Are Chatbots Taking Over The Conversation?
According to a Drift survey, most customers prefer chatbots over online forms. They expect chatbots to reply instantly but prefer to have a chat with a human instead of a bot. A brief look at how brands are leveraging bots Brands are leveraging chatbots to further their relationship with consumers, anywhere, any time. Businesses have […]
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According to a Drift survey, most customers prefer chatbots over online forms. They expect chatbots to reply instantly but prefer to have a chat with a human instead of a bot. A brief look at how brands are leveraging bots
Brands are leveraging chatbots to further their relationship with consumers, anywhere, any time. Businesses have been using chatbots in many ways, including personalisation of customer communication, boosting customer engagement, streamlining online interactions, lead identification and nurturing, improving response rates, and so forth. Automating repetitive tasks has been another consequential usage of AI Chatbots in marketing. But businesses have still been apprehensive about its cognitive merits; Kuki or Mitsuku is the most intelligent chatbot, according to Google AI research. It has won the Loebner Prize Turing Test five times for being the best conversational chatbot in the world.
How Practically Are Brands Using Chatbots to Market Their Businesses?
Siri, one of the most popular and salient names, is a voice-recognition-enabled chatbot that answers the audio questions of users. It’s a virtual assistant or chatbot that leverages artificial intelligence to map voices to users and provides them with apt responses. Even eCommerce platforms have had a boom of benefits through AI ChatBots. To simplify buyer journeys and offer customer support 24/7 is the most visible usage. Other than that a few benefits are:
- Provide contextual product recommendations
- Spot high-potential leads and nurtures them
- Reduce labour overheads
- Collect customer data and insights
Lyft uses AI Chatbots, where you can request a ride from Lyft via chat (Facebook Messenger and Slack) or voice (Amazon Echo). The bot will let you know the current location of your driver, and show you a picture of the license plate and car model. In Slack, you can simply use slash commands (e.g., /Lyft home). It is that easy to use an interface command pattern these days.
Fandango’s Facebook Messenger bot lets you watch movie trailers, find local theatres, and see what’s trending this week. Simply enter your city or ZIP code, and the chatbot will show you what’s playing nearby, when and send you to a page where you can buy tickets; sounds fascinating!
Spotify’s Facebook Messenger bot makes it easy for its customers to search for, listen to, and share music. Once you get started, you’ll get playlist recommendations based on your mood, what you’re doing, or any genre of music you want.
Whole Foods is another application where regardless of whether you’re at a store shopping for groceries, you can always search for recipes with the assistance of the Whole Foods bot on Facebook Messenger. One of the coolest parts is you can search by an emoji to get those recipes, while it also lets you filter your results if you have special dietary needs.
At internationally acclaimed brands like Sephora, you can get all kinds of makeup tutorials if you chat with Sephora’s chatbot. This personal assistant will also help you by providing product reviews and ratings when shopping in a store.
Mastercard’s Facebook Messenger bot makes it easy for customers to check on account transactions (e.g. just ask, “how much did I spend on restaurants in May?”). With Masterpass, customers can also buy from Mastercard partners like FreshDirect, Subway, and The Cheesecake Factory.
For customer service, Staples tries to make everything easier with its intelligent, easy system AI-enabled chatbot, done in partnership with IBM’s Watson. Staples’ Facebook Messenger bot can answer common customer questions, which tend to be about orders, tracking and returns, and whether specific items are in stock or not.
The Wall Street Journal chatbot makes it easy to stay on top of big news and stock quotes with Facebook Messenger. You can also customise alerts; simply type in some basic commands, and you can get company information, key financial metrics, and livestock quotes, along with the latest news posts.
Pizza Hut customers can easily order pizza for delivery or carryout from Facebook Messenger or Twitter. Customers can also reorder their favourite pizzas, ask questions, and see current deals through their AI-enabled chatbots.
There’s a heap of ways to utilise chatbots, and the usage numbers don’t lie. They might not have taken over just yet, but more people are becoming aware of their uses, and more brands are tapping into that opportunity.
But Being Aware Of The Loopholes Makes It Easier To Implement Chatbots In Businesses.
- They are susceptible to data security breaches.
- They can misunderstand user sentiment.
- They can face vernacular issues.
- They can interrupt the user experience.
AI chatbots live on the web and are vulnerable to malware and data breaches like other web entities. They can be used for backdoor entry by hackers if not properly secured. That being said, they can be made as secure as other customer-facing channels by encryption, authentication, protocols, and user education.
Are Chatbots The Future Of Marketing And Customer Service?
AI chatbots are responsible for significant structural changes in many organisations. It enables businesses to provide excellent customer services without increasing the number of employees.
Gartner had already predicted the boom of AI chatbots in the years 2020 and 2021. According to Salesforce, 69 per cent of US consumers prefer using chatbots when engaging with brands since it often yields a speedy response.
Yet most small business owners, when surveyed said, they didn’t use the technology. A chatbot running on your website can answer customers’ basic questions at all hours of the day or night, even if you’re focused on different tasks. According to Facebook, there are now over 300,000 active bots on Messenger.
“AI-powered chatbots can be used for customer support, expanding contact strategy dramatically with a controlled message,” said Joey Penick, vice president of marketing at Lumen Technologies. “These chatbots have become so lifelike that many customers don’t even know the difference, but they offer the added benefit of being able to gather, analyse and provide actionable data that can be used to improve the customer experience.” said the same.
According to a Drift survey, most customers prefer chatbots over online forms, but they expect faster responses from bots. In fact, 42 per cent of the respondents want chatbots to reply instantly. The same survey also revealed that customers still prefer to chat with a human than with a bot. They would prefer brands to provide proactive customer support through live agents the most.
The chatbot market is forecast to reach more than one billion dollars by 2025 as well. Though we can’t predict the fate of chatbots in all industries, they are indeed the cornerstone of customer service in the future. Through sophisticated man-machine conversations and round-the-clock accessibility, they are poised to completely overtake the control from live customer care agents and other customer-facing channels.
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