One of the most talked-about tech trends recently is chatbots. The chatbot craze has been building up for a while now, and it will continue to grow as more businesses recognize its power.

Since the 1960s, chatbots have been around, but recently it has seen exponential growth and huge developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI).

The reason for this tech trend is that businesses are now looking for better automation and customer service chatbots that run on AI technology to help companies generate leads while improving the customer experience for their business.

This article provides an overview of chatbot technology for business, what it can help you achieve and how chatbots transform marketing, sales, and customer service today.

What are Chatbots?

A chatbot is a computer program designed to simulate conversation with human users through text or audio communication channels, especially chat rooms, instant messaging services, or virtual assistants (VAs). The chatbot technology for business concept has been around for quite some time but only recently got popularized by populating the Facebook Messenger platform with interactive AI-powered chatbots. Those chatbots are not chatbots, as AI does not power them.

3 Types of chatbots Generations:

1. First Generation Chatbot:

The first chatbot was ELIZA, created at MIT in the 60s. The chatbot was designed to mimic a therapist and used simple pattern matching algorithms to respond to user inputs.

2. Second Generation of Chatbot:

In 2014, Automatic chatbots emerged capable of replicating conversation without any human involvement, such as Alice from off-the-shelf chat tool provider Olark or Replika from Facebook Messenger.

3. Third Generation of Chatbots

Use AI and machine learning technology (NLP) to become more intelligent and specialized over time, essentially developing an understanding of individual users’ intent and preferences about their specific context. They can understand natural language as complex as the written language — AI chatbots algorithms power this chatbot generation.

AI chatbots are trained to learn from previous chat sessions, track user patterns and preferences for a more personalized chat experience, and process vast amounts of information that would be impossible for a human alone.

How to Use Chatbot:

Some best chatbot app providers like chatbot have constructor which allows you to build chatbots for different chat platforms. Even if you lack coding skills, the chatbot technology for business builder is easy to use. Simply drag and drop can transform your content into meaningful conversation. Several templates can be used as examples as well.

The below shows the chatbot builder interface of chat boat where you can see a chatbot that we had created in chatbot builder designer. You can make this same type of chatbot by following the instructions here.

1) Click on “Create A Free ChatBot.”

2) Choose a platform, i.e., chatbot builder, and click “Continue.”

3) Add a chatbot name, choose chat type between text or image chatbots (image chatbots are more engaging but use some space on your page till you get used to it). Done Till Here

4) You should now see a chatbot designer where you can add content like buttons of various shapes, messages that will appear as answers in the chat screen when someone hovers over them.

5) After designing a chatbot using a chat boat designer, wait for a few seconds while an AI-based chat engine automatically generates the chatbox.

6) Copy-paste this code into any place on your website

7) When users come to your website, their browser will read the JavaScript snippet and turn it into a chatbot chatbox.

The best chatbot are still developing, as such, it has not seen mass adoption by businesses yet. However, the scenario is expected to see a drastic change in upcoming years, which means that if you do not have a chatbot on your website yet, now might be the best time to consider adding one for engaging your users and improving customer experience before someone else does.

By creating chatbots, businesses can provide better customer service at lower costs, thus helping them save more money while getting the upper hand over their competitors.

Why Use Chatbots?

• To Engage Users:

Today chatbots are used to chat directly with customers via chat platforms like Facebook messenger, slack chat, and some chatbot providers also provide top AI chatbots for websites that allow you to chat with your website visitors. This way, businesses can interact better with their customers and even take conversations offline if they need to.

· Simplify Customer Service Processes:

Using chatbots in customer service interactions has become a popular trend among big corporations like CNN, Starbucks, and The Weather Channel because of their ability to automate repetitive tasks to deliver faster customer response times. This chatbox powered by an AI chatbot technology for business provides intelligent responses similar to or better than what human customer support might be able to do but at a fraction of the cost. This chatbot intelligence will only get better over time and help businesses get honest customer feedback, which allows them to improve products faster.

• Automation:

Through chatbots, businesses can automate routine tasks like Updates, Reservations, and other administrative activities freeing up more time for them while reducing errors in data entry by human employees. Chatbots are also great at decision making when it comes to getting information on the weather forecast or news updates because chat chatbots tend to be more accurate than humans but again, this depends on how you train your chatbot with the proper knowledge via machine learning algorithms. According to an article on Fortune, “The Corner Office,” chatbots could potentially replace 60% of customer service representatives by 2020.

• Personalized Experience:

Chatbots can provide a more personalized chat experience than just plain old chatbot chat boxes, which allow users to input information using search boxes where they type the query directly, like in the example below. Facebook Messenger chatbots are used for this purpose because messenger allows you to send images, audio, and video messages, allowing businesses to use personalization techniques that were once only available to e-commerce players. chatbot technology for business are also designed mobile-first, and therefore, it will enable companies to engage with their customers even when these customers are not at their desktops or laptops but on their smartphones or tablets, with instant messaging applications.

After learning the basics of a chatbot are under your belt, it is time to explore how chatbots benefit your business.

Let’s explore the top 8 benefits of chatbots and learn how they can help your business:

• Your customer engagement will increase:

If your customer is willing to use customer service chatbots, they’ll be more than happy to get customer support via multiple channels.

Bot interaction metrics such as response time, success rate, and user satisfaction can be measured by a user’s interaction with the bot or channel. A chatbot technology for business uses data analytics and machine learning algorithms to help companies determine their customer feedback based on context-sensitive responses at scale.

When a customer interacts with a messaging application, a bot may ask qualifying questions ‘depending on what makes sense to draw insights about customers’ intent.

• Enhance Lead Generation:

It can use these lead generation chatbots for lead generation via lead capture, lead generation via surveys, and lead generation by chatting to sales prospects. They may use tools like live chat, email marketing, or even telephone calls.

· Live Chat:

These lead generation chatbots allow companies to get more leads by chatting to their website visitors using live chatbox on the web pages. Companies like Fresh desk, Olark, and Intercom offer this service.

· Email Marketing:

Using lead capture forms powered by lead generation chatbots, companies can generate customers by asking them to fill out lead generation forms via email marketing. Lead generation chatbots usually power these lead capture forms.

· Telephone Calls:

Using lead capture lead boxes or lead capture live chat, companies can ask customers to call them directly for special promotions, check availabilities, and more.

• Reduce Customer Service Costs:

Using a chatbot technology for business service can be much cheaper than maintaining a human support service, even though these chatbots are powered by artificial intelligence. The service cost depends on the API service you are connecting with your service on the other end.

These APIs could provide high bandwidth, high volume data to services like weather forecast service and news service, which services like bots can provide accurate time service to customers. According to David Kenny, the president and CEO of enterprise software firm salesforce.com, “the service cost could be as low as $0.004 per interaction or roughly Rs 2”.

• Analyze Consumer Data to Gain Insights:

Chatbots are a great way to gain consumer insights for businesses by analyzing raw data from chat platform conversations with consumers. Companies can gain valuable insight into how customers think and feel about their product or service by analyzing the user interactions over chatbox on Facebook messenger, slack, or websites.

Chatbot transactions store all the information recorded in those conversations for businesses to gain fundamental insights into consumer sentiment. chatbot technology for business are also helpful in collecting feedback from users by asking live questions, and then they will gain a structured understanding around that question that they ask.

• Develop a strategy for conversational marketing:

The best way to use of chatbots in business to stay ahead of the curve is by implementing a strategy for conversational marketing, which will help you take advantage of chatbots technology.

Developing a proper strategy involves having a clear policy on how your organization wants to use chatbots to engage with customers and know what kind of information customers are willing to share with chatbots.

Developing a strategy also involves conducting proper research on the user behavior and preferences to come up with data insights that your business can leverage for their benefit to get the upper hand over competitors. Developing a conversational marketing strategy will help you stay ahead of future trends as well as helping you build consumers.

• A balance between automation and human touch:

An Automation must be balancing with a human touch. chatbot technology for business powered by AI can automate tasks, but in customer service, automation should follow up with customers who have questions about automation-related issues.

In any customer support situation, your chatbot technology for business should have an option for users to talk to an actual human (or human-like chatbots). For automation, proper training is essential. If you don’t train your chatbot correctly and give it too much automation intelligence or if you use just plain scripting language for automation without specific rules or decisions, this could potentially backfire on users.

• Meet the expectations of customers:

Chatbots are used to improve customer experience by providing them with personalized customer service, which can be done using AI chatbots to make customer interactions more accurate and less time-consuming. Also, chatbot technology for business tend to have very high customer satisfaction ratings compared to other customer support channels like email and phone calls.

Chatbot technology for business can be integrated with third-party API services for customer support. In the future, the chatbot will use machine learning algorithms to understand customer behavior and their expectations about the product.

chatbot technology for business can gain customer trust by politely answering customer’s questions without sounding robotic.

• To achieve scalability in support:

Businesses must achieve support scalability because the number of customers they serve can vary, and customer support jobs or chatbot conversations can also change over time, so companies need to achieve a level of automation that scales as their business grows.

chatbot technology for business are used for this purpose because it allows you to build highly responsive customer service system which uses a machine-learning algorithm to achieve better customer service experience.

The Future of Chatbot Technology:

Chatbots have already evolved a lot in the past few years, but they are about to get better over the next few years. The chatbot technology for business will be available just about everywhere, but experts predict that the future of chatbots will rest on their ability to achieve human-like conversation flow.

Have a look at some Chatbot Future Expectations below:

• Chatbots will be more intelligent and capable of understanding human emotions like happiness and sadness. Businesses can use conversation history for trend analysis and personalization purposes instead of just a simple pattern-based learning algorithm that chatbots use now.
• The chatbot technology will be more or less like cognitive computing that has been developed and demonstrated by IBM Watson in recent years (we will talk about chat chatbots like these in a future blog).
• Chatbot technology is already used by companies like Kik Interactive, Inc., which provides mobile chat applications used by millions of people.
• chatbots will also respond in different languages so that users worldwide can communicate with chat chatbots without any barrier. They will also more easily integrate with others so that chatbot will provide live translations in real-time.
• Chatbots will use Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) for better customer services. Chatbots will be able to chat with customers in the virtual world for highly personal conversations.
• Chatbots will get to know customer behavior better than human employees, and therefore they can provide personalized service to a specific customer segment or a particular group of people.
• chatbot technology for business will provide automatic service to any customer in one language without having language translation abilities but will constantly learn about new words from conversations.

Conclusion:

The chatbot industry has been around for quite some time, but they are becoming more popular than ever before. It may be worthwhile to use it as it is cheaper than hiring someone full-time. It is impossible to make a mistake with chatbot technology for business responses because they only follow pre-written scripts or algorithms, and as artificial intelligence increases, so will their ability to interact more naturally.

In the wake of rapid advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning, we see new generations of chatbots that can perform different functions and serve various purposes. If you want your customers’ experience with your company to improve drastically without increasing overhead costs associated with employing staff members, then it’s time to start considering implementing chatbot technology for business strategy today!