What are Chatbots and Why do they matter?

The world, today is very competitive.  It’s full of opportunities and demands. It’s no surprise that today’s customers have a lot of options. However, their side of the story is not as clear-cut, and smooth-sailing as we might expect. The prime difficulty lies in reaching out to a company, presenting their requirements, and obtaining a desirable resolution to their problems.

Again, this is easily said than done. Often these customers face issues conveying what their requirements are. This means that the original solution has to be reconsidered. It just adds up to the delay in delivering the final solution. The world that we live in, is time-sensitive. We have to move towards a quicker method of customer prospecting and problem identification. How can we do that?

Enter Chatbots

The latest breakthrough in the Customer Experience domain is chatbots. Customers have to be able to express themselves without taking any effort. The days when you asked them to fill up a form or browse through the entire website to learn about your services are long gone. With chatbots, customers can “tell” you what they need in a jiffy.  Chatbot-empowered businesses allow customers to interact with them on human terms, which is quite a contrast to the classic graphical interface.

Companies are betting big on the whole conversational UI technology, to empower their customer-facing directives and collect relevant data about their users. Most relevant examples are Facebook Messenger chatbot integration and Amazon using voice assistant in almost all of their in-house products.

Importance of Chatbots

Chatbot technology presents an incredible potential for all online businesses.One key factor is the absence of any hassle or learning curve needed to interact with such a system. They have the ability to be integrated into the most consumer products and services, with comparatively less complicated training and calibration. In that, it is easier to set-up and fine tune a chatbot to accept your customer queries than to train and maintain human sales representatives, more on that later.

Chatbots provide an effective platform for filtering the common queries and providing them with an easy-to-understand resolution, while also escalating more complicated concerns up the chain for further processing. Chatbots would thus manage the redundant queries faced by a company and helps it’s work-force to concentrate on more unique cases. Chatbots are already treated as the conventional front-line of companies, as interfaces that accept inquiries and respond accordingly.

What the future of Chatbots look like

Conversational UI is a field continuously worked upon, and developments in this technology are to be expected ever so frequently. This promotes further abilities to chatbots, wherein the system is able to identify the end-users needs, wants and history with the brand, to make for a much more convenient and snappier interaction. Developers will be able to build bigger UIs and direct a user experience modeled after a natural human conversation, backed up by a strong connection to the foundation on which the business is established.

Chatbots are not here to replace apps or customer service representatives. On the contrary, chatbots can drive a unique user experience complimented by these existing technologies and thus help businesses clear sales milestones faster than ever before.

Casual Computing and User Participation

Over time, human beings have become accustomed to casual computing. People wake up, check their feeds, do their daily chores, check a few new products on the market and continue with their day. It is no secret that using a computer has never been this simple before, nobody learns BASIC to use a smartphone. This is now the expected standard, and using your website, or going through your storefront is expected not to be too different. They should be engaging, but not in a way that makes the user feel trapped or obliged to make a purchase. Users deserve a right to relevant information, in that they should be able to “flip through” your website and/or product catalog without any complications.

We should be able to provide the customers with a freedom to express themselves and respond with relevant results with a matching context. Furthermore, the ability to identify a past customer and providing them with personalized responses are a big plus to any company intending to implement the conversational UIs into their business. Though humanizing the system is advisable, we should make sure that too much personality does not get in the way of the conversation a customer has with your system. Thus, the application of personality sparingly is a subtle art, which demands priority.

How and Where to Start

With all the advantages present, chatbots can still be classified as a flexible tool. This essentially means that chatbots can work hand-in-hand with other technologies or systems already in place. If you already have a customer service team, chatbots would provide a strong backbone of information for their reference, and assist the representative team to draw quick resolutions based on valid data. Implementing a front line of chatbots allow you to have complete control over the flow of the conversation and the journey of your customers through your website or inventory.

To test the waters and get a feel for this amazing technology, start with Collect.chat – the world’s simplest chatbot builder. Our platform provides an easy-to-use interface to create and manage your own chatbot, and make this chatbot work for the benefit of your website. Feel free to share your opinion in the comments section below, and us know what you would expect to see from this technology in the future.