Customers’ needs are constantly changing. Nowadays you should be available 24 hours a day for your customers’ concerns. For many SMEs, this is not so easy to solve for personal reasons alone. A chatbot can help here.
Whether for flight reservations, customer service inquiries, online shopping, news or taking part in a competition: Chatbots are now relieving app development companies of many tasks. These are intelligent programs that can communicate autonomously with users. They are based on automated learning and are programmed to receive data and respond to specific words and sentences. In this way, a dialog is created with which the customer inquiry, such as the question of the current weather, can be processed effectively.
In the near future, especially the interaction with customer service will experience major changes. According to the research company Gartner, only a third of customer requests should require human interaction. In contrast, two thirds will be processed with automated software. But what is this actually about?
What do chatbots look like?
There are already some examples of bots that can be examined on different platforms. Chatbots are particularly popular within Facebook Messenger because they can be easily implemented with a third-party provider such as ManyChat or It’sAlive. In the words of CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself, it is extremely easy to use Facebook Messenger Chatbots.
A start-up called Yutongofrom Biel has used its chatbot to tackle the task of boosting innovation in companies. Others like insurance companies have developed a bot that can be used to report automobile thefts to the insurer in no time. The chatbot of banks, on the other hand, has an advisory function. This helps the user to find the right banking packages for themselves. The areas of application of such a virtual assistant are seemingly limitless these days. But what are the benefits of implementing such a bot?
The advantages of chatbots
The big advantage of chatbots is their availability at any hour of the day or night. A request from a customer at 3:00 in the morning does not come to nothing, because it is skillfully answered by a bot or forwarded to the right places for processing. Other advantages of chatbots are:
• Speed: In real time, users receive an answer played back.
• Multitasking: The chatbot serves several customers or users at the same time.
• Entertainment: The conversation with a chatbot can be made entertaining and funny, which has a positive effect on the customer relationship.
• Autonomous: A chatbot can be programmed to proactively start a conversation.
• Giving identity: It is possible to create an avatar to simulate a conversation partner.
• mplicity: The paperwork can be relieved from the user by creating context-dependent buttons that only need to be tapped.
Chatbots are integrated into a multitude of analytical tools. This allows you to collect new and invaluable ideas from the day the virtual assistant is launched. Once it is running, the organization has control. It is very easy to manage and maintain the artificial intelligence workforce with the human work team itself.
They learn to send smart and instant messages. From alarms for price variations, reminders to unusual transaction alerts on the credit card. Together with predictive analytics, problems can be solved even before they occur.
Chatbots are helping organizations increase sales. For e-commerce solutions, chatbots can establish personalized interactions with customers and provide advice based on their purchase history and preferences.
Conclusion
There are certain disadvantages to this automated communication. In the case of Facebook Messenger, the bots are based on a simple set of rules or text recognition. Voice assistants like Apple’s Siri or Microsoft’s Cortana are way ahead in terms of artificial intelligence. Bots, on the other hand, have to be continuously developed so that added value can be created for all customers. In addition, some companies are not concerned enough about which specific service they want to offer their customers with a chatbot. In order not to endanger the company image, a little more time should be planned here.
Whether such a chatbot is worthwhile depends on many factors. It is important to invest enough time and budget in such a project so that you can create a positive surprise effect for your customers.
