Superlative customer service is the top priority task in a company. And, the best way to come on the same page and build a sound understanding between the company and the customer is to establish proper communication and interaction between the two. So, in order to comply with this need, virtual assistants like Chatbots have been introduced in the digital world, in which conversation begins right from the very first visit of the customer to the company website with no time restriction i.e. 24*7 availability. Amir Shevat has well quoted in his book, Designing Bots: Creating Conversational Experiences, that,

“Thinking about the bot as a frontend representative of your product or service can make a lot of sense, and having a delightful bot that provides a useful service can generate strong attachment to your brand.”

Chatbots, basically, is a perfect blend of the concept of Robots and Messenger. You might be wondering how does this actually work. Well, let me take you through this, actually, the main technologies behind Chatbots are Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning and these techniques work on the two forms of data i.e. training data and live data. Training data is used to train the Chatbots through the answers to the questions that might be asked by the customer in the near future and live data is the question itself that is asked by the customer when he is online. This entire setup is quite beneficial and effective as the customers get all their queries answered within a few minutes or even seconds sometimes.

In fact, Chatbots are getting even better every day. Now, it not only works as a messenger, rather it understands the voice, tone, and intentions as well, according to which it decides the answer and response. This advanced form of the Chatbots is named as Digital Assistants, which has brought a major revolution in Mobile Technology. With the introduction of the Chatbots, even non-technical people can find their answers and get their tasks done without taking anyone’s help. So, it is for everything and everyone in the digital world.

The speed at which this technology is growing, it is believed that by the end of this year all the call centers will have chatbots at their front end and 80% of companies are likely to use chatbot automation by 2020 as per Chatbots Magazine. Some of the giant companies which rule the market are already using it such as Babycentre UK, Stubhub, Bank of America, eBay, Techcrunch, UCLA, etc.

Approaches of Chatbots to adapt to the customer needs

A customer has diverse needs, which can be categorized on the basis of its exigency and attention required. As per this consideration, Chatbots work on two approaches to define a solution and quench the customer’s requisites.

  • Reactive:

    The Reactive Approach is based on making the user experience smoother and hassle-free, due to which the user feels good and prefer to come back. The services that come under the reactive approach are making recommendations for the items, queries or people, asking the preferences of the customers such as in eCommerce such as Shopify, providing people with health-related assistance such as Youper, etc.

  • Proactive:

    The Proactive approach is a bit critical and assists the customers for analytical realtime activities such as updating the customers about the update in the policies of a company, making suggestions based on their place and time, update in the product feature, i.e., in other words, we can say that this approach covers the user assistance areas where time and place are of the major concern such as Marsbot app.

The Driving force behind the use of the Chatbots

The factors that drive the success and popularity of the chatbots are the services that the Bots offer. Some of them are discussed below:

  • Use of Bots results in improved User Experience as it guides the user throughout until he finds what he desires be it a product, content or services.
  • Bots offer the services customized to the customer rather than being generic and this works wonders as the customer feels homely and taken care of, which definitely attracts the customers.
  • Bots provide better space and experience for the probationers to onboard the websites because on this experience it depends that whether the user will return on this website or not, hence this experience has to be smooth for the future perspective.  
  • Bots help in saving costs and time. As per Juniper research, Chatbots will result in cost savings of approximately 8 billion dollars per annum by 2022 as chatbots will take over the front end task even more efficiently and fastly comparative to the manual assistance at the front end as they can take up one query at a time whereas the Bots can serve many. These employees can utilize their time for deep thinking and critical problem-solving.

How to Merge the Chatbots with the Mobile Application

Mainly there are three ways for merging the Chatbots with the Mobile applications that are: Chatbot Application, Separate Tab for Chatbot and User Interface Chatbot.

  • Chatbot Application:

    Chatbot applications are the separate applications that are coded with the aim to assist the users in multiple ways such as you can have a look on these examples such as Watson’s Assistant( a product of IBM), Xpresso.ai’s Smart Advisor, etc.

  • Chatbot Tab:

    Another way of implementation of Chatbot is to use it in the pre-existing app as a tab rather than a separate application that might take extra space or face some compatibility issues with the device on which it has to be installed.

  • User Interface Chatbots:

    Chatbots can also be implemented as a User Interface on the website itself which quite handy and easy to use, you neither need to install any separate application nor open a separate tab for the same.

Conclusion

As we all know AI and Machine learning is growing rapidly and so are their applications, as one of them is Chatbot itself. And in my perspective, Chatbot will definitely bring a big difference in the working culture of the companies. Building a chatbot has never been easier due to services like Chatfuel, Mobile Monkey, or SendPulse. The later platform even provides an Open AI integration with their chatbot builder. Also, the above article paints a foggy picture regarding what AI could truly have in store later if it has created robots and chatbots. In fact, Ace itself handles AI\ML-based projects and services.

For more information about Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, visit:

  1. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning: How Are They Different?
  2. Machine Learning 101 – The Problem-Solution Paradigm