What is a chatbot?
What are chatbots for and how do companies use them?
A chatbot is an artificial intelligence (AI) program that can simulate a conversation (or a chat) with a user in natural language through messaging applications, websites, mobile applications or by phone.
An example. You want to buy some shoes from your local retail store, you have to access their website, find what you are looking for and buy it. But what if that store had a bot? It would only be necessary to write a message to the brand through Facebook and tell them what we want. And if you had doubts about size measurements you could gt answers to your problem in a moment.
One of the great advantages of chatbots is that, unlike applications, they are not downloaded, it is not necessary to update them and they do not take up space in the phone's memory. Another one is that we can have several bots integrated in the same chat.
This way we would avoid jumping from one app to another according to what we need at each moment. The consequences? More pleasant user experiences and faster and simpler customer service interactions.
Why are chatbots important? A chatbot is often described as one of the most advanced and promising expressions of human-machine interaction. However, from a technological point of view, a chatbot only represents the natural evolution of a response system to questions that takes advantage of natural language processing (NLP).
The formulation of answers to questions in natural language is one of the most typical examples of natural language processing applied in companies.
So, what is a chatbot? It is a piece of software that is designed to automate a specific task. More specifically, a chatbot is essentially a conversational user interface that can be connected to a series of data sources through an API so that it can offer information or services on demand, such as weather forecasts, breaking news, status updates o order information.
Why are chatbots important?
Chatbot applications streamline the interactions between people and services, improving customer experience. At the same time, they offer companies new opportunities to improve the process of customer engagement and operational efficiency by reducing the typical cost of customer service.
To be successful, a chatbot solution should be able to perform tasks effectively. Human support plays a key role here: regardless of the type of approach and platform, human intervention is crucial to configure, train and optimize the chatbot system.
Online purchases and payments management
Chatbots help to simplify the online shopping and payment processes. They provide information and solve the problems that users have throughout the purchase decision process.
They can also perform searches, provide similar products or even allow payments from the conversation chat itself.
Generate and qualify leads
A chatbot can be designed to capture important user information such as email, phone etc. and send that information to sales representatives so they can do follow-ups on the conversation. Then can also filter and qualify potential customers by asking questions and evaluating the response, to filter and only send the most valuable leads to your sales team.