Chatbots are nowadays a ubiquitous thing on any website. This isn’t a new technology update, it has been built and developed in the 1960s. But the capabilities of chatbots are expanding and the technologies like cognitive intelligence and automation are making them more humanlike, with each passing day. It hasn’t lost its charm mainly because it has consistently improved and developed to help businesses expand at a fast rate without depending on increasing the customer support staff. A chatbot is basically a tool that simplifies the work, saves money, and is highly efficient to help merchants offer support at any time of the day.
What is Chatbot?
A chatbot is a text or voice-based software that stimulates the conversation with a user on behalf of the business using natural language processing through messaging applications, websites, mobile apps, smart speakers, and more. With ever-evolving and progressing functionalities, chatbots are a tool that can also be known as digital assistants that understand and translate human communication capabilities.
Most Common Types of Chatbots
Rule-based Chatbots
The rule-based chatbots are recommended for small to medium-sized organizations having pre-defined goals. Though these types of chatbots are straightforward, they can follow certain scenarios and accomplish tasks as per the rules. In a rule-based chatbot, a map of conversation is built using ‘if/then’ logic. It is built by considering a list of questions/keywords a customer may ask and information for the chatbot to respond to. These types of bots will be able to solve the problems they are already familiar with.
AI Chatbots
AI (Artificial Intelligence) chatbots are the bots already used by most industry leaders. These types of chatbots are well known for their self-learning abilities. This helps in perceiving the user’s intentions along with analyzing the messages and offering better feedback. So with AI chatbots, it will always be like ‘higher you train it, better the performance of the bots’.
The Chatbot Architecture
As we have seen, there are two types of chatbots and we already have the information about their functionalities. Let us have a look at the working of these chatbots.
The rule-based chatbots consist of a list of interactions based on ‘playbooks’ set up by the developer in the back-end of the UI. The interaction with this type of chatbot is set by choosing options to click. For example, if a user is planning to checkout options of shades of lipstick, the bot will allow them to select the color option from the pre-defined colors.
Looking at the functionality of AI chatbots, it depends entirely on ML (Machine Learning) and Artificial Intelligence that analyze the data. This type of solution creates a response with the help of information they receive. Though they are highly beneficial, these bots require a training period and the development is expensive and time-consuming.
Let’s start with understanding its importance with some statistics and slowly move towards Chatbots’ future trends.
Recently, a CB Insight report showed that the chatbot market is worth around $7.7 billion. This number itself proves that chatbots are a promising eCommerce area in 2022 and upwards. A chatbot is a tool that can be used in various aspects such as retail, banking, healthcare, etc. If you are an online store owner, these are some of the numbers that will help you learn more about chatbots.
- According to research,69% of consumers prefer to use chatbots for communicating with a brand instead of email or call.
- Juniper Research indicates the power of bots by mentioning that they can handle over $100 billion in eCommerce transactions.
Trends to Follow in 2022
Voice Bots will Rule
Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant might have already become your best friends.
Similarly, for businesses, voice bots are definitely going to be a revolutionary trend. Voice bots will help deliver seamless experiences across platforms for your brand. Particularly talking about the industries adopting voice bots, insurance, tourism, and education tops the list. Voice bots engage customers with automated and intelligence-based communication. It also offers new opportunities for personalization that lead to hassle-free conversations with customers.
In the upcoming years, the adoption of voice bots is anticipated to rise and the searches are all set to go voice-driven.
Chatbots will be more Humanlike
Chatbots are likely to gain advancements and become more humanlike. This is one of the top chatbot trends for the coming years. Natural Language Processing (NLP) bots make use of sentiment analysis and predictive analytics to understand the conversations and answer accordingly.
The major challenges that come along with the chatbots are requests not being understood properly, leading to misinterpretation of the requests, and executing inaccurate commands.
To overcome these challenges, a majority of messaging customer support platforms are built using conversational AI (Artificial Intelligence) bots so smartly that customers are often not aware of the absence of humans on the other side.
Automated Payment Processes
Whether it is about managing campaigns for lead generation or automating payments, chatbots will do it all. In the coming years, chatbots will automate payments and guide users through the process of selection, purchase as well as a final payment. When a user submits the request, the bot will issue an API request and provide a payment link to complete the transaction.
Linking payments to chatbots will allow the businesses to provide enough data to offer conversation-driven upselling to the customers.
Deep Insights to Drive Chatbot Behaviour
Chatbots are evolved enough to become more conversational and communicate effectively with the use of the latest technologies. The next goal is to improve user experience and offer better chatbot behavior. The use of sentiment analysis to make chatbots more humanlike will also help offer delightful customer experiences. For better customer insight, chatbots will collect, analyze and behave according to the customer feedback. Using sentiment analysis, chatbots can modify the responses in such a way that they are aligned with the customer’s emotions.
Wrapping Up
The mentioned trends are sure to make a wave in the coming years. The eCommerce industry is set to introduce and optimize chatbots that are personalized, humanized, and smart enough to adapt to the regional lingo and sentiments. If you’re an eCommerce store, we are a Magento Development Agency that can guide you through the process of installation of chatbots.
We are heading towards a humanized bot world that can not only search, but understands, responds, and even transact on our behalf.
With that, here’s what we think will evolve into chatbot tech in 2022 and beyond. Let’s embrace the bots and train them to be more human!
