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Will chatbots replace customer support?

Do Chatbots Guarantee Exponential Growth for Futuristic Enterprises
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Will robots take over the world?  

Will machines be superior to humans? 

Well, if it is science fiction, they definitely will. However, in the real world, chatbots just like robots and machines are there to help you reduce the repetitive work at hand. Your business will be able to automate processes while you could use your support teams for more productive and engaging experiences. Thanks to artificial intelligence, chatbots sprung up to simplify support. However, the big victory lies in how well these bots could be humanized.  

Sample this. With Chatlayer, an omnichannel enterprise solution from Sinch, chat or voice bots can be deployed within minutes and you do not even have to be a coding genius to do it yourself.  Chatlayer can help you automate over 75% of customer requests. Businesses love these bots because they deliver a consistent customer experience and customers love it because they get instant answers without waiting in a queue. Do we stop at that? No.  

Experts at Chatlayer say, “Chatlayer uses proprietary AI and NLP algorithms, which is written and maintained by a dedicated team of Ph.D. researchers. The result is a powerful and scalable AI and NLP engine that is both extremely flexible and highly reliable.” The NLP engine was benchmarked by external researchers and identified as best-of-breed. Hence, the best chatbot experience is that which gives you a human-feel because the feeling of connecting with a human to help you solve simple or complex problems is unique, satisfying and  effective. This means humans will always be at the core of communication. Bots can however simplify processes to help your business scale with precision.  

How to leverage voice and chatbots for different industries? 

Bots bring the endless possibility to increase the conversations amongst enterprise communication apps with the intent to enhance user experience. Via artificial intelligence and deep learning, bots can help in customer acquisition and effective engagement and can further be trained over a period of time with self-training algorithms to give a delightful experience to customers. Moreover, an open API developer platform will give enterprises the ability to build their own apps and chatbots. Gradually, this will create an entire ecosystem, a paradigm shift, allowing enterprises to create all the essential aspects of the work world around the app. But, humans will still be at the centre of every communication.  

How does Chatlayer voice and chatbot help your business? 

Automate >75% queries : Set aside repetitive tasks for the chatbot. Improve CX with instant answers to all your customer queries. 

Be where your customers are: Why choose one or two channels when you can connect with customers through SMS, messaging apps, Instagram, Teams, Slack, Facebook messenger and voice? Enable supercharged customer service across channels.  

Speak to each and all: Appeal to a global customer base when your chatbot is enabled to carry out intelligent conversations in 100+ languages. 

 Say bye-bye to coding: With Chatlayer, building a bot is simple. You don’t need to be a coding genius and you can choose to do it on your own or ask for assistance. 

 Drive conversions: Chatlayer has helped businesses scale conversions up to 120%. Our AI and NLP algorithms guarantee human-like conversations. 

Live agent: For complex queries, Chatlayer enables quick bot to human handoff which further goes to say that your customer support is an important resource. With a bot around, your support teams can focus on business objectives and outcomes rather than addressing repetitive queries. 

What’s more? Chatlayer bots are easy-to-use and suitable for every industry.  

AI Chatbots for enterprises  

New and exciting business communication channels are evolving to provide an improved customer experience and making life easier for consumers. Chatbots are found everywhere, be it a social-media channel, websites or mobile apps.  Use of chatbots is on the rise due to the enormous potential it can offer for business scalability and growth.  Based on an industry report, chatbots have become the roots of the modern corporate world, facilitating sales-representation activities and customer-care operations and increasing the annual savings of businesses. 

Chatbots and use-cases 

Chatbots are helping towards providing fundamental communications, e-commerce, travel plans etc. While still in its early stage, industry experts believe that the chatbot revolution will take off and gain mainstream prominence soon. Enterprises are beginning to invest in the bot economy with several brands already implementing bots for messaging.  

Let's delve into a chatbot's essential features.

1. Predictive Intelligence

A chatbot can observe customer behavior and past conversations, build a profile of customer preferences, and based on that; it should be able to frame adept and brainy responses and make the business more efficient, more innovative, and successful.

2. Small-talk interactions

The chatbot has an aptitude for small talk conversations. In addition, it should be able to handle simple questions and generate a more realistic human-like response to drive meaningful business results.

3. Advanced messaging

Advanced messaging gives chatbots the knack to send and receive images, documents or links, and files. Then, boost them with clickable buttons, showing users cards and tiles about links, shortcuts, and images.

4. Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning

It is the core of any modern chatbot. Also known as NLP, it employs deep learning to analyze people's input and generate a response. Response analysis and generation are learned through the deep learning algorithm.

5. Topics and intra-topic steps

When something is discussed about a certain item, say, beverage selection on a Food Chatbot and then progressing on to the next step like the payment option, this is defined as smoothly switching from topics to intra-topics.

6. Robust analytics

Analytics shows insights into how your users interact with your bot. With analytics, businesses can understand customers' pressing needs. Analytics is crucial in driving business. When done right, it drives higher sales, improves target marketing, and optimizes experiences.

7. Extended support

Chatbots should be able to supply important information and positive experience, creating a pleasant intimacy with customers.

Eventually, the chatbot should bring a hybrid experience of all these qualities and incorporate structured content and images into the conversation, making the experience more prosperous and more functional.

Chatbots and the e-commerce industry 

For the e-commerce business, chatbots improve customer personalization and engagement. Via smart and articulate assistance, bots attract purchases and increase the number of items in the user's shopping cart. As it reduces the activities of a customer service representative as well as sales associates, it gives a bigger opportunity for customer engagement and personalization. For example, Amazon’s chatbot called ‘Echo’ has completely transformed the paradigm of conversational commerce by straightforwardly answering shoppers’ queries.  

Chatbots and universal adoption   

Messaging apps could be a suitable platform to promote chatbots. Facebook which launched bots for its messenger platform in April 2016 gives the ability to developers to build bots for different types of content. Skype also rolled out its Skype Bot Platform a few years back and now claims over 30,000 developers have started building bots. 

Microsoft released ‘Tay’, a chatbot that discusses with Twitter users and was promoted as a new method of customer interaction. Unfortunately, the bot was suspended but in the words of leaders, Tay "has had a great influence on how Microsoft is approaching AI”. 

Even retail and travel-led companies from KLM Airlines to Taco Bell, Sephora, Whole Foods and Expedia, among others, have all rolled out chat-bots to let users order food, book flights, inquire about services and browse online stores.

To-do bots, reminder bots and poll bots give enterprises an edge over other traditional methods of communication. Similarly, meetings can now be easily scheduled by using zoom, Clara, x.ai and many more. Now, multiple meetings or conferences can be maintained with ease without any hassles. 

Bots could also help futuristic and ambitious enterprises in automating a lot of mundane tasks, weed out inefficiencies, strengthen human abilities, and help employees focus on what really matters in accomplishing their goals and enhancing job satisfaction. 

The future of chatbots 

Although chatbot technology is still at a nascent stage, there may be a paradigm shift from app to bots as has happened from desktop apps to browser apps and browser apps to mobile apps. 

The most anticipated course for the future will probably be the overlap of Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing and Bots Platform that will bring a richer user experience, ease of use and functionality. 

KPIs and metrics for evaluating conversational AI chatbots

Are you thinking about AI Chabot integration to your website to improve your customer care, enhance the availability of online support, or get to know your audience better? Companies all over the world have seen trends evolve and while user expectations have changed, performance metrics have remained quite constant.

Here are some of the top key metrics to monitor your chatbot’s performance.

Self-service resolution rate

Self-service is also known as the deflection rate. It measures the number of users who had a conversation with the AI chatbot and did not continue chatting with customer service agents. This can determine the number of chats that the AI handled on its own and that your customer service agents did not have to. This helps to free up your agents to handle other issues and shows a clear measurable automation rate of the smart AI chatbot.

Cost saved with conversational AI

Your average cost to solve one customer chat session is multiplied by the total number of self-served chats by the AI. This metric shows that cost savings come from using conversational marketing platforms without which this cost would have been spent on human resources to answer FAQs. This not only saves the agent’s time but is spent on solving more challenging and complex problems which in turn can boost efficiency.

Positive customer feedback

Customers can leave positive thumbs up feedback or negative thumbs down feedback. Based on the quality of interactions with the AI chatbot, the score is calculated. Positive feedback means a higher rating, which is clearly defined and measured directly on how customers have rated each solution. While most companies did not originally need AI to develop optical customer relationships or customer journeys, it has helped improve the entire process.

These different KPIs are sufficient to evaluate the ROI and value of your chatbot. Regular monitoring will help you improve the effectiveness of the solution. However, these KPIs should not be the only metrics taken into consideration when evaluating the overall impact of the solution. Companies are now correlating these metrics with their pre-chatbot indicators which can help generate more conversation than before. This can help improve your return on investment in the long run and bring in more customers along with allowing you to boost your brand loyalty and status.