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In May 2014, IBM announced the acquisition of an AI startup, Cognea, that developed a cognitive computing and conversational artificial intelligence platform. IBM aimed to integrate it with Watson, the company’s question-answering supercomputer, for more real conversations with users.
Since then, it's been a wave of sorts with technology companies like Facebook, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and others investing in their own AI efforts while acquiring several startups in the space.
At Build 2016, the company’s annual developer event, Microsoft launched its own bot framework and a month later in April, Facebook too launched its Messenger Platform to build chatbots on. The two announcements gave the companies across the world a chance to bring chatbots to leading messaging services like Skype and Facebook Messenger (along with business services like Office 365, Microsoft Teams and Slack) offering virtual agents for customer interactions powered by artificial intelligence and deep-learning.
Parallel to this transformation, customers have anyway been increasingly adopting virtual assistants like Alexa, Cortana, Siri, Google Assistant or Bixby and getting comfortable with the idea of 'talking to a virtual person.'
“How can I help you?”
Last year, HDFC Bank, one of India’s largest private sector banks, launched its own chatbot for Messenger. OnChat, the bank’s maiden foray into conversational banking, allows customers to transact for bill payments, mobile recharges, booking travel, so on and so forth.
Since its launch, HDFC Bank OnChat has witnessed a surprising 160% month-on-month growth in transactions while garnering over 2.4 million messages. The bot can send personalized communications to customers, like payment reminders, and is smart enough to decipher a mix of Hindi and English – just the way a lot of Hindi-speaking Indians prefer to talk in real life.
According to Nitin Chugh, Country Head – Digital Banking at HDFC Bank, the idea behind OnChat was to allow customers to conduct transactions while they chat with friends on Messenger, thereby taking the user experience in the conversational banking space to the next level. “We believe that harnessing new technology like AI and machine learning will help us transition from providing not just convenience to our customers, but a completely differentiated experience,” Chugh reasons.
Interestingly, OnChat is not just a medium for customer interactions for support and services, it is also another channel for customer acquisition, with nearly 25 % of OnChat users being non-customers.
Chatbots vs Human agents
According to a recent study conducted by Forrester Consulting, commissioned by software and services provider firm Amdocs, consumers in India love the speed and convenience of chatbots and more than 93% consumers engage with chatbots between once a day and once a month.
Yet, half of the consumers think that these bots are not sufficiently equipped to deal with complex requests. Also, the common perception is that bots can’t understand emotions or deliver personalized offers – two things that make a customer support experience worth sharing in person or on social media, building brand’s word of mouth reputation. As per the study, 79% of consumers in India (83% worldwide) would rather interact with a real, live human being than with a virtual agent .
However, Gary Miles, General Manager at Amdocs, sees this negative perception as just a phase. Amdocs has recently introduced a new Smartbot solution with Microsoft that provides service providers with AI capabilities for offering highly personalized and emotionally-aware bot interactions.
Miles thinks as chatbots become commonplace, especially with younger consumers, organizations that aren't investing in the domain run the risk of falling behind the competition. "As the technology and interfaces improve, I think that the percentage of people that are comfortable and maybe even prefer at times interfacing with machines will go up," he believes. 85% of all service provider AI decision makers as part of the study too shared that customer interactions will be carried out by 'software robots' instead of human agents in five years’ time.
The way forward
Aloke Bajpai, founder of one of India’s leading travel search marketplace ixigo, says, “With platforms such as Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp reaching a critical mass of over a billion users, chat-based information and commerce is bound to take off.” With the company’s ixibaba chat bot, he aims to be at the forefront of this evolution. ixibaba offers a human-like-persona of a know-it-all expert (baba) and provides quick, quirky answers to travel planning and booking related queries.
Juniper Research predicts that chatbots will save companies $20 million in 2017, and that figure could grow to $8 billion per year by 2022. As organizations expand their chatbot investments, they need to focus on better personalization, more comprehensive information and an engaging personality. Make them ‘human-like’ and ‘smarter’, as the study says.
