Chat-bots @ your service

Over time, the computer itself — whatever its form factor — will be an intelligent assistant helping you through your day. We will move from mobile first to an AI first world.” Sundar Pichai, CEO, Google

Was that a human or a chat bot on the other side of conversation you just had with a brand?

Yes that’s correct when you interact with a business over chat it can be a chat-bot on the other side listening and responding to you. Bots are increasingly taking over customer service operations in businesses around the globe.

“ What is chat-bot – As per Wikipedia definition - A chatbot (also known as a talkbot, chatterbot, Bot, chatterbox, Artificial Conversational Entity) is a computer program which conducts a conversation via auditory or textual methods. Such programs are often designed to convincingly simulate how a human would behave as a conversational partner” 

Technology giants like Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft and Google are getting in on the game with their own bot platforms. Some of the brands have adopted this disruptive technology and have already started using to reduce customer requests landing to the agents. This not only improves their queue waiting time, consistency, quality of service and cost effectiveness but also better customer satisfaction.

Interestingly (at least I was not aware till a while back) Chat-bots are not new, first chat-bot “Eliza” was created in 1964 by MIT professor Joseph Weizenbaum and since then this has travelled a long way and has now playing a key role in redefining brand-customer interactions and customer experience in completely different ways

How does a it work : Traditionally Chat-bots were more rule based, based on the input and rules defined it use to through an output but over a period of time it now uses Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence. Chatbots are now capable of processing the natural language ie understand the question even if this is asked differently by different people and still produce relevant output. Not just that it also keep learning with every interaction. One analogy is how we interact with kid and with every interaction kid is getting smarter to give a more meaningful response same way Chat-Bots with AI keeping learning and tuning itself.

Messenger based bots : From 2015 onwards users have started spending more time on messenger apps as compared to social apps and both Facebook and Twitter have launched their messenger based Bot service that can be used by Brands to enhance customer experience and also improve availability beyond brand site.

Below is a video from Facebook F8 2016 conference on their how brands can create different engagement models around their apps.(See from 7:32)

Same way Twitter has also launched their offerings

Chat-bots are equally useful for every B2C business with so many examples, here is one of the recent example of how Chat-bot “Emma” has helped Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporation, the OCBC Bank.

Emma has proved itself by accessing a total of S$10,000,000 (~USD$7,117,945.30) in loan applications to turn cold leads to pre-qualified leads, managing 20,000 conversations within its launch from Jan 2017. Emma answers questions such as “How much money can I borrow?” for home and renovation loans, instantly supporting the customer with enough information to follow through with the application process. Emma is currently integrated on the OCBC home loan website and have been a great success in first few months itself.

While there are good examples but as technology this is still evolving and will take some more time to reach at the top of hype cycle but at the same time the initial risks and implementation challenges have been sorted. This fact makes is even more compelling for brands to adopt it and still create a competitive differentiator .

Next in Chat-bots : Understanding the emotional context of the conversation and reply back with relevant emotion through word selection and sentence framing. For example, to reply to the statement “Worst day ever. I arrived late because of the traffic,” the Emotional Chatting Machine can generate different responses, depending on the required emotion. For happiness, it responds, “Keep smiling! Things will get better.” For sadness, it responds, “It’s depressing.” For disgust, it says, “Sometimes life just sucks.” For anger, it says, “The traffic is too bad!” And to express liking, it says, “I am always here to support you.”

The next generation Chatbot from Facebook : Facebook is working on creating a much advance Chat-bot named M, which is already lunched to on a pilot basis to 10,000 selected users in California. M is so smart because it cheats. It works like Siri in that when you tap out a message to M, algorithms try to figure out what you want. When they can’t, though, M doesn’t fall back on searching the Web or saying “I'm sorry, I don’t understand the question.” Instead, a human being invisibly takes over, responding to your request as if the algorithms were still at the helm.

There are enough signs that Bots are here to stay and with time as they get better with AI, they will relieve humans only to assist them to get more smarter and analyze failure instances. Businesses, irrespective of domain have to adopt this technology, its only a matter of time when they want to do it. For enterprises and IT professionals it’s a huge opportunity to work with their customer in defining how they can create disrupting propositions in their own areas leveraging Chat-bots.

Abhinav Kaushik

redefiningthenext.blogspot.com