With a projected worldwide market size of more than $1.3 billion by 2024, chatbots will be a driving force for business communications. 33% of consumers would like to use chatbots to make reservations, place online orders, and other functions. 4.4) Chatbots are having a significant impact on the way businesses connect with their customers, manage their marketing campaigns for lead generation, and automate payments. Reich continues by noting that organizations should fully consider the complexity that underlies building a chatbot equipped to actually add value. “We have a lot of clients come to us and say that they want a chatbot, but we try to unpack that a bit. The end goal may be the bot, but that’s not where we want to start,” says Reich. To build an effective chatbot, Reich explains, an organization needs data sufficient for the chatbot to understand, reason about, and respond to a wide range of contexts with workers and customers. That said, a lot of current generation chatbots are still in their infancy – they have big ambitions but lack the experience and expertise needed to truly deliver.
NBC Politics Bot allowed users to engage with the conversational agent via Facebook to identify breaking news topics that would be of interest to the network’s various audience demographics. After beginning the initial interaction, the bot provided users with customized news results based on their preferences. If you’ve ever used a customer support livechat service, you’ve probably experienced that vague, sneaking suspicion that the “person” you’re chatting with might actually be a robot. Flow XO enables the deployment of bots to different platforms, such as web, Messenger and Slack. Their users include NFL and NBA teams, publishers like TechCrunch dominant chatbot and Forbes, and millions of others. Chatfuel is great for simple and focused bots, but may not work for complex chatbots requiring lots of customization. Servicefriend provides hybrid bot technology for consistent messaging experiences at scale. They offer an “Interactive Text Response” for companies such as Globe Telecom. By platforms, the type of bot content and interaction paradigm also differs. Line and Kik bots tend to be more brand engagement focused, and are more likely to be “loudhailer type” bots (i.e. Announcements and promotions mostly) than SMS or Messenger bots, which tend to be more varied across support and brand engagement.
Maturing Chatbot Market
Though chatbots are still in their relative infancy technologically, they have existed for decades. One of the first chatbots, ELIZA, was developed in 1966 by computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Weizenbaum designed ELIZA to mimic human interaction through pattern recognition; ELIZA could not, however, react to queries in their full context. Instead, ELIZA had built-in scripts that allowed The Power Of Chatbots it to display the illusion of intelligence in answering questions on a given subject, such as those related to psychological evaluation. The current evaluation of the intelligence of chatbots is also a challenge. However, since the process of human-machine dialogue is a continuous process, the evaluation of continuous dialogues of different chatbot systems can only ensure the consistency of the input of the first sentence.
An Accenture report states that almost 80% of bankers think advancements in AI will enable banks to offer a “human-like customer experience”, with 76% believing that robots will be leading the way in customer interaction within the next three years. The Chatbots segment is estimated to hold a larger market size, owing to the increasing demand for AI-powered chatbots to analyze customer insights in real-time. The AI-based chatbots can be used by the enterprises to understand user behavior, purchasing habits, and preference over time and accordingly can answer queries. These types of Artificial Intelligence chatbots are generally more sophisticated, interactive and personalized than task-oriented chatbots. Over time with data they are more contextually aware and leverage natural language understanding and apply predictive intelligence to personalize a user’s experience. ECommerce companies work 24/7 and customers shop online at any time of the day. The customers shop any time of the day from eCommerce stores and expect round the clock services. Hiring customer support agents for providing 24/7 services can prove to be highly expensive. As per Oracle survey, chatbots could save $174 Billion across Insurance, Financial Services, Sales, and Customer Service. Earlier this year, Chinese software company Turing Robot unveiled two chatbots to be introduced on the immensely popular Chinese messaging service QQ, known as BabyQ and XiaoBing.
What Are Chatbots?
Of these, mobile segment is estimated to expand at a significant pace during the forecast period. This is primarily due to ubiquitous nature and owing to the dominance over other platform for messaging. However, let’s not forget that customers do not always fully appreciate self-service channels and often prefer personalized attention that chatbots are not able to provide. Studies suggest that chatbots can decrease current global business costs of around $1.3 trillion which are related to approximately 265 billion customer service inquiries by up to 30% yearly. Moreover, chatbots can also deal with up to 80% of current routine questions. Major makeup retailer Sephora operates more than one chat-based service through Kik, which is a social messaging app popular with their target demographic.