5 chatbot tech trends that will change businesses in 2022

These chatbot trends are hottest in the market

In the 2000s, the modern service desk evolved substantially. Chatbots contributed substantially to this transformation, especially with the promise of versatile new technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and sentiment tracking. The Covid-19 pandemic accelerated the digitalization process. It is characterized by a major shift of customer expectations to more personalized experiences, contextual understanding, and predicting behaviors.

With this backdrop, 2022 presents more opportunities to apply newer chatbot technologies and advance the existing ones, thereby helping businesses connect with current and potential customers. By transitioning from customer-based interactions to more real-time engagements, Gartner predicts that AI will be a mainstream customer experience investment in the next couple of years. In fact, 47% of organizations will use chatbots for customer care and 40% will deploy virtual assistants.

That's the reason why, from MNCs to startups, small businesses to entrepreneurs, everyone is using chatbots as a part of their customer servicing plan. Further, with the apps' market saturating, the shift to chatbots is evident. Estimates suggest that more than 50% of enterprises will spend more per annum on bots and chatbot creation than the traditional mobile app development.  Importantly, the overall market size for chatbots worldwide is likely to be over $1.3 billion by 2024

Leveraging NLP and AI to become more human-like

As the customer base of companies is increasing, so is the need to have a large pool of assistants to service them. AI-powered chatbots have become a cost-saving system, powered to deliver exceptional customer service as they can be integrated with all the platforms, including SMS, email, and apps. They can also be trained to answer a large volume of queries in real-time.

Further, leveraging technologies such as Natural Language Processing (NLP) and AI have resulted in continuous improvements in the chatbot experience for businesses.

In 2022, this trend will continue and chatbots are expected to behave more human-like. Conversational AI will enable chatbots to understand accents, respond to the sentiments with which instructions are given, and share tailored replies, thereby improving the overall experience and building customer loyalty.

For example, chatbot technology has played a pivotal role in the rise of conversational commerce. Brands are now able to have a dialogue with their customers in a personalized manner. Customers too are able to get close-to-real interactions as they would have with salespeople. By creating that dialogue, and reducing the number of steps, brands are able to reduce the time for purchase decisions.

Data-driven insights to drive personalization

Over the years, improvements in chatbots have made it more conversational. With data collected and analyzed, it now shows promise to elevate the customer experience through further personalization.

Sentiment tracking will be a game-changer in 2022; chatbots will be trained to spot the context/sentiment with which commands are being given. It is projected that by 2025, chatbots will handle 75-90% of customer queries. This has become possible due to data-driven insights, which are driving personalized communication from chatbots. With data and learnings, chatbots will be able to identify when the customer is happy, annoyed or neutral, and adapt their communication accordingly. It would also make the transition from chatbot to live agent seamless, especially in the case of a dissatisfied customer.

AI-driven chatbots optimize cost and resource

Startups and small businesses are set to benefit from chatbots as they also optimize costs and resources. As per Juniper Research, chatbots could help trim business costs by more than $8 billion per year by 2022and save up to 50% in customer support costs. Further, chatbots reduce the number of live agents required 24×7 and remove the redundancy of routine tasks and queries.

Growing popularity of voice bots

Voice is increasingly becoming a mainstream technology as it is helping chatbots overcome the limitations of text commands. As businesses expand to tier-2 towns and cities, voice chatbots will also assist in seamless and streamlined conversations with customers, responding to queries in real-time and reducing dependency on smartphones etc., Sectors such as health, finance, and e-commerce will see a huge surge in automation, especially with chatbots being able to enhance the customer experience.

Chatbots to automate payments

With the rise of small businesses and customer trust in digital payments, chatbots will become increasingly popular to automate payments over a live chat or their app.  This would reduce operating costs for businesses, and be easily scalable. With these benefits, technology integration to automate payments will see greater momentum in 2022.

In essence, that future is not far, where businesses create an intranet of chatbots to boost engagement and improve customer engagement. Chatbots will grow further and faster with technological advancements and present more viable and sustainable solutions for businesses.

Author

Vishwadeep Bajaj, CEO, ValueFirst, a Twilio company