ChatBot: A Conversational Interface – A Paradigm Shift

Chatbots are computer programs that simulate human conversation, or chat, through artificial intelligence. They work as human customer support representatives and provide quick solutions to user’s concerns or queries.

This is the latest innovation of technology to provide better customer support digitally. Chatbots perform various automated tasks and provide fast solutions than human support executives to the customers.

Chatbots are majorly divided into two types:

1.    Rule-based (programmed to give predefined responses)

Rule-based chatbots are trained on some factual rules that can vary from quite simple to extremely complex ones and only on the basis of those rules they provide answers to the user's queries and doubts.

2.    AI (Natural Language Processing - NLP) based

On the other hand AI- based Chatbots not only learn the facts, but also understand the intent of the questions and human contexts. AI-based chatbots are way more popular than Rule-based chatbots because they can do everything the rule-based bots can’t and can also make real-time decisions.

AI-based chatbots understand the customer’s questions intents and context. Therefore, they can provide more specific and detailed information to the customers. They are fast and good for enhancing the overall user experience.

Both Rule-Based & AI-Based Chatbots can be operated from:

1.    Messaging applications

2.    Websites

3.    Mobile applications

Both kinds of chatbots provide highly personalized customer support depending on their programming. Earlier, messaging was only limited to SMS but, now the horizon has been expanded.

Now there are many common messaging platforms, which Chatbots makes use of to make intelligent communication:

· IBM Watson

· GupShup

· Wit.ai

· Microsoft Bot Framework

· Chatfuel

· Pandorabots

· Rebot

· Octane.ai

Chatbots have transformed the way of providing customer support and they are still getting evolved with every passing moment.

Shubhashish IT services use GupShup ChatBot building platform to provide conversational chatbot solutions to various industries and verticals. GupShup AI platform, provides tools for the entire bot lifecycle enabling Shubhashish technocrats to quickly build, test, deploy, monitor and track chatbots.

The platform offers SDKs to enable In-App and In-Web smart messaging containing structured data and intelligence. The basic platform enables advanced messaging workflow & automation.

ChatBots are providing customer support digital solutions to many industries and helping them to fulfill multiple business objectives. How these chatbots are being used in different industries is mentioned below:

Banking : Chatbots are providing support for operation-related services, customer service and promotional services.

Insurance: Chatbots are providing support for MIS reporting, customer service, product discovery and sales.

Trading: Chatbots are providing support for the real-time stock price and performance viewing.

Production/Networks/Media houses and Agencies: Chatbots are providing support for content-driven customer engagement.

eCommerce businesses : Chatbots are providing support for product delivery and sales.

Hospitality: Chatbots are providing support for handling multiple (million in numbers) customers in one go. They can effectively perform concierge and other tasks or activities with no language barrier.

Travel and Tourism: Chatbots are providing support for significantly enhancing users travel experience. AI-driven chatbot can help plan trip, book a flight, hotel or cab and much more.

Tips on Structured Bot Conversation Design and Necessary Features:

1. Understanding the goals of customer is the first point. There are number of ways a chatbot could benefit customer’s business:

•  Learning more about customer’s audience
•  Providing customer support through social media
•  Driving traffic to customer’s website
•  Increasing sales

Chatbots can help consumers by:

• Offering easy access to information regarding services and products
•  Providing a quick, online support
•  Entertaining customers while they speak to a human representative of customer’s brand
•  Solving a variety of problems regarding accounts and order

Remember, it doesn’t matter for what reason you are creating a chatbot. Your focus should always lie on designing its conversational flow. Make sure to keep it intuitive and intelligent.

2. It is always a good practice to define bot a personality, which should not sound robotic. Give it a personality and its own character that is aligned with the voice of business brand. One must be careful not to make chatbot appear rude in the process. The personality assigned should be a polite one and should increase the overall customer engagement, and in turn sales. Avoid setting a gender to a BOT. Using a neutral gender is the best approach.

3. A "welcome" message is the most important and helps users understand how to interact with a chatbot. Welcome message is the place to list all options that a bot can do, so that users don't waste time trying to engage in a conversation that bot doesn't support. Ensure, that welcome message provides users with an ability to restart the conversation so that they don't feel trapped.

4. As a designer, to make robot conversations interesting, one must use friendly and inclusive language. Use smiley’s and emoticons to add fun to conversation.

Design a bot to ask and answer specific types of questions like:

• Alternative choice questions
•  Who, what, where, when, why questions
•  Yes or no questions
•  Tag questions that help the conversation flow naturally
•  Try to avoid rhetorical questions at any cost.

Always use pre-suggested text in the form of buttons when you need or want to offer essential information, such as:

• Yes or No answers
• Contact Us buttons
• Feedback buttons
• Buttons that forward customers to a relevant webpage

5. From inside the chatbot, elements such as message bubbles and cards can help guide conversation.

6. The kind of tasks a chatbot is supposed to perform should be the sole purpose to create that chatbot.

7. It is equally important for a designer to keep topic of the conversation, as close to the goal of the Chat Bot while developing scripts. Designer need to understand the fact that why the bot was created and what kind of circumstances will chatbot be facing when dealing with the users and keep the script revolving around it entirely.

8. When asking user a question, chatbot should offer hints. They can be in a visual format like buttons to make them easier to differentiate. Getting a user input, will ensure conversation not going off on a tangent. Once the user answers a question, ask for confirmation before moving onto the next question.

9. The majority of the channels that support chatbots such as Facebook, Viber and Slack, provide some kind of a quick reply or options that can facilitate making a decision. Ensure that they are used to enrich the conversational experience. Design a chatbot to lead the conversation in a way that will keep it on track.

10. Usages of natural language help understand what your users need your help with. Also, it is good to extract entities from the conversation. However, it's important that one must keep the user informed about what the bot actually understood.

11. Designers should plan to deal with interruptions. The user might change their mind about an input they just entered, or they may want to completely change the topic of conversation. Ensure that a chatbot can deal with such interruptions, rather than pushing the user in a fixed decision tree that they need to follow.

12. It's often necessary to hand off the conversation to a person in case chatbot can’t handle it. Ensure that this option is available for a user, and a chatbot stays silent while the operator and the user are continuing the conversation.

13. Building a smart chatbot, that pulls dynamic data from web services, is always exposed to the risk of a failing service call. Ensure a good error handling on all dynamic services that may fail.

After coming a long way from the beginning of my career and being a COO of a renowned organization SITSL, my aim is to strengthen the roots of our business while reaching out to the maximum number of satisfied customers.

If you have a unique chatbot idea in mind to be developed, then connect with us @ – info@shubhashishit.com

We have a bunch of creative brains, technology masterminds, and expert strategists, who work hard to make your idea a success with their technical prowess.