Dmitriy N. Full-Stack Developer

A little bit about chatbots

Chatbots are widespread, many customers have already had contact with this system of dialogue. And their impression is quite positive: the applications are not perceived as annoying, many customers consider chatbots as helpers. Thus, an increasing proportion of customers are willing to chat with such bots.

Customer acceptance of chatbots grows with the quality of the conversation. Basically, chatbot dialogs save time. In addition, companies can make their customer support easier.

What is a chatbot?

Chatbot is an AI program for automated communication. It is a "communication robot", a software or service from the cloud.

Many people are already familiar with chatbots, for example if they've communicated with customer support or asked questions in an online store.

Do all businesses need chatbots?

Most businesses can benefit from chatbots in different ways depending on the type of business and communication with customers. Chatbots can be used in a wide variety of ways. When it comes to quick initial responses to customer inquiries, the "show of presence" in chatbot support is certainly useful. Also, organizational processes, such as reservations and buying tips, can be well mapped to online shopping with chatbot if the processes are standardized.

But there are areas where chatbots won't make sense anytime soon, or only when they get significantly smarter: Wherever special problems and individual issues are involved, chatbots are inferior to human consultants because of the special expertise and real-world performance involved here.

Chatbots are designed to train user input to be able to give increasingly appropriate and personalized answers. For this, depending on a chatbot, user data is also collected and evaluated that the user did not enter at all, but which reflects their behavior on the website and interests. If the user is not informed and has not provided informed consent, this is crucial for privacy. You should check the relevant privacy policy before deciding to use a chatbot. Users will receive a dialog box on the relevant websites where they can enter their questions. The answers then do not come from call center or help desk staff, but are given by the virtual communication robot.

Chatbots are often developed by web analytics for users to personalize their answers. In online shopping, this is easy to do because there is a history of shopping habits, time intervals, payment ethics, etc. Good chatbots are capable of learning and are based on a form of artificial intelligence. Through machine learning (ML), the responses get better and better, so at some point users can figure out if they are talking to a machine or a human.

Thus chatbots will be at the forefront of conversations and decision-making for the nearest future.