What is a Chatbot and Reasons Your Business Needs One

Does your business use a Chatbot? In today’s world, messaging is the most popular way of human to human communication, with over 560 billion texts exchanged monthly worldwide. Whatsapp records more than 65 billion messages every day.

With the increased need to interface with customers in real-time, businesses are developing chatbots to improve customer engagement and provide timely feedback.

Chatbots are being used in different industries to answer simple to complex questions from customers, with its ability to learn by iterating the process of human interaction.

So, what is a chatbot?

A chatbot is a written computer program capable of simulating human conversations on messaging applications, websites, mobile apps, or through the telephone.

There are three types of chatbots; Basic chatbots, Keyword Recognition bots, and Contextual chatbots. All of these chatbots have different sophistication levels, and requests that can be processed.

The Basic Chatbots are based on buttons and menus. They are similar to phone menus and only respond to limited pre-programmed interactions. When interfacing with a basic bot, users receive a list of options. Each selection provides other options until a user reaches his/her desired answer. Basic bots are most times used for FAQs, and there is no application of machine learning.

Keyword Recognition Chatbots listen to users and match keywords from conversations to the information stored in a response database. One of the challenges with these bots is that when there are similar queries, feedback accuracy is threatened.

Contextual chatbots utilize Machine Learning (ML) to remember conversations with specific users. Over time, the bots learn from having several human interactions and improve response accuracy, as well as provide user-tailored responses. These bots are intuitive and understand the context of a conversation to suggest service or product solutions. The use of contextual chatbots in Call Center Studio’s software reduces call traffic by around 60% with the aid of Google DialogFlow. Contextual bots function in omnichannel, sharing information from one channel to another to complete the query of a consumer, thereby enhancing customer experience.

Why Chatbots?

A Chatbot helps in streamlining B2C interaction and enhance efficiency in resolving customer requests, improve customer experience, and minimizing operational cost.

According to a report by MIT Technology, 90% of businesses report faster complaint resolution with bots. Data obtained from chatbots can be analyzed to understand consumer needs better and improve service.

How are chatbots enhancing customer experience?

According to Salesforce data, 64% of agents with AI chatbots can spend most of their time solving complex problems, versus 50% of agents without AI chatbots.

With the aid of Google Dialogflow, chatbots can understand consumers through machine learning, match queries entered from any channel, and give the best-fit feedback.

This increases the efficiency of businesses and allows agents to focus on the more complex issues that require their attention.

Rosy much? There are also challenges with Chatbots

While chatbots have their numerous advantages, some concerns must be considered by every business building one. One of the significant challenges of chatbots is security, and this can be divided into threats and vulnerabilities.

Threats include spoofing/impersonating someone else, tampering of data, and data theft. While vulnerabilities mean a bot can be open to attacks if it is not well maintained, has poor programming, or lacks encryption.

To mitigate these threats, end-to-end encryption, secure protocols, robust user identity authentication, and authorization need to be implemented.

Also, a lack of emotional touch towards a consumer could be a turn-off. Google’s Dialogflow sentiment analysis attempts to inspect user input and identifies the prevailing subjective opinion to determine a user’s attitude as positive, negative, or neutral.

Furthermore, When a chatbot begins to make less and accurate replies, there should be an option for a machine-to-human transition. A user can be prompted to speak to an agent where necessary.

Businesses are adopting Chatbots as it cuts operational costs by 30%. And with a projection that 85% of customer interaction will be handled without human agents by 2021 [Chatbots Life], it’s only logical for any business to enhance customer experience through bots.

Get help from an expert to build an AI-powered chatbot.