Chatbots: The era of Improved Customer Experience & Business Automation

Quantazone blog: Chatbots the era of improved customer experience & business automation
MIT professor Joseph Weizenbaum developed the first chatbot in the 1960s. Named ELIZA.

In the year 2009, a company called WeChat in China created a more advanced chatbots. Early in 2016, we saw the intro of the first wave of artificial data technology in the design of chatbots. Social media platforms like Facebook enabled developers to build a chatbot for their trademark/service. So that customers could carry out some of their daily actions from inside their messaging platform. Introducing chatbots into a community has brought us to the time of the conversational interface.

In this article, we will explain to you how chatbots are redefining customer engagement & service. And how the chatbot benefit’s business beyond customer service.

What is a Chatbot?

A chatbot is a computer program that simulates human conversation through voice commands or text chats or both. The concept of a chatbot itself is nothing new. This has been around since the 1960s. However, applying chatbots to help businesses grow is only a recent phenomenon. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is dramatically changing business, and chatbots, fuelled by AI, are becoming a viable customer service channel. Hence the best ones deliver a customer experience (CX). Especially in which customers cannot tell if they are communicating with a human or a computer. Also, AI has come a long way in recognizing the content and context of customers’ requests and questions.

Some other key factors that have allowed the business to use chatbots are:
  • Chatbots are cheaper and can provide 24/7 support to consumers and are a highly scalable way to engage with the consumers.

  • The rise of artificial intelligence technologies brings chatbots to a new level. Together with natural language processing AI brings up to 90% to an accuracy of the machine. Parsing and understanding of requests is also another significant factor here in sophistication notifications. It considers a context of the situation and is always on across devices.

  • Payment integration to third parties via APIs bring even more options to the chatbot functionality.

The Purpose of Chatbots?

The purpose of a chatbot is to support and scale business teams in their relations with customers. Since chatbots offer many benefits for businesses, saving them money while increasing sales and conversion rates. With the advancements of AI, NLP and machine learning, they will become more and more intelligent. Hence leaving the future of chatbots looking dazzling. What a customer takes home from a brand is the experience it provides. 81% of companies expect to compete based on customer experience in 2019. Finally, this head-on competition is driving brands to strengthen their customer experience strategies.

How to use chatbots to increase customer engagement?

The chatbot’s job is to handle the initial communication and gather any necessary details from your customers. So that when you step in, you already have what you need to engage people meaningfully.

There’s no question that chatbots have drastically changed the way business owners reach out to their customers. Programmable communication bots have taken over many B2B and B2C businesses. The evidence is all around us. As a result, a Juniper Research study predicts that by 2020, chatbots will play a role in a staggering 85 per cent of all interactions between businesses and their customers.

Here’s what you need to know-
  • Bots are Great at Cross-Promoting:

When you have a standard help bot on your website. You can encourage it to ask the people who land on your site to sign up for your business through the Facebook Messenger application. Email is still an accessible and relevant way to generate leads, but social media is closing in fast.

  • Make Sure Your Bot is on 24/7:

We know that there are going to be times when you have to take your chatbot down for analytic analysis and tweaks. Hence other than that you should try to keep your bot up 24 hours a day. Chatbots Magazine conducted a survey. And discovered that 66 per cent of millennials say that 24/7 service is something they consider a benefit to websites currently using bots. Therefore, if you have a bot available to handle customer concern regardless of the time. You’ll stand a better chance at keeping and engaging leads as they go down the sales funnel.

How are chatbots transforming digital marketing?

Now we know what chatbots are. So let’s look at how they’re transforming digital marketing and how they can transform your business in the process:-

Chatbots automate part of the marketing process which frees up your team to work on more important projects.

In case you haven’t noticed, marketing takes work. Chatbots, give you the ability to make marketing easier and more streamlined by automating the beginning of the process. Freeing up your time and energy to work on other things. So chatbots are great for managing the initial steps of the marketing process, whether that’s gathering contact details and information for a sales call. Plus answering general customer service questions, or providing direction on common tech issues.

  • Chatbots increase the volume of marketing conversations:

As mentioned, chatbots can automate a huge chunk of the marketing process. And because it automates a huge chunk of your marketing process. This means you and your team can handle a higher volume of marketing conversations and close more sales.

How the chatbot benefit’s business beyond customer service?

The business decision to implement chatbots has not only to be about offering customers a better experience in terms of customer service. Some other benefits provided by chatbot are:-

  • Operation Cost Reduction:

Chatbots can help with the 4 most common frustrations. For example, getting simple things answered quickly or getting some basic information about a business. This can easily perform basic frontline support tasks.

Chatbots impact businesses by improving sales and customer services. They collect customer information like name, profession, and contact details to create customer profiles. Therefore, chatbots are for both sales and marketing purposes. They keep existing customers engaged with brands and products through push notifications.

They act as a bridge between brands and customers. Providing 24/7 interaction. Chatbots communicate like humans but reduce human error and emotions. Performing routine tasks easily, they enhance customer service.

  • Lead Generation Automation:

Chatbots can help your business gain customers more easily than live human agents. As modern chatbots use natural language processing and direct messages to converse with customers. Automating the initial engagement with site browsers (new or returning) or app users without a live human agent is highly scalable and can help quality interested users easily.

  • Monitor Social Media:

Having a good social media image is important for organizations these days. It is where all the customers are looking. Customers often use social media to grab a company’s attention. Of late, chatbots have entered the social space too. We know chatbots employed on social media as Social Chatbots. They (Facebook and Twitter chatbots) auto-generate messages and help market activities.

  • Facebook Chatbots:

Apart from providing fast resolutions and round-the-clock support. They can also help in other activities like hosting and handling e-commerce, sending timely and personalized messages to customers based on their past interactions and more.

  • Twitter Chatbots:

When a brand is on Twitter, it needs to meet certain expectations like provide quick responses and prove that they genuinely care for their customers. The Twitter chatbot converses with customers using direct messages. Brands like Airbnb, Evernote, and Spotify use a chatbot on Twitter to provide 24/7 customer service.

It offers quick replies

to customers, to make it easy for them to converse with the chatbot.

Types of Chatbots:

1) Scripted Chatbots:

A scripted chatbot is based on a predefined set of questions that a customer is anticipated to ask. The interaction with the end customer happens on the basis of preset rules. With the advanced knowledge base, they help users find answers to simple questions. These bots can aptly respond only to specific instructions. Therefore, you must align the queries with the language programmed in the bot. They are best used on websites with live chat support.

2) Social Media Chatbots:

These chatbots are integrated into a social messaging platform. Therefore this makes it easy for customers to directly interact with the bot, just like they do with their friends. They not only raise brand awareness but also create a customer record for personalized communication. Also, chat messages have a higher open rate than email messages. You can integrate these chatbots within social media platforms like Facebook Messenger, Telegram, Whatsapp, etc.

3) Voice-Enabled Chatbots:

Voice-enabled chatbots like Alexa, Siri creates a personalized experience for the users. These chatbots accept user inputs through voice and act upon user requests. They answer their queries and perform a number of creative tasks. You can create your own voice-activated bot by using text-to-speech and voice recognition APIs.

4) Contextual Chatbots:

Contextual chatbots are the most advanced kind of bots based on machine learning and artificial intelligence. Their basic aim is to try to figure out what the user wants. That is in which sense or proportion the user is asking a question or doing some random stuff on the website. It then reverts those sentiments according to the intentions of the user. These bots remember the previous things a user has already asked or performed. And based on that, they present a more thoughtful answer.

5) Transactional Bots:

Transaction bots can be accustomed to carry lots of solutions or accomplish a specific transaction. They interact with external systems on behalf of humans to increase productivity. They provide many uses for businesses to help increase productivity.

These bots can be classified into assistant bots as they often act on behalf of humans to perform various transactions. For transactional bots several custom solutions are possible. Helping users increase their productivity as the bot interacts with external systems to perform transactions.

6) Crawler Bots:

Crawler bots run in the background to fetch data from other websites or APIs. The crawlers can be made to behave in a given manner. Some examples include price assistants that monitor e-commerce websites for price changes. You can also use to monitor website errors and performance issues.

7) Informational:

Informational Bots push content via various social media channels in the form of push notifications. They push content as it becomes available. These bots can act as research assistants by extracting as much information as possible either from a human or from an internet resource like a website or an ebook. They are very relevant in the education and corporate training sector as well as in the digital marketing sector for research-based tasks.

8) Survey Bots:

Online surveys can help brands find out customer preferences. Survey bots make it easier to collect information from customers. They are much better than online surveys because the conversation is more engaging. By chatting with a chatbot, customers feel like they are taking part in a conversation, not a survey.

Conclusion:

So what can your brand add to your existing strategy to up your game?

A Chatbot.

While there are a bunch of things you can do, chatbots are a must-have in your customer experience strategy. With technology improving by the day, traditional methods of engaging customers are also advancing. Industries like banking, entertainment, healthcare, news, fashion and more have adopted chatbots. Going by research — 85% of all customer interactions conduct without humans by 2020. They had everyone towards using chatbots as the mode of communication. Therefore, a chatbot is one of the key differentiators for brands that provide excellent customer experience with the rest. Enhancing consumer engagement through AI-powered chatbots.

We at Quantazone can help you setup chatbot according to your needs, which will help you in providing better services to customers and will also help in other business activities.

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