Conversational Interfaces such as Voice Interfaces and chatbots are replacing customer care executives that used to solve our queries on long, unending calls. They are the new age assistants who are revolutionising the way brands interact with consumers. Some businesses have chatbots or other conversational UIs as their primary mode of interaction with their online traffic due to the advantages it has over employees.
Chatbots are certainly here to stay as they make the process far easier with just a simple text message and saves our time that we would otherwise spend on figuring out the complex apps and websites.
Following are some of the benefits of chatbots as conversational interfaces:
Gauging the user attention
Unlike the usual customer care calls where you had to wait until the information is fed into the system manually and processed, chatbots give crisp and precise information instantly, eliminating all the unnecessary information. Also, chatbots ask short and to the point questions which prevents users from getting distracted, thereby, saving overall turnaround time.
Chatbots are mostly designed with in-built options which are given to the users when they ask a certain question. This further reduces the probability of giving any incorrect information to the users.
Better cost effectiveness
With chatbots, major costs related to customer care executives are reduced such as training, infrastructural costs for call centres, etc. Though there are maintenance costs involved for chatbots and at times depending on the industry and the complexity of the knowledge it might also require some human assistance, the overall costs are significantly lower. Hence, chatbots are a one-time investment, unlike employees where the overhead costs are variable.
Generating Leads
You must have seen those pop-up chat windows on landing pages of some websites. Those are nothing but chatbots that help you to get more in-depth information in less time. People tend to redirect from the website if they aren’t able to get the information they want on the first page itself. Chatbots can reduce the loss of potential leads by instantaneously giving answers that a visitor is looking for. Hence, chatbots are a great way to convert your website traffic into leads.
24/7 Assistance
Chatbots are continuously on the rise in the business world because it serves thousands of customers for 24 hours a day. It also eliminates the waiting period a customer had to spend in the queue before getting connected with customer care executive. With chatbots, your consumers can get assistance anytime and anywhere with just a small text message.
Greater Adaptability
Among all the apps in the digital world, Whatsapp is the one that is accepted by people of all the generations irrespective of their age and literacy. This explains the acceptance level of simple technologies that do not require much effort other than typing a simple text. Imagine if the chatbot market is able to leverage this fact and make all the industries incorporate a chatbot driven UI for their website or app. Then it would be safe to say that we aren’t far from witnessing another technological disruption.
How to make your Chatbots more effective
Here are some parameters that can be utilised by organisations to make the chatbots more effective:
I. Great conversational experience; Be ‘human’
It is essential to make the overall interaction as human as possible because people will soon get bugged with talking to a machine that just throws straight and mundane answers. Companies such as Haptik have got comedians onboard just to design the chatbot script for their app.
Training the chatbot AI for possible troll actions from people and making it fun will get more consumers to shed their apprehensions about talking to a customer. A great example of this is the chatbot deployed on Slack. Slack is experimenting with various images, friendly scripts, and buttons that generate instantaneous replies.
II. Personalize the user experience
Designing the AI behind the chatbot to give contextual replies and to gauge user intent before replying or asking further questions will help in providing a personalised experience to the users. There is an entire generation of people who find the idea of communicating with AI on a day-to-day basis, an alien concept. Hence, giving chatbots a human touch is not an enhanced feature but the most needed basic feature. Humans are willing to share information only when they can establish a sense of trust and chatbots need to be seen as something that can be trusted and understands people.
III. Make them platform agnostic
There are a number of devices available these days apart from the standard desktops and laptops. Making the chatbot, platform agnostic you can tap deep into the market potential as it’s always easy to chat on a phone or other smaller devices than browsing through website pages or apps. Whether it’s a tab or a mobile phone, businesses must ensure that user interaction on all the devices is smooth and frictionless.
With artificial intelligence making waves in the business world, chatbot is another bolt making a strong case for the existence of Artificial Intelligence. It is just another important evidence for the comfort that AI will bring to human life. Chatbots are one of the best conversational interfaces, and its simplicity outweighs all the other UIs.
