What is a Chatbot?

Digital Advertising industry is undoubtedly one of the fastest growing industries. From pamphlets, billboards, hoardings, banner ads to artificially intelligent customized marketing, it has surely come a long way. After Real-time bidding, Programmatic buying, Internet of Things becoming part of the mainstream, it’s now the turn of Chatbot. Off late, Chatbot has been the talk of the town.

What is a ChatBot?

A chatbot is a software program designed to converse with the end users/customers through a chat interface. Customers can interact with text as well as voice, chatbot converse using natural language. It uses artificial intelligence system through which customers can interact to find answers to their queries and products they are looking for. Chatbots are considered intelligent as they are capable of analyzing patterns in our speech as we talk to them and can offer personalized products. They are smart enough to advertise the right product, to right people and at right time. Businesses are keen to invest in Chatbot as they are capable of not only attracting the potential customers but helps in retaining the existing ones by providing the desired service.

A chatbot is seen as an effective medium to connect with customers and provide them service round the clock. Consumer data is being integrated with the Chatbot program through which they are able to provide personalized offerings and discounts. This results in higher customer engagement.

Service Bots: are used to offer various services to customers like booking a flight, movie, ordering a meal.

Subscription bots: advertise customized and pre-selected categories of content to the users. They send notification messages to subscribed customers at the launch of new product or service.

Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa are most commonly used Chatbot.  While conversing Chatbot can ask no. of questions to users about their likes and interest for better insight which helps them to provide a personalized solution to the user.

What contributed to the emergence of Chatbot?

In the recent few years, it has been observed that almost 75% of the total traffic on the internet is due to messaging apps. People spend far more time on messaging apps like Facebook Messenger, Snapchat, Skype, Apple’s Imessenger and others as compared to websites. So, what this reflects is that the users are more interested in something that is interactive and in real time instead of a website.

This certainly grabbed the attention of businesses and they wanted to capitalize on this user’s traffic for growing their business. Soon there were talks about using chatbots in messaging platforms which would allow brands to interact with customers personally.  In 2016, Mark Zuckerberg announced that it would allow developers to place chatbots on their messenger platforms. And within a year, there were more than 1 Lac Chatbot put on Facebook messenger. WeChat in China have been using Chatbot since 2013 and have witnessed a huge surge in no. of users since then. With bots on messenger, end users can avail all sorts of services be it booking an appointment, choosing the best-suited product or finding a quick and immediate response to your queries.

Bots have been created for Facebook Messenger, KiK, Amazon Echo, Slack to converse directly with the user.

If Know Online Advertising was ever to have a chatbot to serve its reader, it would somewhat be like:

 

Benefits of using Chatbot:

1. Better engagement with the users: Chatbot programs helps businesses to interact with customers in real time which drives their sales up. Bots recommend right products to customers depending on their interest and needs.
2. 24*7 availability: This is probably the biggest positive of using chatbot. They are available to respond to customers at all times which ensure higher customer satisfaction and makes customers feel valued.
3. Personalized offerings: Chatbot reads into the mind of the customer by analyzing his speech and also getting insights from previous chats if there is any available and can come up with best-suited offerings. This is effective means of marketing when it comes to compelling the target audience make the purchase. In turn, this brings better click-through rate.
4. Integrated with social media platforms: Social media platforms coupled with Chatbot program makes a lethal combination. Social media helps companies build a strong relationship with their customers. Chatbot marketing will advertise products; send triggers to the subscribed customers at the launch of new offerings which would ensure enhanced brand awareness.
5. Analyse large consumer database: As bots interact with the customers in real time, they collect lots of personal details from the customers and provide an opportunity to the businesses to know their customers better. Chatbot analyses this data for personalized offerings which increase user engagement.

Future of Chatbot:

Future of chatbot technology looks really promising. Stats show by 2020 almost 80% of the businesses will move to chatbot marketing. A lot of our daily jobs would be taken care of by chatbot. Communication between bots will ensure that appointments would be booked automatically, the decision on meeting place and time would be taken by bots as per the interest and availability of the two parties. Websites coupled with Artificial intelligence would make an interactive web.