Five Reasons Why Chatbots are the Future of Customer ServiceWith improved technology, nuanced communication and greater reliability, chatbots will allow businesses to achieve organizational goals swiftly

The human ability to understand and recognize the content as well as context of communications for ideal reaction is at the heart of every human conversation. What if this underlying principle could be replicated via machines, through artificial intelligence (AI) and Machine learning? You get the highly sophisticated bot based conversations of today.

Man-machine conversations are at an all-time high. Chatbots are making an impact across every industry and operational domain — from optimizing manufacturing operations to inventory and supply chain management. However, their biggest impact has been felt in the segment of customer service, which they have completely transformed. Through round the clock accessibility and highly sophisticated human-like conversations, they have moved beyond the stilted IVR days to dramatically improve business performance.

According to the data of Facebook IQ, the activity of chatbots from January 2017-18 registered a 5.6X YoY growth, 0.9X month-over-month growth. More than 2 billion messages were exchanged between businesses and customers via the 100,000 bots on messenger.

As we move into 2019, let us take a look at the major reasons why chatbots will definitely be the cornerstone of future customer service:

Bots Are Where the Customers Are

The modern consumer is everywhere. E-mails, message reminders, social media chat forums, marketers need to be present on numerous platforms in order to offer a comprehensive interactive experience. Chatbots are able to provide a seamless engagement experience across platforms to help marketers prepare micro-targeted offerings. Pizza Hut, for instance, allows customers to order pizza through chat across different messaging platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, etc. it allows specific target-audience driven retailers to position themselves among customers' friends and family on their preferred messaging platform.

Enhancing Interactivity

Chatbots have moved away from the days of stilted, binary conversations to understanding not just a spoken or typed word, but analyze the context of its usage. The improvements in Natural Language Processing technology has enabled bots to have almost human-like conversations. They can even be assigned a personality that fits with the need of the brand while enriching the customer experience. From funny memes to pun-filled, enigmatic replies, many businesses are giving their chatbots a unique voice that appeals to customers and strengthens relationships.

Managing High-volume of Queries

During the last IPL season, a bot developed by Haptik helped fantasy gaming platform Dream11 handle 30x the average customer query it receives during a single month!

Businesses may experience sudden spike in query generation, and handling such massive volumes through human agents requires considerable funds for training and resource allocation purposes. Through chatbots, marketers can easily handle large volume of queries and offer a uniform engagement experience.

Help Human Agents Handle Complex Queries

By performing repetitive, simple jobs continuously and effectively, chatbots ensure an organization becomes fatigue-free. They also free up human agents and professionals to focus on more complex tasks that require their creative and analytical abilities. Also, the speed with which chatbots are able to complete tasks and perform multiple actions helps an enterprise enhance their overall efficiency manifold. Bots through their algorithm based engagement mechanism are able to offer a personalized engagement experience to a customer, remembering details from past conversations on every platform while handling a massive volume of conversations simultaneously.

Helps Reach Out to Newer Audiences

Moving beyond the type based engagement mechanism of SMS, chatbots can also interact with customers through voice based conversations. Chatbots then can be used to reach out to first generation internet users, bringing the benefit of the internet to them without language acting as a hindrance.

Even enabling chatbots with vernacular language skills helps significantly in extending the advantage of Internet to the most marginalized people. In the field of healthcare for instance, many patients can interact with vernacular language enabled chatbots to resolve their queries. Chatbots, being born into the smartphone and IoT generation, rather than being adapted to it, is perfectly suited to facilitate the diverse conversations of tomorrow.

According to a recent report, the global chatbot market is expected to exceed $1.34 billion valuation by 2024. With improved technology, nuanced communication and greater reliability of enterprises, chatbots will allow businesses to achieve an ideal man-machine employment ratio that complements each other's efforts while achieving organizational goals. Customer service is one such segment which has already showed clear signs of growth post chatbot inclusion. The future promises much more prosperity. Chatbots clearly, have moved on from being a fun tool for the retail industry to a real solution that guarantees stronger customer relationships.