First developed by Alan Turing in 1950, chatbot as one of the most futuristic inventions is now taking over the marketplace technology. Once a mere bot with limited access, now chatbot allows you to experience a real human conversation. The automatic answering machine helps companies answer FAQs and provide guides for newcomers in their platforms or apps so they can respond quickly. Instead of waiting for hours to get in touch with a customer service office to consult about certain products, you can interact with a bot. Developed to ease industrial access, chatbots supports and scales businesses in building better relations with the customers.
Recent study conducted by Drift and team found that more than half respondents (69 percent) prefer chatbots over apps when communicating with companies. Among the reason why chatbot is preferred is because it gives quicker answer to simple questions. Users also believe this answering bot to be superior in areas of 24-hour service (62 percent) and ability to easily register a complaint (33 percent).
Chatbot is not only time-efficient with its 24-hour service and quick response, but also financially efficient. According to Grand View Research, it is estimated that chatbot will gain up to $1.23 billion profit by 2025 globally as there will be more than 25 percent people worldwide using mobile messaging apps. Ray Kurzweil, an inventor, futurist, and computer scientist, also emphasised that chatbot will be indistinguishable for human by 2029 as there were 30.000 chatbots only on Facebook.
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Not only will it be the future communication, chatbot is also a boon to marketing growth. HubSpot study shows that 47 percent customers want to buy items from chatbots. It was mentioned that mostly young adults between 26 – 47 years old spent more than $1100 via a chatbot interaction. Not only that, this technology helps reduce per-query expenses from $15-$200 on human agents to $1 on virtual ones.
However, building an interactive chatbot can be challenging. Customers are seeking real and genuine conversation from this answering machine, while chatbot still has limited access to real communication. Among the main reasons why these bots fail is because of a key element that the developers overlook, such as in its code or programme. To prevent that, here are 3 steps you can take to significantly improve your conversational chatbot experience.
Make sure that your chatbot is actually conversing and not just stating. By giving personality to your chatbot, you can provide an engaging small talk conversation rather than just delivering flat statement. To do this, you do not need to be an NPL networker or machine expert. Instead, you can rely on third party solutions such as Api.ai, Wit.ai, or Lex as they can help you with easy guide to build a small talk chatbot. For example, when a customer asks “what is your name?” to your bot, the most likely answer to appear will be ‘the question is not specified’ because you might not expect him to come with such question. Therefore, you should give a wide range of inputs and outputs responses so the customer will experience a lively bot conversation. Check out this link if you want to know about how to easily build personality on your chatbot.
Chatbot is a machine but without training, this answering machine will not be able to deliver good customer experience. Therefore, make sure to treat it like your own employee and train it. This will help ensure customers’ satisfaction when communicating with the chatbot, and when they are happy, it is expected that it will bring positive affect to your sales.
Additionally, you should be flexible with the answers provided by chatbot, which means that you should not be strict with inputs. Users might pop up with various questions that you never expected. In this case, you should be able to reverse your bot’s current logic. It means that your chatbot should not ignore users’ current state and respond accordingly. Therefore, keep making corrections and re-train the machine as much as possible. Chatbot is not only a machine that you nurture, but it also represents you as a company and the people who run it.
Chatbot is an advanced technology, but the demands of customers will grow from time to time as well. You cannot stay reliant on its service as you can always improve the chatbot. By collecting data from customer’s FAQs and talks, you can set more input to your bot and make it more reliable for customer’s experience.
You can do this by doing a research from any bot platform and analysing their frequent conversations that happen between bot and customers. But you should make sure that the data are safe and secure. The more data you can collect from variant platforms, the more input you can set in your bot. This will give positive result to both, your chatbot improvement and customers’ satisfaction.
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