What is a Chatbot?

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.

If you are new to the concept of a chatbot, now need not to worry as Floatbot brings you a comprehensive guide on what is a chatbot and how you can implement for your business.

This data gives us 2 important details.

• That the customers are more likely to choose a chatbot to solve their queries.
• Adopting this technology at this stage can be an ideal deal for you.

But what is this 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 command it simply helps the users to provide solutions by using the most natural form of communication i.e Chat possibly in the language which user understands.

Here the questions arise 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 few cases in which chatbots have successfully helped many businesses.

• A Chatbot helps customer solve their queries related to your brand. Answering to FAQs or give information about your product or service.
• Besides helping customers in solving queries it also helps them to book appointments, know the availability of your product, and help them to plan their trips and much more.
• Apart from answering queries, bots are also capable of answering multiple queries at a time. And this can be considered a huge benefit of implementing a bot.
• Considering the above cases, it proves that chatbots definitely decreases the time of tasks and helps improve overall performance. Time as a factor, money is also saved, on the basis of reports, it has been estimated that brands can save upto 60% of their time using chatbots.

Why Chatbots are Important?
With doing all these activities here are 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 Online. Here is the amount of time a user spends online.

Your chatbot can be integrated on platforms which help you to be in the same room with your customers and whenever a user needs some information they can directly reach you on these platforms.

These integrations also lead to sales. It acts like your online sale representative to a large number of audience available online. Ready to talk about your product and promote your offers. Your bot provides a flexibility and helps them to reach you 24/7.

The other element that helped chatbot gain popularity is it personalized response to each and every user. This made the various sector use this technology as it was not specific to any one particular industry.

Chatbot are majorly of two types:

• Workflow based or Simple chatbot
  Workflow based chatbots are flow driven, menu based. Users get options to access the bot and that is how the bot works. 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 the user queries with the help of artificial intelligence. These bots recognize keywords from the user queries and respond to the user accordingly.
  With the help of NLP these bots can also communicate in natural language with people.

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

How Chatbots 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 input query and 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.

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

Now chatbots can be easily created without prior knowledge of coding. DIY chatbot platforms enable you to create bots with items that can be used easily. Chatbot development platform such as floatbot helps you in not only creating a bot but also DIY adding capabilities of AI and making the bot sharable when required.

Building a DIY chatbot is made easy by Floatbot.

Floatbot helps you build a bot without coding. You can create on your own or hire us to make a chatbot for you.

Each bot is AI driven. Here is a complete guide for you on how to make a chatbot from scratch? .

Floatbot is all-in-one solution for chatbots which fulfills your all kind of bot requirements.

You can also take a quick look at how an AI-powered chatbot work: https://floatbot.ai/hostedbot/?botId=5aa67cdd42d4e2023c65e8da .

Try it right away and if you have any questions regarding chatbot or development. Feel free to write to us on connect@floatbot.ai.