The Chatbot Genesis
In 1966, a curious researcher Joseph Weizenbaum, developed a unique program in the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. ELIZA, as the program was called, was text-based. Weizenbaum used it to conduct an enlightening conversation with another researcher belonging to the Rogerian school of psychotherapy.
The discussion was an experiment testing the ability of the program to use the principles of the Rogerian theory to extract a response from the user. This was a momentous hour for technology innovation since it opened the doors for the first machine-human interaction and laid the pathway for the modern-day Chatbots that have become an integral part of our businesses today. The human brain had once again expanded its boundaries to newer and more empowering vistas.
Chatbots – A New Beginning
Since its very origins, the ethos of the Chatbot has always been defined by its users. In its very first experiment, ELIZA used techniques that were empathetic and non-directive, posing mostly open-ended questions, to build conversations with its users. It was heavily focused on involving the psychological aspect of user behavior to extract the best response.
This set the stage for future trends of Chatbot evolution – to engage users in a way that makes them feel comfortable and confident to provide valuable and insightful responses. In other words, provides users with an empowering experience to build intuitive and intelligent interactions.
Chatbots in Business
Every business today is driven by its users. Strategies are defined based on user preferences and bottom lines add up because of their expected behavior based on those preferences.
Chatbots are a critical tool in helping businesses accumulate user data to analyze and anticipate behavioral patterns. The AI consulting services help businesses leverage its multiple benefits:
- Ensure that your business is available 24/7 to customers. Even after closing hours, customers can access Chatbots that help to build the required interaction.
- A cheaper alternative to the expensive apps as it does the same job using cost-effective means.
- With human-like interaction abilities, Chatbots help to simulate human conversation thus making interactions more meaningful and satisfactory.
- They have a wider reach as it help you include a larger customer base including those who prefer non-conventional means of interaction, like chat, to know more about your product or service.
- Providing instant feedback to customers who join the chat to know about a product or service, building high-quality interactions to provide demos, and site navigation to help customers find a product all add up to building your trust and credibility with your user base.
- Bots are built with intelligence to not only help you improve your product but also track customer behavior to understand preferences and help you use that data to make informed decisions.
Demystifying User Experience
AI consulting services help businesses install Chatbots in their business devices namely websites, apps, and portals. When installed, Chatbots are intended to fulfill two objectives:
- Analyze a request received.
- Send out an appropriate response.
It is therefore critical that the Chatbots provide the right experience for users to be able to push the right request so that they receive the appropriate response from the bot.
A good experience is often misinterpreted as being limited to merely displaying a good user interface with helpful labels and prompts. While that may be a small part of the entire idea, User experience has in fact, a much deeper connotation.
It relates to the entire quality of the interaction between the user and the bot. This encompasses a whole host of factors like:
- The ease of using the bot
- The accuracy and relevance of the responses the bot sends out
- The tailored approach of the bot
- Smooth flow of conversation
- Ease in handling user errors while maintaining a positive and polite approach
- Ability to display empathy and connect with users at an emotional level
- Consistency in tone, style, and behavior
- Efficient feedback mechanisms
- Ability to display ethical and bias-free considerations during interactions
Positive experiences always create a win-win situation for both businesses as well as their customers. AI consulting services through their Chatbot installation help to increase user adoption, reduce churn rate, accrue profits easily, and build competitive advantage.
Building Experience with Chatbots
To deliver an experience that will help your business linger on in the minds and hearts of your users and make them come back for more, you need more than just an idea.
AI consulting helps you devise a strategy that will give wings to your idea and make it fly high on the winds of opportunity using the three-pronged approach.
- Understand your users
Every successful Chatbot rides high on the reach of its user base. This challenging feat is achieved only when you know who you are targeting. Artificial Intelligence helps you conduct thorough research on user profiles and demography and build a well-defined user persona. The basis of a Chatbot must always be the user objectives that are culled out from the user research. Map the user journey to understand the access points when they might be using the Chatbot. If your Chatbot meets them at these junctions and can help them satisfy their objectives, the design is considered a success. In other words, you have been able to achieve the critical task of delivering a user-specific design.
- Talk to your users
Now that you know your users, you still need to know how to talk to them. Building effective conversation designs is critical at this stage. It helps in continuing the journey of positive experience building that you have embarked on and helps you reach new levels of excellence in customer conversions.
Conversational design or Voice User Interface (VUI) is the practice of building conversations between humans and computers most seamlessly and engagingly keeping it as natural as possible. Conversation design engineers, who are part of the AI consulting services, can be engaged to help you wade through this sea of design nuances to get the tone, pitch, and language right.
Leveraging NLP technology is a critical part of conversation design. It can identify synonyms, multiple language structures, and variations to help Chatbots gauge the user’s intent and generate an appropriate response that is also contextually relevant.
- Build It For Your Users
The true value of a positive user experience lies in its ability to instill a sense of belonging among users. They begin to experience the rejuvenating feeling of homecoming whenever they use the Chatbot. Personalize your Chatbot to make it user-specific and context-aware. When users realize the Bot is responding in context to their earlier preferences and history, it makes them happy and willing to continue. Happy users always build happy businesses.
AI Chatbots – building businesses of the future
Chatbot has come a long way from being a mere text-based program to being a full-fledged engineering marvel. Today organizations like Amazon, Spotify, Netflix, and even the Bank of America are building their business strategies based on input received from these AI innovations.
As business needs evolve, Chatbots have been revamped beyond the mere visual and aesthetic appeal. It has been embedded with the critical user experience design benefits to make itself more adaptable, available, and accessible to users.
