Chatbots are (not) born equal
While chatbots have been around for a while, they are not all born equal. Digital Conversational Agents, or Chatbot refers to a broad range of technology platforms that allow people and customers to engage through a conversational channel with the platform in order to answer specific questions, provide information or accomplish tasks.
In order to simplify things for our readers, (a more detailed description is included in our article “What is a Chatbot”), I am going to categorize Chatbots into two groups characterized by “complexity”.
Let’s begin by taking a look at the “Simple chatbots”;
Most of the popular Chatbots lie in this category, they mainly used by brands as a “marketing” stunt, and utilized for casual use, to deliver and entertaining brand experience for customers, providing basic information, with minimal risk to the brand image as possible, no one really thought about abandoning their Apple iPhone, or Amazon Alex device when they gave an irrelevant answer, these are examples of unbound chatbots that have no specific context to operate within. More commonly known as virtual assistants.
In a competitive enterprise culture, chatbots need to be way more smarter in order to be of a benefit to the enterprise goals, meaning, they need to be able to integrate with enterprise systems (CRM, KBs, Billing Systems, etc .. ) leverage big data, use powerful AI algorithms to help customer answer questions, resolve issues, or conduct tasks.
Intelligent Chatbots: Answering questions, interacting with customers, resolving issues and conducting transactions are all tasks that need to be performed by enterprise chatbots, their ability, effectiveness and ROI are based on their ability to perform on scale that meets the effectiveness of the company’s best customer service agent, or customer experience agent. The fact that these chatbots that are constrained to certain expertise field or “bounded” to a specific field, Telecommunication, Insurance, Pharmaceutical, Banking, Storage, etc .. ) ensures they can provide the service they are created to provide, since the risk for the brand for a client or user not receiving the support they need, or receiving wrong information on an insurance policy or a medication interaction.
There is a diversity of channels that chatbots can be deployed on, from web, mobile, social, SMS, email, and many others, where the can be deployed in a Reactive mode, where they sit on the channel and listen until a user or customer asks for support or click on the Chatbot icon/Menu button (or messing app) , or they can work in an ProActive mode, where they monitor users interaction with pages, intentions, and offer specific help when they detect the user may need assistance or initiates an exit intent, this model has helped many businesses reduce their bounce rates and increase conversions by engaging visitors who weren’t able to find answers or locate the information they need from the first visit or page of the website.
botique.ai is an enterprise platform that automates chat interactions using proprietary Conversational AI. Our QnA Digital Agent platform provides a coding free — 3 steps (40 seconds) Digital Agent, by importing business information from websites and different resources, that can be published on websites or other social channels to increase user engagement, conversions and leads, and reduce customer service costs.
