What Are Chatbots? How Do Chatbots Work? Top 10 Applications

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What are Chatbots?

“A chatbot is a type of software that can help customers by automating conversations and interact with them through messaging platforms.”

A chatbot is a software program that can hold a conversation with a human user. They essentially automate one-to-one conversations. But don’t be fooled into thinking that all they do is talk. They can do everything from turning your lights on to advising you on what investments you should be making.

Also known as Artificial Conversational Entities (ACEs) or conversational agents, chatbots are quickly changing the way business is being conducted. The automation of basic, mechanical processes through conversational agents allows businesses to concentrate their valuable resources on tasks that actually matter.

With chatbots evolving and growing more powerful in their capabilities, they’re gradually becoming an integral part of our daily lives. And no, we’re not just talking about our virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa. We now have bots of various types, being utilized in almost every way imaginable. Here’s a quick tour of the marvelous world of chatbots.

How do Engati integrations and deployment help?

Engati chatbot deployment channels

Customers are omnipresent. They interact, engage, and communicate with brands and seek instant answers to their queries. It is over the odds to lose out on customers across digital platforms who can bring potential value to a company. Engati provides easy deployment of chatbots across multiple digital platforms to stay connected with all your customers.

We also support deployment for channels such as:

WhatsApp
Facebook
Telegram
WeChat
Instagram and more

All you have to do is select your channels from the channel deployment menu, and you’re set!

And if you’ve already deployed your chatbot and would like to deploy it on additional channels, simply select Channels from the Configure menu and select your channel of choice.

‍The same Engati chatbot could serve as a social media chatbot, a website chatbot, and much more — create your bot once and deploy it across all your channels.

How can businesses benefit from chatbots? And, What are the applications of Chatbots?

Healthcare

We need to integrate healthcare chatbots with e-health records to start with the basic patient data. With time, they can use the data to provide patient information. Determining basic symptoms and matching them with known ailments is also something that the bots will become good at, with time.

Availability round-the-clock — Healthcare Chatbots are available 24/7 and are dedicated to assisting patients through their recovery. This chatbot can help you in tasks such as reminding you about your medicines, providing medical information, giving you tips, and monitoring your overall well-being.

Builds a rapport with the patients and provides assistance — Imagine one of your patients has fallen ill but can’t describe what they’re feeling. What would they do? They’d start by looking up their symptoms online, and you know how that turns out. They would most likely land on a page that scares them further and stresses them out even more.

Schedule appointments — Chatbots can help patients book appointments directly from your website chatbot. Not just that, they can also assign a relevant doctor to your patient, send the doctor an email with patient information and create a slot in both the patient as well as the doctor’s calendar.‍

eCommerce‍

Customers expect lightning-fast responses and want the purchase process to be quick and seamless. Moreover, the surge in mobile eCommerce has raised the bar as organizations need to accommodate higher volumes of traffic. eCommerce Chatbots like Shopify chatbots allow businesses to attract clients one-on-one too in a personalized manner.

Provides personalized suggestions — AI chatbots remember the past interactions of the users and use them further to customize future conversations. Moreover, bots can keep the focus on customers while promoting the products or services.

Records real-time interactions — AI chatbots enable e-commerce businesses to get hands-on real-time user interaction. They can analyze information to improve the services as per the user input. The instant access to critical data reduces the operation cost and maximizes a business’s efficiency and functioning.

Eases customer executives — As chatbots can handle 80% of the repeated queries of the customer, they can help customer care executives keep the locus of support to solve complex queries. By addressing complex queries with priority, you can win more customers while reducing the operation cost. Allows customers to browse and compare products with ease‍

Insurance

Insurance companies have been able to uplift their services, communication, efficiency, and customer support by incorporating insurance chatbots into their workflows.

Process claims faster — As part of efforts to make claims smoother for policyholders, chatbots can help out in processing claims. The chatbot will then pass on that information to an agent for further processing.

Help in finding the right insurance policy — Chatbots assist clients in choosing the right insurance policy by collecting large amounts of data.

Manage claims and renewals — Healthcare or employee-initiated policyholders are always eager with their claims. With the help of chatbots, they can check their coverages, file for a claim, track status, and assist in the renewal process also.

Many other businesses industries like government, logistics, education and many more.

Once you’ve registered, you have to follow these simple steps-

Step 1: Select the Create a Bot button on the portal’s homepage.

Step 2: Give your chatbot a name, a description, and assign a category.

Step 3: Then you’ll be presented with a library of our templates. You can either browse through and select the one that suits your use case or click Skip and build the chatbot from scratch.

Step 4: Next is channel setup. Here, you can customize your chat window for web chat and select which channels you’d like to deploy the chatbot. Then click Next for the live chat menu.

Step 5: If you’d like to support your chatbot with live chat, enable it in this menu.

Step 6: The conversational intelligence step will allow for quick FAQ set up and customizing the welcome path for your bot.Step 7: Finally, review all changes, and your bot is ready to be deployed!

You can also watch this complete step-by-steptutorial on getting started with Engati!

How do Engati integrations and deployment help?

Engati chatbot deployment channels

We also support deployment for channels such as:

WhatsApp
Facebook
Telegram
WeChat
Website and native mobile applications
And more

All you have to do is select your channels from the channel deployment menu, and you’re set!

And if you’ve already deployed your chatbot and would like to deploy it on additional channels, simply select Channels from the Configure menu and select your channel of choice.

‍The same Engati chatbot could serve as a social media chatbot, a website chatbot, and much more — create your bot once and deploy it across all your channels.

Check out our pricing here.

Engati Integrations for your chatbot

With a robust, flexible integration platform, you can easily integrate data flowing from multiple sources, whether it’s on-premise or on the cloud. Engati provides easy integration with the following platforms.

SalesforceZendeskGoogle Calendar Integration‍Google Sheets IntegrationSMS IntegrationJSON API Zapier IntegrationSocial Media Integration‍

Why Chatbots are the future?

Despite always being connected to the internet, GenZ is considered the loneliest generation yet. Keeping this in mind, it is highly likely that we will soon be seeing chatbots that have Emotional Intelligence. These bots could judge the user’s emotion and respond in a way that is sensitive to the user’s state of mind, performing sentiment analysis in the process.

AI is the future. We’re going to be seeing bots that sound more human as time passes. Someday, we may even get bots that are indistinguishable from humans, even though that’s a long time from now, but that’s where we’re headed!

‍Here’s a quick infographic that could help you understand why chatbots are the future:

FAQs‍

How much time does it take to build a chatbot?

The average time required to build a chatbot system could range from a few mins to maximum few hours. You can get started with pre-designed templates and customize them as per your requirements!

Are chatbots successful?

The success of chatbots is the impact it’s creating on customer experience. Chatbots help the business to provide overwhelming customer service which pushes more and more companies to try them.

How effective are Chatbots?

As per IBM’s research, chatbots can successfully answer up to 80% of routine questions without human intervention. In addition, the capacity to manage multiple customers at once makes the chatbot a better choice when compared to a human. Chatbots can increase operational efficiency in your sales, marketing, and customer support teams.

Do Chatbots increase sales?

When used smartly, chatbots will improve your revenue significantly. They not only help in lead generation & sales but also play an important role in customer support and nurturing. They provide omnichannel support to your customers throughout the entire journey.

What are the must-have features for Chatbot?

Following are the 7 must-have features that can change the mechanism of business functions and help increase customer success.

1. Customized customer interactions

Chatbots can collect user data and function as per customer needs and behavioral patterns with the help of AI, making the entire customer journey more personalized and customized.

2. Chatbots with emotional intelligence

With the help of sentiment analysis, chatbots can pick up the underlying emotions and intent of customers and respond to them most appropriately.

3. Trainable intelligence to reduce resolution time

‍This is among the most exciting chatbot capabilities, wherein you can train the chatbot to perform complex reasoning on its own, without human interference, with the support of DocuSense.

4. Easy omnichannel deployment and messaging support

Engati made it easier through the OneView inbox, empowering conversations across 14+ channels and stitching them into a single inbox, providing an easy gateway for your customers to engage with your business.

5. Extensible integrations with 3rd-party applications

Integrating with 3rd-party applications allows businesses to extract or workaround necessary data, analysis, and reports that are important to monitor trends and form business decisions.

6. Rich contextual history

This feature allows brands to keep the conversation more relevant and contextual every time the customer interacts with the chatbot.

7. Multilingual conversations for a global audience

Engati chatbots can converse in more than 37 international languages providing a wide array of languages to select from.

What are Chatbots? How do Chatbots work? Top 10 applications was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Time Stamp: May 3, 2022