Chatbots are the newest face of digital transformation. Most leading banks and insurance companies in India have set up customer facing chatbots that are rapidly gaining traction. Chatbots enable a more personalized connection with the customer in terms of language, speed, relevant products, etc. 24×7 operations is a major advantage for both customers and BFSI companies which is why they are quickly becoming popular.
Chatbots can be programmed to do anything as long as it is programmable. A big challenge has arisen because chatbots are programmed to mimic humans. Humans obviously have a wide range of abilities, and programming chatbots to provide such a wide range of abilities is currently impossible. Thus, when customers interact with chatbots, they tend to get frustrated when the chatbots aren’t able to respond to their requests, and even more when chatbots can’t even understand their requests. Avoiding such customer frustration is an important aspect of chatbot design and development, else the backlash could be worse than the benefits.
A recent research report published by Banking Frontiers in association with Accenture, titled Digital Directions & Transformation 2018, finds that one very simple way to try and overcome this problem is to classify chatbots at specialized rather than general, so that customers have a clear perspective of what to expect and what not to expect . So, three categories of chatbots have emerged – Informational, Transactional and Advisory. These categories are self-explanatory.
They may remind us of the 3 characters in the famous movie 3 Idiots….who set out to change the way the world thinks and acts. Chatbots too are set to make a lot of changes.
The earliest deployment of chatbots in on web and mobile platforms. The next area of deployment is Facebook. Other social media platforms will come next for chatbot deployment. As of now, Alexa has a lead over Google Assistant in testing and deployment of voice chatbots.
The report is available at https://www.payumoney.com/