Chatbot Development - An Important Part Of Enterprise Mobility

Chatbots have become a huge phenomena today. Supported by Artificial Intelligence(AI) technology, these bots take the customer support services a step higher. Due to a large gamut of benefits which these offer, most of the brands, from small to big, have resorted to chatbot development. These have become the object of massive media coverage as well. The fact that these initiate customised conversational flow between a brand and its consumers, makes them highly relevant. 

Most of the big organisations from around the world are realising the value of a bot and how it can amp up user engagement rates. Since these are easy to embed within messaging applications, developers find them much easier to create.    

Supported with Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology and language-based rules, bots are usually friendly and highly interactive. They offer 24*7 support, that too, in real-time. Here are some of the points which show why bot services must be a part of enterprise mobility solutions for companies today:

•           Better Customer Service: Human representatives and personnels may not always be accurate in their responses or available for resolving customer queries. Support staffs might not be ready to answer clients, especially during holidays or weekends. In order to avoid such cases, brands are developing bots. These offer the right kind of support which a customer needs during unusual hours, such as midnight or wee hours of the morning. An AI bot can provide precise responses to customers, guide them, influence their purchasing decisions, suggest new product catalogues to them and even provide them real-time, effective and quick solutions. 
•           Improved Brand Value: Although a bot's functionality is often restricted to conversations only, however, it plays a prominent role in improving a brand's market value. The fact that a bot engages into personalised and one-on-one conversations with audiences, makes it really effective and friendly. Audiences are able to connect with the brand a lot more. This makes them develop a strong relation with the brand. Automatically, the brand image and the position improves too in the process.
•       Friendly Pocket Companions: These AI supported bots are friendly pocket companions. Built within popular mobile messaging apps, these serve as perfect digital guides for people. Those interested to seek answers related to different company products, events or new services, can simply take out their smartphones, access the app and start talking to a bot, to get all their answers. It is that simple and accessible. 

 

Owing to the above mentioned factors and many more, companies are focusing on chatbot services. Brand of various sizes are exploring the full possibilities of bots, for an enhanced customer support system and improved enterprise mobility solutions.

Chatbot Services - Helping Brands Amp Up Their Customer Support

Today, chatbots, integrated within messaging apps, such as Facebook Messenger, are much more than just a feature for marketers to explore. In-app bots are fast turning into pocket companions. For instance, the all new Facebook chatbots are created to strengthen the interaction between brands and consumers. With their ability to engage into personalised, authentic and real-time conversations with humans, chatbots are becoming a preferred tool for most companies. Today, chatbot services form an integral part of enterprise mobility solutions for many brands.   

Bots have created a stir in the market and quite understandably so. Supported by Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology, bots can be trained to respond to human emotions. These bots are programmed with Natural Language Processing (NLP), which helps them to answer various human queries. This steps up the quality of customer support services. Chatbot development is fast becoming a go-to-market solution for companies of different sizes. If you are interested to develop a bot for your company, make sure to train and program it well. Your bot can build your brand by:

• Instantly Responding to Customer Queries: Bots can serve as a great customer service tool which allows the customers to choose product options, place and track orders. This helps the customers and troubleshoots all their problems within few minutes.

• Personalising Content Experience: Nothing can be more attractive than helping your customers with personalised contents. For example, the grocery store Whole Foods, use bots which provide personalised contents like recipes. They use bots as an extension of their content marketing solution. Tailor-made contents can automatically drive audience engagement a lot more than standardised content.

• Streamlining Product Lists: Often, customers might not like wasting time browsing through a mobile site to select a product. Instead, if you use a bot which helps the customers choose product categories by listing items, your customers will be able to make their purchasing decisions faster. This way, not only the bot helps the customers with product suggestions, it also gathers customer preferences and accordingly positions each product in the market.

• Cultivating Connections Through Entertainment: Bots can also be used for engaging customers into interesting games. This enhances customer attention. Many companies also use bots to roll out exciting offers and contests for the audiences. This drives deep user engagement. 

Improving brand awareness through bots is becoming a growing trend nowadays. The smartest strategy here is to explore the full potential of a bot so that your brand is able to strengthen relationships with your customers.

Understanding Natural Language Processing To Build Better Bots

Science fiction, for all those who love them, has set our standards for technology pretty high. Stanley Kubrick's box-office smash hit “2001: A Space Odyssey” was made way back in 1968 but can be safely called the prototype of modern day artificial intelligence. He was certainly way ahead of his time and even today our expectations from AI and the reality has a big gap. Let us find out how a computer is made to 'understand' human language, which in turn becomes the base of all AI platforms.

Now, you may think why is it so important for chatbot development? Once we cover the basics of NLP, it becomes easier to design bots more efficiently by defining the limits of its learning.

NLP - Where It All Started

Alan Turing, in his famous experiment from the 1950s marked the beginning of this journey by defining standard parameters to call any machine, 'smart'. Through the 1970-80s, coding came into picture and linguistics experts collaborated with coders to produce software like SHRDLU, CHAT-80 etc. 

However, the biggest challenge was to grammatically interpret a sentence.

Machine learning, came next in the 1990s, which was the result of an increase in statistical research in NLP. Machine learning is the most popular model today and is based on probability. This essentially means that the more data one feeds, the better the model becomes.

So, where has so many years of advancement lead us to? The results are amazing today and we can accurately process sentences with up to 98% accuracy.

Where We Stand Today? 

Although, it is developing at a staggering speed, NLP and AI face two main problems today. Let us throw some light on what these are and how are they affecting chatbot services. 

1. Multiple ways of expressing

“What is the temperature today?”, “How cold is it outside?”, “Is it warm enough to go out today?” and the list is endless. There could a million ways of expressing the same thing, in this case a weather query. From the point of view of NLP, it becomes tedious and needs creating associations between the different words.

2. Words or sentences are contextual

Isn't this the basis of language? The same word may mean different things in different contexts or even different in the same context for two different individuals. We, as humans sometimes fail to grasp the contextual meaning of words and sentences and here we are, trying to teach a machine the same. 

In essence, AI cannot be improved solely through a probabilistic model and needs more contribution from the users themselves. A better understanding of NLP can help chatbot developers to produce bots that are truly like the AI from sci-fi movies we love so much. 

How Can Chatbot Development Outsourcing Help The Travel Industry?

Like all other forms of modern economy, travel is also changing! Gone are the days when travellers would go through the painful drill of going to travel agents/experts and find out the best deals. In today's digitised world, everything happens with a click and chatbots are changing the way it is all happening.

Chatbot development outsourcing, can be a boon for travel companies and so many of them have already embraced this change. In this blog, we will try and cover the different uses of bots in this industry.

Important uses of chatbots in the travel industry

There is not one but four distinct areas in which bots can benefit the travel business. It is almost like bot technology has it's own niche which it is capable of serving fully (fully automated and glitch-free). According to Sabre, the broad areas of functionality are-

1. Booking help-desk- We already know several services like Skyscanner, Booking.com etc. which become your online travel agent and perform all necessary operations needed while reservations. All of them have Messenger integrated bots which help in reservations via different social media websites. Bots are more convenient because of their simplicity and conversational nature and often more effective in retaining clients better than websites/apps.

2. Better customer care and disruption management- This is particularly a company-centric benefit where companies can avoid negative feedback from being public. Chatbots provide a personal platform for grievance redressal. From the customers' point of view, bots rule out the tedious ordeal of finding out phone numbers or mail Ids for lodging complaints or get clarifications.

3. OTA- Chatbot development companies can be specifically told to work on the NLP aspect of the bot to suit individual company requirements. People often use complex phrases like, “romantic hill vacation” and a proper understanding of the geography, linguistics and other preferences of the clientèle can help the bot give the best results.

4. Local guide- The travellers today prefer seeing a place like a local would. Chatbots act as local guides by showing recommendations, becoming language buddies etc. They are gathering local information based on device location and 'speaking' the way they would to a localite!

In order to cater to this growing global clientèle, travel companies are making necessary changes and expanding. A study by Expedia, it is confirmed that while planning a trip, people visit up to 38 websites (along with the word-of-mouth technique) and if you have done this too, you will agree how tedious it is! Utilizing the power of bot technology, it is now possible to bring all these websites on to one platform and simplify the whole process as well.