The chatbots have made strides since their inception almost a decade back. There are many of them who gives customer support on Slack and yet others aim at lonely people keeping company with their surprising wit.

The potential of these chat based bots is game changing and there are many experts who even predict that these will eventually dislodge the apps with their uniquity, usage depth and importance in our daily lives.

Almost all of the technology majors are putting all their investments behind AI, which is in turn is based on machine learning and Big Data, as they are continuously trying to reach what may be termed as nearest to human intelligence. The bots in the present times are for initiating dialogues and to spur conversations with the customers.

However, there are many instances when these bots go bad. Some of these may tell the same thing repeatedly and yet some others are unable to answer the simplest questions, as the designers mistakenly overlooked that the humans often ask questions which are unpredictable and silly.

A poorly designed chatbot user experience will quickly turn a customer engagement into a terrible user experience. The users generally have high expectations from these bots powered by Artificial Intelligence. It is these which are taking customer experience to the next great level. The UX experience rendered by these bots must be able to make the customer feel as if the chabot is speaking in its own human language.

The foundations on which these bots are based on are not only dependent on the programming skills but there are lots of dependencies on the chatbot UX design. The usability of the bots is determined by how much they are able to answer the queries asked by their users.

Here are some UX elements that builds successfully the most engaging and interactive chatbot:

1. Smart Chatbot

AI must have the ability to comprehend in-depth human behaviour. Not much cross questioning is required, but they must be able to answer all the queries from the humans. Your bots appear with a smarter personality  with fully incorporated AI and language interpretation in place.

2. Visual Representation

Humans prefer to think that the bots used by them are more like friends who are answering all their queries in the form of some useful information, rather than one human machine interface or for that matter a robot.

There are many users who quite annoyingly ask repeated silly questions to their bots, so that they must be designed in such a way, that the most polite and non-offensive answers are provided with.

3. Chatbots with Compact Replies

Short and simple answers are what attracts your  users. If the chatbot is unable to reply in lengthy sentences, then they must be programmed in such a way that the replies are made in short and compact sentences.

The conversation with these bots is made more engaging and interactive with videos and photos to explain something in further details.

4. Escalation System in Chatbots

These bots also need some human supervision as it is not always possible to get all the answers based on them. There are some levels of interactions which require customer interactions to be carried out with the company executives.

The best of the UX for chatbots ensures that the bots are programmed in such a manner so that it understands when to escalate the query to a higher level supervisor. This will make it possible to resolve the customer issues, without causing any delays whatsoever.

The bots that are developed must ensure that the bots say the right things at the right time. You can involve a set of random people to test the bot, whether it has the right effect. This will be successfully bring out those areas which were overlooked earlier. Once the flaws are rectified, these chatbots can be successfully displayed to millions of users. The chatbots must not be the ones that performs some mundane activities, but must be designed as a specialized purpose-driven bots that engage your target audience.

Anteelo is one of the best custom chatbot development company, that have seen an outstanding pace of growth, in a matter of two years time. They have worked in many verticals like restaurant, health, learning, entertainment and many more. They believe in delivering user-centric apps for their customers, utilizing cutting edge technologies.

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According to ComScore’s 2017 US Mobile App Report, users spend 90% of their mobile app time in their top 5 apps. Surprised? Well, more alarming is that nearly 50% of their time is spent on a single app, leaving 18% lesser time for the second and other three apps. This means that until and unless your app is the first or second most used application, there’s no way to get valuable users’ attention. But, is it so easy to become the first choice of the users? With Google, Facebook and Apple leading the market in terms of user engagement, this seems to be nearly impossible. What to do then? How to rise above these tech giants? Well, the answer to these questions is Chatbot.

Chatbot- The New Face of App Market

“The tech industry continues to undergo critical changes. The Websites replaced the desktop Operating system, mobile apps trumped over the websites and now, the Chatbots are all set to surpass mobile applications.”

Chatbots are becoming a hype in the tech industry! Also called Bots and Messaging bots, Chatbots are considered among the best ways to reach the customers and keep them hooked. As per our experts, chatbots with the help of messaging applications are providing newer opportunities to brands for user attraction and engagement. It is offering a promising future to the businesses, and in fact, is supposed to surpass mobile apps by the year 2020. So, what’s your plan now? Ready to invest in the technology used by popular companies like Hyatt, Spring and HealthTap? To make it easier to decide, here we are sharing the merits and demerits of Chatbot Development.

Benefits of Chatbot Development

• Reach a Wider Customer Base

As the messaging applications are gaining huge momentum over social networks and other applications, a Chatbot built into a chat platform like Facebook Messenger can help you to reach a wider customer base across the globe.

• Increased User engagement

Chatbots are usually text-driven, with images and unified gadgets. It enables the users to get all the information under the same roof, without going through the whole content. In short, the bots screen out the content users which to know and deliver to them in no time. With the help of Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning, the chatbots learns from the user’s behavior, previous interactions and offer customized services/products. Also, it keeps the vital details like name, address, credit details, etc. into its storage which implies the user need not to provide these information again and again. Apart from these, the Chatbots keep consulting the users like humans about their previous experience, which helps the customers get emotionally linked to the bot.

“According to Gartner’s report, 85% of user communications will be managed without human involvement by 2020.”

• Round the Clock’ Customer Service

Another reason why businesses are looking ahead to shaping the future with bots is its potential for ‘round the clock’ customer service. This empowers the customers to communicate regarding any product/service even in the midnight and get a response immediately.

• Faster & Customizable Facility

The websites take a few seconds or minutes to load, while the mobile apps consume your storage space. However, the chatbots loads instantaneously and do not ask for separate phone’s memory storage. Thus, they win the race as users prefer mobility solutions with faster loading time and lesser memory consumption.

Besides this, the bot provides a wider array of services- ranging from diagnosing your health to buying a gift to booking a flight ticket at the same platform. This is one of the prime reasons users love bots over the mobile apps.

• No More Stress of App Downloads

One of the challenges faced by the companies is getting their app downloaded. According to a report, though the number of app downloads is going to exceed 197 billion by this year, the rate of app downloads in the developed countries like the USA is declining to zero. In such a scenario, a Chatbot can be the ultimate solution for you! A Chatbot is integrated within the messaging apps, and need not be downloaded for usage. That means, your targeted audience can take the perks of your chatbot without compromising with their phone’s storage.

• Lower Development Cost

With Chatbot development, you can be available on all the mobile platforms and devices; you no more need to rely on platform-centric development resources. You need not spend weeks and months on developing an app or wait for approval from the app store. Also, building a chatbot is much faster and cheaper. According to our developers, a top-class Facebook bot can be built at about half the cost of a mobile application. Isn’t that amazing?

Limitations

• Immature

There’s no exaggeration to the fact that the Chatbot is the fastest flourishing technology in the field of app development. But still, it is not mature enough to give tough competition to humans and mobile applications. According to the top mobile app development companies, the bots gain knowledge by the interactions and might need a human assistant to handle the situation when something goes wrong.

The very best example of this is Microsoft’s chatbot Tay which turned from human-loving bot to a racist freak within 24 hours.

• Can Replace Promotional, Retail & Content-focused mobile apps only

Although there are millions of applications on the App Store, about 75% of revenue is driven by games. Various mobile app development agencies have integrated the gamification into the bots to attract the younger audience, but there’s still tough competition in the market. The applications like Prisma, Pokemon Go and MSQRD are still ranking on the top, proving that mobile apps are still in business.

Conclusion

Now, as you are familiar with the advantages and disadvantages of Chatbot development, take the right decision for your business. For any further query or get a bot for your business, contact us!

The post A Quick Overview of Chatbot Development : Benefits and Drawbacks appeared first on anteelo.

In general, chat adoption rates are still not as strong as clients would like. Those who simply built a chat option with the expectation that user would adopt it by themselves are seeing between 7% to 12% of their volume via chat.

Most of these organizations are doing nothing to promote chat as a support channel, assuming that users would gravitate to chat as many of them already have in their personal lives. That’s a mistake because, when it comes to social behavior adoption patterns, it is important to realize that users do not behave the same way in the workplace as in their private lives. User who would potentially prefer chatting will fall back to calling the service desk if that is what most of their coworkers do. After all, one of our strongest drivers as human beings is our desire to fit in amongst our group of peers.  The weight that the old adage “When in Rome, Do as the Romans Do” has in our decision-making is often underestimated.

The key, then, to overcome adoption barriers, is to find ways to modify the behavior of a small percentage of the population – enough that the social trend starts to pull the rest toward the new desired behavior. (This is why group subscriptions to gyms are often more successful than individual promotions). Studies by Alex Pentland and the MIT MediaLab suggest that the frequency of contact and level of trust between the individuals is much more important than the pure number of people pushing the adoption of new behavior. One of their research studies found that user adoption of a new tool (a company social network in this case) was almost guaranteed if the user received at least three invitations from their trusted peers in a short period of time.

So, what does it take to specifically increase the chat channel adoption? Here are a few approaches:

• Promote it. Remind users not only that the chat support channel exists, but that it’s good. (You should, of course, also make sure that it actually is a good service.)
• Identify service advocates within the user community.  Make them part of the promotion of the new channel and reward them for getting people to use the service. This can generate a domino effect, helping the social trend accelerate over time.
• Make chat very accessible and easy to use. If picking up the phone on my desk is faster or easier, nothing will make me stop that behavior when I have an urgent issue. So, instead of giving chat the usual set of barriers — accessible only through a service portal that requires you to open a browser, find the URL, log in with credentials you may not remember, find the button on the page, provide basic info all before getting in a queue — why not allow direct access to support on a medium where users already chat, like Skype? This way, you tap into the built-in mental pattern that tools like Skype generate in our brains (I need to talk to someone, so I look for them in Skype, I chat with them).
• Add innovative features that can make chat more appealing. For instance, AI virtual agents and automated translation would make service available 24×7 while improving quality, speed and accuracy.
• Expose users to metrics on their personal contact behavior to incentivize the new behavior. For example, a campaign that makes them feel “out of touch” with the social norm can help. Instead of telling them “you should chat” or “chat is great,”  it’s better to tell them “most users in your department chat with the service desk as the first channel” or  “80% of your peers found chat more effective at resolving IT issues.”

With these recommendations, voluntary adoption of chat can increase from those averages around 10% to those around 20% or 25%.  And as virtual assistant technology becomes more available, embedding a chat function within a Skype or Microsoft Teams environment becomes a more viable option. These virtual assistants contain a good library of responses built into an AI engine and will greatly enhance usability.

As things continue to evolve, many contact channel policies will change.  We expect to see a day when all IT issues are first sent to the virtual agent before trying any other channel. Some companies may not even make other channels readily available to users. Instead, built-in integrations with a virtual assistant could enable users to request a chat with a live agent as a secondary option, or automatically log a ticket without human interaction.  When paired with automated translation services, this will result in a smooth, seamless “chat-first” channel, and radically change how we think about global service desks in the future.

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