AI has been in buzz these days, however, the AI Chatbots are more in news. Chatbots are declared the next big thing and yes, it certainly is with its fascinating features. AI Chatbots are computer-based software that communicates with the business prospects/loyal customers over a live chat interface. This interface is either the business website or its Skype handle, Facebook messenger, WhatsApp, etc. Moreover, these AI chatbots have made mentions in almost all industrial verticals, including AI in fashion design, real estate, healthcare, finance & marketing, ecommerce, and many more. Chatbots offer real-time messaging preference to your business service and companies can boost their social media marketing with its use. Chatbot services are a great way to handle social media messages and attain customer satisfaction by instant replies to customers.

Various surveys suggest AI Chatbots’ significance and the reason it is the guardian angel for every company’s social handle. Check out:

A survey by Oracle informs that nearly 80 percent of the marketers will be using a chatbot facility by 2020. 

Other surveys by the 2017 Aspect Consumer Experience Index suggest that nearly 49% of the business client interact with AI-powered bots once a week. Moreover, 45% of the customers not even bother about whether they are talking to a bot or a live agent and consider a live agent only when the issue is extreme, and nearly 33% of the customers want bots to provide customer service, as they are swift and accurate. 

With the increasing use of AI Chatbots for businesses today, here is how it benefits your business and helps to excel in social media marketing:

• Enhanced customer service

Since live agents can’t be available everywhere, chatbots help to answer customer queries ensuring boosted satisfaction. Remember the last time you talked to the customer support of any app you use? Well, most of them have messaging bots that answer instantly and in case of any extreme issue, the customer is forwarded to a live agent.  

To the user, chatbots seem to be “intelligent” due to their informative skills. However, chatbots are only as intelligent as the underlying database.

-Peter Gentsch

It is vital to note that bots are designed to answer queries and its software has some limitations. Thus in case a customer requires talking to a live agent, bots transfer calls to an experienced call manager so that there is no compromise to customer satisfaction. 

Chatbots may not solve complex issues, but they are master at doing simple and straightforward tasks. This is the root cause every business wants them in use to save time, energy and expense. 

• No queue issues

Social media marketing faces the threat of queueing up customer queries. Customers always complain about long wait times and unprofessional response from the service providers. Well, having a bot by the side, faster customer service is assured and there is no issue of long wait concerns that often irritate the customer. 

Chatbots are the fastest customer service agents that reach customers within seconds of an inquiry. Human response takes time, however, chatbots can get along your business social media platform and can answer customer requests easily without any error. 

A business just needs to find its most engaging social platform and connect a chatbot through messenger from the same. Bots can reply, analyze and give you all customer data in real-time, thus is better than hiring expensive live agents for every task. 

Although bots cannot perform all tasks, Chatbots easily perform those that do not require human intervention and can be handled by pre-defined programs as instructed by humans. Artificial bots are in buzz these days because they can excellently reduce your customer service response time. 

• Handle large volumes

Every business has a social media agent to handle all inquiries. These agents often face a hassle-full situation of a large volume of requests from the customers. However, when a chatbot looks after the business customers’ online, there is no capacity limit and it can answer all inquiries at the same time with an appropriate answer. 

Chatbots are automated systems, which can analyze customer queries easily providing an answer accordingly. Bots do not care about the number of messages and do not get irritated with repetitive query answering. It is much cost-effective than hiring and training agents to handle inquiries and can bring your business better customer satisfaction. 

• Pro-active customer interaction

Monitoring every user on the website constantly is not possible for live agents. However, Chatbots have this ability to monitor every customer’s activity and provide real-time information. Chatbots can be designed to keep an eye on the customer activity so that it is easy to reach the user at the right time with the correct response. 

Such a service is impossible without the help of a bot. Social media presence for every business is important and thus having a bot to reply to customers instantly is important. Every business’s social media marketer trust bots, as they know chatbots assist in query handling and boost customer satisfaction with an automated and accurate response.  

• 24X7 support

Chatbots help your business service be available 24X7 to the customer. Live agents are only available at customer support for a specified period and in odd timings, bots take up the job of answering queries efficiently. Several companies have their social media messenger bots available at support all the time.

These bots transfer only those queries that demand human vigilance. Chatbots solve customer concerns by being available even in odd hours and that too in limited budget. This is the reason every business’s social media marketer wants a bot installed for its business social page that has the highest market reach. 

• Messenger marketing

Every business requires an appropriate social media marketing strategy for success. Talking about marketing strategies, messenger marketing is a new term. This word came into existence after the introduction of AI-driven Chatbots. 

Messenger marketing is all about getting to the customer, conducting marketing operations, and collecting data by uniting both bots and business messaging apps like Facebook, WhatsApp, etc. 

The main reason this marketing strategy is essential for your business is that customers have started moving to messenger apps to enquire about any query, which is why a bot on the social platform is necessary. Live agents cannot be available 24X7, thus chatbot helps with swift answering and looking after customer satisfaction. 

Customers nowadays give less time to social channels and are more of messaging geeks, thus messenger marketing is integral.

• Replying FAQs

Chatbots can identify customer issues through FAQs. Artificial bots can easily redirect the customers’ on the relevant material of FAQ. This helps to solve the customers’ basic issues easily without any hassle, thus proving bots to be a great tool for help. 

Live agents can also perform excellently when it comes to FAQs. However, why hiring agents in-house for different tasks when a bot can perform the same in a limited budget! 

Well, bots have several perks to offer making it obligatory for today’s competitive business environment. Integrating chatbots with the business social media marketing can do wonders for customer satisfaction, thus why avoiding it! 

Thanks for reading!

The post AI Chatbots: The Guardian Angel for your Business! appeared first on Cyfuture Blog.

Time has briskly changed the pace at which technology is progressing. The progression of technology has, in turn, challenged the verticals of human intelligence. Strategic intelligence has become the new culture and Artificial Intelligence has emerged as the new normal. The advent of Artificial Intelligence has invaded all sectors alike. The prominent one among them is the business process outsourcing industry. Let us explore it in detail.

Deep diving into Artificial Intelligence

Put in simple words, Artificial Intelligence is the intelligence shown by machines. If we deep dive into the neural schema of Artificial Intelligence, we find that machine learning and deep learning power the inner core of Artificial Intelligence. When we talk about machine learning, we are actually referring to a sequence of algorithms and other relative arrangements, which get created during the execution of a specific task. On the other hand, deep learning is all about the variety of permutations and combinations, which are possibly closest to the algorithm needed to execute the task. Thus, it can be concluded that it is machine learning and deep learning that form the basis of pedagogical theory lying underneath Artificial Intelligence.

Interface with Business Process Outsourcing Industry

A survey conducted with attendees of Intelligent Automation, Chicago, 2017 revealed the following figures:

• 56% of attendees had confirmed that they plan to partially automate 21-40% of their business processes using AI.
• Over 40% of attendees had confirmed that the major challenge in implementing AI is the Standardization of processes before implementation.
• One more interesting finding is that 68% of attendees confirmed that the FTEs will be redeployed into more value-added work and 8% felt no impact on FTEs.

We may conclude the following from the above-mentioned survey;

• Artificial intelligence and BPO industry has a strong correlation with each other in the domain of chatbot.
• Chatbot can be called a mini AI robot which is at the intersecting point of both AI and the BPO industry.
• A close interface of AI with the BPO industry would lead to the generation of huge revenues and act as a powerhouse for other startups.

The superposition principle of AI and BPO

Artificial Intelligence is fast invading various industries, so it is dictating upon business process outsourcing companies. To put it in a nutshell, Artificial Intelligence is transforming industries by researching in Big data and Cloud computing. As such, BPO is the one that is most affected as it is intimately related to both the former and the later. Moreover, it acts as an epicenter for numerous kinds of business process outsourcing companies. The centrality of the BPO industry also paves the way for meeting the growing customer expectations. Therefore, it would not be wrong to point out that a thriving BPO industry would flourish with AI intervention.

In the post-globalized world, businesses are eager to pile up their revenues. To make it happen, they want to cut down on unnecessary costs and further the scale of their operations especially in the untapped markets where favorable business conditions are present. Hence, they desire the outsourcing units to leverage the power of AI so that not only the subsidiary company is benefited but the parent company also becomes a partner in the road of rapid monetary progress.

BPO companies worldwide are now fast responding to this changing business climate. Using Big data and cloud computing they are mining large sets of data and generating a comprehensive graphical analysis from the raw and randomly stacked up data sets. These analytical data sets are not only useful for the scaling up of business operations in general but also tracking up customer satisfaction by review monitoring in particular.

Hence, when we are talking about the superposition principle in the case of AI and BPO, we are referring to the mutual benefits one can bring for the other. Put in simpler words, AI can make the BPO industry thrive in the form of revolutionizing the processes liked to chatbot. On the other hand, BPO industry can benefit AI by acting as a hotbed of research and a new genre for researchers interested in this field.

Read More: Is RPA the end of Business Process Outsourcing?

Mr. Chatbot!

The AI technology that powers the chatbot performing various functions would need to be taught various kinds of interactions. Few among them are mentioned here in brief.

• How to interact with customers and identify various kinds of problem sets?
• How to go ahead with using data and generate meaningful data sets?
• How to analyze the performance of chatbot in detail?
• How is chatbot being monitored and continuously improved over time from user inputs and human oversight?

 It is pertinent to note here that the “improvised” chatbot will not ponder over time and again what it is doing, as a human would. Instead, it would simply act in the way it has been programmed, learning continuously from the data it processes over a period of time. Let us now come to the primary question that arises here. How will the chatbot deal with emotional responses from consumers who are upset about a product? Will the chatbot generate an adverse reaction about a product? Would that lower the reputation of the company? Would a logical, algorithmic, sequential and dispassionate response lead to an increased level of consumer dissatisfaction or would rationality be able to prevail over emotion? And what would the circumstances be if the chatbot provides its clients with incorrect information or an incomplete date? Last but not least, who would take the liability of the adverse circumstances if they arise in the future?

Footnotes

Research is the science of optimists. This reminds us that after studying the various pros and cons of Artificial Intelligence vis-à-vis business process outsourcing, we have to conclude that positive prospects overweight the negative ones by a considerable margin. As such, the intervention of AI in the BPO industry would provide new pathways to this emerging sector. It would not only spin revenues but would also empower businesses. The time seems just ripe enough to promote the mutuality of the nascent BPO industry and the already prosperous AI sector.

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