Debunking the Misconceptions Associated with Chatbots

The global chatbot market size is forecasted to grow from US$2.6 billion in 2019 to US$9.4 billion by 2024, at a CAGR of 29.7%.

Chatbots have become hype in customer interaction. With their capability to interact like humans, they are becoming a major gamechanger in customer-company interaction. The global chatbot market size is forecasted to grow from US$2.6 billion in 2019 to US$9.4 billion by 2024, at a CAGR of 29.7%. A report by Gartner states that by 2022, 70% of white-collar workers will interact with conversational platforms daily.

Moreover, as pandemic halted operations, organizations resorted to deploying chatbots, so that customer conversations are not affected. Even before the pandemic hit the global economy, the chatbots were widely utilized by organizations to provide efficient customer support services. Since its inception in 1996 in automated telephones, chatbots have come a long way to mimic the human voice. A chatbot is a software application integrated with or without artificial intelligence that can stimulate a conversation with a user in natural language through messaging applications, websites, and mobile apps.

Despite their extensive use, organizations are still apprehensive to deploy chatbots. This is either due to the lack of knowledge about chatbots or an array of misconceptions surrounding it; Hence, so many companies haven't yet deployed chatbots. This article debunks the most common misconceptions of chatbots.

Misconception#1: Bots will replace Humans

Movies like Terminator and Space Odyssey has fired up the human imagination of chatbots as some dystopian entity. It is a common belief that jobs of the human race will be stolen by bots. However, a key factor that organizations often overlook in their skepticism about chatbots is that humans tend to guide chatbots. Though they function by learning texts like humans, chatbots will always look up for human assistance. Undoubtedly, they are deployed to limit the manual work of human and often mimic human beings for advanced customer-relationship. But, eventually the success of a chatbot in any organizational set-up requires human intervention.

Misconception #2: Developing and Deploying the Chatbots by IT Department

It is a common misconception that since chatbots is software, the responsibility of creating it lies with the IT department. Understanding customer behaviour is the key area where chatbots are deployed. As customer services team, deal with customers on a day-to-day basis, they garner a better understanding of the customer's behaviour. That's why it becomes imperative that these segments share equal responsibility for creating the chatbots with authentic designs, techniques, and knowledge that can work parallel with the customer patterns and behaviours. Moreover, these teams can also experiment and align different techniques, to create more natural human-like interaction than robotic and devoid of personality.

Misconception 3: Limited capabilities of Chatbots

Undoubtedly, customer interaction is the key arena where chatbots are deployed. Customer interaction is just the tip of an iceberg while leveraging chatbots. By integrating data analytics, the chatbots can be used to make a customer profile by analyzing the customer's history. Moreover, customer profiling will also assist chatbots in understanding the client's preferences, so that it can interact with the client with a variety of topics. By gaining insights about the customer's needs through this, a strategical approach can be chalked out for improving the products and services.

Outlook

Chatbots is a very valuable entity of organizations. With misconceptions, the capability of chatbots becomes limited. Hence the organizations must clear all the doubts created with chatbots while deploying it.