Internet of Things (IoT) and digital assistants have entirely changed the future of customer support services, whether it is the live chat or live answer support. Back in 2016, AI chatbots were only considered as a type of modern science fantasy, something out of a Sci-Fi movie. They were typically classified as nothing more than overrated Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems, which won’t learn to walk, forget about running. With the right facets in place, however, they successfully gave a proof of the superficial level of interaction between human and machine. Chatbots have displayed an enormous growth within a short span of time and helped entrepreneurs to build a strong bond with customers.

What is an AI Chatbot?

Also goes by various terms such as talkbot, IM bot, interactive agent, chatterbot, and Artificial Conversational Entity (ACE), a chatbot is a computer program powered by artificial intelligence that allows you to simulate a real-time conversation directly with a business via acoustic or textual methods. In this, customers can interact with companies in their natural language, usually via text or messaging app services. By understanding the intent and requirements of customers, the AI chatbot provides them with an immediate response.

Giant tech companies like Nitro Cafe, Coca-Cola, Sephora, and Marriot are going all in by building smart chatbots for each core channel so they can employ the chat interface in a way that yields the maximum return with minimal fluff. In fact, according to a survey by Oracle, around 80 percent of businesses will use chatbots as the primary mode of interaction for customer services by 2020. Additionally, the global chatbot market is expected to grow at a CAGR of about 37 percent within the period 2017-2021.

What Industries Chatbots are Winning Over?

AI chatbots are quickly becoming the most popular choice for various industries such as:

• E-commerce & online marketing
• FinTech, financial & banking
• Customer services
• Travel, tourism, and hospitality
• HR & recruiting
• Health and medicine
• Entertainment & news media
• IT helpdesk and technical support

So, What is the Relation between Conversational Interface (CI) and AI Chatbots?

Since Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology still has a long way to go, a new trend has evolved in the bot building market that will handle unstructured inputs from the User Interface (UI) perspective and harness the micro-decisions that consumers experience.

Experts say that Conversational Interface (CI) is a hybrid UI that will take the smart chatbots to the mainstream market since it’s entirely focused on providing users with a personalized experience and more improved, structured results. In this, the interface design is displayed in a prescribed chat format where users can communicate with a system or real person using text or voice. By combining the natural language interface with various visual and graphical UI elements such as unfurl links, menus, and interactive buttons, the virtual assistant understands unstructured and intricate requests, personalizes responses, and then delivers the right content to satisfy the user intent.

What are the Benefits of Using a Conversational Interface for Chatbots?

Conversational Interface (CI) improves not only landing page conversions but also the user engagement as well as overall customer satisfaction. Since chatbots are getting smarter and more powerful, self-service is going to become a lot more helpful, robust, and relevant.

From engaging potential users to driving them through marketing as well as sales funnel, everything starts from a conversation. Building a conversational user interface for websites and other systems will allow entrepreneurs to employ chatbots in numerous ways that will quickly bring a great value and add dollars to their bottom line. Some of the pros are:

Driven User Engagement and Sales Funnel

In today’s technology-driven era, most businesses fail to capture users’ attention and start a conversation with them. Well, just designing a website or app, adding a bunch of products, and then crossing your fingers is not going to build a constructive engagement. A standard Graphical User Interface (GUI) or landing page typically provides users with all the information at once, including emails, sign up pop-ups, slack notifications, etc. As a result, users get easily distracted and confused by all sorts of multiple inputs and Call-to-Actions (CTAs), which result in losing interest and then leaving your brand.

For both businesses and customers, chatbots, powered by the AI invasion and combined with the conversational interface, indeed are a game-changing deal. By combining the AI advancements with the simple, storytelling flow of CI development, businesses can improve the conversational capabilities of chatbots and provide info progressively under the user’s request or command. In this manner, they can automatically improve landing page conversions and also move users down their sales funnel effectively.

A great example of this is Typeform’s conversational article that combines chatbot interactions with conventional text-based content, which takes users on a journey and also shares additional valuable information about certain subject matters. By designing a conversational experience, entrepreneurs can improve their relationship with consumers as well as add value to their readers.

Better Content Gamification

Since the conversational user interface is more interactive compared to a typical GUI, chatbots make content more personalized, useful and also provide one specific CTA focused on each user interaction with the system. In this way, they keep your customers in a loop through binary interactions – inputs and outputs. Card, track, and topic are some different categories of conversions that you can create to bounce the user from one piece of content onto the next.

Elevated User Experience and Customer Services

Chatbots indeed won’t ever replace human within customer service entirely since people still rely on human experience. But AI chatbots have drastically reduced the response time, prevented user irritation, and improved the lead of time of conversations, thereby increasing customer satisfaction and UX. Since the CI enables users to undergo the precise type of experience that they would get into the brick and mortar retail store, customers are now comfortably interacting with the chatbot.

More than half of users prefer businesses that integrate a virtual assistant into their apps and websites. Also, it has become almost indistinguishable to assess either we are talking to a real person or a smart AI chatbot. Not only are they perfectly able to hold conversations but also assist in troubleshooting various glitches.

Real-time Lead Qualification

A common mistake most marketers usually commit is to only spend their resources and time on improving the lead conversion rate, and not tracking the stages of their digital marketing funnel. By the time your visitors reach the ending point of the funnel, you can surely attain between 30 and 35 percent of conversion rate, but if none of those potential leads convert to a purchase, you will fall into a lose-lose situation. It means you are not only wasting your money, time, and efforts but losing your potential customers as well. CI by nature involves a two-way communication process that directly connects businesses and customers by providing and asking information from users simultaneously via the chatbot.

For example, Drift uses a pop-up live chat window to engage visitors in conversations and also asks some qualification questions to check if the lead aligns with their services or products.

Better Cost Effectiveness

One biggest win for CI and AI chatbots is that they are reliable and cost effective. Compared to an NLP technology, the cost of designing and implementing an interactive CI is almost half.

Initial Implementation charges:

• NLP: 10k-20k; not counting the additional costs with respect to real human assistance and AI training during the first six to twelve months.
• CI: 5k-10k; doesn’t require any (or many) human agent support once deployed because CI can work autonomously.