Chatbots and their Roles in Multiple Industries for Business

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.

 

Steps To Creating An E-Commerce Chatbot

Have you ever talked to a chatbot without getting the appropriate answer?

In this article, we will give you some guidelines that you can follow when creating your chatbot. This will help your customers keep their cool if the Chatbot doesn’t understand what the users are saying.  When you create your chatbot, you need to know your customers. Is your core customer a 50-year-old woman who does not use the new technology so much? Ok, in this case your bot must also be 50 years old.

A good menu = a happy customer

When your customer starts chatting with your e-commerce chatbot, it’s because he is interested in your products. To help a client avoid getting stuck in a conversation with your chatbot, your persistent menu needs to be well thought out.

Having things like “Categories”, “Opening Hours” and “Getting to the Site” will definitely help your customer find what he or she is looking for. You might think that “Going to the site” is weird, but you have to accept that your chatbot is not perfect, it does not understand everything and can hang. The redirection of your customer on your website can therefore be a good way to display your products, for example.

Today’s chatbots are not human

Your chatbot will never be human, or at least for now. The experience of users improves over time and the technology of the bots never ceases to exceed to understand the human language. When your robot does not understand something, it should respond with something like “I did not understand what you’re saying. Do not hesitate to visit our website www.yourwebsite.com or if you want to chat with a real person, I can easily do it “.

Answering something like “ok” when your chatbot does not understand is to be avoided, this will be experienced as a bad experience for the client.

Today, you should always compare your chatbot to a machine that can only follow a set of rules. It can not be human, so do not try to make it human. In the beginning, your robot may not understand a few simple conversations, you have to train your bot and develop it, it is the best technology to understand your customers.

Creating a good chatbot is not easy! But the teams at Oh my Bot! are always here to help you!

How Do Chatbots Improve Customer Experience In Different Industries?

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 .

Elements To Take Into Account While Creating a Chatbot

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.

Chatbots and the Future of Marketing

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.

4 Steps to Create the Perfect Chatbot for your Business

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.

 

How Chatbots Can Boost Your Business

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.

Chatbots, Artificial Intelligence & Messaging: Opportunities For Your Business

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.

Facebook to Launch Group Chatbots on Messenger

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.

WeChat And The Origin Of Chatbots

Recently, there has been a lot of talk about ChatBots that are increasingly replacing applications. It’s time to have a lookback at how the ChatBots phenomenon started.

This phenomenon of ChatBots started in China with WeChat. What is surprising is that WeChat has a bot platform for 4 years now! We’re talking about Facebook Messenger bots, Slack bots but WeChat started the gear! Which means that we already have matter on the subject and that we can already know what mistakes not to commit.

But how were ChatBots born in China? In China, social media is much better integrated into consumer shopping experiences.

Compared to Europe or the United States, the Chinese consumer’s psychology is peculiar. Chinese consumers are wary of the products manufactured in their country because of the various scandals that have erupted in recent years about safety standards. Beware, the Chinese consumer feels reassured when asking questions to other consumers or the manufacturer directly, his intention to buy is therefore influenced by the answers he will get.

It is from these thousands of consumers, who need to ask questions to be reassured, that were born the ChatBots in China, well before those developed by Facebook and others.

WeChat ChatBots

Since the launch of the application in 2009, WeChat has conquered many users. Even if we leave the bots aside, WeChat is a great social network.

In the third quarter of 2016, WeChat had more than 705 million users. In China, more than 70% of smartphone holders use WeChat. This can be compared to the penetration rate of 67% of Facebook for US Internet users.

Thanks to its platform, WeChat has made easy the development of ChatBots simple and not very intelligent. ChatBots have become one of the preferred means of customer service, because they have reduced the time spent interacting online with consumers. However, this does not mean that you can not develop a smart bot on WeChat.

Chumen Wenwen, a company founded in 2012 by a former Google employee, has built a very sophisticated bot that runs on WeChat and other spaces. The company has combined voice recognition, AI and WeChat platform in a package that provides information to users. By connecting to third-party APIs, the app can answer questions about what’s around you, including movies, restaurants, and more. Even before creating their own website, some entrepreneurs started by creating their WeChat account.

Types of ChatBots on WeChat

There are two types of ChatBots accounts; There are subscription accounts and service accounts. These two types of accounts have been launched as a ChatBot but have been modified to rely less on artificial intelligence. The main users of subscription accounts are content publishers, they automatically receive, once a day, the latest published articles. These users click on an item to be viewed in a built-in WeChat browser. This type of account is for people who want to follow a trademark or influence on WeChat.

For companies, this creates a gold mine of data such as the number of users who have seen this or that article. From these data, companies and brands can then target their audience for a certain type of content. Through A / B testing, marketers can identify effective ways to structure their content and in what format to publish it.

Customer services for brands and companies subscribing to WeChat use service accounts to interact with their customers via the application. Fashion brands, airlines, restaurants, hotels or e-shops often use ChatBots for their online interactions.

On WeChat service accounts, all types of messages (information on latest promotions and events, location of nearest restaurants, updates on airline tickets) can be sent to users. In addition to the simple interactions of subscription accounts, consumers can find themselves engaged in more complex conversations with bots. Nevertheless, developers and brands recognize that at the moment, their robots are unable to handle all types of customer requests. Therefore, these accounts must be supported by employees.

How do ChatBots work?

The WeChat bot platform is simple. WeChat robots work by identifying keywords in text strings and using manually coded rules for how to answer a question. Bots also work with automatic learning, meaning that the more users interact with brands and companies via ChatBots, the more intelligent ChatBots become and learn to understand user requests.

Although robots learn to understand these requests, they continue to send pre-made replies. Unfortunately, they can not yet give very complex answers to specific questions. The bots of brands and companies on WeChat are basically there to provide a simple customer service but also to entertain the users.

What is the future of WeChat ChatBots?

WeChat is installed on most smartphones in China, and the Chinese are completely immersed in a world of virtual communication and technological evolution. With each new version, the functionality of the WeChat application improves and the ChatBots transform the interactions with the consumers, the interactions are thus more and more sophisticated.

WeChat users understand that they can not only have a nice chat with ChatBots, but they can also get valuable advice from these bots. Companies that have official accounts on WeChat know that ChatBots help them to extend their customer service teams more efficiently and allow them to respond to a greater number of requests, which corresponds very well to their business models.

In the near future, for consumers, ChatBots will no longer be a novelty and will no longer be the object of entertainment but will rather be an omnipresence. For businesses, ChatBots will be an integral part of their business.

However, as on Facebook Messenger and other Western platforms, in most cases, WeChat robots do not use a true conversational strategy. WeChat also has buttons that allow users to interact without too much chat. For now, the race is still open, to see who can develop a ChatBot that is more than a website on Facebook Messenger Conversation UI.