The Current State of Chatbots
Well, chatbots garnered a lot of fuss about being the ‘next cutting-edge’ thing for companies to stay ahead of the competition. That’s when the battle to deploy these shrewd tools began, but little did these companies know about the kinds of experience the chatbots offered.
What organizations missed out while choosing is the ‘intelligence level.’ A dumb bot kills your user experience (UX) single-handedly! Check the user conversation with a bot in the image below:
We’ve been stuck there at some point with such a bot. Such conversations irk us, don’t they? But they have downsides that are fatal to business health – let’s look at those.
The Threat of Having Such Bots
Today’s digitally-empowered customer needs the service on the go – and one bad instance is enough to trigger a change in service.
All it takes is a couple of clicks – and your customer is at your competitor’s door already. A bad UX leads to: an increase in consumer complaints, customer churn, and eventually loss in revenues.
Cut to the chase, a lousy bot can’t control the fate of your business. So, do we go back to humans? Of course not, we choose a better version – more intuitive, more conversational, and more intelligent.
How Should an Intelligent Chatbot Look Like?
Ideally, an intelligent Chatbot solution should get better with time. How does it get better though? Here’s how: when chatbots are machine learning-based, they improve with growing datasets and bot modeling.
In simple terms, more the conversations they have with users, better the responses will get. The end result? Each time demonstrating better human-like conversational capability.
What Are Some Features That a Chatbot Should Include?
So, here we’ve narrowed down a couple of features that an intelligent chatbot should have:
- Conversational Maturity – a natural language processing-enabled chatbot that enhances the contextual experience.
- Personalized – can the chatbot remember the user name, history, and preferences to make meaningful conversations?
- Intelligent AI-based – does it have the ability to understand the tone and context to deliver intelligent responses?
- Predictive and Reasoning-based – a right chatbot should be capable of providing right offerings and options to users based on their behavior/history
- CRM and Platform Integration – all leads should flow to salesforce or other CRM platforms effortlessly without manual intervention.
- Chatbot Persona – another important feature could be building a unique persona for the chatbot to build a deep connect with your customers/users
- Interactive UI/UX – does the chatbot offer a rich experience through UI to guide high-level engagement?
- Analytics – this feature is critical as data analytics will help you find patterns to make data-driven decisions
Well, include the aforementioned features in your checklist to evaluate a chatbot. But what are some benefits that you should be looking at after deploying a chatbot?
How Does A Chatbot Help Your Business
- Reduce Operational Costs and Grow Revenues – let your executives work on other revenue-generating tasks and avoid errors to bring down costs drastically
- Improves Customer Engagement – offer solutions proactively to customer queries and engage them
- 24×7 Availability and Wider Reach – provide a seamless and rich experience to multiple user requests simultaneously
- Time-Saving – your support executives can now focus on revenue-generating tasks
- Lower Sales Cycle – offer solutions faster, generate, qualify, and nurture leads to help the customer make decisions faster
- Faster Onboarding – allow smooth and effortless onboarding of customer (even employees and other stakeholders)
- Workflow Automation – let the data flow from chatbot to different legacy systems and platforms with zero manual intervention
- Business Decisions – gain business intelligence by analyzing the data obtained
Where Can We Use the Next-Gen Chatbot
- Sales – integrate CRM and empower sales reps with critical lead info
- Marketing – recommend the right products at the right time
- Customer Service – resolve customer queries instantaneously
- HR – drive employee satisfaction by addressing their queries
- IT – raise, assign, and track IT tickets effortlessly
- Admin – streamline all admin-related tasks
- Application-processing – automate all kinds of application for quick processing
Now is the Time for Next-Gen Chatbots
Bank of America’s AI-powered chatbot Erica is used by over a million customers for mobile banking and other services.
- The chatbot market is growing with an average of 34.75% CAGR – with voice-based devices finding a good demand in the market. This allows the customer to talk directly to bots without having to type.
- Gartner estimates that only less than 1/3rd of conversations need some kind of human intervention.
Customers now are ready to not just have conversations but also buy from them. The time is ripe to make an investment in an intelligent chatbot.
