Dreaming of Electric Sheep: How Chatbots Will Change the Future of Business

Dreaming of Electric Sheep: How Chatbots Will Change the Future of Business

Umbrella IT

Business is increasingly intertwined with technologies. Last years were marked by the explosion of interest in chatbots, programs that complete a wide range of tasks and interact with people by mimicking real human speech.

Many leading brands from Uber to Sephora are experimenting with chatbots and the debates of whether bots will replace human employees in future are continuing. However, the popularity of chatbots in business goes on to gain traction. Well, you can’t beat an employee who is always polite, dutiful, efficient, available 24/7, and never takes a sick day, can you?

80% of companies want their own chatbots by 2020.

In light of this, the question arises: what effect the chatbots implementation in business will produce? Umbrella IT company looked at why everybody’s talking about chatbots, at what stage of development the chatbots are in 2018 and how their further expansion will change the future of modern business.

Chatbots In 2018

Just as AI, chatbots is the trend, that dates back to the past: the first virtual program-interlocutor ELIZA was created by Joseph Weizenbaum as far back as 1966. ELIZA was able to maintain a dialog with a user with a help of active listening paraphrasing the original users’ words. It was the first time in history when the regimented interaction between a human and a machine took a shape of a real-life communication.

Since then chatbots made a quantum leap. As recently as 2016 Mark Zuckerberg spoke about benefits of chatbots in business. Time proved him right: in 2018 chatbots are a smart communication system that enables the business to be closer to its clients.

The speed at which chatbots evolve, expand the scope of their application, and penetrate new industries, leaves no room to doubt: this technology is an advanced tool that has already started dramatical changes in traditional business operations.

Why Are Chatbots So Popular

Chatbots are that unique case when business meets a client halfway in most convenient and comfortable manner and along with this gets profit:

The Future Of Business With Chatbots

In the era of instant messaging, the business transition to the text format seems justifiable, and chatbots implementation - logical. According to Gartner’s report, 85% of consumer communication will be automated by 2020 and the number of call centers agents will be reduced to the minimum. TacoBell chatbot already helps users to place an order via Slack and train tickets can be bought online via Telegram. The same is true for the various business processes inside the organization.

Let’s take a closer look at the future of business after the chatbots revolution.

Business Side

  • Chatbots and IT

Telephone-based query processing in IT is a practice that should have to be blackballed a long time ago.

Chatbot integration into the IT department of the company enables to improve efficiency when employees allow the chatbots to complete their routine tasks and fulfill standard service requests. While the chatbot is working, IT agents can focus on the priorities.

Moreover, a chatbot processes incoming requests instantly 24 hours per day and quickly redirects a user to a human agent, if it’s needed.

  • Chatbots and HR

Chatbots have a huge potential for HR, that is quite ironic for the department named Human Resources. However, their popularity is reasonable: chatbots contribute greatly to the business process automation, all while the working conventions of HR department are preserved.    

Due to the delegation of certain job interviews to the bots, a recruiter will be able to save some time, and the same familiar and comfortable for an applicant form of interaction "question-answer" will remain. With one exception: all the answers will be digitized immediately and arranged by a bot in accordance with specific position requirements.

  • Chatbots and Marketing

Chatbots are easily integrated into different branches of marketing from brand-building to product placement. The long-term goal of this technology implementation is primarily focused on the market research and better customer experience rather than immediate sales growth. Detailed analytics paired with the improved customer experience is crucial for the client loyalty and business success.

Chatbots don’t replace humans. Chatbots make the customer experience better.

Chatbots will become the saving grace for the companies that process a large number of customer requests. More than that, chatbots will send your potential clients personalized messages and quickly adapt to a new target audience in the span of a single conversation. The survey also shows, that 47% of customers are open to buying from the chatbots. 

Important: an ineffective chatbot confuses your employees and compromises the service quality. According to BI Intelligence, 60% of US customers cancel their order if the client service is unsatisfying or they faced with difficulties during the checkout.

Client Side

  • Healthcare

Healthcare industry opens up the endless opportunities for chatbots case scenarios: to choose a health center, find the best expert in his field, make an appointment or call a doctor, get the results of tests, сhoose the right medicine, check its pricing and availability and place an order safely and confidentially. All of it will be possible with a medical chatbot that will relieve the medical workers from the necessity to waste their time on organizational aspects.

  • Finance

Online-banking is gradually losing its status as the most comfortable and credible payment method. Modern banks increase their presence in the internet penetrating into the messengers, and the WeChat users are already able to one-tap buy any product, pay their bills or order service. In the future chatbots will replace a personal fiscal agent: a fin-bot will provide information of the spent transaction, analyze the income and expenses, make a deposit, activate a new credit card, converse the currency, transfer money to another account and boost the customer loyalty by providing the transparency of all the processes.

  • Tourism

With increasing frequency tourists use chatbots to plan and organize their trips. It’s almost impossible to imagine the future global travel and tourism industry without chatbots. Indeed, the chatbots are the ones who are going to book the flight tickets, check-in at hotels, choose a perfect tour, generate the map of the client’s route and offer a top of sights. Chat-bot will help the user navigate among thousands of different offers and choose the perfect option, with a minimum of efforts.

  • E-commerce

Unfortunately, on the current evolution stage chatbots are not capable of compensating for all the subtleties and nuances of real interpersonal interaction at a proper level yet. However, even now a smart bot successfully minimizes human participation in routine processes and increases business efficiency.

In the nearest future, a single chatbot would be able to processes such a number of requests from customers in just an hour for which it would usually take more than a hundred people. Chatbots will offer each user a fine personalized content to form the loyalty to the brand and generate new leads. There is a vast number of use scenarios for bots in e-commerce: assistance in choosing the right product, model, size, style, ordering, providing information on the availability of goods and delivery, feedback and customer insights, claims processing - all of it takes marketing to a qualitatively new level.

Summing Up

A chatbot is a tool whose range of use scenarios is limited only by your imagination. The flexible application of artificial intelligence algorithms will allow the chatbot to learn fast and evolve constantly.

Today chatbot is one of the hottest trend opening great opportunities for business optimization and efficiency. There is an expert consensus of opinion that this tendency is going to strengthen its relevance and secure the marketplace.   

The benefits of chatbot development are extended both to the internal business processes of the company and to the different industries as a whole.

So, in the future fully integrated into business chatbots will be able to:

  • cut down expenses;
  • optimize and improve business process efficiency;
  • reduce working pressure;
  • constantly evolve;
  • be an integral part of your team.

Profit of the symbiosis between chatbots and business is obvious: traditional ways of doing business inevitably remain in the past. It is difficult to foresee what our life will be like in 10 years, but one thing is for sure: there will be a lot of artificial intelligence in it.

A personalized AI chatbot, created by the experienced developers, will become an indispensable virtual assistant for your customers, a valuable helper for your employees and a reactive accelerator of your business.

Want your own chatbot? Contact us now!

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