Chatbots for Business | Benefits and its Best Practices

What are Chatbots?

It is a well-known fact that technology is evolving very fast. As a result, the range of technology increases day by day and results in low-cost computing. The technologies developing, such as Machine learning, Deep learning, Natural language processing (NLP), and Big data analytics, have provided a new speed-accelerating fuel to Artificial Intelligence. As a result of which, it is possible to implement a conversational Interface Intelligently. These Intelligent (loaded with logical ML/DL models) conversational interfaces use Machine Learning, Deep Learning as their backbone. You can also learn more about Botnet in this insight. It is unnecessary for these Chatbots Applications always to be textual. These interactions can be Voice and Image-based.

A competitive advantage because they generate leads and respond to questions all the time. By interacting and providing answers in real-time. Source: How To Use Chatbots To Grow Your BusinessSource: How To Use Chatbots To Grow Your Business

Automated Intelligent Agents

• These are the computer program you can talk to through messaging apps, chat windows, or voice calling apps.
• These intelligent digital assistants resolve customer queries in a cost-effective, quick, and consistent manner.

Why these are essential for Business?

Features of Chatbots

• Conversational Maturity: Beyond everyday understanding and interaction, it has specific natural language processing (NLP) capabilities to understand the context of a multi-lingual conversation. It can also define the intention of a question – what is needed – to provide a useful first answer and suggest options for confirming or clarifying intent. The best bots have advanced conversational capabilities and can proactively search for details, and even if the dialog is not linear, they can ask clarifying questions.
• Omnicapable: For a smooth experience, it converses seamlessly through various digital platforms and maintains data and meaning. If necessary, even passing that information on to a live agent in the best cases.
• Emotionally Intelligent: During an interaction, t can infer customer personality traits and understand feelings and tone to deliver a personalized experience or, where necessary, escalate to a live agent.
• Free to Explore: It can reach, consume, and process vast amounts of data — both structured and unstructured — to gather relevant data from any source to solve customer problems quickly.
• Pre-Trained: Without human intervention, it can execute complex reasoning. An excellent service bot, for example, should be able to infer solutions based on the relevant case history.
• Autonomous Reason: It is pre-trained to understand information and words unique to the brand or industry. Perhaps better, addressing rising customer requests from a specific sector is pre-configured.

RPA ( Robotic Process Automation) is one transformation which is automating our daily repetitive tasks. Click to explore about, 3 Best RPA Tools

How does it work?

• Knowledge Base - It contains the database of information used to equip bots with the information needed to respond to customers' requests.
• Data Store - It contains the interaction history of a bot with users.
• NLP Layer - It translates user's queries (free form) into information that can be used for appropriate responses.
• Application Layer - The application interface is used to interact with the user.

How do Chatbots work?

Design a perfect architecture with all the components rightly placed in it. After that, decide on architecture. The critical elements of the architecture are -

• Conversational UI (Face of the bot)
• Speech to text converter (Ear of the bot)
• Text to Speech converter (Mouth of the bot)

• By the year 2022, over $8 billion in cost savings are expected in the banking industry, with Chatbots expected to save banks between $0.50 and $0.70 per interaction.
• Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Capital One, MasterCard, and American Express are just a few banks that have implemented bots.
• Original research by DigitasLBi conducted by Harris Poll showed that more than 1 in 3 Americans would be willing to purchase a bot. Consumers spend an average of $55.80 per purchase.
• It substitute for significant and expensive call centers while providing 24/7 support. Bots remove the tendencies for human errors since Artificial Intelligence doesn’t have a bad day and takes it out on your customers by shouting at them halfway through a support call.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is “the ability of machines to understand and interpret human language the way it is written or spoken.” Source: NLP Techniques and Applications Overview

How to adopt Chatbots Development Services ?

Chatbot development services can result in significant cost reductions for enterprises. Chatbots can handle a high volume of enquiries at the same time, minimising the need to hire and train additional customer care people. This lowers labour expenses and allows businesses to better deploy resources. Furthermore, chatbots can automate repetitive tasks like answering frequently requested inquiries or giving basic information, decreasing the strain for human agents even further.

Machine learning, Deep learning (both require training of the model), and Natural Language Processing are the indispensable components of any bot architecture that requires the following components mentioned in the architecture.

Components to adopt the usability of Chatbots

The main components which should be essential to adopt it for using it are -

• Train the bot
• Conversational UI

Training the Bot - Machine Learning and Deep Learning techniques work on the model's training, which is conceptualized with the following diagram's help.

Conversational UI - To accurately implement a UI to support a bot, one has to consider the following factors divided by three categories, which are the pillars of a conversational UI -

• Users feature
• Agent features
• Tasks features

Benefits of enabling Chatbots applications

• Increase availability time and response time as bots are supposed to work 365 days a year, 24 hours a day, without any pay.
• These bots are exquisite weapons to tackle three main V’s of big data: Volume, Velocity, and Variety.
• These are tools that can also be used to know and understand a respective company's customers.
• After having top advantages, it also has a superior power that it has a low maintenance cost.
• The data generated by Chatbot Applications can be saved and used to perform analytics and predictions.

Best practices for Chatbots development

• Graphical Botflow
• Fluid Conversation
• Rich & Interactive content
• Natural Language Processing
• Supervised learning
• Human handover
• API Integration
• Language Support

AI is the ability of machines to perform tasks that usually require human intelligence. Click to explore about, Artificial Intelligence Applications

What are the best Chatbot Tools and Applications?

Use frameworks related to ML/DL such as Tensorflow, Keras, etc. Specific tools for the particular purpose of designing a Chatbot are divided according to functionality.

Prototyping Tools

• BotSociety
• Botmock
• BotPreview
• Both frame

UI Kits

• Bots UI Kit
• Layer UI Kit
• ConvoInterface

Frameworks

• Bottr
• BotEngine
• Microsoft Bot framework
• Botmaster.AI
• ParlAI
• Caffe 2

Marketing Tools

• Bonobo.ai
• Fred

Summits Tools

• Chatbot Summit
• ChatbotConf
• Botness

Monetization Tools

• RadBots
• Waves
• Waylo

Job Platforms

• Botunity
• BotJobs
• Botified
• Botgig

Concluding 

• Explore more Robotic Process Automation (RPA) for Financial Services
• Read more about Best Practices and Challenges of of RPA