What is a Chatbot?

Jul 02, 2018

We are halfway through of completing this year, but before it ends we don’t want you to turn a blind eye to a technology that is significantly going to boom. According to Gartner, chatbots will power 85% of all customer service interactions by the year 2020.

Yes, you read it right. 85% of customer service by 2020, and we are mid-2018.

This data gives us 2 important details.

That the customers are more likely to choose a chatbot to solve their queries.
Early adopting this technology can be an ideal deal for you.

But what is a chatbot? Why is it important? How does it work? Why is it so popular? Which company can use a chatbot? These questions will encounter when you think of considering a chatbot.

Put these thoughts out of your mind, you’ve got our back! This article will help you understand what is a chatbot and various other parameters surrounding it. Let us start by knowing, what is a chatbot?

Chatbot Definition

A chatbot is a computer program designed to simulate a conversation with human users, especially over the Internet.

Catching the main keywords from this definition: {{A computer program}}, {{conversation}}, and {{Internet}}.

A chatbot interacts with your customers via internet in form of messages. Here the chatbot doesn’t set any command, it simply answers users query.

Here the question arises of what can a chatbot do?

In basic terminology, a chatbot can automate tasks. The task can be further divided into other segments like customer support, surveys, lead generation, appointment scheduling, and much more.

Here are a few cases in which chatbots have successfully helped many businesses.

Answering to FAQs & give information about the product or service.
Helped users to book appointments, make payments, address a problem, and help them to plan their trips.
Chatbots were able to answer multiple queries at one go. Marketers consider this as the biggest advantage.
From the above cases, it proves that chatbots definitely decreases the time of tasks and helps to improve the overall performance. It has been estimated that brands can save upto 60% of their time using chatbots.

Why Chatbot is Important?

With doing all these activities here are a few reasons why it has become the talk of the town, and why were industries quick enough to adopt it?

Chatbot offer brands to be available on platforms where their audience spent most of their time i.e Social platform.Your chatbot can be integrated on platforms, which help you to be in the same room with your customers. Making it easy for them to reach you.

These integrations also target a lot of sales. It acts as your online sale representative to a large number of audience available online. Ready to talk about your product and promote your offers.

The other element that helped chatbot gain popularity is it personalized response to each and every user.

Chatbots are of two types:

Workflow based or Simple chatbot
Workflow based chatbots are flow driven, menu based. You set the flows and information related to your product and when the customer asks about a particular information that flow will be trigger automatically.
AI or Intelligent chatbot
Intelligent bots are capable of recognizing user queries with the help of artificial intelligence. These bots recognize keywords from the user queries and respond to the user accordingly. NLP and other machine learning tools help the chatbot to communicate like humans.

For example:

If the user asks to schedule an appointment, then the bot will trigger the actions related to appointments.

The below imagine explains what an Intelligent bot is made up of?

elements of an intelligent bot

How does Chatbot Work?

Chatbots are capable of answering to various user queries depending upon the functionality. Also guides users on getting appropriate information anytime they require. AI-based bots can detect the user intents from the query, evaluates and responds accordingly.
For example, if the user asks the bot to “Book flight to Dubai on 5th July”, then the bot can detect the destination and date from the query.

how chatbot works

While in the workflow based chatbots, bot guides users with the help of flows. Flows can be internally connected or redirecting to a URL(depends upon the type of bot and requirements).

How to build a chatbot?

Developing a chatbot with the help of coding is challenging because you will have to get the right resources in place, get professional in the field of AI and technology to develop a chatbot development platform. But as technology is booming the tech geeks couldn’t hold themselves back from making a platform for brands to use a chatbot in the easiest way possible.

Chatbot development platforms help you to easily create a chatbot without any coding knowledge. Like on Floatbot, you can create your own chatbot without any hassle. Here is a complete guide for you on how to make a chatbot from scratch?

create a chatbot with floatbot