Why Chatbots Should Be Part of Your Big Data Plan in 2018

Two buzzwords worth knowing in tech: chatbots and big data. These technologies are constantly improving, and their intersection is one of the most exciting places to be in tech in 2018. Read on to find out why.

Big Data Is the Future

At this point, you’re probably familiar with big data ‘the steady and gigantic flow of information businesses collect and leverage to improve marketing and customer service.

Big data is getting really big. Experts are predicting that we’ll be sitting on 35 zettabytes of data by 2020. A zettabyte is roughly one billion terabytes. So what do we do with all that information? Build a better robot that intersects chatbots and big data.

Where Chatbots Come In

Chatbots are AI digital concierges for users. They answer questions, provide direction, and give users information. The biggest advantage of chatbots is that they’re automated and can handle mundane, repetitive, time-consuming tasks, leaving human workers free to do things only humans can do.

Chatbots provide a natural way for customers to interact with companies, says Harrison Brady, Communications Specialist for Frontier Communications. The conversational nature of chatbots helps create a more intimate atmosphere than an app can, and for many uses, it’s also more intuitive.

This means that the user can literally just ask their question and get an answer rather than filling out forms. It’s all about reducing friction as much as possible, says Harrison.

Leveraging Chatbots to Gather Big Data

You may have heard of the three V’s of big data: volume, velocity, and variety. Big data is built on these three pillars, and they’re the tools that differentiate big data from traditional research and information gathering. The more data your business can gather at greater speeds and across a range of areas, the better poised your business will be to leverage that data to gain a competitive advantage. As a result, you can target the right audience with the right information at the right time.

But how do you reach a critical mass of the three V’s? And how do you process it all into usable information? That’s where AI ‘namely chatbots ‘come in. Chatbots are a perfect collector of big data. They can handle large numbers of inquiries at once (volume), manage those inquiries, and categorize the information at much greater speed than humans (velocity), and gather a tremendous range of information (variety).

As bots collect and analyze data, they can also use that same data to provide better service and collect more data once those changes have been made. Take sentiment analysis, the practice of trying to determine a person‘s emotional reaction to something through text. As bots collect more data and successfully identify more sentiments, they become better at analyzing that information, and can therefore collect more data. It’s a cycle of constant improvement that’s only possible through machine learning and using big data.

Making the Most of Chatbots

Chatbots not only gather information but also offer valuable customer service at the same time. People are increasingly comfortable with online, AI-enabled bots to provide information and handle basic requests. It’s often more efficient for both the company and the customer to, say, book a hotel through a bot than it would be over the phone or with a data entry form. If the process goes smoothly, customer satisfaction increases ‘and satisfied customers are worth their weight in gold.

Chatbots can help you collect clear messages from your customers, in the parlance of your customer, says Evgeny Sorokin, Head of R&D at Devexperts. This is more than just basic user tracking on a website. The user expresses his wish or dissatisfaction in his natural language. The value of such data is very high.

As you begin implementing chatbots into your marketing and big data strategy, establish key performance indicators that will help you measure your success and identify areas that need improvement.

Chatbots and big data feed off each other in exciting ways, and it’ll be very interesting to see how these technologies evolve over the coming year. One thing is for sure, though: the future is looking mighty big.