Integrating AI Chatbots: What you need to know?
Since childhood, we dream about a genie coming out of the bottle to serve us. Soon, it turns into a reality with the advancement of artificial intelligence that’s in full swing and AI chatbots that are taking a technological leap forward. In a huge wave of progress, chatbots use is not limited to imitating human conversation in various messaging apps, while it’s going far beyond providing a response to the customers.
The leading players tapping the chatbots potential to avail the immense opportunities offered by them. The chatbots are used for automating the routine tasks, improving response rate, personalizing communication, enriching customer service, streamlining shopping experience, increasing customer engagement, deriving business intelligence and targeting wider audience efficiently. The slew of benefits is gearing up the various industry verticals like- banking, education, hotel, healthcare, telecom operators, and pretty more to leverage the AI chatbot system to ace the marketplace competition.
The chatbot is a rewarding opportunity not just from the business perspective, but from the user’s point of view as well. A study has proven that quick and efficient access to information, fuelled up the conversation and social experiences, curiosity to explore chatbots and the funny tips from chatbot motivates the people to use chatbot. There is no wonder in the growing worth of the chatbot market at an incredible rate.
According to research, “The chatbot market size across all the industry verticals is expected to reach USD 3,172 million by 2021.”
Different types of the businesses integrate the chatbots based on the business need and the power of a chatbot they require. Broadly, the chatbots are divided into two groups:
· Simple command-based chatbots
The simple chatbots have become an obsolete trend as they work according to pre-programmed commands defined by the developers. They simply search the databank of replies and provide the response when the context of query matches any reply, else it responds with the message, “Sorry, I did not understand.”
· Smart machine learning based chatbots.
The smart chatbots are the trained bots that converse with the users based on natural language processing and get smarter as they continuously learn from the previous conversation. They record the user information, connect all the data points and analyze the data to make intelligent suggestions to the customers while interacting with them, which makes the users feel more personal.
Incorporating AI chatbots can cut down the cost, streamline interactions, and increase sales. Viewing the benefits of chatbots for the B2C industry, 80% of the businesses planning to integrate Chatbot by 2020 to increase the revenue. It’s a great time to dive in and build a chatbot.
Perhaps, developing a Chatbot is challenging, but staying attentive to every minute detail can help in building the chatbot that offers great value.
Here’s how you can develop and integrate the chatbot that lets your business win:
Ascertain the purpose of chatbot development
The first step towards bot development is understanding what the chatbot will do and what the problem it will solve by performing a list of functions. The vivid comprehension of the client goal for the chatbot enable the developers best design the conversation and come up with the functional aspects, which meets the long-term goals of the chatbot development.
No matter how much time it takes, but the developers should dedicate the time to understand and create the list of goals to serve the clients and the end purpose efficiently.
Design the conversation
Basically, the chatbot conversation comes in two categories- structured interactions and unstructured interactions. The structured interactions involve analyzing the logical information, and unstructured interactions include the text written in freestyle as the people converse with their friends and family.
When the developers start with script creation for the messages, they must ensure that it contains the positive sentiments that can turn, the user into a brand ambassador, address the negative comments tactically, use bespoke words that make people feel like chatting with a friend, and easy-to-understand for the users. The content blocks decide whether the users continue the conversation or not, and end up with a positive experience.
In addition to conversational content, the conversational user interface must be simple and intuitive because the users are inexperienced in conversing with the robot. Make the interface user-friendly by using the conventional buttons, keeping the conversation flow natural and task-oriented, and guiding the user conversation with actionable statements.
Read More: Technologies designing the personalized digital customer experience
Define the way of creation
There exist two ways of developing chatbot- using ready-madechatbot software and building a custom chatbot from scratch. Either approach has their own pros and cons. Let’s see in detail:
The businesses having short of time, budget, and coding expertise, going with the former option is best for them. There are many chatbot builder platforms like- Motion.ai, Smooch, andflowXO that encourages beginners or non-technical users to build and deploy the chatbots in a DIY way via drag-and-drop templates. After understanding the bot training modules, you can start creating chatbot conversation and uploading them to the cloud, to get the chatbot ready to work, which can deal with unstructured data and converse with the users.
When building a chatbot using code-based framework is the choice, creating a custom chatbot is feasible where the algorithm of actions are described, and a database of answers is developed. The chatbots with AI brains work efficiently in solving the complex problems as they decode the unstructured conversation in a split of second and respond the users instantly. There are many services such as Microsoft bot frameworks, Wit.ai, Api.ai, and IBM’s Watson leveraged for building a bot from scratch.
Create, host and launch
It doesn’t hold significance what method of creation you have chosen for the chatbot development when the chatbot functions flawlessly and brings winning results. But, before making the chatbot out, it’s necessary to double check how chatbot is performing as a single error won’t let the chatbot stand out and it may get lost in the crowd.
Also, when the bots are created on the top of the platforms, hosting becomes easier as no brainstorming is required for the server configuration. Additionally, the platforms provide the hosting services free till your bots get viral and thereafter other platforms would be ready to host your bot at no cost to get your hands dirty on their interface.
On the other hand, when the chatbot is created from the scratch, you have to decide where to host it: natively on your website, or on a hosted platform like- Facebook Messenger, Slack or Skype or Telegram. With hosted platforms, it’s an easier way to reach wide customer bases, and with a native chatbot, it’s difficult to make the prospects find your website to interact with the bot.
After successfully creating and hosting the chatbot, launch it on the market with the intelligent marketing strategy to draw the attention of target audience and ensure it brings more user into the fold.
Summing it up
The chatbots are no more the in-thing, they have become the future of the businesses. The businesses considering them as a beginning and like to wait until the chatbot industry explode are making a big mistake. To stay at the forefront of the innovation, the businesses should invest in the Chatbot development.
If you are interested? It’s great! But, the real challenge lies in chatbot development. Before kicking off the development, realizing the level of complexity and nature of the work the businesses want to accomplish through chatbots, and thereafter, the decision of building the chatbot from the scratch or using chatbot builder is all-important to inch the chatbot closer to your dream. Consider all the aspects to develop, deploy and implement the chatbot that’s preferred by the users.
