Everything is digital today. Everything is becoming automated or streamlined, and businesses are striving to implement cutting-edge and innovative technologies like artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and augmented reality. The top businesses of today are efficient in managing both their employees and customers alike. However, the real heroes here are AI chatbots, who deserve a lot of credit for boosting business and improving customer engagement. The chatbots contribute towards a company just as an employee would do, helping customers with their queries and getting back the clients who were no longer interested in the products.
In recent years, AI powered chatbots have become a crucial element of modern business. The bot allows businesses to connect with their customers in new exciting, engaging, and interactive ways, and also helps them streamline some of their customer service processes. AI powered chatbots are now highly popular and have become a part and parcel of marketing strategies.
What is a chatbot?
Chatbots are basically an AI-based computer program, engaging in conversation with the person on the other side of the computer/mobile via auditory or textual methods. AI chatbots help to perform tasks at times when the resources are unavailable or exerted with the workload. Most of the web based AI chatbots are powered by Python.
One of the first chatbots to be developed was ELIZA. It acted as a Rogerian Psychotherapist and was designed with the intention to beat the Turing test. The system succeeded in convincing a lot of people that they were actually talking to a human being. A major part of AI research is directed towards making a conversational AI and advances in them have made these chatbots possible.
One of the most powerful chatbots in existence is Mitsuku, 5 time winner of the Loebner Prize Turing Test. It has the persona of an 18 year old girl from England. Meena, a chatbot from Google, recently made the news with claims of being proficient in follow up conversations. It is based on a neural network and behaves very similar to humans.
Benefits of a chatbot
- Instant responses to your customer
- Improved UI and UX
- Cost savings
The best part of having a chatbot is the instantaneous response you can give to your clients. Instead of waiting for you to email back, a client can get replies to their queries quickly. You can set up a chatbot to take customer orders, for collecting their contact info, for resolving customer queries and many others, the possibilities are endless. They allow you to cater to your audience away from your time zone. It allows you to provide support after hours.
Another great benefit of a chatbot is the improvement of UI and UX. Instead of putting up all your information on your website and expecting your visitors to find them, a well-designed AI chatbot for your website can help your visitors access the exact piece of information they want and prevent a cluttered interface on your website or app. Chatbots can save up to 30% in customer support costs. Often, chatbots combined with human input can make customer support highly efficient. Chatbots can resolve simple queries and a human agent can resolve the more complex ones. This can reduce the number of customer support agents required to resolve FAQs and resources can be directed towards resolving complex queries.
Various Industries where chatbots shine
- eCommerce
- Customer service
- Travel Industry
- Banking
Ecommerce
The eCommerce field has definitely experienced massive growth with the arrival of chatbots. Various companies have reported a huge increase in profits and conversions with the incorporation of chatbots. Companies have reported a 20% to 300% increase in their sales with the use of eCommerce chatbots.
The AI chatbots are fast replacing emails in the industry. These chatbots can send automated emails, which have a better open rate than regular emails, helping businesses connect with potential and new customers.
The marketers use the sales funnels and segment their audiences to deliver interactive and engaging content, personalized to meet the unique needs of the customer using eCommerce bots. The AI-based chatbots can connect based on emotional reasoning, increasing customer loyalty, and sales.
With eCommerce chatbots managing customer relationships and working on engaging prospects are now easy. eCommerce bots have algorithms to identify when the user says no to a particular product, along with the reason for the same. They can recommend products based on their recent purchase history. When a customer abandons a product from the cart, the bot can send an email immediately to understand the reason for abandonment. The bots are able to personalize the emails and the products for the customers, thus making them engage with the website, and improve the conversion rate.
Customer Service
The Chatbots in the customer service field has saved an approximate of $15Bn for the companies, by reducing salaries and other resources. The companies are said to have a huge improvement in their techniques and management as a result of improved customer service.
FAQs are the best example where AI chatbots can help the enterprise. Whenever the client asks a question, the bots can answer it from the available documentation, making it easy, fast and efficient for the company. The customer service person is not always available or he/she does not always have an answer to the queries posed by the customers. That’s where the bot comes into play. They will be able to answer the questions faster and help the customer.
Swiggy has enabled a chatbot for easy and quick resolution of customer queries, such as problems with an order, the delivery address, etc. The combination of human intelligence and chatbot AI provides a quick and seamless experience for the customer.
Another great example of the food industry taking the charge is the Dominos twitter bot that allows you to order a pizza by tweeting an emoji, which in my opinion, is more or less a PR stunt.
Travel Industry
The AI chatbots are able to respond to customer queries and increase the number of bookings for the travel and tourism industry. Travel companies were able to increase customer interactions by 40%. Some companies saw a growth in revenue by $50K a month while enjoying a steep rise in customer bookings.
Users generally tend to check out the travel locations, check the itinerary and finally move out of the website. The chatbots can help the travel company to interact with the user, find out the booking status and the reason for not completing the bookings. The customers usually compare prices and other details for the different hotels, flights, etc. With a chatbot AI, the hotels and other travel-related applications can gain an insight into what the customer is looking for and personalize the itinerary accordingly. This will help the company improve its bookings and increase the number of conversions by optimizing their prices and facilities according to customer needs.
Banking
The finance industry has undergone a massive change due to various policies, laws, and incorporations that has taken place. The Bots can tell the users about the extra charges and fees that may occur during transactions. The bot can warn the customers of various policies or dangers while during a transaction, especially when one is traveling abroad.
Based on banking behavior, users get banking and other tips from the chatbots. These personalized tips help the user have better banking experience. The increasing usage of bots in this sector ensures a 24/7 customer support system.
Digital assistants
The digital assistants in your smartphones are some of the best examples of chatbots. Google Assistant, Siri, Cortana and Alexa could be described as some of the most advanced chatbots in existence. What started as simple talking bots or voice search platforms have evolved into complex ecosystems. Google recently released Google Duplex in many parts of the US, which essentially lets you make restaurant reservations using the Google Assistant on your phone. The AI system makes a call to the restaurant and talks to the employees to make the reservation for you. Currently, just about all the smart home ecosystems support one or more of these digital assistants.
As digital assistants migrate to standalone devices such as Google Home, Amazon Echo, Apple HomePod and are becoming more and more ubiquitous in homes, brands and services are integrating their services with these systems. Major media outlets have made their news podcasts and other services accessible through social media. Uber has made it possible to book cabs using Amazon Alexa. As more and more services and brands get integrated with digital assistants, and with new smart devices coming every day in the market, it is clear that voice-based chatbots and digital assistants are becoming more and more relevant and simpler. Now would be a great time to step in and take advantage of chatbots.
Recent trends and the future of chatbots
The implementations of voice experience have given chatbots a major boost, resulting in the popularity of various assistants. Voice powered chatbots helps to improve the overall experience of the customer, proven by a rapid rise of bots. With more and more connected devices and wearable tech coming to market, voice assistants and chatbots are going to be more common in everyday life.
The conversational AI bots will take over the regular bots, helping users to hold conversations, instead of the repeated statements delivered by the bots previously. The AI bots can understand the needs of a user and respond accordingly, resulting in increasing the overall sales and improve the marketing efforts of the company.
The powered chatbots will be able to collect the data, work on it and analyze it to identify perfect insights for the company. The bots will help the companies in predictive analytics.
Thinking about incorporating AI powered chatbots to boost your business? Nuventure Connect can help you build chatbots customized to your industry. Combined with our decade long service expertise and dedicated Software solutions team is capable of building custom chatbot solutions for any industry, be it, E-commerce, customer service, banking assistants or AI smart assistants. Please contact us for a free consultation and insight into how AI powered chatbots can help you in your daily business.