Chatbots Revolutionizing the Digital Playing Field - They Are Here To Stay By Karanjit Singh, CEO, Kellton Tech Solutions

Chatbots Revolutionizing the Digital Playing Field - They Are Here To Stay

Karanjit Singh, CEO, Kellton Tech Solutions | Wednesday, 19 July 2017, 04:57 IST

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Chatbots are the lat­est technology trend driving modern busi­nesses. Industry ex­perts believe that 80 percent of the enter­prises are already using or want to implement chatbots by 2020. But, why this hype? Are chatbots really better agents of customer service compared to FAQs, emails, and tel­ephonic conversations?

Due to adoption of smart phones, bandwidth availability and people using messaging/chatting apps heavily through out the day people are used to conversation like experience over chat. That means the chatbot interface is not new to them.

Now comes to the conversation with bots, people are already using websites to fill online forms for dif­ferent services like getting an insur­ance, inquiry about services, book­ing tickets etc. If the same services are available in an interactive inter­face that can converse with the user as a real service agent or personal assistant, it will give a fantastic ex­perience to the user. Not only this, a carefully designed conversation can ease out the mood of the person as no body wants to fill a lengthy bor­ing form.

Quicker delivery and speedi­ness makes chatbots far more supe­rior than the normal FAQs. Actu­ally, browsing for the answer in the FAQs section is not very interesting. A delay in getting the right answer causes frustration in the customer’s mind. Hence, they are disappointed with the company’s sales process.

If the chatbots are backed with deep learning, big data analytics and data science it can do wonders in every area of industries.

A study by BI intelligence con­cluded that automate customer ser­vices through chatbots will help enterprises save about $23billion an­nually. Juniper’s research, Chatbots: Retail, eCommerce, Banking & Healthcare 2017-2022, predicts that chatbots will save about $8 billion per annum by 2022, i.e. up from $20 million this year.

Why chatbots are here to stay?

• Easy-to-use: You can use a chatbot through a mobile app, or a website or any messaging channel like Fa­cebook messenger, Skype etc. They help in communicating and captur­ing real-time data with the help of chatbot messaging.

• User experience: Chatbots provide a seamless customer experience as it is much more interactive and intelli­gent than a normal form and it also generates the desired customer infor­mation quickly on the screen of the user’s device.

• Reducing the operation costs and turnaround time of many pro­cesses across the industries like Insur­ance, Hospitality, Banking, healthcare etc.

I firmly believe that chatbots will be a long-term asset for enterprises that will improve the customer expe­rience, enhance customer journeys, and increase the levels of customer en­gagement across the enterprise.

For continuous business improve­ment, chatbots come with a unique ca­pability to learn and adapt themselves around the varied customer needs.

Enterprise Chatbots Vs Social Chatbots

There is a big difference between an enterprise chatbot and social chatbot. The social chatbot can go wrong in responding to the queries/chat mes­sages without any major damage as people will ignore it or take it lightly but in case of an enterprise chatbot, it the chatbot’s response is wrong then it can pull you in a legal battle, or rev­enue loss or you will end up los­ing the customer. The social chat­bots can be created by supervised machine learning where you have plenty of data from multiple con­versations among people and you train the chatbot to answer the queries using its neural net easily. But for an enterprise chatbots you can not just train it with conversa­tion data and open it for custom­ers to interact with. You will need to design the conversation very carefully and within the bounda­ries of the enterprise policy and knowledgebase as a wrong inter­pretation of intent by the bot can generate a totally different answers or action which may lead to cus­tomer dissatisfaction.

Global chatbot trends

•  Increase in the use of mobile messengers: Messaging apps like Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger etc. are the preferred way of com­munication among mobile users. However, automated conversa­tions of chatbots are reshaping the mobile industry.

•  Chatbots are supported by top companies like Microsoft, Face­book, IBM etc.

•  Cost reduction in the develop­ment of chatbots due to rady made converastion API from IBM wat­son, Microsoft etc.

•  Adopting chatbots in an early stage does not require a huge in­vestment. Today, you have cost-effective options, which respect your data security guidelines.

As with all successful tech­nologies in past, chatbots are here to stay and have to go a long way, and it will be interesting to see just what they will be able to accom­plish as they develop.

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