5 chatbot trends to grow your business

Check out five amazing chatbot trends to improve and automate your business operations

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and ML or Machine Learning trends are revolutionizing several businesses and industrial operations, including customer service, call center automation, banking operations, sales, and more.

AI isn't anymore just for Fortune 500 companies or multinational corporations (MBCs), but many small businesses and companies are leveraging AI technologies and solutions. One such solution is—chatbots.

In recent years, chatbots have been gaining immense popularity. Chatbots are extremely critical for businesses that are looking to improve and automate their business operations and offer enhanced and exceptional customer experience and boost sales.

In this article, we'll take you through some of the latest chatbot trends in the industry you can implement to grow your business in 2021. But first, let us start with the basics and see what chatbots are exactly.

What are chatbots? 

Chatbots are computer programs used to conduct conversations and communication with humans or customers through a messaging interface.

Most of the chatbots are powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology—facilitating problem-solving, improving customer interactions, and sending personalized messages to improve the overall user experience.

Many people think that chatbots will replace the human workforce and sales agents in different sectors like the backs, call centers, etc. however, it's not true. Chatbots are only meant to make the employee's tasks easy and offer highly accessible and 24/7 customer service to the website visitors.

As per Lauren Foye's statistics, banks can automate upto 90% of their customer service and interactions using chatbots by 2022, signifying the importance of the current chatbots trends in banking and other industries. So let us see some of the top chatbot trends you can deploy for your business's growth.

Six amazing chatbots trends to deploy for your business 

Implementing and deploying AI chatbot solutions will push your organization towards the next customer service and business operations scale. Here are some chatbot trends to help you get started with business automation.

AI chatbots in customer support

Several call centers across the globe are increasingly adopting chatbots and other digital assistants to reduce customer service costs. So yes, as organizations are upgrading from inefficient IVR technology to Artificial Intelligence, chatbots are significantly helping them save costs and maximize profits.

Chatbots aim to reduce the number of employees and agents needed to handle customer calls and requests—allowing them to focus on other high-value and complex tasks. This not only saves infrastructure costs but also improves employee productivity, operational efficiency and enhances customer service as chatbots are available 24/7 to assist customers.

Here are the benefits of chatbots in customer support:

• Organization's process automation by allowing chatbots to handle first-level and repetitive customer queries.
• Streamlined customer interaction—as chatbots offer the easiest way of customer interaction.
• Sentiment analysis to understand the customer's tone and desire and get the context of the conversation to deliver a better experience.
• Recommend services and products to the customers based on their past purchases and buying patterns—increasing personalization.

Chatbots are offering a more human-like chat experience 

Chatbots are slowly and eventually becoming the driving force behind business communications.

Organizations are dedicated to making chatbots offer human-like and natural conversation-like experiences to catch up with the ever-growing customer demands and expectations, with the support of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and Natural Language Processing (NLP).

Chatbots with conversational AI and NLP help businesses:

• Improve and build stronger customer relationships.
• Understand customers better by valuable insights and feedback to help deliver a better experience.
• Boost their credibility, customer loyalty, and reputation.

Mobile Marketer's research suggests that around 40% of millennials claim that they chat with chatbots on a daily basis—proving the increasing popularity and preference of chatbots amongst consumers.

Chatbots in messaging apps and platforms 

Messaging applications such as Whatsapp and Facebook are on the tremendous rise and are surpassing social media networks. For instance, in 2018's first quarter, Whatsapp gained over 1.3 billion monthly active users.

The use of messaging applications helps brands and businesses have meaningful conversations with the target base and create long-term relationships. In addition, when chatbots are used with these messaging applications, it leads to greater customer service and personalized one-on-one customer interaction.

With chatbot's conversational AI on messaging applications, businesses can push:

• Brand awareness with quick responses
• Better customer support with tailored responses
• Sales and lead generation

Messaging app use is increasing each day. And you may require multiple Facebook, Twitter, or other app accounts for your business to promote your brand and connect with your customers. Unfortunately, to create these accounts, you require mobile numbers for verification. And providing a single phone number for every account is not possible.

For this problem, you can use a mobile phone number verification service that lets you create Facebook or other app accounts using a virtual/temporary phone number. This way, you can create business accounts on the desired application without providing your actual mobile number for verification.

Chatbots in HR and other internal businesses use 

Besides managing customer requests, chatbots streamline many internal business processes for small to huge organizations.

Here are some uses cases and examples:

• Human resources: Chatbots help in resume screening, choosing the right candidates amongst a pool of applications, employee management, completing HR transactions, answering HR-related queries, and helping HRs make better-informed decisions.
• Internal help desk: Chatbots can help IT help desk workers by answering common customer queries on their behalf. By handling repetitive and simple queries, chatbots enhance employees' productivity and increase responsiveness.

Payment automation

The future of chatbots is—payment automation.

Chatbots have the capability to automate simple payments and transactions—allowing customers to pay directly through Facebook Messenger apps, virtual assistants, or live chats. This instant way or process of the transaction can make customers satisfied, more content—increasing your business credibility and customer retention rate.

Accepting payments through messaging apps like Facebook Messenger can offer your business the following benefits:

• Offer personalized recommendations to customers.
• It's a trusted platform, so customers find it reliable to share credit/debit card information.
• Customers can easily make transactions through their phones.
• It is a much more cost-efficient solution for payment transactions than other channels like live chats.

Conclusion 

It is more than a necessity to keep up with the ongoing technological trends and deploy them for your business to automate mundane and redundant operations, save costs, and offer better customer service.

Chatbots are one such trend, and their use is increasingly spreading and growing at a rapid rate amongst different business sectors.

So, it is extremely important to keep an eye out for these trends and improve your business operations accordingly. If you wish to grow your business in 2022, make sure to check out the amazing chatbot trends mentioned in this article and aid your business's growth. chatbots