Several software companies like Microsoft, IBM, and Google have development tools and frameworks to build chatbots using latest technological trends and advancements such as AI, NLP, speech recognition and more. These technological innovations have made it possible to release, develop and maintain chatbot applications.
Getting Started With Chatbots
Before you take a plunge into chatbot development solutions, it is important to overcome the apprehension of a bot assisting you in business operations. Here, are the steps to consider before the steps to walk through when getting started.
Define goals first
Are you looking to solve customer queries or grievances, promote a new product launch? Or lead generation? First narrow down your use case scenario to find out which use case will be most effective for you. This will help you nail down a specific goal for your chatbot. Remember, bot cannot do each and every task. Think of an existing problem and understand how to fix an existing problem in an efficient manner.
Choose the Right Platforms
Your chat conversations will drastically vary based on the pages, networks and platforms your programs live on. Some of the popular chatbot publishing platforms are FB Messenger, Kik, Slack, Telegram, and WeChat as well as company website.
A chatbot publishing platform is a medium from where chatbot can be accessed by users whereas a chatbot development platform is a tool allowing you to create a chatbot. For instance, if someone is coming to homepage it’s more likely that user will have different questions compared to someone visiting Twitter page. Gather information on your audience as possible to guide the question.
Craft Your Bot’s Voice & Personality
Chatbot is all about humanizing conversation and giving your brand an identity. Give your bot a name and a personality. Maintain consistency and at the same time be transparent with customers, while fostering a friendly tone. In order to give chatbot a personality, ask your company’s customer service rep to find trends and latest updates. Ask questions that will help figure out what stops a user from converting to a customer. Social media team needs to provide insights about how customers interact on social channels. Different teams such as Sales, Marketing and social media need to collaborate to craft an interactive as well as amicable personality for chatbot.
Benefits of Chatbots in Customer Services
Technological advancements in chatbots don’t mean robots are taking over the world and will make skilled professionals redundant. The purpose of a chatbot isn’t to completely replace the humans on your marketing and sales team. Instead, chatbots today only help marketing or sales teams to bridge the gap that exists in communication .
Saves Resources
Chatbots mainly automates conversations that would primarily require human intervention or any employee to answer questions. This form of interaction would ultimately require human touch. A company can automate conversations in order to save time and money.
Generate Leads & Revenue
Customer support is the focal point of business growth. Chatbots automates initial interaction between customer representative and users, delivering qualified leads for organization. Effective use of chatbots allows customer representatives to focus on more quality and meaningful work instead of answering mundane questions repeatedly.
Enhancing User Experience
Chatbots can ask a series of qualifying questions aimed to understand user needs and requirements. This will help to provide best possible solution for their needs. By personalizing the questions a chatbot asks related to goals, personal preferences, industry domain and more for a better user experience.
Provide Continuous Support
Chatbots offers 24*7 support to customers. Whether it is emergency or providing support when the office is closed, chatbots provides access to information when needed. Chatbots help you phenomenally decrease the average time taken to respond to a customer’s grievance, bringing you closer to your customers’ expectations.
Engage Users in a Unique Way
Traditionally, customer questions were directed to customer representative via email or the telephone, which made user experiences fairly routine, standard and non-customized. But chatbots offer a new, fun and engaging way to connect with brands at an entirely new level.
Chatbots and Enterprise Technology Solutions Offerings
Leading companies have started to integrate Chatbots in business processes ranging from HR, Customer Services, Social Media Marketing, IT and procurement. For instance, a virtual HR agent can answer several questions from routine inquiries regarding pay and leave benefits to complex questions about HR training programs. There are limitless possibilities when it comes to Chatbot implementation giving rise to sophisticated automation opportunities and providing users the chance to interact with complex applications in an intuitive manner.
Business impact can help reduce costs by improving customer experience and satisfaction, disseminating relevant information quickly and increasing compliance with several internal processes.
However, in this race of automation and Artificial intelligence, it is important not to forget the objectives of your business. Chatbot deployment in enterprises also raises a host of potential security issues as enterprise-level chatbots require access to confidential information, user credentials and enterprise data. Partner with a top chatbot development company to help analyze and mitigate risks in the process.
Finally
AI is soon becoming a reality. Companies that don’t adopt the change face the risk of getting left behind in the race of innovation. Bots are the first step ahead in the conquest of building an intelligent enterprise that can help make decisions effectively and quickly and create engaging experiences.