What is a Chatbot?

Published in

Floatbot

5 min readMar 5, 2020

Note: Original article is published here:What is a Chatbot?

We are halfway through of completing this year, but before it ends we don’t want you to turn a blind eye to a technology that is significantly going to boom. According to Gartner, chatbots will power 85% of all customer service interactions by the year 2020.

Yes, you read it right. 85% of customer service by 2020, and we are mid-2018.

This data gives us 2 important details.

That the customers are more likely to choose a chatbot to solve their queries.
Early adopting this technology can be an ideal deal for you.

But what is a chatbot? Why is it important? How does it work? Why is it so popular? Which company can use a chatbot? These questions will encounter when you think of considering a chatbot.

Put these thoughts out of your mind, you’ve got our back! This article will help you understand what is a chatbot and various other parameters surrounding it. Let us start by knowing, what is a chatbot?

Chatbot Definition

A chatbot is a computer program designed to simulate a conversation with human users, especially over the Internet.

Catching the main keywords from this definition: {{A computer program}}, {{conversation}}, and {{Internet}}.

A chatbot interacts with your customers via internet in form of messages. Here the chatbot doesn’t set any command, it simply answers users query.

Here the question arises of what can a chatbot do?

In basic terminology, a chatbot can automate tasks. The task can be further divided into other segments like customer support, surveys, lead generation, appointment scheduling, and much more.

Here are a few cases in which chatbots have successfully helped many businesses.

Answering to FAQs & give information about the product or service.
Helped users to book appointments, make payments, address a problem, and help them to plan their trips.
Chatbots were able to answer multiple queries at one go. Marketers consider this as the biggest advantage.
From the above cases, it proves that chatbots definitely decreases the time of tasks and helps to improve the overall performance. It has been estimated that brands can save upto 60% of their time using chatbots.

Why Chatbot is Important?

With doing all these activities here are a few reasons why it has become the talk of the town, and why were industries quick enough to adopt it?

Chatbot offer brands to be available on platforms where their audience spent most of their time i.e Social platform.Your chatbot can be integrated on platforms, which help you to be in the same room with your customers. Making it easy for them to reach you.

These integrations also target a lot of sales. It acts as your online sale representative to a large number of audience available online. Ready to talk about your product and promote your offers.

Chatbots have played integral role for many type of businesses till now. If you are thinking of having a chatbot for your business then have a look at its importance and benefits.

Chatbots deliver plenty of benefits to a business. Apart of saving time and resources bots can also understand intents of any query and therefore gives appropriate response. Bots also increase the accessibility of the products or services providing all the information required on all the platforms.

List of benefits one can get with the chatbot implementation

Online assistance to customers on all the platforms 24 X 7.
Live chat communications when the bot is not able to reply.
Ease to customers in navigating the required information about the business.
Marketing made easy with the broadcasts send via chatbots.
Business can provide always available support on all the platforms.
Customer engagement increases by 10X with the quick responses.
Business can get a lot of insights on how they can improve their services by monitoring customer’s activities.
Chatbots have also proven one of the best lead generation way to get to your customers.
Chatbots are also capable in detecting each and every user and thereby personalizing the response for each.
Last but not the least, all the benefits ultimately leads to increase in savings.

Bots give us the most easy and flexible means of communication. Getting benefits of such a technology is worth the time and efforts on a long run.

Chatbots are of two types:

Workflow based or Simple chatbot

Workflow based chatbots are flow driven, menu based. You set the flows and information related to your product and when the customer asks about a particular information that flow will be trigger automatically.

AI or Intelligent chatbot

Intelligent bots are capable of recognizing user queries with the help of artificial intelligence. These bots recognize keywords from the user queries and respond to the user accordingly. NLP and other machine learning tools help the chatbot to communicate like humans.

For example:

If the user asks to schedule an appointment, then the bot will trigger the actions related to appointments.

The below imagine explains what an Intelligent bot is made up of?

How does Chatbot Work?

Chatbots are capable of answering to various user queries depending upon the functionality. Also guides users on getting appropriate information anytime they require. AI-based bots can detect the user intents from the query, evaluates and responds accordingly.

For example, if the user asks the bot to “Book flight to Dubai on 5th July”, then the bot can detect the destination and date from the query.

While in the workflow based chatbots, bot guides users with the help of flows. Flows can be internally connected or redirecting to a URL(depends upon the type of bot and requirements).

How to build a chatbot?

Developing a chatbot with the help of coding is challenging because you will have to get the right resources in place, get professional in the field of AI and technology to develop a chatbot development platform. But as technology is booming the tech geeks couldn’t hold themselves back from making a platform for brands to use a chatbot in the easiest way possible.

Chatbot development platforms help you to easily create a chatbot without any coding knowledge. Like on Floatbot, you can create your own chatbot without any hassle. Here is a complete guide for you on how to make a chatbot from scratch?

Want to see how an AI-powered chatbot works?

Here is a demo for you: https://floatbot.ai/hostedbot/?botId=5aa67cdd42d4e2023c65e8da

If you have any query, do let us know. Write to us at connect@floatbot.ai