Chatbots: Let’s have a real Conversation

Number of chatbots are smashing all records, do you need one?

Year 2017 has been declared the year of chatbots. And why not, if the bot police is to be believed, more than 30,000 branded and 6,000 voice activated bots were launched in 2016, that’s about 100 chatbots a day. And looks like that trend is continuing in 2017.

The Chatbot magazine defines chatbot as a service powered by rules, and sometimes artificial intelligence, that you interact with via a chat interface. There’s a bot for everything now: travel, shopping, insurance, health and even a psychiatric advisor for a $39 a month.

The two reasons chatbots are becoming so popular are the prospect of better customer experience and improved operational efficiency. A chatbot can provide 24x7 access to some elements of sales and support functions making it more convenient for customers. For the businesses, reducing support calls into the staffed contact centres will reduce cost and help improve the support provided to the really tricky calls that do come in.

There are two other elements that don’t get discussed as much. Firstly, proliferation of devices and their rich functionality have created new challenges for user interfaces.

Devices rule our everyday lives and have become smaller and more personal. Each new device or app or platform create a new way to interact. But how can we consolidate and unify our customer experience? The natural language ability of chatbots using Artificial Intelligence provides exactly that.

“Language is the most powerful, useful, effective communication technology ever, period.”

- Jonathan Libov, Strategic Product Advisor

The other aspect is that there are many situations where customers do not like to speak with a person. According to Usurv, “Just under 1 in 5 of consumers (18%) admit to actively avoiding calling businesses to elude the frustration of automated menus. In those under 24, this rises to a shocking 61%.”

Take the case of aspirational customers wanting to buy a luxury car but hesitant to confront a pushy sales guru at the dealership. Or a health insurance customer wanting to find out more about benefits under policy before undergoing a treatment. In the absence of a channel that provides information the way we are used to in everyday life, these are moments of truth that we cannot influence, and hence risk loss of sale or attrition.

So, do you need a chatbot?

Gartner predicts that by 2020, 80% of new enterprise applications will use chatbots, and by 2021, most enterprises will treat chatbots as the most important platform paradigm; and “Chatbots First”, will replace the meme “Cloud First, Mobile First.”

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has gone as far as to announce that the operating system of the future isn't Windows, but "conversation as a platform."

I think the real question we need to answer is how we can simplify the experience of users at critical moments of truth by taking away the complexity of user interfaces and encourage them to interact with businesses as and when they like.

What do you think?

Contributors: Saugata Ghosh and Nathan Ross, Capgemini Digital Services