By Joey Ricard - November 25, 2021
What can chatbots do? Well, they can do a lot more than you can think or know. Especially when it comes to online businesses, chatbots are almost everywhere.
One of the major perks of AI chatbots is that customers don’t have to wait for talking to a service agent over call anymore. But this is not it. There are plenty of other advantages of an AI chatbot which makes them so prevalent almost everywhere online these days, from ordering pizza to booking air tickets and even accessing your bank account-related information.
Let’s check out how AI chatbots are revolutionizing communication with customers and transforming businesses. Here’s almost everything you need to know why millions and billions of people across the world are deploying AI chatbots on their business websites. Have patience and read on!
The term ’chatbots’ has been derived from ‘chat robots’. Chatbots, also known as talkbots, are computer programs that simulate human conversations via text or voice communication. Customers can directly engage with bots through voice or messaging applications and chat windows.
There are basically two different types of chatbots, one is Flow chatbots and the other is AI or Artificial Intelligence AI chatbots. While the former is a tree-based model where users are guided down a path that is pre-defined and pre-determined by the developers; in the latter, the chatbots are more self-trained and sophisticated.
Utilizing the tremendous advancements made in the field of AI technology and related techs such as machine learning, AI bots have been made to have qualities like decision-making and understanding.
HelloYubo, Botsify are some of the popular AI bots with Chatfuel being the world’s leading and the best AI chatbot platform for Facebook Messenger.
There’s no doubt that chatbots are presently ruling the market as far as its use of the latest Ai technology in different business industries is concerned. Let’s take a quick look at the major perks of AI chatbots, how AI is transforming business, and the way businesses communicate and function online.
With the rapidly increasing digital space, brands these days rely more on different digital platforms to attract their target audience and promote their services and products. Since, conducting these everyday activities on the different social media sites require constantly available teams and a lot of effort, AI bots have taken the lead here.
Yes, automating the digital marketing tasks, chatbots in digital marketing can take care of the advertising part as well as communicating with the users on digital platforms as a real digital marketing team.
Example: Leveraging the AI bot technology, brands like Dominos’ have uplifted their customer engagement metric. Thanks to Dominos’ chatbot, customers can now order from the restaurant menu through Facebook Messenger without leaving their favorite app or creating a customer profile or account.
When an enterprise utilizes the power of AI talk bots, they simplify and speed up a lot of enterprise-related work. For example, chatbots can help the company’s HR department to perform faster with the onboarding process of its employees or help sales representatives quickly access phone numbers.
To provide maximum support to enterprises, AI chatbots simply become integrated with the back-end systems of the companies such as customer relationship management or inventory management, etc.
No one likes to wait, especially when they are surfing the internet and are interested in finding or buying a service/product online. A website that makes its users or potential customers wait, eventually ends up losing customers and sales. But AI talk bots can help in reducing this waiting time.
As chatbots quickly give answers to the common questions usually asked by most users such as location, order status details, store hours, etc., avoiding a long line of customers waiting for a response from your business’s side through a call or for an email can be avoided.
There are times when users are unable to find the products that they are looking for while shopping on a website. In such cases, AI-enabled chatbots come real handy as they help with finding the products of your choice by suggesting similar products.
Example: The chatbot on H&M is one of the great examples of AI chatbots helping businesses with product suggestions. Here, when you tell the chatbot the apparel you have, it instantly suggests all the clothes that might further complement the apparel that you’ve mentioned.
Believe it or not, but a huge number of emails that customers send to a business go unread which can evoke distrust in the users’ minds regarding the business. However, with AI chatbots, it’s possible to minimize this and improve your customer engagement as well as their trust. Wondering how?
The chatbots reply to almost 80% of the messages and queries sent by the customers that motivate them to further associate with the business, build trust, and a strong relationship between a business and a customer.
Plus, AI bots are conversation-based, they make the customers feel like they are talking to their friends. For a business, it’s easier to convey its ideas to customers and engage them through bots.
Even call centers can leverage the power of AI chatbots by letting the customers interact with the chatbots first instead of any employee or agent. Chatbots can smoothly assist consumers with performing tasks and solve issues related to checking account balances, changing passwords, scheduling an appointment, etc.
Another strength of AI bots is that they can welcome users with branded greetings in small chat windows whenever they visit the website. And not only just welcoming the prospective customers to a website; AI bots can also direct them to the services or products they are looking for on the website. Depending on the inquiry made by the customers, the bots quickly redirect them to other pages of the website.
Whether it’s expediting daily activities such as making reservations from doing grocery shopping from a browser/ mobile device/ a chat platform or navigating their daily life, consumers can perform all these online easily with AI bots. Augmenting human skills instead of replacing them, AI chatbots work effectively as digital personal assistants.
For example, products like Google Home, Amazon Echo, or apps like Microsoft’s Cortana and Apple’s Siri use AI bots to perform their part as personal assistants.
Providing customers with quick solutions is one of the many ways in which AI bots help businesses and online companies deliver awesome customer service.
Here, chatbots serve more as an ally of the company and offer support in resolving customer issues.
By answering almost immediately, AI bots make customers happier and win their trust. And the best thing about bots is that they can do it over and over again which results in fewer cases getting logged for the company’s support agents to resolve.
Consumers expect reliable and fast customer service and support that is available 24X7. And AI bots meet these criteria perfectly as they come with the capabilities of satisfying the customers with their upgraded customer services.
Chatbots can not only help with providing human agents with lead generation but can also help in achieving it for a cheaper price.
Yes, chatbots can handle and help with starting the support interaction that prospective customers initially have with a business and help human agents to follow up on those later.
By asking various relevant questions like email addresses, bots simply gather crucial information about users which is then passed on to a sales representative who can use the qualified lead to personalize their future interactions with the users.
Plus when you run an ad on Facebook, for example, the chatbots start the interaction with users in Facebook Messenger which costs you less for your clicks as Facebook lives the idea that you’re running your ads directly in messenger.
Compared to traditional email marketing, generating leads through deploying a chatbot in marketing turns out to be quite a cheaper option.
No, it’s not only the eCommerce stores that are finding AI bots extremely helpful and deploying them; there are many other industries as well that are equally using and considering the chatterbots to be of great advantage. Let’s see the major industries where the transformations led by chatbots have already been evident and the use of AI bots is growing rapidly.
Chatbots are already being used in the healthcare industry and medical sector and are believed to impact the healthcare organizations tremendously by more than 40% of the healthcare executives in the coming three years, as per a report from Accenture.
AI bots in the healthcare sector are considered to be a more accurate and reliable alternative to the online searches that patients usually do to understand the cause of the symptoms they are having. Based on the basic information that they collect from patients, chatbots help with providing the patient with further information regarding their condition and instruct about the next steps to follow.
Along with offering instant guidance and information regarding first-aid and in emergencies, AI chatterbots also help the clinical teams by easing their daily caseloads. In this scenario, after analyzing the patient data, chatbots suggest to them whether they should opt for an online discussion with a clinician or visit the physical office.
Even when it comes to offering solutions to simpler and mild medical issues or providing guidance regarding medication management, the use of AI bots is pretty prevalent in the medical sector.
Do you know that in a month, an average customer interacts with the bank almost more than 17 times? This basically means that banks get numerous opportunities to engage their customers. And that’s where chatbots come; they help banks to seize this opportunity and capitalize on customer engagement.
Engaging customers successfully means bringing more business to the banks. And as chatbots offer a more personalized and holistic approach and advice, banks can engage their customers successfully as almost 20% of bank customers these days prefer digital communication only rather than walking into the banks.
Thanks to the AI chatbots on the mobile apps of banks that now users can simply ask for their account related details and chatbots instantly shows the result such as last transaction details, account balance, etc.
And not only these, but there are also other types of AI bots that help with streamlining various banking and finance-related processes as well as reducing the burden on the bank staff. Take ‘TaxBots’ for example; they primarily work on predicting the tax obligations of a business.
These are some of the major market segments that receive some of the most terrible customer satisfaction surveys. To finally be able to talk to an appropriate customer service agent, here customers have to go through numerous steps of pre-determined questions. But, the deploying of AI bots changes it all.
Now the customers can talk about their issue to the bots who then try to resolve the problem by providing the customers with relevant information. Even if the bots fail to understand what the customers have asked, they ask for further clarification through such intelligent queries that make the customers feel like they are talking to a human customer service agent.
When it comes to the use of chatbots in the insurance industry, AI bots are widely used for the added value and innovation they provide to the sector.
It is primarily to boost the customer experience through more efficient and 24/7 available AI talkbots, that insurers now are investing more and more on AI bots. But along with that, AI bots are also deployed in helping customers with buying insurance due to the AI bots’ ability to simplify the process and quickly respond to the queries made by the prospective customers.
After all buying insurance is a critical decision that makes customers desiring access to proper data to back up their insurance investment decision is pretty obvious. Even filing claims or applying for insurance is also a time-consuming and tedious process. And that’s where AI bots come in.
They not only help in optimizing the journey of the digital customers by providing them with relevant info at each step but also assist with the tasks of educating the customers on different insurance-related FAQs and with payment assistance and claim processing.
As a result of the insurance industry transforming into a more chat-intensive and seamless one, AI bots are becoming the new industry norm. Now insurance agencies are deploying chatbots to collect valuable feedback for their products, brands, websites, etc., and to recognize customer preferences and customer segmentations. With just some simple text or voice commands to chatbots, customers can get all the information they need regarding available discounts, insurance pricing, how to initiate an application or submit payments, file claims or delete assets covered, and many more.
Have you ever come across chatbots on travel websites that suggested you most suitable holiday destinations as per your criteria? Well, then you’ve already witnessed how artificial intelligence in business related to travel websites is advancing and taking customer experience one step ahead in the form of chatbots.
Be it suggesting the users about the ticket prices or finding out details about the weather of a particular area, chatbots have boosted the functionality of travel websites to another level.
Focusing more on improving communication with the users, chatbots are now even suggesting to users whether they should carry an umbrella or a raincoat or some winter clothes with them or not depending on what they suspect the following hours or days in an area might be.
Take the chatbot that appears on the travel website of Kayak.com. Once you’re done selecting your travel destination or flight plan, it’ll update you regarding estimated departure time, delays, etc.
Do you know, from CNN IBN to Fox News, The Guardian, TechCrunch, Engadget all these leading news channels have already deployed chatbots on their websites?
Yes, now that more and more news channels are utilizing chatbots, now users can simply type the topic they want to know about and the chatbots will give all the related stories and relevant information regarding it.
Some say that with the pace at which chatbots are evolving and are being embraced by different business industries, the days aren’t too far when the search window will be replaced by AI chatterbots.
According to many, one-day chatbots will gain enough potential to replace many apps as bots are used on messenger like apps such as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Kik, etc. as bots. Over time, chatbots are likely to become more robust and will pass the Turing Test where Ai bots will simply become indistinguishable from a human representative.
Even a recent study has shown that in the future of chatbots it is imminent that a growing number of companies across different industries will deploy AI bots for making space for customer relationships and more strategic work and offload different manual tasks.
But wait, ai bots aren’t predicted to be a complete replacement for human service agents or customer service representatives. But yes, a recent study led by Gartner, a technology advisory firm, shows that above 85% of customer service centers are expected to be operated by AI chatterbots by the end of 2020.
Does your online business still lack the presence of an AI chatbot?
Then, why not connect with us, Klizo Solutions, and deploy your very own chatbot right away?
Considering what chatbots can accomplish when implemented correctly, “After all this time” you must have realized that having chatbots have ‘Always’ been the next best step to boost customer engagement as well as conversion. Yes, chatbots are the future of marketing.
Contact us today and know more about how we can help you develop an effective chatbot strategy.
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Joey Ricard
Klizo Solutions was founded by Joseph Ricard, a serial entrepreneur from America who has spent over ten years working in India, developing innovative tech solutions, building good teams, and admirable processes. And today, he has a team of over 50 super-talented people with him and various high-level technologies developed in multiple frameworks to his credit.
