Why developing a chatbot could be good for your business

by Siya Carla, Solution Consultant at Finoit Technologies

One of the biggest vogues in town – chatbots have literally evolved business. The interaction, operation, and connection of business with its customers have changed since then. It’s like an uplift of virtual touch with customers. First introduced by WeChat, chatbot has ever since bought a new meaning in the business world.

WeChat realized its importance much sooner than others and allocated resources to plan the development of the chatbot technology.

They integrated AI with voice recognition and its integral chat platform. After that, the app was able to achieve much more than the simple task of chatting alone, and it was a success because for every service user didn’t have to download the new app.

Post the success of WeChat, Facebook developed its own chatbot and integrated it with Facebook Messenger.

The chatbot session started with an integrated P2P payment method on the messenger app and then moved onto a full-fledged chatbot API to for customer interactions. Right now, there are more than 11000 active chatbots on the Facebook Messenger and around 23000 registered accounts on wit.ai.

Having elaborated two examples of the success of chatbot integration in the business, you must be thinking to have the feature in your business by now. We are here to highlight the factors on why you should consider getting a chatbot developed for your business and how it could take your business to new heights.

Since the evolution of chatbot, it has come a long away, both in terms of technology and its functional capability to help the businesses. Here are five ways chatbot development can be good for startups and enterprises alike.

1. Automated virtual customer support
Being available 24/7 and able to handle customer support is not an easy task. At the same time, it’s very important to be ready for customer queries. This has been an issue for a long time as you can’t alwasy assign someone to take care of customer queries.

As per an industry research, chatbots are expected to deal with 90% of all customer inquiries within the next five years.

Almost every customer usually has a specific set of questions. With the help of a chatbot, all such similar and related questions could be answered easily at any time. This way business could work on other important factors and allocate resources accordingly.

2. Chatbot development is cheap
If you are thinking that the idea of including chatbot is great and could help your business, then you may be correct. However, if you think the cost of chatbot development is huge, that isn’t right.

Developing a chatbot is not necessarily expensive and it can work out less compared to an application development cost. Having understood its importance and the ease of development, big giants like Microsoft, IBM, Google are investing in chatbots.

3. Best user interaction

Retaining those loyal customers is a big task. You regularly need to entertain them with the latest features, new developments, advancements and ensure better user interaction.

With chatbots, you can leave some of the job of user interaction to them and be sure that they would handle them well. They are developed in a way to function and provide specific information to the user at a time. They can engage users and maintain the conversation easily.

4. Resource utilization

When chatbots were not there, businesses used to allocate resources to engage customers and sort their queries. However, this can cost businesses more, since resources were utilized for the support services and not for actual tasks.

The reports of Chatbots Magazine states that introducing virtual agents or chatbots can boost up the businesses and save up to 30%.

The introduction of chatbots in these businesses freed the human resources from some of the user interaction and businesses now could utilize them in other important functions related to transactions. This not only saved the budget but also increased the feasibility of user involvement with the business.

5. Enhance your presence

Today, it’s all about the presence of a business across many channels both online and offline. The success of any business lies in its global presence and branding. A well-established, branded and channelized business is expected to go in the long run in the market. When the channel list increases, so do the requirement to maintain the scenario.

On almost all platforms, chatbots support the businesses to engage users, maintain conversations, helps them with the required information. Chatbots can even come to support when there’s any payment to be made which make the experience for users personalized and unique.

To sum up, there is no way you could get enough of chatbots. They can be cheap, personalized, user-friendly, the latest trend, highly appreciated, a feasible solution of the decade. This trend looks like it will to evolve with more developments.