Chatbots have been around for decades, but businesses have only recently begun to take advantage of the chatbot.

You can find chatbots in the messaging application on your smartphone for personal use or on the company's website for business use. A well-optimized chatbot can be a great addition to a company's website because it can help increase your conversion rates.

A real appreciation for bringing chatbots further into the spotlight for Facebook Messenger, due to the fact that Facebook makes it possible to integrate chatbots into the platform.

In 2016, messaging applications have surpassed social media and the four largest messaging applications have reached around 4 billion users (great potential for business!):

Benefits of Using Chatbot in Your Business

• Chatbots have potential. Even though they are increasingly used, modern chatbots are still a young technology. With the continued development of AI, the potential of bots in business and personal life is unlimited.

• They are easy to build. It depends on what you want to achieve, of course, but you can design a simple chatbot based on Facebook Messenger without any programming experience.

• Chatbots emphasize the brand and corporate image. Chatbot represents the company when communicating with customers, so, from a marketing point of view, it is the perfect embodiment of brand building.

• They offer direct services. A well-optimized chatbot only communicates important matters and does not overload the user.

• Chatbots automates the process. Bots can do human work for, in general, ordinary or basic analytic tasks.

We can distinguish two main types of chatbot:

Simple (Scripted) - This is the simplest type of chatbot. Conversations with this type can only occur in the manner and direction that has been determined. In other words, you will get a programmed response to every question you ask. The chatbot cannot deviate from this in any way. Simple chatbot appears in messaging applications such as Messenger or Skype. Their sole purpose is automation, such as booking flights or making purchases.

Smart - Using artificial intelligence allows chatbots to provide a more flexible response to user questions. This type of bot (like Cleverbot) learns from every conversation and uses this experience to answer future questions more accurately. However, artificial intelligence also has limitations: chatbots that are built with AI technology still cannot understand more complex contexts or lead conversations - it only provides answers.

Chatbots are small programs that help automatically simulate interactions with customers based on a predetermined set of conditions, triggers, and / or events.

There are several advantages to using Chatbots:

1. They can be proactive or reactive.

2. Their responses are consistent at all times.

3. They can respond immediately to customers.

4. They can help you gather important data and also learn from the data collected.

5. They can be used through a variety of different media such as SMS, live chat, or even social media.

6. The concept of chatbot itself is not new. In fact, they have been around since the 1960s.

In fact, if you want a crash course on the history of chatbots, see this infographic from Futurism.

However, implementing chatbots to help businesses grow is just a new phenomenon.

Business chatbots applications for goods facing consumers are growing rapidly.

In fact, more than 59% of Millennials and 60% of Gen Xers in the United States have interacted with chatbots.

And according to a Facebook survey, more than 50% of customers say they tend to shop with businesses they can contact through chat.

And according to Gartner,

"In 2020, 85% of our involvement with business will be done without interacting with other humans. Instead, we will use self-service options and chatbots. "

Conclusion:

"80% of businesses say they currently use or plan to use chatbots by 2020."

Customers expect to find the information they are looking for at the click of a button and in the blink of an eye.

When this is not possible, brews are frustrated, and this can cause you to lose sales or even lose potential customers forever.

To understand how chatbots can reduce some of this frustration and improve user experience, we must first look at how customers choose to interact with businesses today.

In the 2017 Global State Customer Service Report by Microsoft, we can see how email and telephone are still the dominant communication channel for many customers.

And although live chat, self-service, social media and chatbots are relatively lower in terms of raw volume, the growth of this channel is surprising.

About the Author:

The author works at Fusion Informatics, a leading chatbot development company, where our AI development team helps build applications that allow your customers to experience a user-friendly experience in every aspect.