The chatbots have drawn in a lot of hype, expectation and speculation in recent years. Facebook, Microsoft and all other tech giants today consider that chatbots are the future.
In fact, they are capable of fundamentally revolutionising the entire experience of computing by transforming the way services and contents are used in the web.
About 60-80% of businesses have chatbots today for interacting with the customers. Just like a brick and motor shop cannot go without a great sales person with good communication skills, similarly the online ones or ecommerce stores cannot go without chatbots.
What Are Chatbots?
Chatbots are computer programs that can be used by anyone to interact or to find information or services or to get things done. These are empowered by Natural Language Processing (NLP) and machine learning.
These are automated and smart conversational identities that can make tapping on menu and drop-down buttons, selecting the search buttons and navigating through the redundant website pages much simpler.
In a smooth and conversational format, these chatbots offer specific results.
Why Websites Need Chatbots?
When you create a website, you usually are happy as now your business can serve customers 24/7. But even then you may find that your audience is not so satisfied. Now why does that happen?
Well, with your site you can earn business visibility for an entire day. But that does not ensure that your customers are gaining the right service.
So you have to analyse how efficient your customer service providers are and how well do they address the problems faced by your audience! Such questions will make you doubt your service quality towards your audience.
And herein comes the need of chatbots that will solve all these issues for you.
Elements Making Up the Perfect Chatbot
The right chatbot usually has certain characteristics and the most vital among them is assistance. A good and helpful chatbot can be created by providing it with the capability and information to facilitate customer interaction that is positive.
Secondly the chat bots must be friendly. Now for being friendly you have to ensure that you don’t use an AI based language for chatbots. If the recommendations are always “call us” or “send an email”, it is not helpful or friendly.
Lastly, the language used by chatbots must be conversational. So you should opt for chatbots that are friendly, conversational and friendly.
Effect on Website Development
Here is how Chatbots have impacted web development. Take a look.
- Understanding AI Principles and Natural Language Processing – It is high-time that developers look beyond the usual backend programming languages and begin getting familiar with NLP and machine learning. The developers should know that their future relies on the NLP algorithms. This technology involves learning patterns and executing entity recognition, tokenization, speech tagging, normalization, sentiment and intent analysis and dependency parsing to design an intelligent site chatbot.
- Conversation Replacing Navigation and Browsing – The first motive of all web developers is to develop a site that can be navigated easily by the customers. Now what happens when you replace the navigation elements with a bot?
With bots the customers will have the same experience like visiting a shop where the bot will guide him/her to the right product. This is going to provide the real-time, personalised shopping experience to the customers.
- Developing Conversational UI – Web developers face some real challenge here. From designing a bot that speaks the language to avoiding conventional graphic elements, web developers must be able to provide users a choice to have a human conversation with the bot.
- Integrating with Frameworks of Best Bot Development – A bot development framework consists of Bot Connector, Bot Builder SDK, Bot Directory and Developer Portal. Currently there are Wit.ai, Microsoft bot framework, Aspect CXP-NLU and API.ai.
The chatbots are definitely the future of web development that facilitate in a variety of exclusive ways including phone interactions, customer support, info retrieval or filing which make ecommerce operations much simpler.
Now almost all brands can benefit for these chatbots that are super-easy to deploy.
However, the experts of responsive web design company suggest that web developers must opt for flexible, event-based framework built on proven techs so that they can overcome or surpass shortcomings that are usually found in the platforms of bot development.