The Current State of Chatbots and Why Now is the Time to Invest in Them

Much of the artificial intelligence research being done today is purely academic. But in at least one area, we’re seeing an intersection between artificial intelligence research and real life. Consumer-facing chatbots are computer programs developed by companies to converse with their customers for any number of reasons. There are shopping assistant chatbots, financial planning chatbots, personal coach chatbots, customer service chatbots, and many other kinds of consumer-facing chatbots and 2017 seems to be their big year.

Chatbots have a lot to offer businesses who invest in them. They can provide customers with 24/7 support without the high cost associated with maintaining a 24/7 support team. For businesses on the fence about chatbots, here are a few good things to know.

Two kinds of chatbots

There are essentially two different kinds of chatbots. One operates on a rules engine while the other uses machine learning and natural language processing. Rules engine chatbots are not so very different from the automated phone answering systems that have been around for years. They are programmed to recognize a number of preset commands and questions and to respond from a bank of prewritten responses. Rules engine chatbots are easier and less expensive to program but they’re also more limited in what they can offer for brands and customers. They work best in highly regulated industries where customers will mostly be using the chatbot for a limited number of functions.

More advanced chatbots use subsets of artificial intelligence such as natural language processing and machine learning. Through natural language processing, chatbots can understand more open-ended queries even if they haven’t been specifically programmed to recognize those specific queries. Through machine learning, chatbots can improve the more interactions they have with customers as they learn to recognize patterns and incorporate information gained from past failures. These are more expensive and difficult to create but they also have a lot more to offer.

Which kind of chatbot you develop for your brand will depend on your particular circumstances and goals. Many choose to start with simpler rules engine chatbots before investing in more advanced AI chatbots.

Do they really work?

Many business owners wonder if chatbots live up to all they hype–and there has been a lot of hype surrounding chatbots. The answer is both yes and no. The artificial intelligence necessary to create a program that can really think and converse like a human simply doesn’t exist yet and there are drawbacks to using chatbots. For one, they will make more mistakes than humans. For whatever reason, the simplest questions can sometimes throw off a chatbot and can result in an inappropriate response. Furthermore, some people are just hesitant about the whole idea of conversing with chatbots in large part thanks to negative portrayals of AI in pop culture.

On the other hand, discounting chatbots because humans can differentiate between them and real humans is a lot like throwing out the baby with the bath water. Chatbots are expected to save businesses more than $8 billion this year alone and many customers will appreciate the option to avoid waiting on hold on the phone by speaking to a chatbot instead.

Why now is the time to invest

Chatbot technology is far enough along to have become affordable and practical for the average small business and the growing popularity of open-source chatbot projects and chatbot building software has made it easier than ever for businesses to design one without spending a fortune. On the other hand, it’s still new enough to be novel and innovative and give brands a head start over ones that are still stuck on the fence.

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Source: businessnewsdaily.com/10295-chatbot-ai-customer-service.html

Chatbots and the Hospitality Industry are a Match Made in Heaven

Businesses of all kinds are discovering the many benefits that chatbots have to offer them. One industry in articular that’s especially well-suited for chatbots is the hospitality. Here’s a look at five ways that chatbots can help with businesses in the hospitality industry.

Automated reservations

Making reservations at a hotel is already pretty easy thanks to the internet. Either visit the business’s site directly or choose any third-party booking site to make your reservation. But some people prefer the experience of talking through a reservation or they have questions that need to be answered before booking. Instead of having to call up the property and tying up a front desk clerk, the person could open up a messaging app on their smartphone and initiate a conversation with that company’s chatbot. The person can ask questions, compare pricing for different days, make a final selection, and make the reservation all with the help of that chatbot who will communicate that booking to the property’s reservations software.

User behavior analysis

Another advantage of chatbots over front desk clerks are their ability to remember every detail about every customer they help, ever. Chatbots can get a sense of a person’s preferences. Are they typically traveling with pets. Do they require a smoking room or a non-smoking? One larger bed or two smaller ones? This creates a more personalized booking experience as a chatbot can come into the interaction with a pretty good understanding of what the customer wants.

Upselling

Upgrades like a room with a better view or a multi-room suite complete with jacuzzi tub are where many businesses in the hospitality industry really make their money. But customers are wary of upgrades especially when they can sense the urgency in a reservations specialist’s voice. Live representatives can get a little anxious about upselling when a commission is at stake. Chatbots don’t need a commission and they can offer various upgrades to customers in a less-pushy tone.

Top-of-mind awareness (TOMA)

Top-of-mind awareness (or TOMA) is something that every brand strives for, even if they’re not familiar with the term. TOMA is about being the first company on a person’s mind when you mention the industry that company belongs to. When a customer thinks “hotel,” you want them to think of your brand immediately. Chatbots can help with TOMA because they’re ever present on customers’ favorite messaging platforms and are always just a couple of taps on a smartphone away.

Customer support

Finally, chatbots are great for the hospitality industry because it’s an industry where customer service is especially crucial. Customers are quick to write a bad review for any business who doesn’t provide excellent service. Need to modify or cancel an existing reservation, a chatbot can walk you through it. Already in the hotel and need something brought to the room, tell the chatbot. This frees up hotel staff to handle only the most challenging situations since chatbots are taking care of everything else and keeping guests happy.

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Source: rnews. co. za/article/16228/chatbots-and-the-hospitality-industry

A Closer Look at the Evolution of Chatbots

Chatbots are predicted to change the way business and customers interact. But what exactly are chatbots? They’re computer programs designed to simulate conversation with a human. Chatbots can speak with an actual voice, or they can be entirely text-based. Most of today’s chatbots are text-based programs that people can chat with on various messaging platforms like SMS (texting) or Facebook Messenger. To better get a sense for what chatbots are, what they can do, and what they will be able to do, it’s helpful to look at their evolution.

ELIZA: The first chatbot

The first computer program that could be termed a chatbot was ELIZA. ELIZA was created by MIT professor, Joseph Weizenbaum to demonstrate the superficiality of communication between man and machine. Ironically, ELIZA ended up demonstrating the exact opposite. Though ELIZA was fed scripts in order to “learn” how to form intelligent responses to statements or questions, ELIZA was not communicating from actual intelligence. Despite Weizenbaum’s insistence that ELIZA was not intelligent, the people who spoke with the computer program came to believe it was and often attributed emotions to the program.

Mobile digital assistants

Today’s mobile digital assistants like Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa are simply advanced versions of ELIZA. Like ELIZA, these digital assistants can simulate human intelligence and can even come across as having personality and emotions but they are only selecting set responses drawn from information stored online or within mobile applications. They are also programmed to give a number of humorous responses to questions that their developers predicted they would be asked by curious users. Like ELIZA, they are not truly intelligent.

Task-specific bots

We are now living in a time when the popularity of chatbots is exploding. The majority of chatbots being deployed across messaging platforms today are more advanced in some ways, and less advanced in others as compared to earlier chatbots. Today’s chatbots are more specialized to do a specific task such as booking travel, making dinner reservations, ordering pizza, or managing a person’s calendar.

Chatbots as digital friends

As artificial intelligence researchers discover the secrets of machine learning, natural language processing, and machine learning, they will be able to create more incredible chatbots that are capable of learning and developing intelligence. These chatbots of the future may be capable of building rapport with humans even forming emotional bonds. Businesses that can develop and use such tools will have a huge step up when it comes to customer service and all other business-customer interactions.

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Source: entrepreneur.com/article/293439

Use Chatbots to Supplement, not Replace, Existing Customer Service Efforts

Chatbots are one of the most talked-about mobile trends in 2017 with many predicting it will be the future of business-customer interactions. With the growing popularity of chat platforms like Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp and the steady popularity of SMS (or text messaging) brands are trying to communicate with customers where they already are. Millennials don’t like to call customer service hotlines, they like to interact with short, to-the-point text interactions via SMS or messaging applications and brands are scrambling to make that possible.

Chatbots are computer programs that are designed to simulate a human chatting via SMS or a chat app. They use varying amounts of artificial intelligence and machine learning to figure out what people are asking them, and then they attempt to generate an appropriate response.

Companies are designing chatbots that can make dinner reservations, book flights, buy movie tickets, complete online purchases, offer product suggestions based on customer preferences, and even resolve customer service issues. There are a growing number of chatbots and chatbot stores across all chat-based platforms and the majority of brands that don’t yet have deployed chatbots are working to develop them. So with all the excitement, is it worth jumping on the bandwagon?

What chatbots can and can’t do

It’s important that brands and customers both recognize the limitations of chatbots in their current state. The technology for chatbots to perfectly simulate conversation with a human simply doesn’t exist. Humans might be fooled initially but they catch on quick that the “person” they’re chatting with isn’t a person at all.

According to one study, 70% of customer service interactions via chatbot required human intervention at some point. Just three in ten were able to have their issue resolved without human help. This tells us that we’re still a ways off from replacing live customer service representatives with computer programs.

You may be wondering, if chatbots fail 70% of the time, why invest in developing them at all. The reason is because they can learn. With each failed interaction chatbots get better at interpreting and replicating human speech. They’re worth investing in because they will get better. Even in their current state of development chatbots are worth the effort. Chatbots are most effective when they’re used to automate some of the more simple parts of the customer service interaction such as pulling up account information or answering simple questions that have little room for error and then passing them off to a live agent for additional help.

Chatbots and the future

Chatbots very well may be the future of business-customer interactions and though the technology that would enable chatbots to fully replace live customer service representatives doesn’t yet exist, it can one day. Early adopters of chatbots will be instrumental in advancing the technology and they’ll be a step ahead of those who are hesitant to get on board.

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Source: business.financialpost.com/entrepreneur/small-business/0508-biz-eb-erin/wcm/ebfafa19-087f-43bf-a6a6-71145ce69cf9

Chatbots and the Uncanny Valley

The term “uncanny valley” was coined by notable robotics professor, Masahiro Mori, in 1970 to explain the phenomena of unease in the presence of humanoid robots. Mori, and other AI and robotics researchers since then, have noticed an interesting trend in which people start out with a positive view of robots but grow increasingly uneasy the more closely they resemble humans. Then at a certain point when the robots are practically indistinguishable from live persons, the unease subsides.

Much psychological thought has gone into this phenomenon but it is still unclear what exactly causes it. One thing is clear, however, when robots resemble humans but there’s something a little off, we notice it, and it creeps us out. This is one of the biggest problems facing artificial intelligence and robotics researchers today.

Though chatbots are not humanoid in appearance—they’re not machines at all, but rather, computer programs—the uncanny valley is still a phenomenon that has been observed with them.

A history of automated customer service

When companies first began using automated phone answering systems to more efficiently route calls, the voices were obviously robotic and the customer on the other end knew it was a machine. They knew what the system could and couldn’t do and it didn’t resemble a conversation between two humans in a way that made people uncomfortable. As time went on, however, these systems became more advanced and the line between machine and human were blurred. The majority of automated phone answering systems today still use a more monotone, robotic-sounding voice though the technology exists to make it sound more like a human.

The problem for chatbot developers

The first chatbots were simple programs that were able to respond with a handful of pre-written sentences. But as more artificial intelligence goes into the programming, chatbots are being developed that can engage in small-talk and can even simulate personality. While some may respond positively to this, others prefer their chatbots be more obviously robotic in their conversations. For chatbot developers, that means walking a fine line between creating chatbots that aren’t seemingly rude in their directness but not overly human-sounding either, at least until the technology advances enough to make chatbots indistinguishable from real humans.

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Source: theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/uncanny-valley-digital-assistants/523806/

How To Use Chatbots To Generate More Leads

If you’ve ever had to call a customer support number, you’ve encountered that all-too familiar voice reading off a list of options and which numbers to press to record a response. They often ask a series of questions designed to either give you the information you need, or transfer you to the person who can best help you. Often they’ll automate the some of the process by getting your account number information so the live person won’t have to go through those routine questions at the start of the call. These digital phone assistants free up human resources and improve productivity for the live customer service agents. They’ve become commonplace so much so that we expect to get one when we call customer support and are surprised if we don’t.

Though there are still some that don’t like interacting with these phone robots, overall we have a positive view of them and they’ve becoming fairly accurate at getting us to the right person quickly. We also recognize the need for their existence.

The internet now has its own version of the automated phone assistant in the form of chatbots. Chatbots are designed to do the same kinds of things but they operate online, on mobile devices, and within messenger apps.

The challenge presented by chatbots

Just as customers were initially hesitant about the growing use of automated phone assistants, many have misgivings about chatbots preferring to speak or chat with real people. But just as automated phone assistants overcame these obstacles, chatbots will as well.

One issue people have with chatbots is that they’re too-robotic or impersonal. Chatbot developers are constantly working to counteract this stereotype by developing a chatbot with a pleasant personality and the ability to engage in some small talk as a human would.

How to best use chatbots on your website

User behavior suggests that consumers don’t appreciate chatbots that are overly intrusive or annoying. Chatbots shouldn’t show up on the homepage in the form of annoying pop-ups. On the other hand, you don’t want to bury them in a place customers can’t find them when they want to. The ideal use for a chatbot would be to try and anticipate when a customer is likely to have a problem finding information or to have a chatbot that can recognize based on user behavior (long pauses between clicks or frequent clicking between pages) and initiate communication then. In this way, website-based chatbots can be used to generate leads and conversions when they otherwise might have left the site in frustration.

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Source: forbes.com/sites/ajagrawal/2017/05/25/bot-hype-how-to-use-chatbots-to-get-more-leads-for-your-site/#5976e9af24c1