ChatBots

ChatBot

What is a Chatbot?

AI based software that can:

  • Simulate and process human conversation (text or voice)
  • Allow humans to interact with digital devices as if they were communicating with a real person
  • Be deployed across websites, applications, and messaging channels such as Google, Facebook Messenger, Twitter, or WhatsApp.
What is a ChatBot

Benefits/Advantages of ChatBots

Benefits of Chatbots

There are several benefits of ChatBot such as:

  • Reducing customer waiting time and providing immediate answers
  • Providing customers with 24/7 customer support
  • Removing the threat of unpleasant human-to-human interactions that are dictated by the mood and emotions of both the service or sales representative and the customer.
  • Minimizing the stress and annoyance that some customers feel when having to contact customer support by reducing wait time and streamlining the conversation;
  • Advancing brand personality by adding customized elements to the chatbot
  • Personalizing each customer experience with the use of AI-enabled chatbots.
  • Cost-effective.
  • Save time.
  • Proactive customer interaction.
  • Improving the redirection of customer queries
  • Monitor and analyze customer data.
  • Improve customer management.
  • Eases scalability to global markets.
  • Substituting for emails.
  • Managing sales funnels.
  • Unlike applications, they are not downloaded.
  • Not necessary to update them.
  • Do not take up space in the phone’s memory.
  • We can have several bots integrated into the same chat.
  • Improved customer experience.
  • Simultaneous conversations with thousands of buyers.

Types of ChatBots

There are several types of chatbot such as:

  • Scripted or quick reply or menu-based chatbots
    a.
    Most basic chatbots act as a hierarchical a. decision tree
    b. These bots interact with users through a set of predefined questions that progress until the chatbot has answered the user’s question.
  • Keyword recognition-based chatbots
    a.
    bit more complex, they attempt to listen to what the user types and respond accordingly using keywords picked up from customer responses.
  • Hybrid chatbots 
    a. Combination of menu-based and keyword recognition-based bots.
  • Contextual chatbots
    a.
    Use NLP to understand the context
    b. ML and AI to remember conversations and interactions with users
    c. Use these memories to grow and improve over time.
  • Voice-enabled chatbots
    a.
    This type of chatbot is the future of chatbot technology.
    b. Voice-enabled chatbots use spoken dialogue from users as input that prompts responses or creative tasks.
    c. Current examples include Amazon Alexa and Apple’s Siri.
Types of ChatBots

Rule-Based ChatBots

Rule based chatbots follow the predefined paths during conversations. At each step during the conversation, the user will need to pick from explicit options that determine the next step in the conversation.

Advantages of Rule based Chatbot

Key attributes:

  • These bots follow predetermined rules. So it becomes easy to use the bot for the simpler scenarios.
  • Interactions with rule based chatbots are highly structured and are most applicable to customer support functions.
  • Rule based bots are ideally suitable for answering common queries suck as an inquiry about business hours, delivery status or tracking details.
  • Reducing customer waiting time and providing immediate answers
  • Providing customers with 24/7 customer support
  • Removing the threat of unpleasant human-to-human interactions that are dictated by the mood and emotions of both the service or sales representative and the customer.
  • Minimizing the stress and annoyance that some customers feel when having to contact customer support by reducing wait time and streamlining the conversation;
  • Improving the redirection of customer queries
  • Advancing brand personality by adding customized elements to the chatbot
  • Personalizing each customer experience with the use of AI-enabled chatbots.
  • Improved customer experience
  • Simultaneous conversations with thousands of buyers
  • Cost-effective
  • Save time
  • Proactive customer interaction
  • Monitor and analyze customer data
  • Improve customer management
  • Eases scalability to global markets.
  • Substituting for emails
  • Managing sales funnels
  • unlike applications, they are not downloaded
  • Not necessary to update them
  • Do not take up space in the phone’s memory
  • We can have several bots integrated in the same chat.

Conversational ChatBots

Conversational Chatbots

Conversational chatbots are also referred to as virtual assistants or digital assistants. They are much more interactive and personalized than rule based chatbots. The conversational chatbots converse with the users as in a way humans converse and communicate in real-life situations.

Conversational communication skills of the chatbot technology empower them to deliver what customers are looking for.

Key attributes:

  • Conversational bots can understand the context and intent of complex conversations and try to provide more relevant answers.
  • AI bots apply predictive intelligence and sentiment analysis to understand customer emotions closely.
  • Machine learning bots learn from user behavior and provide more personalized conversations.

Challenges

There are various challenges in a ChatBot, some of them are as follows:

  • AI-enabled bots can learn from each interaction and improve their own behaviors. Unfortunately, this process can cost businesses a lot of money if the initial interactions cause customers to disengage and turn away.
  • Varieties in the way people type their message can make it hard to understand their intention. Chatbots must be able to deal with both long and short sentences, as well as chat bubbles with lengthy content versus multiple very short submissions.
  • The different ways in which humans talk can also be difficult for a chatbot to understand. For example, the user may use slang, misspelled words, and short-form or acronyms. Unfortunately, NLP is limited and cannot fully resolve this challenge.
  • Human beings are random and user behavior is controlled by emotions and moods; users may quickly change their minds. After initially asking for a suggestion, they might switch to wanting to give a command instead. Chatbot technology must be able to adapt to and understand this element of randomness and spontaneity.
  • One of the biggest challenges is that chatbot technology is still new and, therefore, it faces new obstacles that companies may not know how to deal with.
Challenges of a ChatBot

Use Cases

Customer Support ChatBots:

  • Retail Support Bot handles queries related to your retail product line, you can also use this to sell your product directly from your chatbot.
  • Telecom Bot provides your customers the convenience of checking their bill, make a payment, recharge plan, change plan, change number etc directly through the bot. It also procures any customer queries related to your service.
  • Techdesk Bot to help employees of an organization to connect to the internal technical support team for issues related to system and access to services/Applications. The bot also sends a confirmation to the customer through email.
  • The banking bot caters to your banking needs in an interactive manner. It provides account-related information, ongoing offers, helps you get an update on your checkbook, and also takes you to travel booking facilities.
  • Order issues help handle issues with food delivery orders.

HR

  • Keeping the pulse of your employees has never been easier. Integrate chatbots like Polly into your collaboration environment like Slack to monitor their satisfaction and productivity.
  • Answering common HR-related questions is time-consuming and boring for employees but an ideal job for chatbots.
  • Completing transactional HR services: Most employees have a hard time remembering where they need to fill in their absences and vacations. Especially new joiners are clueless about such things. A cool solution is to stop recording absences altogether. A slightly less cool solution is to roll out an HR chatbot on the common chat platforms for such questions
  • Streamline expense reports: A virtual assistant can help in users creating expense reports, adding line items, adding transactions, and approving expense reports.
  • Onboarding & Training: Chatbots like Botbot.AI can help organizations enhance the enterprise onboarding process by revealing insights from candidates’ conversational data. Chatbot facilitates the training of new employees when they are fed with orientation materials such as videos, photos, graphs & charts.

IT

  • IT helpdesk: Helpdesk functionality can be easily embedded in a bot that can create/assign cases, notify users of updates and answer users’ questions.

Facilities and other support services

  • Helpdesk: All facilities-related requests can be collected by a chatbot that will also notify users as their requests are completed.

Supply Chain

  • Inventory management: Chatbots can enable organizations to check inventory levels. For example, the bot can return the most current inventory numbers for an SKU. Customers and suppliers can also track the present status of the shipment by typing the delivery number. LiveTiles has a retail inventory management chatbot that brings inventory tracking, supply chain tracking, and staff management systems to form a retail store management system on demand.

Appointment scheduling or Booking Bots:

  • HR Bot for scheduling meetings and interviews.
  • Healthcare Bot for booking appointments.
  • Travel Bot for flight bookings.
  • Hotel Booking Bot to book rooms and services.
  • Appointment Slot Booking can be integrated with any type of business.
  • Cinema Bot to book movie tickets.
  • Service Bots for automotive businesses.  And so on

Entertainment bots

  • The tv show guide is a simple yet powerful chatbot to help track channels as per category for a service provider.
  • The go-karting bot is an ideal chatbot template for booking go-karting services. The bot also shows some information about tracks and karts.
  • Quiz bot serves a quickfire round of questions to those interested in a little harmless fun dose of quiz questions. It ends with giving a quick score based on the correct answers.
  • Riddle bot engages your customers through games to keep them coming back to your website.
  • News and media bot helps users access news from different categories. So the bot flow leads the user to news categories where they can select the desired category to access news and can also subscribe to a category.
  • Cinema bot lets you book movie tickets, read reviews, browse through different genres.
  • The entertainment factory is a bot assisting you with everything at your favorite getaway location. Adding ease to your fun!
  • Youtube channel bot to deploy a chatbot using this template anywhere to use it as your new social media channel to share your youtube content.
  • The podcast helps the user learn about the universe with the help of podcasts or become a VIP member to get updates!

Sales

  • Sales assistant (assistant to sales reps): Integrated to your CRM system, your chatbot can act as an assistant to sales personnel, by notifying them when they are assigned opportunities, simplifying lead creation and updates.
  • Selling/marketing the product in text-only channels: Deploying chatbots to official social media accounts (including WhatsApp) can help organizations attract customers. For example, Dominos launched its Facebook Messenger chatbot (so-called “pizza bot“) to ease the process of pizza ordering by being where customers are. Customers can reply with a pizza emoji or word so that the bot understands and delivers the pizza.
  • Customer outreach is better when bots write the first reply. For example, while reaching out to SMEs, you can send automated emails and chatbots can respond immediately to leads. Reduction in response times is one of the biggest boosts to conversion as demonstrated by this study by insidesales.com
  • Lead nurturing: Communicating with customers at every stage of the sales funnel, helping them get more informed about your services and products. Bots listen to the needs of customers and provide the information and answers they need.

Marketing and Sales ChatBots:

  • E-commerce bot to browse through products directly from the chatbot. You can send your customers images through carousels and link your website for purchases.
  • Education-course bot allows prospective students to browse through various course offerings by an educational institution. The chatbot also provides details on course fees, duration, and admission mode per course.
  • Automotive Lead Generation bot allows customers to get details on cars, features, prices, etc, along with booking service.
  • A real Estate bot can collect requirements from your customers on what they are looking for.
  • A Quiz bot for market research generates a quiz around the market research. It comes with attractive wallpaper and button color customizations. Saves the answers provided by the user, calculates their score, and also sends an email to the user letting them know their score.
  • Social media marketing bot is a lead generation chatbot template for social media marketing agencies. Which notify the admin whenever a new lead is generated.
  • Lead generation Google helps you take user information and save it in google sheets. So the prospects are already on your product have strong leads. So this bot will help you store that information which can be used market products to these customers or provide support to convert these leads.
  • Lead generation with Salesforce helps you take user information and save it in Salesforce. Prospects already on your product are strong leads this bot will help you store that information which can be used to market products to these customers or provide support to convert these leads.
  • Recommending new offers: Recommending the right products to the customer based on her verbal feedback
  • Understanding your customers: Asking the right questions at the right times on your application or website

Industry ChatBot Solutions

E-Commerce

  • Shop with conversational commerce unlock more options
  • Set price alerts
  • Choose gifts
  • Reserve products
  • Track orders

Travel

  • Book travel
  • Book accommodation
  • Get advice on topics like where to visit, what to see

Finance

  • Investment management:
  • Credit applications
  • Money transfer

 Healthcare

  • Therapy
  • Handling insurance coverage inquiries
  • Tracking prescription use

E-Commerce

  • Shop with conversational commerce unlock more options
  • Set price alerts
  • Choose gifts
  • Reserve products
  • Track orders

Travel

  • Book travel
  • Book accommodation
  • Get advice on topics like where to visit, what to see

Finance

  • Investment management:
  • Credit applications
  • Money transfer

 Healthcare

  • Therapy
  • Handling insurance coverage inquiries
  • Tracking prescription use

 Real-Estate

  • Provide advice to customers on choosing a neighborhood or street for their real estate investments

Assists doctors

  • Assists receptionists, nurses, and interns
  • Patient engagement
  • Population health management
  • Care coordination
  • Expediting triaging patient

Banking Chatbot

  • Personal Banking Services
  • Uninterrupted Customer Support
  • Customer Feedback & Measurements
  • Delivering Personalized Marketing
  • Employee Self-Service

Education

  • Anytime Assistance
  • Innovative Teaching
  • Wider Reach To Students
  • Student Feedback
Use Cases of ChatBots

Which ChatBot Application is right for you?

Which ChatBot is right for you
  • There are different approaches and tools that you can use to develop a chatbot.
  • Depending on the use case you want to address, some chatbot technologies are more appropriate than others.
  • In order to achieve the desired results, the combination of different AI forms such as natural language processing, machine learning, and semantic understanding may be the best option.