3 Ways How a Chatbot can Impact Your Business?

By Sami Ammous, Director and Sales Engineering Asia Pacific, Avaya Inc.

Sami Ammous, Director and Sales Engineering Asia Pacific, Avaya Inc.

From the imaginative film, Her, where Joaquin falls for his Siri-esque operating system, to Mark Zuckerberg’s very own Jarvis, advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning has changed the face of digital engagement. This, coupled with the proliferation of messaging applications, has led to the steady rise of chatbots as it continues making headwind into nearly every industry through consumer goods like Mattel, Hello!, Barbie and ride-sharing companies like Uber.

As more businesses invest in AI technologies and systems such as neural networks, induction algorithms, and real-world human trainers to improve bottom line, chatbots represent a very real digital disruption that could revolutionize industries, consumer interactions and individuals. So much so that by the end of 2017, IDC is predicting cognitive systems to be used in 30 percent of the top 100 banks in Asia to solve challenging problems and transform the FSI industry.

With the customer experience battlefield getting more competitive than ever, organizations will need to move at lightening-speed. The race is even more crucial as the millennial generation starts to demand self-service convenience and yet still want a personalized experience. Long established corporations with traditional customer service units are now unwillingly sucked in by the waves of change and must now either surf the changing tide or die.

“ Chatbots are poised to become the future standard of customer experience.”

Here are three ways in which chatbots can improve customer satisfaction while positively impacting your business bottom line.

1. Delivering a Personalized Experience: Through the use of artificial intelligence and natural language processing, chatbots can

improve customer service by automatically deciphering conversational inputs and identifying appropriate responses in real time. Chatbots are able to answer queries in a straightforward, conversational manner no matter the time, place or communication channel customers choose to engage with it, for a seamless experience.

Insights can also be collected to ascertain the reason for a customer call and a decision can be made whether the query can be automated or whether the query requires a customer service agent. This personalized service response greatly improves the customer experience, building loyalty, increased purchases from the organization, positive word of mouth reviews and ultimately resulting in an increased customer base.

2. Greater Insights into the Service Matrix : Businesses can also use data gathered from chatbots to get a comprehensive overview of customer interactions and reasons behind their queries. The information will provide insights into service areas the business is doing well in – fewer queries – as well as service areas where the business needs to invest additional resources – areas where there is a high number of queries.

Additionally, the types of queries customers are asking will also enable companies to efficiently allocate resources – to make improvements to the product, or to improve service agreements or communications around the product.

3. Building Additional Revenues Streams: Businesses can use chatbots to aggregate information from a wide range of customers across platforms, geolocation and languages enabling them to get a comprehensive overview on past and present interactions. Businesses can then understand pain points and customers demands, to not only drive deeper customer engagement, but also provide actionable insights in building additional revenue streams – from up selling services to customers to innovating new products.

With chatbots being a software-based AI algorithm, businesses can start developing or editing the algorithm to suit today’s customer expectations and demands – affording them with the flexibility and agility needed to keep up with the changing landscape and to develop smarter customer insights based on targeted data analytics while driving the business agenda.

Chatbots are poised to become the future standard of customer experience. By 2020, IDC is expecting the market for A.I. apps to reach $40 billion as businesses continue to invest in their emerging technology to improve customer service, businesses processes and operations. What businesses need to be wary of is the fact that the perfect usage of bots is not to replace customer service agent, but rather to enhance them and customer experience as a whole and use intelligence gathered into actionable insights to improve business efficiency.

We are still in the early stages of unlocking the full potential of chatbots. As the space matures over the next several years and best practices crystallize, we are confident that chatbots will play a defining role in shaping the future of business.