The rise of chatbots has redefined conversations with businesses and services by fuelling the growth of messaging platforms. Conversational user interface or ‘chatbots’ have seen a large scale trial and implementation throughout 2017 with companies as well as individuals programming and launching a chatbot of their own.
ZDNet states that the year 2016 has seen 33,000 chatbots which are being made available on Facebook Messenger.
Viber, WeChat, and Facebook Messenger have gathered together more users than Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram put together.
Chatbots are doing wonders across various industries and serving with various solutions for better customer service and customer experience, like:
- Personal online banking.
- Creating insurance claims and monitoring them.
- Assisting with booking flights and travel accommodations.
- Chatbots provides service support to various channels and management software.
As 2018 is here, let us see what all good we have in store for
chatbots in this year.
Chatbot Trends – 2018
1: The Year of The Voicebot
2018 will be the year of the voice-bot’ as survey speaks that 30% of interactions with tech will be conversation-based. In the coming years, more brands will be seen adopting a voice-assisted bot which is original and built for their brand. Like Amazon’s Alexa and Echo Dot, many large retailers are creating voice-assisted bots which help in checking orders, making purchases, offering product suggestions, and extending the brand experience with services.
2: Websites With Chatbots
Sometimes users confuse chatbots with live chat. Are chatbots available only on messaging? Isn’t it live chat for sites? Users are having this dilemma to date.
With 2018, advancing companies are enthusiastic to incorporate conversational interfaces into their business strategy. Companies will soon be offering unparalleled chatbot experience embedded within their site. 2018 will define how digital experience will modify in the forthcoming years. Soon, 2018 will set a new internet experience altogether.
3: Chatbot Marketing Is Driven By Social Apps
Mark Zuckerberg quotes that, “Messaging is one of the few things that people do more than social networking.” But there are very few platforms which are available for people to use. It has been observed that 72% of U.S smartphone users use less than seven applications in a day. Such consumer behavior stats have helped companies in getting the idea of fabricating chatbots with them.
Here is an example of how user interaction happened with Pizza Hut’s chatbot. This began with an autoresponder which asks users about placing an order with the chatbot.
Here, we can see that chatbot shows deals and promotions which is of great relevance for users since they intend to order pizza through an actual chat conversation! This is done via Facebook, and the similar chatbot works using Twitter.
Study shows that social messaging is overtaking social media platforms and is encouraging chatbots as well.
Recently, the research from Credence predicted that enterprises would transmit two trillion messages a year by 2017, thereby, creating a market worth of $78m by 2022.
4: Gain Customer Insights Using Chatbots
Enterprises can gather customer insights using chatbots which can help in improving all stages of the marketing funnel. Pizza Hut chatbot is the perfect example of chatbot which helps in guiding a customer through final stages of the journey of the buyer. Chatbots also keep the information intact about the kind of questions a customer asks.
Chatbots not only assist you in answering all your future questions or upsell additional questions, they also suffice when your customers need to close the deal. After collecting analytics, a proficient marketing team will always be acting in the cycle of constant improvement. Such process is automated by advanced Autobots. Advanced Autobots are able to improve themselves by learning from conversations held earlier, and therefore, are able to answer more questions.
5: Deep Learning and Artificial Intelligences
Gartner says that artificial intelligence will amount to 85% of customer relationships by 2020.
AI is something which is not new to marketing, as well as enterprises. The marketing tasks which were earlier done manually have been automated now.
As robotics will be exhibiting its wonders, AI is also expected to make a lot of money for many companies. Although it is difficult to tell how much smarter a chatbot could be, the wonders about to happen when a chatbot could run millions of algorithms in real time and devise a strategy for converting every potential prospect individually is unimaginable.
6: A Cost Effective Solution
Since Facebook has decided to let third-party applications build chatbots in their messenger platform, the prices of chatbots have lowered drastically. Chatfuel, OnSequel, and Botsify simplify the development of chatbot and therefore, one can easily create chatbot without the complications in programming. These programs help customers in browsing, making a purchase, and interacting. This is done with the help of predetermined menu options.
Blake Morgan, Forbes writer, says, “Chatbots are the future of customer experience and they hold the power to replace many apps and search windows in the near future. Instead of exchanging customer emails and solving queries using mail server system, answer real-time questions of customers is both quick and easy.”
Stats Speak: Overwhelming stats and evidences:
- In its ‘Top Strategic Predictions for 2018 and Beyond’ report, Gartner mentions that more than 50% of enterprises will spend more per annum on chatbots and bots creation than traditional mobile app development by 2021. This very clearly explains that chatbots will be changing the way organizations are operating their businesses and serving their customers.
- Statistics show that Whatsapp and Facebook Messenger alone have more than 1 billion users per month!
Facebook Messenger already has around 100,000 chatbots, with 20 million businesses actively responding to the messages. - From just 20% in 2017, there will be an expected increase to 93% in 2022 in effective chatbot interaction.
- Chatbots will improve cost-savings in billions of dollars in domains such as banking, healthcare and retail and consumer goods.
- A budding thought that chatbots will soon be replacing native applications is therefore becoming a reality and this soon will be seen in 2018.
Get some extra knowledge about all the upcoming trends of 2018 HERE:
Top 6 UX Trends To Raise The Business Scope In 2018!
5 Top #EnterpriseMobility Trends To Watch For In 2018
Top 7 Mobile App Development Trends 2018
Top 6 Upcoming Big Data Trends of 2018
References: nativemsg, marutitech, businessinsider, disruptordaily, trak, statista
Ajeet Singh
