Chatbots: how AI helps the growth of businesses

Chatbots drives tremendous business growth since it has become the most favoured practical artificial intelligence implementation for a business.

Artificial Intelligence, or ai, caters to the changing requirements of businesses with its excellent technical concepts. And the updating trends of this technology is responsible for its place in Gartner’s top technological trends for 2020. Moreover, the increasing practice of these solutions enables an exquisite use experience that gives a boost to business growth and helps increase revenues. Also, the higher security constraints implemented in these solutions is one of the crucial reasons businesses are favouring this technology.

Chatbots for businesses: the purpose it serves

Chatbots are made up of two words – chat and robot. They basically serve the purpose that relates to customer support.

Businesses have to pay attention to customers’ changing demands and deliver support as customers of today ask for excellent support throughout the time. Chatbots can ease up the load from businesses’ shoulders by providing a way to helm excellent customer support. They are programmed to serve users by answering their queries from the installed answers and delivering a human-like experience. And the increasing popularity of chatbots in business solutions is undoubtedly becoming an example of excellent implementation of this concept. 

Types of chatbots

Based on the intelligence they are programmed to deal with, chatbots can be divided into two types:

• Basic chatbots – answer a finite set of queries of users that have already been fed in their system. These chatbots are programmed using keywords and regular expressions that let a chatbot understand the user queries and respond accordingly. 
• Smart chatbots – use the concepts of machine learning to learn from user behaviour and queries to provide quick replies. These chatbots can evolve as they store the user queries and the answers that users found useful to understand the appropriate response from the finite set it is fed with. 

Benefits of using chatbots in business solutions

Businesses nowadays are considering the popularity of chatbots among millennials as a driving source of their increased use. However, there are many benefits a chatbot can offer than just the popularity and touch of modern technology. 

1. Personalised experience

Chatbots are great at crafting a user-centric experience for all the customers of a business. When a customer asks a single question to a chatbot, for example, instead of showing a long list of products or information, it efficiently fetches the reply that suits the query and delivers the output. 

It creates a human-like experience and also personalises the replies as per the queries posted by customers. If you are using a smart chatbot, you can also program it to provide recommendations based on the queries of users and deliver an enhanced experience. 

2. Higher response rate

Customers find various ways to connect to a business for posting their inquiries. Some look for their social media accounts, for example, a follower of the Connect for Success Facebook Page can send a query through Facebook Messenger. 

If you have integrated a chatbot into the system, you don’t have to worry about customer queries. Chatbots can efficiently answer all the questions posted by customers and deliver an excellent experience. While you can rely on providing a unique experience, chatbots also offer the right answers without fail.

3. Automate mundane tasks

There are many common questions asked by customers, and customer support would get tired of answering the same repetitive questions. But chatbots don’t as they're just a piece of code integrated into the solution to automate those tasks.

Hence, chatbots help in providing customer support services 24/7 and deliver excellent results by answering queries.

4. Learning from experiences

When it comes to exploring the area of chatbots, machine learning and artificial intelligence correlate. As the chatbots are trained to answer human queries, there always are chances that some queries remain unattended from the developer’s side. But this particular instance is covered up by a reply, and later, the customer agent is handed over the problem. 

But chatbots do not let these instances happen repetitively. Instead, chatbots can be trained from the queries that users post and improve their performance. If a business chooses to integrate chatbots into their system, they can rely on them to learn from the customer experience they have had and progress further to ensure customer engagement. 

5. Streamline the process

Chatbots help in streamlining the tasks that customers want to perform later. If an e-commerce website has opted for a chatbot to answer the queries of their shoppers, for example, it can send the query to the sales department directly without needing the customer to repeat the same thing twice. 

How are chatbots created?

Many businesses consider chatbots as an expensive technology because of the machine learning associated with them. However, developing chatbots is easier than you think. With support from expert engineers and experience in crafting chatbots that suits the business requirements, a chatbot gets ready. 

Programming a chatbot is an expert’s task, and they can complete it as per the given requirements. Also, integrating a chatbot into any business system is their responsibility. But before the development starts, the business has to think of the aspects that directly affect the outputs a chatbot generates: 

1. Goal – the chatbot should follow a purpose and stick to it, and before you develop a chatbot, it is essential to clear the concept in advance. 
2. Medium – you should first decide where you want to integrate the chatbot. Whether it’s your website, customer support panel, mobile app, social media page, or anything else.
3. Customisation – based on the requirements of your business, you can choose to integrate an already programmed chatbot or decide to use a customised chatbot that you build from scratch. 

The new aspects of technology are beneficial for businesses and customers as well. With the help of virtual assistants and chatbots, customers can get quick answers to their queries. They also help to smoothen out the buying experience.

Therefore, the benefits earned by chatbots for every industry remains the same. It promises to bring more revenue through enhanced customer engagement and increased user conversion rates for businesses.