People who researched the chatbot market say that by 2021, it will have grown from $703.3 million to a whopping $3,172.0 million in just three years. Intelligent chatbots are being increasingly embraced by all types of businesses, from Fortune 500 to future startups, to improve speed and efficiency.
Businesses must accept emerging technology, consequently selecting solutions that boost client interaction, as chatbot trends and AI/ML expand in popularity.
According to a CNBC analysis, adopting chatbots would help businesses save more than $8 billion each year by 2022. With great innovation potential, here’s a quick breakdown of the chatbot industry trends we might see in 2022.
Top 9 Chatbot Trends
Payments will be handled by chatbots
Chatbots will go beyond customer support and directly affect your revenue by including payment alternatives. It might be as simple as a user typing “Payphone bill” into the chatbot, and the chatbot will guide the dialogue to the final payment. An API request is sent by the bot when a user requests it.
There will be more bots that help make payments without leaving the chat platform in 2022, such as Paypal and digital wallets.
Connecting with the payment infrastructure provides the chatbot with adequate data to facilitate conversation-driven upselling to your users. A user’s transaction data, payment confirmation, expense records, etc. can be updated in real-time to increase user confidence and retention.
Voice Bots Voice is the future
According to Forbes, voice searches will account for over 50% of all searches by 2022. According to Accenture research, digital users prefer voice and text-based messaging platforms. “Ok Google, what’s on my calendar today?” is already a habit. Voice-driven chatbots can let your users have a seamless experience with your business.
Conversational bots are intelligent and may assist via text or voice. Automating consumer engagement will continue to grow in 2022, especially in industries like insurance, travel, and education. The ability of these bots will increase as human dependence on them grows.
Human-like Chatbots
Chatbots are rapidly developing, and the market is far from saturated. Today’s chatbots can do more than just answer inquiries. As chatbots become more human, they will keep you interested by moving the discussion ahead rather than breaking it.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered chatbots will mimic human communication and discern client intent. The chatbot will then respond to the human’s query.
Chatbots with AI will prepare customer care professionals for high-impact talks this year. By interacting with customers, AI-powered chatbots will understand patterns in their behavior.
Emotional Intelligence Chatbots
Emotional intelligence is the ability to recognize and respond to human emotions in a conversation. For example, AI employs facial feature detection techniques to detect how a person is feeling.
AI recognizes emotion in speech and text. When a chatbot detects what you type, it automatically extracts information and attempts to comprehend your mood. Your emotions will be predicted by chatbots based on punctuation and capitalization.
2022 will see the emergence of emotional intelligence chatbots in the AI tech industry, transforming numerous sectors. Companies will build emotional intelligence bots to offer soft skills to businesses, affecting how consumers contact and interact with firms.
NLP-based chatbots
Customer service firms will greatly benefit from NLP-enabled chatbots. NLP interprets user intent and creates responses.
NLP may learn from previous talks and improve response time. The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) is said to be employing NLP in their chatbots to improve customer experience.
In 2022, more developers will be working on strategies to teach their bots on multiple encounters and dialogues.
Chatbot Analytics and Insights
Any organization can benefit from analytics to track, retrieve, or analyze data. They help you understand customer needs so you can constantly enhance your methods.
Chatbots enable massive data collection by recording every question asked, every answer given, and every inquiry sent to agents. This data helps firms enhance their progress and better grasp the consumer attitude.
This allows you to create greater relationships and rapport with your customers.
Bots that self-learn
To stay ahead of the game, you must constantly update and train your bots. Companies will build self-learning chatbots in 2022. So firms don’t have to give new data to bots. They will learn to analyze every encounter and keep users or customers interested. In other words, customer feedback will help bots improve their response times.
Social Media Chatbots
Social media is now the center of much social engagement. We now use social media to express ourselves, order items and services, leave reviews, and even contact businesses. Businesses must utilize chatbots to facilitate interaction on these platforms.
Many industry leaders have already implemented chatbots to better understand client needs and create ways to support consumers. Facebook already has a chatbot option, but it is quite limited, probably just a test to see how well they work on the platform. Yes, absolutely. Facebook is currently leading the way in allowing businesses to utilize third-party chatbots to assist in this process. Every social media outlet will probably follow.
Chatbot Text Messaging
While email and phone conversations are still popular methods of communication, a personal message remains the most personal. People constantly check and use SMS and WhatsApp to communicate.
In 2021, chatbots will use this to better connect with audiences. Yatra and MakeMyTrip currently use chatbots to send airfare and hotel tickets directly to WhatsApp and details via SMS. This has made the procedure easier for users, and any improvement would be welcome.
SMS and WhatsApp bots will customize experiences and promote open-ended interactions in 2021.
Important Chatbot Features
1) Conversational Maturity with NLU (NLU)
A chatbot could only react to your requests using a predetermined algorithm. Now, with NLU capabilities, a chatbot can grasp the context of a conversation. Even in any language.
With NLU, a chatbot can determine the intent of a question. It can then assess the question and respond correctly. If the chatbot can’t come up with a suitable response, it eventually presents options to explain the user’s purpose.
Conversational patterns are rapidly evolving as more people actively communicate. Thanks to Natural Language Understanding, chatbots are becoming conversational.
2) Chatbot CRM integration
Modern chatbots should be able to simply integrate with any CRM. When chatbots can handle real-time customer interaction operations, they will be able to solve many difficult problems for users much more easily. CRM software can help with frequent backups and password changes.
3) A Chatbot Should Be Faster
We often question why brands are using chatbots nowadays, and the answer is simple: to make our lives easier. By saving time and effort. It can address basic difficult issues without client support.
Instead of a customer combing through pages and pages of data to solve a problem, a chatbot can quickly identify the issue.
4) A Chatbot Can Explore Solutions
The freedom to explore is an important aspect that should be included in your chatbot. Your chatbot can help customers more effectively if it can process large quantities of data.
It will be able to gather data from many sources. These bots can effectively handle practically any client problem by assessing existing Internet solutions.
5) Create a Chatbot with a Specific Purpose
A bot without a purpose will not be able to generate relevant and timely results. With more encounters, a chatbot becomes more nimble and versatile. So, while designing and integrating a chatbot into your website, make sure it can accomplish what it needs to do. The more focused the chatbot’s purpose, the more nimble and efficient it will be in fulfilling goals.
6) Keep Chatbot User Interfaces Simple
Last but not least, make sure the chatbot is user-friendly. Customers may be annoyed when they contact you for help. You don’t want to aggravate them. Make your chatbot visible, proactive, engaging, and visually appealing.
