Sunday 4 February 2018

What Chatbots are doing in the Digital Age

Our lives have changed for good due to the digital tsunami – it started with internet in 1995, then in 2004 social media stormed the world with Facebook, then came iPhone in 2007 and the whole world changed. Every mobile company started making smartphones for easy user interaction.

Today’s game changer is Chatbot !!

A bot is nothing more than a computer program that automates certain tasks, typically by chatting with a user through a conversational interface with help of natural language processing (NLP).

You don’t have to scroll through thousands of products on the website, just order to a bot and it will take care of delivering it.

There are 2 types of bots making inroads - Informational bots & Response bots.

Information bots are like subscribing to a breaking news or weather alerts based on your reading habits while response bots are responding to a user requested problems.

These bots should know everything about the customer they are talking to resolve the issues.

Many companies are considering voice interface to ease out the interaction and save the efforts of typing texts. Users converse with chatbots just like they do with family and friends.

Instead of asking your customers to visit the website & ask to find what they want or call the customer service, it is much quicker and easier to get direct answers via chatbot.

With digital assistants like Apple Siri, Google Home, Amazon Alexa voice has become an integral part of the interaction.

Chatbots, powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning, can learn our habits, understands our tastes and preferences and can be much more pleasant than a sequence of scroll, taps, and clicks to get to where the customer wants to go to complete an action.

Imagine how easy it is by chatbot to order pizza, book a ticket, complain about a defect of the product you just purchased than calling a customer service, waiting for IVR choices and spend more time just listening to music or customer rep.

Some of the technological advances in chatbots are:

·      They can be multilingual very easily than humans
·       Can be available 24/7 without any extra money to be paid
·      Anyone can interact regardless of device or channel or browser
·      Faster adaption by users
·      Ability to access data instantly than humans

The travel industry has plenty of areas where chatbots can help to take the burden off the staff, and also enhance the experience for customers. Everything from booking hotel rooms and flights to renting a car or providing assistance during a trip could be successfully handled by a chatbot.

Chatbots in healthcare are helping patients with common treatments by asking simple question and answers about symptoms.

Customer service is the most common area where chatbots are used today.

As NLP is constantly undergoing breakthroughs, chatbots will be able to interact with humans more seamlessly.


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