In the past, when consumers wanted to interact with a company, they had limited options. They could choose between emailing the business, phoning them, or even trying to speak to a rep in person. Now, we’re finding new ways for enterprises and their customers to interact. Sometimes, this also means passing conversations over to a robot, for them to handle.
Capable of mimicking human conversations, chatbots have soared in popularity over recent years as organisations have invested in better ways to quickly serve their customers. With a chatbot, your company can be online and ready to answer questions whenever your client needs you. What’s more, you won’t have to spend as much on human employees either.
While chatbots aren’t intended to eliminate the human worker, they can be an excellent supplement to the workforce for many ventures. From saving time to reducing repetitive tasks, there’s a lot that a chatbot can do.
What are Chatbots?
In basic terms, a chatbot is a computer program designed to simulate human conversation. It communicates with people through text messages or online messaging and integrates with your website or CRM system. Chatbots give businesses a way to consistently serve and support their customers, without having to hire endless staff members from around the world.
Used correctly, an effective chatbot can help with everything from getting rid of routine tasks, to processing simultaneous requests within an enterprise. What’s more, their processing speed means that they can solve issues for clients quickly, earning customer loyalty. Since customer experience is the biggest differentiator for modern companies, chatbots can be a great way to build your strategy. Around 83% of online shoppers say they need support throughout their buyer journey. Chatbots can help by providing guidance, suggestions and more.
Chatbots can also contribute to cost-savings for today’s businesses. After all, it’s much cheaper to create a chatbot than hire a new team of staff. What’s more, cross-channel bots mean that you can handle multiple queries at once. Chatbots can even reduce human error, which may be one of the reasons why they’re set to control about 85% of our interactions by next year (2020).
When paired with artificial intelligence, chatbots also give enterprises a way to improve their knowledge about their target customers. With a bot, you can collect insights and gather useful information about your products and services. In the future, we’ll continue to see the development of smarter bots that not only communicate through text but through natural language processing and voice too.
Chatbot Trends
According to The State of Chatbots report, 64% of users consider 24-hour service to be the best feature of chatbots. What’s more, over 50% of consumers expect businesses to be available to answer their questions all of the time. Chatbots can help to transform the customer service industry as we know it. Here are some of the biggest trends in the sector.
1. The Rise of Voice
Chatbots are no longer regulated to the realm of text anymore. In recent years, customers have become increasingly enthralled by the rise of voice bots and digital assistants like Siri and Amazon Alexa. Billions of voice-enabled devices have been sold around the world, and people are starting to feel more comfortable using their voice to make requests. In the years ahead, we’ll begin to see more natural language programming and understanding solutions in voice-enabled chatbots.
Chatbots with IVR capabilities may even be able to take over the introductory conversations that customers have with a business when they call a contact centre.
2. Work Process Transformation
Chatbots open the door to a wide range of new working solutions. With chatbots, employees can find information that they need as rapidly as possible, which means less time searching through content, and more time getting work done.
In the years to come, employees may even start to embrace their own personal virtual assistants that they can use to set up meetings, find information, launch programs and also make notes on their behalf. These assistants will make meetings and everyday work more efficient by reducing the repetitive and time-consuming tasks that often hold workers back.
3. Customer Analytics and Insights
To get more in-depth insights into what customers need, we need to collect as much information as possible. Fortunately, chatbots can be designed with machine learning algorithms built in. This means that they can obtain useful data from the hundreds or thousands of conversations that they’re having with customers, then use that data to drive better business decisions.
It’s even possible to create chatbots that integrate with various points of data throughout your company so that you can gather more contextual information about how your teams and clients interact.
1. Chatbots in CPaaS
Chatbots are becoming an increasingly common addition in the CPaaS environment. With the as a service solution, companies have the freedom to build their chatbot capabilities into any existing device or process in their workforce. This means that you can create chatbots for your SMS environment, your social messaging space, or anything else.
More flexible chatbots designed and implemented through APIs will ensure that companies can provide a more customised and efficient experience to their employees and customers. You could even create a chatbot that instantly pops information up in front of an agent after a conversation is sent from a messaging tool into a video and voice chat. This creates a more seamless customer service experience.
Chatbot Statistics
Today’s businesses need to be more agile than ever before if they want to succeed in an increasingly competitive space. Chatbots allow organisations to perform faster, deliver better results to customers, and even increase consumer loyalty. All the while, they remove repetitive tasks from everyday workers to keep your employees happy and engaged.
- Chatbots will be responsible for up to $8 billion in annual savings by 2022
- 42% of consumers are already using digital assistants, along with 72% of business users.
- 31% of business execs think that virtual assistants will have a massive impact on their business.
- 34% of business employees say that chatbots allow them to free up crucial time.
- 27% of consumers weren’t sure if their last business interaction was with a human or not.
- 40% of consumers don’t care if a chatbot or human answers their question, as long as they get serviced quickly
- 38% of consumers say that they think of chatbots positively.
- Chatbots reduce customer support costs by up to 30%
- 53% of consumers are more likely to buy from companies that they can message.
- 31% of consumers say they want to see more companies using chatbots.
Chatbot Hashtags Used on Social Media
- #Bot
- #Chatbot
- #AI
