Businesses often ignore customer inquiries and nearly 90% of queries did not get responses and made the users wait for long hours. According to Twilio Global Study, claimed that 66% of people prefer to talk to the brands on messaging platforms.
Customers are always looking for a long-term relationship with a business. Most of the businesses are adopting the latest trends in technology and chatbots are no exception. It is affecting the enterprise world, be it marketing and sales, customer service or healthcare.
According to Blake Morgan, a writer at Forbes view chatbots as the future of customer experience and have the power to replace search window and apps in the future.
Chatbots when used correctly can make a remarkable difference to the buyer’s journey and save some cost on hiring customer sales representatives. Rather than asking customers to send an email for queries, chatbots can answer the question in real time without any delay. The use of chatbots is expected to be incorporated for multi-purposes and will be adopted largely by many other industries in the future.
With so much to say, let’s have a look at how chatbots will be trending in 2018. Let’s get started.
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Mobile Apps will go Obsolete
Mobile apps have been popular among users of all kind whether it be business executive or a consumer. However, the innovation of mobile apps is declining day by day. It does not mean that mobile apps will vanish completely, but it would demand the best of the best.
According prediction by the Gartner, chatbots will become the face of the Artificial Intelligence and transform the way apps are built.
Chatbots are quite popular to reach customers and approximately 75% of smartphone users use some kind of messaging apps like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, IMO and WeChat. The majority of companies have already developed their chatbots on messenger. Some of the popular ones are Hyatt (hotel Chatbot), HealthTap (Health Chatbot) and CNN news cchatbot.
The end users will have collaborative and efficient chatbots to support seamless communication and interaction. Chatbots will streamline the organization’s workload and offer a pleasant customer experience as compared to mobile apps.
Will Help Gain Customer Insights
You may have interacted with various chatbots that would ease your purchase journey. Indeed, it can be helpful in improving marketing funnel at any stage. For instance, chatbots can store the customer questions, which makes it helpful to analyze their preferences and choices. This would help the companies to offer them products that interest them the most.
Gaining customers insights would be helpful especially in retail business. Tracking the customers’ pattern you can identify which products or services are preferred and manage the inventory accordingly.
Imagine a customer visits an online store, search for a particular product and could not find it. The reason is that it was never there and the retailer was never interested in displaying the product. When the customer asks the chatbots about the particular product, the answer would be a straight no. However, the chatbot has gained the necessary information about the product as well as customer. The data will be helpful in gaining insights on what customers are looking for and arrange for it.
Deep Learning and AI
According to Gartner, Artificial Intelligence will be around 85% of customer relationship by 2020. Chatbots are getting smarter day by day, and now it is impossible to distinguish it from a human. It can run millions of algorithms simultaneously in real time and devise a strategy to turn every prospect into a lead.
In today’s complex and split online world, it will take some trial and error before AI chatbots master the slenderness of polite chat. Chatbots AI in business applications and customer services are widely popular and the ability to distinguish the tones of human speech is becoming vital. Google has already stepped into Artificial Intelligence that is not easy to distinguish from human being. In coming years, the keyboard might not be on the face as most of the devices have the capability to ask what we are trying to do.
Emotion Recognition will Develop Deep Relationship
The ability to recognize human emotions is the biggest challenge for AI. A chatbot in order to enhance customer relationship will need to adjust according to one’s given mood and frustration. The potential of this innovation will go beyond the business world.
For instance, mental health providers are struggling to develop a chatbot that can act as a counsellor. Recently in 2014, a chatbot named Karim used to treat patients suffering from PTSD. The innovation of such kind in chatbots will reduce the cost barrier that prevents many of the low-income people to get treatment for being mentally well.
Chatbots with Conversational Interface will be Mainstream
Chatbots with conversational interface will be the most popular trend in the future. It will be helpful for organizations to serve customers better. For instance, the automated and static conversation leave the human unconnected. Moreover, people tend to be impatient and want a quick solution to their problems.
A study reveals that 64% of customers and 80% of business buyer expect real time responses and interactions from the organization.
Chatbots are ideal to deal with this problem and offer solutions to provide human like conversation, engage customers deeply, increase user attention and deliver quick response. Mitsuku is a real example of human like chatbots that allows users to chat about anything depending on mood and language.
With the growing potential of conversational interfaces and chatbots, Facebook has recently launch an open source research platform known as ParlAI for chatbot developers. It will support developers to develop more chatty and personalized chatbots.
Conclusion
Chatbots are no doubt, future of intelligence, marketing and customer services. It has the capacity to assist customers and businesses similar to humans. With each passing day and revolution in machine learning, artificial intelligence, augmented and virtual reality and natural language processing, chatbots will resemble to human and offer real time communication as well as an integral tool for the users in everyday life.
Author Bio:
Ray Parker is an entrepreneur and internet marketer with over 15 years of experience in Search Engine Optimization, Creative Writing and Digital Marketing with IQVIS. He has worked with several clients from all over the globe to offer his services in various domains with a proven track record of success.
