What is a Chatbot?

A chatbot is technology that simulates human conversations. Chatbots rely on artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and speech recognition to understand and respond to the humans they are interacting with. The use of chatbots has seen significant growth recently as the technology has advanced and companies recognize their value. That value includes proactively communicating with customers, reducing service costs, and offering more convenience to consumers, to name a few of the benefits.

Chatbots can perform a variety of tasks. For example, using voice commands to order a pizza and receiving a response back with the price is a type of response from a chatbot. Chatbots are good for these types of clearly defined, repetitive tasks. In fact, most chatbots fall into this "clearly defined, repetitive task" category. And then on the higher end, there are solutions like Siri and Cortana.

The use of chatbots in customer service

Chatbots are being deployed by businesses to facilitate both service and sales conversion. Customers are often invited to chat by chatbots when they visit certain websites. One of the appealing features of chatbots is that they can have hundreds of these conversations simultaneously with customers - something that can't be feasibly done with human agents.

Chatbots are good for resolving basic issues. As part of this process, a chatbot might collect the customer's name and contact information, possibly a confirmation or order number, and a description of the issue. If it can solve the problem, it will. However, if the issue the customer describes doesn't contain a key word or phrase the chatbot recognizes, it won't be able to give a helpful response.

Even when chatbots can't resolve an issue, that isn't necessarily a failure. The chat session often gets elevated to an agent, accompanied by the information the chatbot collected. That creates efficiencies for the agent and creates a better experience for the customer.

When deployed thoughtfully, chatbots can play a valuable role in an organization's customer service model.