6 Trends in the AI-Assisted Chatbot for Service Market

The use of artificial intelligence (AI)-powered chatbots and intelligent virtual agent tools to assist customer service organizations is quickly becoming an industry standard for delivering real-time, personalized service. Numerous factors, including the mandate to engage seamlessly and contextually with customers, productivity gains, and cost savings, among others, are driving growth in the market. These are the resulting trends that will affect customer service organizations:

1.   Blended AI

One of the initial trends in how enterprises use AI-powered bots for customer service interactions is to automate simple requests or first-level queries, but then loop in live agents for more complicated issues or if a significant number of inaccuracies occur. This process is often referred to as “blended AI” and can be conducted seamlessly in the background, without customers even realizing that’s occurring.

2.   Chatbots will replace apps

Improved processing power, ability to interpret natural language, and improvements in AI have given credence to the potential for bots to replace apps. Also, their ability to de-clutter users’ mobile phones and save the battery life, as well as create convenience since they reside in the cloud and require no manual updates, point further to a potential bot takeover of apps. Although bots are unlikely to replace some of the popular apps such as Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter.

3.   Facebook will drive user adoption

At Facebook’s annual F8 conference, the company introduced new capabilities intended to demonstrate how chatbots can be useful in consumers’ daily lives. Capabilities included conducting a group chat with a business, sharing sports highlights, booking flights on Hipmunk, or making dinner reservations via Open Table. Scannable QR codes are also available to assist with transactions. The announcements and deployments are the company’s goal of making Messenger the hub of activity for users.

4.   Chatbots will replace the search window

Instead of just listing hundreds of thousands of search results for consumers, specialized chatbots in different domains do the legwork. Several music and concert search engines like Spotify for Skype, Stars & Cats, and TickX use chatbots to retrieve information about song titles, concert dates, ticket prices, etc.

5.   Conversational commerce and chatbot monetization will rise

Shopping cart abandonment is at an all-time high, as customers want to avoid the time spent registering accounts or going through payment security systems. Chatbots can research specific customer requests, provide personalized recommendations, and assist on-the-spot purchasing all in real time. They can also automatically connect to customer data and instantly verify identity, and then give customers targeted options in real time.

Despite the innovations in solving chatbot technologies, it may take some time before many other retailers are willing to invest significant resources until the ROI from purchases is widely proven. As enterprises begin to realize the proven benefits of chatbots for commerce, they’ll develop chatbot monetization strategies that will create intangible brand value.

6.   Chatbot for call deflection

Because chatbots allow for information to be transferred via hyperlinks and rich multimedia rather than through a linear voice translation, chatbots offer a standardized way of connecting with businesses. They reduce the complexity of finding and delivering first-level queries for customers. Deploying chatbots for first-level queries and to deflect calls appears to be the initial use for AI-powered chatbots by many enterprises. As BI Intelligence reports, chatbots will contribute to cutting customer care costs by up to 29 percent, so the use of AI-powered chatbots to improve call deflection by sending customers to alternate channels, will only increase as more enterprises realize their potential for cost savings.

Go to www.Ovum.com to read my full report, Market Radar: AI-Assisted Chatbots for Customer Service