Automation in the true sense is transforming and improving the dynamics of our day to day life, making it more simpler. This evidently also makes some of our daily tasks very transactional and repetitive. This happens with business conversations as well. It involves asking or responding to a lot of questions or requests and most of them can be similar in nature. Hence chatbots are becoming the go-to-choice for a lot of brands and enterprises.
The word Chatbot has become a buzzword in recent times, but the origin of first-ever Chatbot was in the 1960s. It was developed by Joseph Weizenbaum named ELIZA at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1994. It was named after Eliza Doolittle, a working-class character in play Pygmalion, ELIZA was meant to emulate a Rogerian psychotherapist. The chatbot would operate by recognizing the words or phrases and keywords received as input and would trigger an output by pairing them to a list of possible sets of responses.
Back to the Future
The journey of chatbots from the 1960s till date has been nothing short of evolutionary. Many new developments have seen transforming the abilities of a chatbot and Artificial Intelligence is the biggest hand to take this functionality to the next level. After ELIZA, many new chatbots were developed such as Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity (ALICE) which was inspired by ELIZA, SmarterChild, IBM Watson, Jeopardy & the voice bots including Siri, Alexa, and many more.
According to the Chatbots Market Research Report 2020-2027, the chatbot market is projected to surpass 1.34 billion by 2024. However, AI-based chatbots are anticipated to record a CAGR of 53% as there is rapid progress in the field of NLP and machine-learning which can offer personalized responses.
Chatbots have opened new boundaries of communications into the business world as we can now have 2-way communication. Chatbots apps have gained traction as it enabled businesses to connect with many customers globally by sending personalized messages and offering 24/7 services. These chatbots solutions are prominent in sectors like BFSI, e-commerce, hospitality, gaming, healthcare, and many more similar industries.
The Significance of Chatbots
With the successful deployment of chatbots over the past few years, every type of business is trying to adopt Artificial Intelligence technologies to improve daily operations. One of the prime significance of a chatbot is its availability, as they can be used 365 days a year with 24/7 service and save money for companies round-the-clock.
Chatbots eventually reduce the customer service agents’ workload as it answers millions of customer queries across multiple channels. In this way, it efficiently cuts down the time spent by each customer service agent on each issue.
If chatbots are built correctly they are easier to use, run, as well as maintain, and also the up-gradation process becomes easier. You gain insights into customers by asking for feedback to make further improvements. It also helps to track the response given by them and monitor customer data.
Chatbot interacts with customers only when it is initiated by them.The chatbot never shares unnecessary information with customers and tries to maintain the flow of conversation. In this way customers never find it monotonous and chatbot helps to improve brand perception in the long run. Chatbots can also share rich content such as images, video files, product pages, and share the pricing.
The chatbot can also forward questions to a real person if the query is complicated, this way the customer support can be improved with the help of chatbots.
Though chatbot provides speedy and quick responses, it requires strong network security. Building strong network security for every chatbot eliminates the security vulnerabilities from hacking the websites and email addresses of a company.
Chatbots with Artificial Intelligence are dramatically changing how businesses communicate and help to reach out to a large set of audience via messaging apps and websites. Furthermore, you can measure the metrics, interactions with customers, and can consider their requirements to have a better understanding of your chatbot ROI.
With so many advancements happening in the chatbots, it’s not only going to benefit large enterprise and mid-size companies but also small-sized companies.
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