Surely on more than one occasion you have used a livechat customer service, but can you tell the difference between talking to a real person or a robot? How was your experience?

In recent years, chatbot services have become very popular thanks to advances in technology and data processing.

What is a chatbot?

The chatbot comes from the word Bot, a software that try to understand a person's needs through natural language. A bot is capable of carrying out specific tasks and tries to understand human behavior.

Un Chatbot it is the evolution of a bot, it is a service that Use artificial intelligence with which people interact through the interface of a chat.

We should not fall into the mistake of thinking that a person can interact with a bot just as if they were talking to another person in natural language, although this may be the objective but, with current technology, it is not yet possible.

Some of the best-known platforms that allow adding artificial intelligence programs (chatbots) are: Facebook Messenger, Slack and Telegram.

If you have any specific questions about chatbot terminology, you can read this chatbot glossary.

Types of Chatbots

While there are common points in the How chatbots work, can be divided into 2 types of chatbots:

RULED-BASED bots:

The behavior of this type of chatbots is determined by the rules we indicate to you. At each step of the conversation, users must choose one of the options shown to them to determine the next step. These types of bots have quite a few options, quick answers, and minimal text input.

AI bots:

These are chatbots that are built with artificial intelligence techniques. These types of chatbots are able to collect information and provide results based on conversations made by other users.

The main difference compared to the flow-oriented chatbot is that the intelligent chatbot will be able to analyze a set of parameters and understand what the user's intention is and therefore react accordingly.

A user can ask a question to a chatbot in different ways, for example: “I want a flight to Barcelona on the weekend”, “a trip to BCN next Saturday”, travel to Barcelona on 25/11", the bot will transform all these questions into the same instruction: (intention: travel) (city entity: Barcelona) (Entity date: 25/11).

What are chatbots for?

Currently, chatbots are a great opportunity for companies, offering new ways to connect with your customers at a lower cost. With the use of chatbots, we will no longer have to wait for an operator to answer our questions.

Advantages and disadvantages of chatbots

Advantages

• Availability:

Chatbots can be operational 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Like this, with a chatbot you don't miss opportunities to connect with your customers.

• Time savings:

Efficiency and ease of interaction they create for employees, customers or other users.

• It allows you to know the user:

We can know the most searched and used words, what users are most interested in.

• Lower costs:

They save businesses money and are easy to set up (depending on the application being used).

• High volume of requests:

If the company receives a lot of requests, there is no need to increase the workforce, chatbots make it possible to deal with all the questions.

• Data Collection:

They can find the information requested of them in a huge database much faster than a person.

• Analytics:

Chatbots can record data, trends and metrics to later monitor interactions and adjust their processes and responses accordingly. Chatbase is a tool that we can use to analyze chatbot data.

• Platforms:

They allow use on different platforms and are easy to adapt and integrate into the business. They also make it possible to carry out specific installations.

• Artificial Intelligence:

Bots accumulate the knowledge they receive and become more intelligent and flexible after each conversation with the customer.

Disadvantages

• Inflexible:

Depending on the type of chatbot we use (RULED-BASED bots or AI bots), this one will not allow us to deal with some questions because we will not have them in our database. If the chatbot can't provide an answer and there's no human presence, the customer may be frustrated and dissatisfied. This is one of the Failures that a chatbot can have. According to Digitas LBI, 73% of Americans would never use a brand's chatbot again after having a bad experience with it.

• Data loss:

We must always have backup copies, we cannot risk losing the data we already have in place because otherwise, reimplementing everything could be costly, and we should have a person serving the customers.

• Non-acceptance by users:

Many people don't like to interact with chatbots, they prefer to talk to real people. It's essential to study your company's target audience before implementing a chatbot. Imagine that your target is older people, maybe they're not interested in talking to a chatbot and it's better for the company to have real people.

• Emotions:

A chatbot cannot interpret the sarcasm or emotional states of the users who interact with them. Sometimes they can be misunderstood.

Chatbot Statistics

Here are some very interesting statistics that certify the importance of the use of chatbots in companies:

• According to the Mobile Travel Report 2017 study carried out by Kayak, half of Spaniards have used a chatbot during the booking process of their trips.
• The estimate for 2020 is that 80% of online transactions are carried out through bots.
• According to the One Reach study, 64% of customers prefer text solutions before calling customer service.
• According to research from Roko Labs shared with BI Intelligence, investments in the chatbot industry between 2015 and 2016 grew by 229%.
• 45.8% of consumers prefer to communicate with a company through a messaging application than by email. (subisendio, 2016)
• According to customer intelligence company Wunderman, by 2020, chatbots will become the main source of obtaining information about consumers and will operate more than 85% of customer service centers.
• By 2022, banks could automate up to 90% of their interactions with chatbots. (Foye, 2017)

In the following graph we can see the growth, in terms of search, of the word chatbot worldwide over the last 5 years:

What industries use chatbots?

Chatbots can be introduced in any sector, so it's quite difficult to certify that they work better in one sector than another. In fact, a specific chatbot can be created for each company and sector.

For example, we could use a chatbot to:

• Order takeout
• Offer commercial offers
• Offer user support by a company
• Dealing with an incident
• Recommend products and/or services
• Monitor customer satisfaction
• Make reservations at hotels, restaurants, flights, etc.

There is a infinite possibilities for chatbots, and as we have already mentioned, they are a great opportunity for companies to get to where their customers are in a personalized way and offering a user experience unique.

La Chatbot technology can be very useful for your company, while this technology is being perfected, brands can be optimizing and experimenting on their websites and social networks.

How can we help you?

If you need more information, do not hesitate to contact us.