Chatbots are the most widely used form of artificial intelligence (AI), and experts predict the chatbot market size will grow from $2.9 billion in 2020 to $10.5 billion by 2026.
Why? Companies recognize the multitude of benefits chatbots offer. From collecting information, qualifying leads, booking meetings, handling support tickets, answering low-level questions, streamlining sales, and more, there’s a lot a chatbot can do for your company!
What’s even more fascinating about the capabilities of a chatbot? They keep growing. Businesses and people find new ways to utilize them, and trends emerge. Ready to see how you can implement a chatbot for your team? Check out some of the biggest trends and use cases we’re following in 2022.
Providing an Empathic or Human-Like Experience
Just because your lead or customer is talking to a robot, it doesn’t mean it should feel that way. Chatbots that use natural language processing (NLP) and similar AI can intelligently understand the conversation and its intent. How? They use AI to understand the nuances of human dialogue, dialects, and language to execute accurate commands and respond in a human-like manner.
If your chatbot doesn’t have NLP capabilities, you can still make it feel like a person is having a natural conversation. Focus on:
- Writing enticing welcome messages
- Having compelling, opened-ended questions
- Responding to technical commands
- Carefully crafting your task flows
- Continuously training and updating your bot
Other AI functionality can also improve your customers’ experience and make it feel more genuine or emphatic. AI-powered bots learn with every interaction, helping them to provide better assistance and help your business better understand customer behavior. Ultimately, your chatbot’s results will be stronger overall.
Utilizing Voice
Juniper Research predicts that consumers will interact with voice assistants or bots on more than 8.4 billion devices by 2024. Specific chatbots utilize AI to assist with text and voice. They synthesize human speech to communicate with your leads and customers and route the data they receive back into your CRM or other platforms.
If you have a large customer base or generate a ton of leads routinely, a voice bot may be a perfect solution. They’re accessible at any time, many consumers still like being able to talk to someone or something, and many can be integrated with other services. What’s more, voice bots allow for personalization that reduces problems faced while dealing with customer requirements.
Accepting Payment
More banks and other financial institutions are starting to implement payment options within their chatbots. But this trend isn’t only limited to these industries. Any organization that utilizes e-commerce to pay for its goods or services can incorporate payment options into its chatbots.
Your bot can be equipped with the API of your chosen payment system, and whenever there is an occasion for payment, the bot can send a request to the API, then provide a link for payment. This trend helps automate simple payments and allows users to make payments without having to leave their conversations. It’s also cost-effective and improves customer satisfaction.
Simplifying Recruiting and HR
Thinking about posting a job opening to your website or LinkedIn, but don’t have the time to properly weed through your candidates? A chatbot can help. A recruiting chatbot can filter candidates out, schedule them for interviews that work with your schedule, and answer basic questions. By doing this, it helps speed up the entire process, while ensuring a consistent response to each and every person.
You can still use chatbots after you’ve hired your new employee, too! Your company can also use it for a variety of internal purposes – a trend that’s emerging as larger organizations with huge workforces uncover more use cases. Some enterprises use them to help hire and onboard new employees by sorting out candidates in the interview process, then answering basic HR questions after they’re hired. Smaller businesses can also utilize chatbot functionality to perform these tasks, and other internal communication they find may be better suited through chatbots.
Automating Other Tasks
While not necessarily a new trend, automating specific tasks through a chatbot will still be prevalent for years to come. And for a good reason! Why spend the time you don’t have on tedious tasks when a chatbot can perform them and guarantee 100% accuracy? You can have your chatbot automate everything from reservations, appointments, meetings, asking for company reviews, and more.
Minimizing human error through chatbot automation is also useful because it will help build trust and loyalty – and your customers will keep coming back! Hopefully, they’ll bring in new ones, too.
Multilingual Capabilities
If you offer goods and services across the globe, a chatbot with multilingual capabilities will come in handy. After all, a chatbot is only helpful if you can understand the language it’s speaking, right? Chatbots with multilingual capabilities will instantly earn a positive reaction and increase customer satisfaction scores.
Multilingual chatbots that use NLP are equipped to identify a user’s language or even use an IP address to find the geographic location of your user.
Analytics and Insights
Chatbots are capable of aggregating enormous amounts of data because they keep track of every question asked, any customer interaction, every answer delivered and more. This will help you understand your customer’s requirements and even their buyer journey.
Businesses can use all of this data to continuously improve operations, products, services, employee morale and more (depending on how it is used).
Combining with Other Messenger Apps
Applications like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp have been used by businesses before for customer support and service. However, an employee typically handled the conversation, making the experience similar to live chat. While that’s not necessarily bad, chatbots can still save time and money, and more bot-like functionality is being incorporated into these popular apps. People are already comfortable with chatbots and text messaging, so combining these two forces is a trend that can have good results.
Replacing Forms for Lead Generation
If you’ve struggled to get online visitors to complete your contact forms, chatbots could help. Some companies have already turned to chatbots to get their users to sign up for various things, like downloaded content or demos.
While web forms can sometimes be too long and have too many questions, chatbots are intelligent and initiate engaging conversations – which helps with conversion. Additionally, many chatbot platforms let you provide predefined answers to questions in the form of buttons, which are easy to click on and keep the conversation moving.
Last Chatbot Thoughts
These are just some of the trends we think will be big in the chatbot landscape in 2022. With the versatility of chatbots, there’s no denying that there are likely other trends of use cases out there we haven’t considered yet! If you want to brainstorm any other ways to use chatbots for your company, reach out to our team.
