Many of us have already had conversations with robots, via Siri or Alexa. But have you heard of how chatbots revolutionize the customer experience?

Answering questions, solving customer problems, recommending products, chatbots can do many tasks. The use of email applications such as WhatsApp, Kik and Facebook Messenger has grown significantly in recent years, with email applications now surpassing social media. In addition, chatbots start-ups are developing and licensing their technology to large enterprises, which facilitates the development of chatbots. Chatbot technology is constantly improving, and can be deployed in all industries.

Each industry has a different use of chatbots. Take the examples of insurance, banking, retail and education.

Chatbots for the Insurance Industry

Navigating the world of insurance can be confusing for many customers, but chatbots mitigate this confusion and provide information, recommendations in a more accessible and user-friendly format. A handful of insurance companies today turn to the chatbots to automate their processes and remove red tape for an improved customer experience. Chatbots have also entered the world of small business insurance to facilitate processes by replacing physical insurance agents by chatbots using Facebook Messenger.

Chatbots for Banks

The growth of chatbots in the banking industry is great. A recent study revealed that in the near future, people will receive their paycheck via chatbot. The chatbot goes beyond the basic functions of mobile banking to maintain personalized discussions about each client’s finances. Chatbots can use predictive analytics and cognitive messages to perform tasks ranging from making payments to repaying credits, and even notifying customers of personalized savings opportunities.

Chatbots in the Retail world

From clothing stores to restaurants, chatbots are a revolution in the retail world. The use of email applications like Kik, Facebook Messenger, Snapchat, WhatsApp, which reveal excellent customer experiences. In fact, the biggest advantage of chatbots is not the mobile aspect, but personalization. Chatbots can store huge amounts of customer data and generate interactions, the chatbot is able to tailor its responses and recommendations to provide an enhanced customer experience. In a world of hyper-personalization, being able to create a personal relationship with customers is a great strength for business.

Chatbots in Tourism

Gone are the days when we spent days looking for recommendations in travel guides! Travel websites are showing lower utilization these days as more and more travelers move to mobile for travel planning. Chatbots can answer questions and provide advice and recommendations in real time. Instead of booking a hotel weeks in advance, users can now send a message to a chatbot to get information about the hotel and book a stay the day before they leave. Travelers become younger and more comfortable with technology, which means there is a huge demand for chatbots in the tourism industry.

Chatbots in Education

Nowadays, young people are connected to their smartphones continuously, which is why we are seeing an increase in the use of chatbots in higher education, where they are very adapted to this demography. As teenagers and students turn away from social media to mobile messages because of their more private and controlled nature, these young people are looking for ways to integrate ubiquitous technology into their learning. While chatbots are not widely used in education at the moment, there are multiple robots for teaching, and those that exist have incredibly succeeded in reaching students in a learning method that they understand and appreciate .

Launching a new digitized consumer service and sales solutions on a messaging platform can be an exciting but also tricky step especially if your business is new to the digital world and in sales solutions. But setting up chatbots to reduce the consumer’s effort and increasing the speed with which it gets the desired help is not as difficult as you might think.

Here are some things to keep in mind to make sure you create an efficient and easy-to-use bot:

1. Build your bot from conversations with your consumers rather than from the most frequently asked questions (FAQs)

Your chatbot is created to hold conversations with your consumers and not to provide closed responses. Articles about FAQs and basic knowledge are written in order to generate a detailed and unique message to a large audience and this is a problem. Effectively, conversations that you can have with a chatbot should look like benefits to texting that you send rather than to a Wikipedia page. The establishment of an active dialogue between the Internet user and the chatbot must follow the specific route of the consumer with the least effort for the consumer and the improvement of the offer of services and solutions proposed by the chatbot. While it is important to accompany chatbot responses with content such as product pages or database media, the majority of your chatbot responses should be based on actual conversations your real agents might have with your consumers. So you have to start creating your chatbot with transcripts of live conversations, voice calls and correspondence by mail.

2. Perfection is the enemy of good

The content of answers usually comes from one of these three sources: from the company with internal articles on basic knowledge and company policy, from the actual agent with transcripts of conversations chats or calls or Well the last source is that of the consumer with conso returns or post-purchase surveys. There is a strong tendency today to create chatbots thanks to the knowledge of the company and this is a mistake. It is preferable to rely on analyzes of agents and conversations that have already existed and so leave the minimum space to the source of the company if we want to create an effective bot that interacts correctly with consumers. It is necessary to leave the learning part of the machine to be done thanks to the data collected by real agents. The more conversations your virtual assistant will have, the easier it will be to make quick changes that will improve the accuracy of the bot’s responses, which will reduce time for consumers and thus increase consumer satisfaction.

3. Be agile

In the call center, supervisors train new agents every day to speak as if it were their first call in order to ensure quality and effectiveness in the answers offered. You must follow the same approach with a chatbot. Once the bot is launched, it is necessary to pay attention to the questions or complaints most often received and to study which conversations receive the most negative feedback. It may be worthwhile to have a subject expert in your company accompanied by a digital consumer service expert to quickly coordinate updates and improvements, adding adjustments to the answers for common questions, and approving Recommended by the machine.

4. When can you expect a return on investment after launching a bot?

The period of profitability is often dependent on the price model you have chosen for your program. Traditional software costs, maintenance costs and professional services costs can take months or even years to be profitable, depending on the bot’s launch framework and the rate of convinced consumers. However, payment models for performance are highly coveted by companies (contacts, sales conversion, qualified management etc.) because they mean no extra costs and a return on investment from the first conversations with the bot.

5. Be a Risk Taker

When your chatbot is live and actively helps your business to have interesting conversations and a smart, intelligent service, there is still one small thing to do about opening quick access to tools like your website Or mobile application. Many conversations that arrive on the bot allow to have data and the intelligence of the way of the consumer makes it possible to improve the solutions proposed by the bot. Finally, it is necessary to create a bot easy to access, intelligent and conversational. It is true that consumers are true followers of this new means of communication since they are fond of contacts like the bot due to its ease of use and efficiency.

The advancement of digital marketing is intriguing. In the years 2000, it was dominated by the SEM and the SEO. In the early years of 2010, this has migrated to social networks. And, more recently, we have seen mobile marketing appear with the advent of applications.

As we all know, we are now in the era of messaging. And of course, marketing and the interface with the consumer take advantage of this new era in the form of Chatbots. The behavior of the buyer was marked by a shift from social networks to messaging platforms such as Facebook Messenger, Apple iMessage, Slack, and so on. As a result, technology companies are now building Chatbots on these platforms to provide smarter, more engaging channels, but also to deliver more efficient customer services. Needless to say, they are now an integral part of business marketing strategies.

Whatever the type of industry, brands today benefit from Chatbots and these are an integral part of their CRM systems to manage loyalty programs, repair forums, product launches, and more. The list is endless. Chatbots offer a real commitment beyond clicks and views. With personalized conversation, they help brands inform customers directly. Overall, they provide a strong personalizing power of the brand towards consumers.

Sephora has created a robot on Kik and shares beauty tips with teenagers. The robot first identifies the teenager’s focus: eyes, skin, hair, nails, and so on. – and only offers relevant products, beauty tips and tutorials. Facebook Messenger, which now has nearly 11,000 bots, has become the first place for companies to develop robots. This can be a good place to start when looking at the development of Chatbots embedded in Messenger applications.

Chatbots are optimized for mobiles. So you do not have to solve the additional problem of optimizing them on the mobile. More importantly, they are easy to implement.

By integrating Chatbots on all social media platforms and interconnecting them, marketers can update brand messages across all platforms. This ensures you have a coherent brand voice. As you note, there are few disadvantages, given the consumer’s dependence on technology.

The future of Chatbots is still a curiosity, as technology evolves and the robots themselves become “smarter” and more “human” in their analyzes and responses and we can’t wait to see how brands utilise this in the best of their ability.