The Now and Next of Chatbots

About Author : BigTapp Analytics  | Data Scientist | AI, ML & Cloud initiatives

They can provide intelligent interactions to digitally savvy consumers. The early days saw elementary rule-based chatbots address basic FAQ queries offering robotic user experiences. However, growing demand for personalization and advances in sentiment tracking, machine learning, and natural language understanding (NLU) have led to the evolution of next-generation chatbots that are unsupervised and context-aware. Customers are no longer required to follow a script since the chatbot can comprehend what is being asked, grasp the purpose, and respond appropriately. 

According to Business Insider, 66 per cent of consumers say they are willing to spend more money with a business that offers excellent customer experience1

The current industry scenario 

The digital transformation drive has seen AI-enabled chatbots becoming a staple in customer service, healthcare, and financial services, bringing considerable benefits through improved services. Patients can now receive timely, informed responses. Hospitals and clinics are now overburdened with simple inquiries and requests that do not need assistance from experienced doctors. 

Banks are turning to delivering seamless self-service for tasks from checking account balances to offering better investment advice to users. Since chatbots using conversational AI can deliver highly personalized customer service based on the customer's location in real time, they are also helping banks work over their "disjointed customer experience" and provide one 'bot" across many channels with centralized management capabilities. 

AI-enabled chatbots assist insurers in assessing risk, detecting fraud, and reducing human error throughout the application process. Companies are better positioned to sell clients the plans that are most suited to them. 

What Big Tapp offers in the chatbot space 

BigTapp, with its experience with NLP-based BOT solutions, designs conversational AI-based solutions. 

A leading marine refrigeration unit was outfitted with an AI-based troubleshooting system to provide a seamless troubleshooting experience to the technicians. BigTapp used NLU and NLP to provide a human-like response through dashboards to queries from users, in this case, technicians. Integrating various enterprise applications at the back-end/knowledge repository facilitated the solution's responses. 

The result was quick troubleshooting, accurate diagnosis, faster turnaround to the client, and happier customers and technicians. 

In another case, a prominent franchise of restaurants wanted to profile and process interactive customer text data to understand customer sentiments over social media better and gain meaningful analytical insights. BigTapp equipped them with an Alexa-powered ordering system, an NLU and an NLP engine that could fetch the right menu to customers using historical and contextual data such as the weather at customer location. 

The result has since increased customer satisfaction and customer Lifetime value and reduced guest defection through enhanced guest profile-based insights. 

What is the future roadmap for chatbot technology? 

Chatbots are here to stay. A Mordor Intelligence evaluation predicts the chatbot market will grow over 34% between 2021 and 2026 when the market is expected to reach $102 billion2. 

Conversational marketing bringing brands and customers together in personalized interactions, will become the leading approach to customer acquisition, engagement, and retention. Conversational chatbots are passive because they are limited to being found on a brand's website. The future is predicted as where these conversations are taken to where the customers are at any time. 

 

Reference 

1 Microsoft view cited in businessinsider.in with an article titled, “Customer service experiences are more important than ever in the age of e-commerce” 

https://www.businessinsider.in/tech/customer-service-experiences-are-more-important-than-ever-in-the-age-of-e-commerce/articleshow/51463032.cms 

 

2  Mordor Intelligence evaluation cited in forbes.com with an article titled, “The Truth About Chatbots” 

https://www.forbes.com/sites/servicenow/2022/01/21/the-truth-about-chatbots/?sh=51642105797d

 

 

Other Reference 

https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesbusinesscouncil/2022/01/10/five-ways-chatbots-can-boost-customer-value-for-smbs/?sh=53145fa81a86

https://botsify.com/blog/industries-taking-advantage-of-chatbot/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesbusinesscouncil/2022/01/10/five-ways-chatbots-can-boost-customer-value-for-smbs/?sh=53145fa81a86

https://web.timetrade.com/files/content_resource/TT_Retail-Exec-Survey-Brief.pdf

https://theappsolutions.com/blog/development/challenges-of-chatbots-for-business/

https://botpress.com/blog/successful-chatbot-projects-avoid-these-mistakes 

About Author 

Bigtapp | Data Scientist | AI, ML & Cloud initiatives 

BigtappAnalytics helps in analysing and engineering data, draw inferences and predictions and essentially make data useful on all fronts using various opensource and cloud tools. Krishna Kumar has developed ML and AI services, features and products in Fintech, chatbots, streaming data pipeline development and more. He has implemented projects on AWS, Azure and GCP. He is a certified AWS Developer Associate.