Defining chatbots
“A chatbot is defined as a computer program designed to encourage conversation with human users, over the internet. Chatbots treat conversations like a game of badminton: Talk, reply, talk, reply and so forth. It’s that simple, but let’s get into why there is high demand for chatbots especially in the year 2019”.
Why a rise in chatbots?
Chatbots are conversational interfaces, which aim at assisting customers in interacting with larger organizations. The main benefit with chatbots is they are much more dynamic a problem solver than a simple FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) webpage. So, what exactly is an FAQ webpage? Glad you asked. A FAQ webpage is way too wordy to explain so we’ll just carry on boasting about the Chatbot.
Latest advancements indicate that majority of chatbots currently are leveraging keywords and certain phrases, in your text. Why? Well it’s simple, this is done in order to return or generate a response that, even while it does appear to sound strained or somehow like a forced conversation it eventually does begin to make some sort of logical sense.
How far then are chatbots evolving?
Yes, it is true chatbots do grow just the same way a human does go through each stage of their lifecycle. Artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots incorporate similar mechanism but growth, however, is powered by larger datasets for training and more advanced machine learning algorithms. The current chatbots manage to improve through leveraging user input as training data.
An Artificial Intelligent Chatbot will essentially better learn to serve your consumers after carrying conversations with them over time. This is achieved by updating its machine learning models as it completes more and more conversations with humans.
What to expect in 2019
One popular 2019 trend is to display chats as text bubbles, which will help on capitalizing our familiarity with such visual cues. The main goal is to design a robot that mimics a human in conversation, and therefore the familiarity in the visual presentation is a crucial part of the overall experience.
However, that’s not all, there’s more!
Some experts believe that chatbots could one day, evolve and replace search bars in our internet browsing. That’s insane right. Just to put it into context, think about it in this way; When you query a search engine you are basically asking a question that a machine is answering. Majority of the time you don’t type in the entire question, but rather an approximation or abstraction of your question. Once that’s done the process isn’t over you then have to scroll through varyingly relevant results. I know, typing that felt long as well, but imagine if you had a machine that was conversational, you’d have a much easier time reaching the search result that you’re looking for.
That’s where the chatbot comes in!
Is building a chatbot that difficult?
The best chatbots in the market take into consideration the decisions, both macro and micro that consumers go through on a daily basis and use them as an opportunity to help. Chatbots should provide a solution when people need it most. However, the challenge of building a chatbot isn’t a technical one. It’s more of your conversational skills. For a chatbot to succeed the key thing is to understand the interaction your audience is already having with your brand. Using that understanding, you can then create a chatbot that yields maximum Return on Investment. It is important to remember that a chatbot can’t do it all. It should focus on one thing and do it very well.
Example of Brand Chatbots In the Kenyan Market
Meet Safaricom’s Zuri
Safaricom’s Zuri offers the following services;
- Managing premium SMS subscriptions,
- M-Pesa reversals,
- Airtime top-up both through M-Pesa and Scratch cards,
- data bundle purchase,
- M-Pesa and Airtime balance enquiry and a few How-To options.
Initiating a conversation with Zuri is very straightforward. Zuri will greet you back and introduce herself giving you options of the services she offers. The whole conversation is fool-proof due to the fact that it is a matter of following basic prompts.
So, there you have it, more digital trends to look out for! If you are looking for the digital marketing agency in Nairobi Kenya for the job, feel free to give us a shout and we will gladly deliver the best solutions for your business. We look forward to catching up soon, do have yourself a fantastic week.
Feel free to also check out our very own case study below with our loyal client Samsung, in which we used the innovation of chatbots to achieve fantastic results for our client as well as went on to win our very own award.
