Chatbots

What is a Chatbot?

Chatbots are at the talking point of the business world now. The arrivals of chatbots have opened up new realms of the customer engagement and new ways of doing business in the form of conversational commerce. It is one of the most useful technologies that businesses can rely on, possibly replacing the traditional models and making apps and websites redundant. 

A Chatbot (“Chatter Robot”) is a computer program that mimics human conversations in its natural format including text or spoken language using artificial intelligence techniques such as Natural Language Processing (NLP), image and video processing, and audio analysis. The most interesting feature of the bots is that they learn from the past interactions and become intelligent and smarter over the time. 

Chatbots works in two ways- rule based and smart machine based. Rule based chatbots provide predefined responses from a data base, based on the keywords used for the search. However, smart machine based chatbots inherit its capabilities from Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Computing and adapt their behaviour based on the customer interactions.

Relevance of Chatbots in Business

We are living in an era where customers are tech- savvy, always connected to social platforms through their smart mobile devices. This new generation of customers expects intuitive and seamless customer experience from the brands they engage with. They demand near real time response to their queries and expect more personalized recommendations/ suggestions from the brand. To satisfy these customer demands and to address the increasing competition in the business space, more brands/ businesses are turning their focus to build chatbots or virtual agents that can manage customer queries round the clock without any delay. In fact, chatbots engage their customers in the right place, at the right time, with the right information in a cost-efficient way. It acts as a human face of the brand where customers can build trust and empathy.

Advantages of Chatbots

•    Ability to engage with the customers in a natural and friendly manner

•    Easy to interact using a simpler interface

•    Interactions are possible through familiar platforms like Facebook chat through API

•    Capability to outperform humans with the speed of handling customer queries

•    Improved efficiency with round the clock customer service

•    Easy to build and cost efficient

Future of Chatbots

Chatbots are currently seen on websites, social platforms and smartphones and are utilized as easy and fun ways to assist customers in their interactions with a brand. Even if the bot revolution is in its early phase, we can expect a lot more advancements in this field. With the evolution of AI technology and deep learning, the chatbots are expected to become more empowered to offer better language processing capabilities and extensive personalization in the coming days. Let us expect in the future, chatbots will get embedded in almost all the interconnected devices that we use in our day to day lives. This will fundamentally transform human interactions with digital business platforms and will open up new realms of personalized customer experience. Foreseeing this immense potential of the chatbots, organizations have started investing heavily in this space. The next generation of intelligent chatbots with more power to store, synthesize and recall data can possibly make smart purchasing decisions for you, or warn you of a bad weather condition or hectic traffic on your drive way to office.