BOTS RISE

How much can companies rely on bots?

How much can companies rely on bots?

BRANDS AND BUSINESSES

are increasingly using chatbots to connect with their customers – either for customer care or marketing. Gartner predicts that AI technology will become pervasive across software products and services by 2020. It will be among the top five investment priorities for more than 30 per cent of CIOs.

Today, brands are letting bots answer customer queries over chats, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. This helps the company save money and lets employees focus on more significant work. Bots also help accumulate user data and trends over a period of time. Neil Shah, Research Director, Counterpoint Technology, explains: “When a customer service executive, who has acquired the skills to deal with customers over time, quits, all the intelligence is lost; whereas the insights acquired by bots go into the company’s repository.”

Bots are being employed by brands for sales, too. Starbucks has a chatbot in its app for customers to place orders via voice command or chat. Facebook, too, has opened up Messenger for companies to build bots and converse with users directly. Bots are particularly useful in digital marketing and analytics to tweak market campaigns in real time, resulting in more ROI for ad spends.

However, it’s still early days. Bots are only being used for monotonous tasks that require minimum human intervention, says Rakesh Barik, Partner, Deloitte India. “It is the machine intelligence bit that will let bots mimic human behaviour; that is still in the works,” he adds.

Initial tests in the AI space have not been encouraging. Microsoft had to take down its AI bot on Twitter, called Tay, when it started posting offensive remarks. Until major headway is made, experts suggest that critical work be handled by humans and only those tasks that do not require judgment calls be assigned to bots.

BOTS ARE PARTICULARLY USEFUL IN DIGITAL MARKETING AND ANALYTICS TO TWEAK MARKET CAMPAIGNS IN REAL TIME, RESULTING IN MORE ROI FOR AD SPENDS