How a chatbot works and how it can turn useful to your business

Lately I’ve come across chatbots everywhere I turn. I’ve almost haven’t time to quit BIT’s “Be Tech” theme area (where we’ve right discussed about bots applied to the tourist market) and here is Facebook officially launching “M”, Zuckerberg’s response to Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana and Google’s Allo.
In short, it seems that the bot’s era is finally commenced, with all those remembering “good” HAL 9000 in 2001: A space odyssey duly touching wood.
But what are chatbots, how do they work and, mainly, how can they turn useful to our business?

What a chatbot is

The use of bots on a large scale was favoured just about one year ago right by Facebook, introducing them on Messenger. Since then, i.e. in just one year, over 40 thousand bots were born, and this figure is expected to keep growing.
The reason for this rapid success is easily explained: chatbots are “wonderful tools”, at least as far as productivity and efficiency are concerned, because they allow to simulate an intelligent conversation with the user of a chat, answering to frequently asked questions without the need for human assistance. Thus, being active 24 hours on 24, almost completely autonomous and able to “store” the interests, preferences, age and tastes of their human counterparts, they offer tremendous benefits to companies in terms of customer care. They are actually able to provide customers, automatically, useful links, news of interest, technical assistance in ordering, booking or purchasing a product or service as well as many suggestions and clarifications, and they require the intervention of a human operator only when the conversation goes beyond their programming. This enhances the interaction between customers and brands (admittedly allowing a big cost saving compared to the same role carried out by an employee).

How does a chatbot work?

Thanks to its “artificial intelligence”, a chatbot can “understand” the user’s questions, “translate” them into a “query” to be submitted to the database which it is connected to, then process an appropriate response and present it to the customer in a “natural” language, that is almost indistinguishable from a human being’s one.
Do you want to try it for yourself? Just go to your Messenger account, click on “search”, type Meteo.it and touch the icon of the Epson Weather Centre. Then choose from one of the questions about what the weather will be in Paris or in London, tomorrow as well as at Easter.

How can a chatbot be useful to anyone who makes business?

If in terms of customer care the function of a chatbot is clear, figuring out how to leverage this technology in marketing is less intuitive. However, chatbots have already proved useful to:

1. sell: chatbots can be real personal advisers. Spring, for instance, an e-commerce for apparel and accessories, has made a dedicated bot to advise clients on the clothes best suiting their tastes;
2. simplify payments: the entire sales process, from product selection to truck functions as well as the payment method, can be managed by a bot;
3. help logistics: the management of orders and shipments, the after-sales service, the response to complaints, the change of billing and so on, are all proper chatbots’ functions;
4. profile customers: the thing chatbots do at their best is to store data and consumer preferences, thus setting the stage for remarketing activities as well;
5. retain customers: talking with a bot is an unusual experience (at least for now), albeit effective for sure (they’re available 24/7), and it can increase engagement with customers;
6. test the interest of the market for the displayed products and services: chatbots can be also useful in making market surveys which otherwise would be much more complex and expensive.

Chatbots in tourism

This year, at BIT, there was also talk of Smart Tourism and Social Media, and Marketing Informatico web agency presented an artificial intelligence project dedicated to tourism and baptized Bot Magellano.
Magellano, therefore, is a Facebook Bot allowing hotels, restaurants and stores to contact customers around the world (in 14 different languages) and answer their questions in real time, including the management of a reservation or the quickest route to get there.
The great thing is that Magellano was born in Italy and it’s aimed at anyone working in the Italian housing industry, but in the international tourism there are so many examples of chatbots designed for travel: Edward (Radisson Blu’s virtual assistant) Best Friend (Best Western Italia’s chatbot), Skyscanner (search bots for airline flights directly running on Messenger), Tripadvisor (could Kaufer & Co ever be one step behind?).
So, let’s get ready to call a taxi, book a restaurant, reserve a hotel room and fly throughout the world less and less bound by the need to interact with other human beings. Yes, because AI ​​is gradually replacing humans in many activities (just think of Ehang 184, the drone we mentioned a few weeks ago in another #Impressions and beginning in a few months to cause the retirement of Dubai’s taxi drivers). It is clear that this technological evolution can’t please everyone, but it is reality and we must take note of it, with all its pros and cons.

Hello, who is speaking?

Chatbots are still young and immature. Only imagination can give us a glimpse about what lies ahead. Of course, not all that glisters is gold: today technology still suffers from many limitations (bots are still unable to interpret all user questions as well as irony, sarcasm, puns…), there are risks in terms of security and privacy that we don’t know yet how to stem, and the chance to obtain wage jobs with “low intelligence” is shrinking (that’s why you start insistently talking of “universal basic income” – a concept no longer just for idlers). Yet the spread of AI seems unstoppable, to such an extent that digital communication involves more robots than human beings – right today, not in a future yet to come.
Actually, according to “Bot Traffic Report“, a research developed by Imperva Incapsula, a US company monitoring the Internet, in 2016 only 48.2 percent of the online traffic was human-driven, while more than half (as many as 51,8 percent) was generated by bots.
This means that if today we are asking ourselves the question “Am I chatting with a real operator or a bot?”, it might soon be the bots’ turn to have this doubt.
Till the fateful, ominous sentence: “This conversation has no purpose by now. So long!”.