How Chatbots Are Changing the Game

What are chatbots?

A chatbot is a computer program designed to simulate conversation with human users.

It is an automated agent inside your business that use artificial intelligence to deal with customer inquiries.

Chatbots, powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) dramatically improves the

conversation experience, allowing a more natural interaction between the bot

and the end user.

Looking backward?and "Connecting the dots"?(quoting a great speech of the past) on my learning path...

I have to admit it:

AI was been one of the more appealing and charming matter that I've studied at University, as well as complex.

"Connecting the dots, until the bots"?(it?sounds such a pretty good slogan).

What kind of impact will the bots have?

Machine learning (a subfield of AI) is based around the idea that we can create algorithms that, using neural networks, can learn from data and then make predictions as they encounter new data.

And that’s the point: many people believes that in the future the bots will replace only the manually or less qualified jobs. Nothing more wrong.

If it’s true that there are some jobs that will never be substituted by the bots, on the other hand it’s true that we are not talking about bots that “do things” simply replacing the human recurring activities.

The bots of the future will be able to understand and to learn by the data, perhaps better than the human beings.

The bots will be able to learn.

Feature like that is been considered be particular to people until now.

Good or bad? Hard to say. It will depends by the grade we will be able to surface the next huge changes than impact our jobs and our lifestyles.

We will have to reinvent completely our habits, jobs, worklife balance and even starting to rethink the concept of basic income in the next decades.

Of course, if we will be able to handle and rule these changes in the right way, we could spend our time on more profitable tasks, focus on less recurring activity and not reproducible, so more creative.

Why use chatbots?

Don’t do what you can assign to someone else.

In this case the real question should be why we don’t use a chatbots.

Why we don’t assign a task to someone else that is able to accomplish it for huge volume of data with less effort and without errors?

Besides that, it’s allow us to focus on other things more profitable.

Using automated rules that you have created, chatbot can automatically respond to thousand of incoming requests with relevant and personalized answers. If the chatbot will not be able to process a question, it transfers a conversation to an expert who meanwhile can pay attention on other activities, increasing him workday performances and be more productive for business.

Another reason to prove the fact we can't do without this technology is the increasing use of mobile.

Over the last decade we have seen the dramatic increase in adoption of Mobile as an involvement channel for consumers and employees within the enterprise.

The most conservative estimates predict that there will be?over?10 bilions?of device by 2021.

We can read the future analyzing a few significant numbers:

• 150?is the average number of times a person looks on their mobile each day
• The?6 of the 10 most-used apps?on mobile devices are instant messaging apps.
• 87%?of people who always have their smartphone at their side, day and night

The folks got used to use a messaging channels day-by-day and now they prefer to use a messaging app than any other channel also to communicate with Business.

What industry will be impacted by chatbots?

Most industries will be impacted by chatbots across B2B, B2E and B2C use cases.

We are already seeing several customers with B2C use cases in the banking, travel and utilities sectors.

Let's see something else.

The chatbots will impact?HCM world, there are several use cases for employees in HR:

• Talent acquisition: chatbots could help in the screening process of thousands job applications
• Onboarding: chatbots could make the on-boarding process a really self-service process
• HR assistant: chatbots can serve as a mobile HR assistant that helps employees get answers to Frequently Asked Questions and basic company-related information
• Annual Performance Review: chatbots could?help to accumulate precise data from employees avoiding all that time-consuming activities like filling questionnaires and surveys that make the workforce slow down throughout the annual evaluation period
• HR support: chatbot could represent a first level interface between hr admins and the cloud HCM tools

All the above use-cases are possible thanks the ability of chatbots to talk with workforce management softwares like HCM Fusion, Kronos, Workday,

Automatize the administrative activities will allow to focus on more profitable HR strategies avoiding to waste of time to respond at the massive holiday requests that you were facing off...

Researchs shows that between?30-50%?of HR workday is spent responding to internal questions.

Sometimes, the employees have to wait up to three days for a response from HR when the hr bot would response instantly. 24 hours a day, seven days per week.

Benefits enrollment, recruiting, onboarding, training and payroll processes all require massive amounts of repetitive activities.

Imagine saving the time to plan, design and setup HR strategies.

Bear in mind than?77%?of HR executives expect to redeploy the human talent management by new forms of automation.

Chatbots will impact business area like the?marketing automation, improving all stage of marketing funnels, responding to customer questions and escalating the conversation when the lead is ready to be converted and talk with sales team.

Chatbots will able to build marketing funnels within the chat messaging app in a way more efficient and profitable than traditional channels.

There is a real mismatch between the performance of email marketing campaign (open rates: 25% , click rates: 10%) and Fb Messenger (open rates:?80%?, click rates:?over 50%).

Another industries which are been impacted by the automation will be the?e-commerce?and?customer service.

E-commerce bots will be essentialy chatbots that make purchase items online more engaging and more personal. The static website and mobile app will be replaced by conversational agents that according to user input may suggest some items that are more personalised to the user’s need.

Imagine to visit an e-commerce website of some retail company with a chatbot that is able to understand your taste and which you can start a conversation with asking him to show you instantly the things you are looking for, instead to browse tens of static page or worst the entire catalog.

Not a simple search engine of static keyword but an automatic agent which is able to catch your truly intents, learning from conversion experience.

You could start a conversation also to have a support if you are facing any issues at purchase stage.

Chatbots can also be used to automatic customer support. Well trained chatbots will be able to accurately answer and resolve customer queries 24/7 with very low operational costs.

Interacting potentially with millions of customers at any given time. If a human were doing the same tasks, then it would require massive capital costs and operational costs.

Probably the chatbots will merge their future developments with other disrupting and growing technology:?blockchain?(other technology that will completely change our lifestyle and make some jobs disappear like the notary).

What is the connecting point between chatbot and blockchain?

Humans are essentially social animals, that is why interacting with pleasant and friendly man-made computer programs could increase dramatically the danger of phishing.

The blockchain technology is essentially a decentralized database that tracks any kind of transaction in a trustworthy way, allowing us to provide our personal information in a secure way.

And what about chatbots and?IoT?

It’s estimated?that around?20 billion?of ‘connected things’ will be online by 2020.

Chatbots can play a main role of interface, to make sense and human-friendly all the data provided by the Internet of Things.

At last, we must recognize that ROI of chatbots would be represent also improving the value of the brand, which is fundamental for increasing monetization over the long term.

At the end of the day, the chatbots can also bring an indirect ROI but they still keep essential for company digital stategies.

Said that, the chatbots are already between us, the?36%?of brands?have already implemented them.

It has been estimated that the?80%?of brands?will be using chatbots for customer interactions by 2020 with?188?billions?projected investements.

The future is marked.

Chatbot’s key components

You can see all kinds of chatbots like a set of 4 high-level components:

• Artificial Intelligence Engine

The NLP (Natural Language Processing) engine to classify and predict user intent and accurately execute the required dialog flow

• Conversational Flows

The conversation logical paths that the bot designer will configure in order to define how the bot respond to user inputs

• Back-End integration

If the chatbot need to perform a custom logic or recover some information from other platforms, you need to integrate it with a backend system that holds the request information for a targeted use case (HCM system, Sales CRM system, MAT and so on)

• Channel Connectors

The interface between the Bots and the messaging channels used by your target users

The key to make the chatbots a disrupting innovation is to integrate them with the currently mass messaging platform became along the way standard "de facto” like Whatsapp, FB Messenger, WeChat (very popular in asian market) glancing with interest to personal assistants like Siri and Amazon Alexa.

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What will chatbots do?

In order to make chatbot run some custom actions, you need to configure a shared APIs and integrate them with your chatbot.

Once you will have your backend integration with third part system, your chatbot will able to glean data from that.

It is going to call your custom APIs according to user intent detected.

You will also have to train it in order to improve the user intent processing.

Once you developed your first chatbot version, you’ll be able to make him to do what you want.

The sky will be the limit.

Alex