Listly by Jelena Cekic
It appears that the chatbots have entered the market out of nowhere and conquered different niches and marketplaces. Today, people can stumble upon a chatbot in all the modern communication channels, ranging from Facebook Messanger, and Viber to Slack and Skype.
For those of you who are interested in chatbots, as I am, I’ve compiled a list of companies that have successfully implemented them in their day-to-day operations. But before we jump to that, let’s quickly go through the introduction to chatbots.
Chatbots started their evolutionary journey as a simple computer program. They were coded to simulate conversations and amuse us. They’ve come a long way from being a simple piece of software though.
Powered by the cutting-edge technologies, chatbots no longer merely simulate conversations. Instead, they actively participate in them, ask questions, provide answers, and more importantly, learn and adapt.
Several modern chatbot platforms have made this technology easy to use. Snatchbot, for instance, delivers the best AI chatbot on the market. Don’t get surprised when you find out that it’s completely free and you don't have to invest in a dime to get your hands on a chatbot of your own.
Starbucks recognized the pain points in the process of ordering coffee and snacks. They wanted to streamline it and make it more convenient for their customers. To achieve this, they integrated a chatbot with a mobile app.
The Starbucks My Barista app is designed to help customers order their favorite drink on the go. The chatbot they are using supports both text and voice communication, which significantly increases the functionality and potential uses of the app. For instance, customers can place orders while driving, commuting, and so on.
Powered by AI, the Starbucks chatbot will be able to learn a lot about the customers it serves. The chatbot will, in fact, be able to learn the customers' preferences and habits. This will help Starbucks deliver a custom-tailored service, delight their customers, and increase their customer base.
Lyft has specialized in providing rides for their customers from point A to point B. One could easily think that there isn’t much room for improvements to be made in this business model. But Lyft has proved otherwise.
As a car service company, Lyft has one goal – to consistently deliver memorable customer experience. To enable this customer retention strategy, Lyft has launched the Lyft app. Thanks to the chatbot tech, Lyft app has become an interactive assistant to all the Lyf customers.
Powered by the AI and machine learning chatbots, this app is able to learn, predict, and anticipate customer questions. By offering the option to each one of their customers to solve any issues by having a meaningful conversation, Lyft has hit the sweet spot between customer experience and affordability.
A chatbot in the finance industry? While this does sound a bit futuristic, it’s really not. There are many banks and credit card companies that have already recognized the value of and implemented chatbots. One of these is MasterCard.
MasterCard has already done a lot to make their digital services more appealing to their users. The latest efforts have been focused on making them more conversational. This is why MasterCard added a chatbot to their official Facebook Messanger account.
The AI-powered chatbot helps MasterCard users review their account balances, make payments, review the purchase history and go through their purchase habits. Thanks to its learning capacity, the chatbot is also able to make contextual offers and send important updates to users.
Spotify is an online service that allows its users to search for, listen to, and share music. Over the years, the platform has grown to become one of the leaders in this industry. With so many artists, compositions, and song titles, they had to do something to help their customers find their favorite tune without breaking a sweat.
The company decided to seek help in chatbot tech, only to soon discover that the chatbot is an absolute hit. Its base functionality is just an extension to the searchability that already exists on the platform. But the new features are the ones responsible for making it a hit.
Powered by machine learning and AI, Spotify chatbot is able to find out in which mood the customers are in and what they are doing at the moment. According to their current mood, their current engagement, and past music choices, the chatbot offers custom-tailored playlist to every user individually.
To resolve customers issues efficiently, companies had to hire more customer support agents. Thanks to AI, the chatbots are now able to help busy help centers and enable them to stay consistently efficient.
While dealing with the users on its own, an AI-powered chatbot can analyze chat transcripts and use voice analytics to identify relevant keywords in all communications. This can help customer support agents quickly identify the possible resolution options and which assets they have at their disposal.
In the long-term, AI has proven to be the most valuable ally. Thanks to its capacity to learn, it can provide valuable information to companies, such as purchasing behavior, customer habits, trends, common issues, individual preferences, and so on.
In the end, I have to address the human aspect of AI-powered chatbots. To bring them closer to the people and make the conversation appear as human-to-human interaction, the chatbot developers turned to natural language processing.
But the NLP is not only here to help chatbots appear more human – it also enables them to derive meaning from users’ text or voice inputs. This further streamlines communication and helps chatbots reply instantly and accurately.
Simply put, without NLP, chatbots are unable to deliver superior answers and they will also appear generic and artificial in the eyes of your customers.
Chatbots are the most prevalent solution in our modern landscape. As you can see, they didn’t get to the throne by mere chance. These four companies are successfully using this tech, I’m sure that we will see many more joining them.