Do you find it difficult to interact with a person on another end? Then the world is adapting to your needs. According to one of the research pieces conducted by Gartner, 85% of the customer interactions would be handled without human facilitation. But if you are wondering how it is possible, then you must revisit your question and ask what chat bots are. Yes, all this humanless interaction is going to be possible with the help of chat bots.
In this article, we are going to highlight what are chat bots, how are they being used in businesses for your facilitation and where can you find them, if you are eager to use chat bots. Additionally, the downside of chat bots and their impact on you as a customer would also be highlighted here. So, keep reading as this is definitely going to be an informative journey.
What are chat bots?
It is a highly sophisticated degree of automation that has been designed to facilitate the users in the best possible way. You can consider it a service based on artificial intelligence, through this service; you can expect to get responses and facilitation, as you would manage through a customer representative. The chatbots chat with customers to solve their problems or help them in finding the solutions. In other words, automation has replaced humans once again.
How do chatbots work?
If you are, wondering how can a machine know what are you talking about and how can it help you feel that there is a human responding to your queries, and then you’ll definitely have to use bots. The natural language and the quick response time make them efficient in handling the customers.
Like any web utility, chatbots have two ends, a front end, and a back end. The back end of the chatbots defines the actual functionality. In the back end, the chatbots have been programmed to analyze a question and provide a response to the client. From the front, the chatbots could acquire the form of any messaging app or chat box. The link between the front and backend is maintained by the web server.
Significance of Chat bots:
After knowing what are chat bots, the next question that would arise in your mind is why are they important. In order to answer this question, we would give you examples from your own scenario. Here are a few points to prove the significance of chat bots:
1. To make the customer comfortable:
At the start of this article, you agreed that talking to a human for simple queries is often difficult for you. For people like you, chatbots could be a blessing. Businesses are realizing this fact and ensuring that you get the chat bots everywhere.
2. To respond promptly to customer queries:
Although customer support centers have long been established by the companies to get the response, you need to wait from a few minutes to a few days, depending upon the company you are interacting with. In order to reduce these delays in the response, the companies are shifting towards automation.
3. Creates higher customer satisfaction:
How would you feel if your query to a business would be answered in no time and proper results? You’ll probably try to get in touch with that business again and would probably recommend it to the others too. So, overall customer engagement that you can expect through bots is a lot higher than the traditional ways of handling queries.
4. 24/7 customer support:
By using humans as the customer representatives, it gets difficult to ensure 24/7 presence for handling customer queries. Additionally, the number of queries to be handled has their own limitations when considering the human representatives. So, all such problems are automatically resolved by using chat bots.
5. Available on computers and mobiles:
The need to keep your website mobile friendly is now one of the requirements of the search engines too. So, if your customer support won’t be mobile friendly how you can expect to optimize it for a search engine? So, for that chatbots come with readily available backend features to ensure that the web and mobile presence are both handled in an efficient manner.
6. Cost saving:
By installing artificial intelligence once, you are good to go. You don’t need to provide the human customer representatives the monthly salaries and perks to keep them motivated towards the job and the company. So, it results in a significant amount of saving for the business employing them.
7. Time-saving:
Handling multiple queries, all at once, is not possible humanly. But for hat bots, it is. This is why the businesses are considering them for enhancing customer loyalty from their clients. Overall, these chat bots can result in saving a lot of time of the user and the customer representatives who would have been answering these queries manually.
8. Unlimited features:
For you as a user, the major function of the Chatbot could be to provide you with an accurate response. But for businesses, there are unlimited features that this artificial intelligence technology could provide you with. You can expect to be detected by the chatbots over a number of forums. You don’t have to get connected to these bots every time rather the voice recognition, and face recognition would be enough for this purpose.
So, apart from making the customer experience better, the businesses can collect a whole lot of information about you and your preferences without spending an extra dime over it.
Where can the chat bots be used?
If you have got the main idea but unsure about the medium through which chat bots are available for you to get help, as a customer, then we are here to explain that as well.
1. Official Websites:
Businesses employ chat bots on official websites. “Need help” or virtual assistant dialogue box that appears on these websites are actually the chat bots. You can post your query and expect a suitable response before you choose to talk to human customer support.
2. Social Media:
Additionally, social media platforms like Facebook Messenger and Instagram also have facilitated bots in the chats. So, you can ask your question any time and expect an instant response. In most cases, you don’t have to initiate the chat on your own. Just by visiting a specific page, you activate these chats on their own. So, the messenger bots and Instagram bots are actually changing the ground realities in which the businesses have been operating these days. Similarly, artificial intelligence is also being used on email forum as well, providing the users with the optimized experience without involving any hassle.
Downside of using chatbots:
Although, the importance of chat bots for you as a customer and for the businesses is remarkable, there are certain problems that you can associate with the usage of this new technological advancement as well. One such issue is that there is a lot of security issues involved when dealing with this technology.
This technology is quite prone to hacker attacks. So, if you want to keep your conversation or interaction with the particular business as private, there are lesser chances that it would remain so. This is because of the vulnerability of the online world that makes them vulnerable too. However, the businesses can take steps to improve the security of their website and these chat bots too.
Examples:
In order to get the practical overview, we are discussing a few businesses that use chatbots in daily routine. Starbucks is one of the prominent businesses where chatbots can allow you to place the order. You can use text or voice order placement facility and can get your order ready within no time.
Additionally, WholeFoods, Sephora and MasterCard also utilizes this technology to serve customers. In order to get a better overview regarding ease of usage, you can place orders directly through this technology.
Conclusion:
Chatbots are no doubt the part of the new technological revolution. These bots are the best examples of artificial intelligence through which you cannot only get the adequate response to your query rather the time and cost involved in getting the response is lower as compared to the other alternatives. Businesses are employing this technology to create better customer engagement, but in the end, it is you who is going to use this technology and get maximum out of it. So, it is essential that you must know all the aspects associated with chatbots in detail. Don’t forget that there is a bit of a security issue attached to them as well.
Feel free to share your experience and understanding about chatbots in the comments below. Do you like using them? Which medium is most appropriate for you?
