Chatbot?—?From Disruptive Technology to Reshaping Business Globally, A Walk Through in 2017

Chatbot evolution was on rise in 2016. But it took a flight with the onset of 2017. Every morning there was a news of new way of utilizing chatbot in real life scenarios.

Big companies have adopted chatbots and opened a new way of marketing. Small & medium businesses have started to realize the potential of chatbots in business. In a nutshell, people across globe has started to understand the technical paradigm shift in a decade initiated by chatbot.

Chatbots Are Here to Stay

With 1.3 billion users in Messenger, the pattern of communication has changed now. People are sticking to personal messaging apps more.

They feel at ease to text over calling or emailing. The rising trend shows that people even like to send messages to businesses or organizations over Facebook Page than sending formal emails like the last couple of decades.

Even people don’t mind talking with a chatbot while buying an item over internet. Thus businesses are gaining more customer insight and making better sales funneling. The profit margin also improves from business perspective.

Chatbot Adoption in Different Industries

This has led a profound change in the way businesses are connecting to customers. As a matter of fact, customer care is the segment which is mostly focused via chatbots by every domains.

Apart from customer care, chatbots are also adding values to other business segments like sales funneling, lead nurturing, helping customers to showcase product or service, payment, reminding events, helping in making better decisions and so on and so forth.

Based on the case studies, it seems below are the industries that will benefit most from chatbots. The trend is already in place this year.

How Social Media Can Boost Chatbot to Users

Chatbot developers across the globe are full of passion to take this revolution to the next level. But still there is a world full of people who have not heard about chatbot yet. Trust me! They exist. So developing a prototype and selling it in the market will be two different aspects which needs to be bridged quite nicely. In between, tech giants have started to acquire the chatbot market very fast.

But the good news is that small and medium businesses will always look for low cost chatbots where the budding entrepreneurs can pitch in. This segment is huge and proper marketing strategy can sky rocket the business pretty soon.

Chatbots connecting more social medias will open up the possibilities to connect more people around. Although Facebook still reigns in the market. But other platforms are also competing with each other.

With the release of Messenger 2.2, now the most desirable feature is available — to integrate Messenger chatbot in any customized website. This would save a lot of money for businesses around.

Resource Availability

76% of the businesses believe that resources to build a chatbot are easily available. But this is quite dubious in nature. Market survey shows that around 38%-42% chatbots are bad bots which make very poor response or worse — they spam users. Because there is no standardization defined yet, chatbot industry is little shaky in defining its own limits of standards.

With many tools available in market, it is much easier to build chatbot without even coding knowledge. Developers can thus focus more on conversation models to retain users. But this has its own downfall as well. During issues, it will be difficult to troubleshoot bots from core level. Also less freedom will be there while delivering new bots (until you pay heck of money to the tool developer team).

Throughout 2017, the increase of coders is on rise to get a good hold of the technology which will surely benefit the chatbot industry in coming years. With the increasing demand, businesses will soon face the crunch of professional chatbot developers around. More people should join the parade soon.

Summary

When the demand rises towards high end, so is the supply. The market is now getting flooded with chatbot related tools and developers as the businesses are planning to adopt chatbots pretty fast to be the effective player in the market.

2017 has shown a significant flourish and diversification in chatbot evolution which is very healthy for a disruptive technology. It is expected that chatbots will have a compound annual growth rate of 35.2% between 2016 and 2021.

The smart advisors/chatbot market will grow in value from $703 million in 2016 to $3,172 million by 2021 — MarketsandMarkets

2018 will be an exponential growth phase of chatbot for sure. With more technological advancement in place, the upcoming year will be an year of sales & marketing where businesses need to be more educated to adopt chatbot to reign a fair share of global digital market.