There’s no arguing the need for using a chatbot today. Various reports and studies provide numbers that will turn any unbelievers. For example, Juniper Research states that by 2020 chatbots will be able to save businesses $8 billion in costs. However for chatbots to be that effective for your business they have to possess specific features. Today those include responding to voice commands, using advanced NLP (natural language processing), and being highly specific.
Why Chatbots Rock Today and How They Matter for Your Business
Chatbots boost the business so well because they can be extremely efficient in resolving customers’ problems quickly. And according to Harvard Business Review, a 10-minute waiting for an answer via an app or a call center reduces the chance of establishing an effective contact by 400%.
Keep this in mind when developing your chatbot as efficiency, speed of answering queries, and quality of the answers provided are key metrics that will determine the success of your bot. You also shouldn’t forget that while hosting a chatbot on your website can increase the retention time, poor hosting of the website itself can negate that boon. Be sure to look for a host that can remain stable and reliable no matter what. Web Hosting Media is one of the services that provide independent reviews of hosts and other information that can help with the selection of the best package for your business.
Developing the Best Chatbot Today: 3 Trends to Embrace
1. Make your bot a great conversationalist.
Am AI is not yet advanced enough to be a good conversationalist in a free conversation. However, you can program your bot to be great in its specific niche. This will take a lot of work from the developers and business alike as you have to predict all possible questions and program the bot to respond correctly to incomplete and partially incorrect inquiries. You can use these conversational analytics metrics for chatbots in order to assess how well yours is faring.
Luckily for all business owners planning to use chatbots, the NLP technology is progressing extremely fast and is one of the main trends for developers this year. It’s also called natural language understanding tech and is the software used by the AI in order to understand, process, and interpret human inquiries correctly. The best solutions today are developed by Google (DialogFlow), Facebook (Wit), and Amazon (Lex).
2. Enable your chatbot to interact with voice commands
Simply put, a good bot today must be able to ‘talk’ to the user. Even if you don’t get it to respond ‘vocally’, the users should be able to file their questions/inquiries using voice commands.
Another leading trend among the chatbots of 2018 is making them into true virtual assistants. The most advanced versions of today work similar to this. Incorporating smart hubs used in thousands of homes today is one of the trends one has to embrace as soon as possible as this can still give you an edge.
3. Set up an entire virtual call-center
There is no technology yet that can make a single chatbot proficient in a variety of tasks and subjects. However, your customers will no doubt have different kinds of inquiries (for example, product selection advice and customer support). The best solution is to get multiple chatbots.
Every bot you have needs to be highly specific and easily visible on the website so your clients know exactly what to click in order to get the type of help they need.
