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• Health – patient care, provide appropriate remedies for specific disorders
• Retail – help customers search for products and place their orders
• Utilities – add new services and products, report issues, faults and problem resolution
• Telco – get to the right division within the organisation, add new services, faults and problem resolution
Chatbots are capable of anticipating and acting on customer intent, improving time of resolution, and rarely need to engage with a human for problem resolution and self-service functions. The more a chatbot is deployed, the more it effectively learns from one conversation to the next as it takes note of shared dialogue and content. The result: chatbots naturally evolve over time especially when they begin to access the vast amount of data from the systems they have available and the link between AI and Big Data only grows stronger.
Where is this all heading?
Almost 80% of companies are considering chatbots for their customer care strategy by 2020. 62% will implement chatbots by the end of 2018.
There is even speculation that chatbots will replace search engines.
What this illustrates is the simple and natural way chatbots access information
from multiple sources, their potential power, and their extraordinary ability to discover and learn.
Many articles are also being written about why, and when, chatbots will replace apps. This is largely due to the fact that chatbots mimic century-old human communication, in a natural manner, rather than forcing us humans to interact in a prescribed way. This is consistent with the trend of the declining use of dedicated mobile apps, and greater uptake of social media interfaces. The obvious example is Facebook Messenger which is especially friendly to chatbots, and many chatbots are instinctively gravitating towards this channel. It’s on this premise we will likely start to see chatbots become more embedded in social media and begin to replace dedicated mobile apps.
Why are Chatbots so hot?
24 x 7 access to customer engagement is fast becoming a mandatory requirement for today’s organisations. Chatbots fulfil this requirement by offering 24 x 7 x 365 coverage, far cheaper, and more effectively, than human agents especially in peak periods. Australian airline, JetStar, and their virtual assistant “Jess” is a great recent example of the effectiveness of