Two new industries – healthcare and banking – are on the verge of becoming the next big users of chatbots. Why these industries?

Chatbots have been recently been useful for industries across the board, here’s a look at the Chatbots in different industries and how they are helping business.

E-commerce

1800Flowers was one of the first companies to use chatbots for direct sales. You can browse and buy your flowers without ever talking to a person or even visiting the site. There are multiple Chatbots for retail and e-commerce like ordering a Pizza to  shopping for clothes.

The press

Many applications like Wall Street Journal and CNN rely on chatbots to help users customize their news and offer daily updates. There are also applications, such as Line and Quartz, specifically designed to help you receive daily news via a chat interface.

Tourism

Chatbots such as KAYAK, SnapTravel, Skyscanner are used as personal travel assistants to get prices, reviews and keep abreast of the changing weather and other things that could affect your trip.

Although chatbots can not completely replace human customer service to solve problems, they can quickly become an invaluable tool for frequently asked questions or for performing basic tasks such as communication.

Chatbots in the health industry

Although you do not imagine asking a health question at a chatbot, note that health is one of the biggest growing chatbot markets in the world. You will not receive any prescription or diagnosis from a chatbot, but for common questions or even to locate patients or healthcare professionals, chatbots could easily find their way into a medical practice.

Chatbots in the banking sector

The bank via chatbots is infinitely faster for the bank and its customers. Why call your bank or connect to a mobile portal to find your balance when you can send a message on your bank’s chatbot with your request?

Chatbots in the banking sector are designed to handle everything from deposit checks to money transfer and processing of basic questions. They can even be used to avoid fraudulent transactions without having to spend more than 20 minutes on the phone.

The biggest obstacle with these types of chatbot is to make sure the servers need to be secure. For example, if a stolen phone is used, the thief can not talk to your bank’s chatbot, so there may be conversational security checks to prevent this from happening. Chatbots quickly become one of the most versatile tools in the digital age. When properly programmed, they can be valuable tools for almost every industry. If you spend a good part of your day answering the same questions to your customers, it might be worth investing in a conversational robot for your business.

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.

Tweet “The Future of Chatbots” and watch the results. Chatbots are the future of every business. They are everywhere. Very regularly, there is a new technology offering a new solution that pushes chatbots to be more useful and powerful.

Most discussions on chatbots are focused on Artificial Intelligence, and although it is good to build a chatbot, the chatbot is much more than a text conversation.

Imagine yourself entering a mall. You look right and see the man collection. You look left and see the woman’s collection. Now, close your eyes. Can you navigate to the child collection? Although you are familiar with this mall, it is unlikely that you can find your way!

Walking in a mall with your eyes closed is similar to most of the conversation interfaces that are found today. Everything you need is available, but without the proper guidance, discovering information is difficult. Let’s think about what exactly a Chatbot is.

You will probably answer either of these two answers: it is a conversation robot, or it is a computer program designed to simulate conversations with human users. In reality, a chatbot is an e-mail application, sometimes called a chat interface, designed to simplify complex predefined tasks. Chatbots are very useful with regard to simple activities, such as ordering meals or booking a taxi.

Chatbots are becoming more and more sophisticated, and the biggest companies such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft to Disney, Taco Bell and CNN are using them.

Let’s find the right way to build an effective Chatbot.

1. Find an identity for your Bot

A good robot must be carefully thought out. You have to ask a few questions:

Why should you build this robot?
Who is your target audience?
What problems will the robot solve?
How do you present the robot: as a person or a robot?
These are things you need to define precisely before being absorbed into your bot’s development process. Define basic user cases and stick to them.

Your robot must know his identity and understand what is expected of him. When a user will ask questions such as “What is your name? “,” How can you help me? “,” What questions can I ask you? “, The robot must be able to respond.

2. Create your feed

A structured conversation flow is the core of building effective and engaging conversation interfaces.

Want to build a chatbot for a grocery store? Such a robot should allow users to order food products online and even automate their meal preparation planning. The core of the conversation should focus on buying food. Sometimes people leave conversations, so you should always include the possibility of short conversations. Your robot should trigger specific feelings specific to each user, then create hooks to take advantage of these feelings and make the customer experience better.

The conversation with chatbots is unlimited and your bot will probably not understand everything your users will ask. Plan these situations without breaking the flow of conversation. Even if your robot can no longer provide answers, you must make the experience as good as possible.

It is necessary that the flow breaks when the chatbots can not answer any more, but no matter how. For example, by triggering a message such as “Please excuse us, we have no answer to your question”. You must inform your users that your robot understands and that it is there to help them. Your bots should always drive the conversation forward. They should consider suggesting things to help users discover new features. It is then necessary to use phrases or suggest buttons that can be operated to redirect clients to a location that could solve their problem instead of leaving them with a white screen blank.

3. Attach importance to content

The basis of the chatbots is above all the content. Obviously, you want your robot to be as human as possible. Users need to have experiences with them again. You should use a friendly and inclusive language when you talk to your users to make them think they are chatting with someone familiar and not with a machine.

Is your robot able to correct its own mistakes? When your users are unhappy with the experience, will your robot recognize it and will it work to direct the conversation in a different direction or will it continue on the script like a robot without emotion?

Some chatbots have planned content instead of offering an emotionally appropriate response. Chatbots are there to save you time. Otherwise, they have no more interest than a site or application.When designing content for your chatbots, you must create limits to the conversation either by giving your user buttons commands that are selected and easy to use. Do not let the conversation open to interpretation. Without borders, your users can break their experience with your bot. Also be sure to repeat the information so that users feel more comfortable knowing that you understand them.

For example, if the user requests the robot to remind him of a meeting at 2:00 pm, the bot will send him a confirmation message stating “I will send you a reminder for your meeting today at 2:00 pm”. The chatbot must be able to provide all the necessary information in the messaging application, making it a pleasant experience for the user.

4. Select the correct channels

Once you have developed and coded your bot, you can then take the most exciting step, that is, selecting the desired channels! Facebook Messenger, Slack, Telegram, WeChat .. You must select the platforms according to your target audience and the experience offered to the user. We are moving towards a time when robots have a strong impact on the customer experience. It’s time to create the future of chatbots

The 4 steps of creating a chatbot can seem long and tedious, but they are paramount.

Chatbots are computer programs capable of conversing via artificial intelligence and have long been used in different forms. They are most commonly used in automated customer services, such as faster response to customers and dramatically reducing their waiting time. Chatbots are increasingly sophisticated and use high-level artificial intelligence. Besides, artificial intelligence is so good that many Chatbots are indistinguishable from human beings when they hold a conversation.

Why are Chatbots so interesting?

The answer lies in their versatility. They can be used to perform a multitude of functions in the areas of customer service, customer interaction and many marketing functions. Chatbots have enjoyed a high popularity since Facebook has authorized branded Chatbots on its Messenger application. However, there are also Chatbots of information, the best known are Siri, Cortana or Echo of Amazon. These chatbots are designed to meet customer needs and provide them with information about their research and expectations.

Here is some information about Chatbots and how they boost your marketing strategy. Chatbots are useful for:

Client service

How many times have you ended up with Vivaldi in your ears for half an hour while waiting for a customer service representative to answer you on the phone? It must be admitted, companies very often have poor customer service and this is all the more alarming, because often the calls relate to simple complaints to solve and are solved in 5 minutes barely. It is from there precisely that Chatbots revolutionize customer services: a simple sending of chat makes it possible to obtain an instantaneous response. By integrating the bots into your customer service, you will greatly improve customer satisfaction.

Getting to Know Your Customers

Chatbots can play an important role by analyzing customer data and optimizing sales and marketing strategies. Some Chatbots can be formatted to monitor consumers’ purchasing behaviors and intentions so they can learn their preferences. This allows you to review your strategies and know the consumer’s favorite products.

Custom ads

Chatbots are also essential in terms of personalized announcements. Chatbots work as follows: When a client accesses your chat with a request from the customer service, the Chatbot hosts the client, gathers the information and then asks the client to wait. During this interval, the client name and other information can be used to generate custom advertisements. Custom ads are often useful in sales conversions.

The important point here is that if Chatbots can be of excellent help for employees especially as an alternative to the waiting call, they must look real. If the chatbot is of poor quality and the customer realizes that it is a robot with whom he converses, then this can harm the brand image.

Proactive interaction

Most brands use passive interaction with the customer, meaning that they only respond to customers who ask questions but do not bother to go to other customers. However it is very important for a brand to have feedback from its customers and therefore to take the initiative to contact them. Chatbots are very useful for this kind of interaction with customers. This support is necessary in order to check whether the customer needs assistance or not, the customer will be all the more satisfied as the brand takes care to question him about his experience. This will only reinforce the customer’s sense of closeness to the brand.

Optimize your media

Chatbots are perfect for communicating with customers and collecting opinions. This strategy is very useful, especially for the optimization of a website. Getting feedback from customers will help you improve your website and satisfy your customers. For example, if you have a page that receives a lot of organic traffic but nobody buys, you can ask your Chatbot to collect information about why people leave the page without buying.

Proximity to customers

By using the information Chatbots collect from customers, you will be able to create customized messages for each consumer, which will allow you to increase your conversion rates.

Be available 24 hours a day

Mobile messaging applications are the most widely used applications. On average, they have a retention rate twice as high as all other applications.By maintaining a presence on a messaging application via a Chatbot, you can save money while remaining available to your customers 24 hours a day.

The digital world of today prefers instant messaging to voice exchange. The appearance of chatbots and Artificial Intelligence is there to meet these needs but it is a challenge for companies and developers who must find the perfect tool to respond to these changes.

Identification of opportunity

As these technologies continue to evolve, it is important to discuss the major challenges developers face in creating chatbots and using AI for businesses.

Customer service, which is already a focus for many developers, is the most obvious opportunity for chatbots and artificial intelligence for businesses. The first step is to identify the major problem for most companies and, in this case, the opportunity is clear: to improve customer service in order to reduce the high cost associated with malfunctioning.According to some studies, poor customer service will encourage consumers to no longer buy on an e-commerce site while customers satisfied with customer service will remain loyal and will even recommend the site to their loved ones.

Customer service paradox

The high cost associated with poor customer service will attract the attention of businesses, but the use case becomes stronger when we stop a little to focus on the real challenges faced by different customer services and why this gives rise to uncovered expectations. In today’s globalized marketplace, customers expect 24/7 customer service, but they also want personalized service and clear, accurate answers.

The cost to provide this level of service to customers with live agents is prohibitive. This is why more and more companies are experimenting with chatbots to reduce their costs, but also to maintain a personal touch by automation and self-service.

Businesses know that they need chatbots and artificial intelligence for their customer service if they want to fully satisfy their customers.

The gap between experience and expected experience plays an important role in the extent to which client satisfaction ratings continue to be severe, particularly when existing systems are used. However, many customers still prefer to deal with agents online and are not receptive to automated solutions, creating a dilemma for some companies. The best is to integrate both and leave the choice to customers.

The major concern is that chatbots and the AI ​​have a long way to go before being widely adopted by companies. These tools will take a little time to be able to provide real added value to businesses and gain the trust of customers. For example, the accuracy of speech recognition reaches 90%, but is it good enough to assume perfect customer service?

The other problem raised by some companies is the fact that the chatbots replace the agents. However, customer services should be more likely to see chatbots as a complement to the work of agents on-line, enabling them to maximize their effectiveness.

 Which solution should be adopted by companies?

Businesses can not afford to wait for accurate 100% language recognition to integrate chatbots into their customer service. Client expectations are changing too fast to wait, and companies must be ready to try new support solutions to satisfy their customers. Especially since for many of them, improving their customer service is an emergency.

The key is therefore to accept certain risks until the refinement of these applications.

Over the past year, we have seen a meteoric rise in the number of Chatbots dominating the conversational user interface with multiple businesses jumping in the bandwagon to interact with their customers and prospects using Chatbots. From travel bookings to ordering a pizza, Chatbots have been capturing the world by a storm with the amount of potential it has to disseminate information in the touch of a button. These Chatbots act as your virtual assistant and provide you information instantaneously in the comfort of your messaging applications.

Recently, there have been several rumours on what’s in store for Chatbots on Facebook Messenger. According to Techcrunch, Facebook in their next conference will be announcing the launch of group Chatbots to Messenger and is in talks with various Chatbot developers on the launch. These group Chatbots can be added to group conversations to carry out various tasks and have a conversation collectively with a group.

This is quite an interesting update for businesses and can give them the headstart to develop Chabots that can serve multiple users at the same time.  For example, a group of basketball fans can add a Basketball Chatbot to their conversation and be updated on the news and score in real time through the Bot.

Group travel plans could also be arranged and paid for by all the members of the group using a travel Chabot and dinner reservations for the group can also be quicky made using a group Chatbot.

This also opens the door for entertainment bots and big entertainment giants could also make it possible for a group to watch content in the comfort of their Facebook Messenger. Movie nights with long distance friends could also be possible with a Movie Chatbot on Facebook Messenger.

A group Chatbot on Messenger also allows businesses to disseminate their information to more number of people and is expected to give rise to a more viral growth of Chatbots in the community.

Whether it is a group that loves hourly sports updates or random hourly giraffe facts to mildly annoy their friends, the potential for interaction with group Chatbots makes it a much more enjoyable and immersive experience for Messenger.

While Facebook has not confirmed these rumours, we can only wait till the next conference to find out for certain if they are making an entry into the Chatbot world.