Chatbots are Here to Stay, but What are They? Why Do We Need Them?
You’ve probably heard a lot about chatbots and read about the immense potential they have to help businesses and customers. There are also encouraging predictions about the money chatbots will help businesses save in the years to come.
What are these chatbots? Will they replace conventional methods of business communication processes? Where do you come face-to-face with a chatbot? And most of all, do we need them today?
What are Chatbots?
A chatbot is a portmanteau: a blend of two words — chat and robot. Chatbots are computer programs capable of having conversations with people using Artificial Intelligence.
Some people insist it’s a shortened term for chatterbot — coined by Michael Mauldin when he developed Julia, a chatterbot prototype in the 1990s. But the history of chatbots is older than this example. It has its roots in the Turing Test about four decades prior to Julia.
The Turing Test:
In the 1950s, Alan Turing, theoretical computer scientist, devised the Turing Test to test how similar a computer’s intelligence would be to human intelligence. You can find the first instance of chatbots to this test. 15 years later, experts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory created Eliza.
Eliza was among the earliest natural language processing programs with an ability to respond to questions based on user prompts. The story behind Eliza is read with awe even 30 years later.
There have been remarkable developments in the history of chatbot development — from Parry, to Jabberwacky, Alice, Smarterchild, and IBM Watson through the decades that followed.
Advancements in Natural Language Processing and a paradigm shift in business processes involving customer relation management have also had a direct impact on the development of chatbots. Chatbots have now grown to perform multiple tasks — solve customer’s problems, speed up routine tasks, augment human resources and save precious amount of money for organizations.
Who Uses Chatbots and Why Do We Need Them?
Chatbots are now an integral part of small, medium, and large business houses and are fast becoming the first point of contact for customers. The ease with which chatbots can be installed, trained, and operated by businesses gives a sense of delight to their service delivery teams, mainly operations, sales, and marketing.
Similarly, customers don’t have to wait endlessly to reach customer service executives and have their problems solved. Instead, they can switch on their computer or smartphone, login into the website and start a conversation with the chatbot.
Chatbots retain customers’ chat history, using it to understand what a specific customer has asked for and use it to predict appropriate responses for future conversations. This makes it possible for chatbots to suggest the best possible options for customers. Customers are happy for two things — they do not have to explain an earlier problem all over again. Additionally, this also saves time.
Conclusion
Chatbots have started a revolution in businesses in customer engagement. Additionally, they’ve also given customers a valuable avenue to solve their own problems. Users don’t have to wait for companies to begin customer service operations. Companies can tackle queries round-the-clock with a chatbot in their operations.
Yekaliva is a chatbot powered by advanced AI technology. It can provide 24/7 customer service, keeping each and every prior interaction in mind. It can provide highly accurate answers, weeding out irrelevant responses in the process.
If you’re looking for a chatbot to solve your customer service problems, check out Yekaliva, it just might be what you’re looking for.
