Chatbots Gone Mainstream: Can They Help with Job Scheduling?
- April 16, 2018
- By: Vonigo
In recent years, chatbots have established themselves as a legitimate marketing tool. Modern chatbots have a lot of skills compared to their ancestors. Initially, chatbots only had the ability to reproduce a typed conversation. Now they are going mainstream. Is it time to consider whether they could be useful for helping with job scheduling?
From “Too Risky,” to the Mainstream
The global chatbot market is expected to reach 1.23 billion dollars by 2025. By the end of this decade, 80% of businesses surveyed want to include a chatbot in their functioning.
They work in a pretty simple way. The customer writes the keyword or phrase, and the bot acts the way it is programmed to, thus satisfying the need of the consumer. That means that a chatbot, when deployed properly, could automate the task of job scheduling. They can answer sales questions and help customers make the decision to book with you.
Examples of Chatbots in Action
Companies nowadays use these computer programs for customer service, personal assistants, and even helping their buyers with discounts and deals. Tj Maxx is an example of a company that has greatly benefited from introducing a chatbot into their online store. The smart automated shopping assistant has helped over a million customers over in less than two years.
How Chatbots can Make a Difference with Job Scheduling
One of the most useful characteristics that chatbots have is the ability to qualify a company’s leads. Many of the questions that customers ask have already been answered on your website. Your admin staff spends a lot of time answering the same questions that a chatbot can handle with ease. If it reduces the cost of getting a booking onto your schedule, it might be worth considering.
Another major characteristic that chatbots have is that they can find the right way to interact with the customer by understanding the sentiment and tone. This is really important as it makes the humans feel like they are talking to a live agent instead of a “robot.” They are also quite predictive and can keep the conversation going. This wasn’t always the case, but the technology has improved vastly. You may have even had an interaction with one without noticing. Even if you noticed, if your questions are answered, you might not have minded.
A Chatbot Infographic
“A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it could deceive a human into believing that it was human”, said Alan Turing. And with the help of the artificial intelligence, chatbots are only going to become more and more sophisticated in the years that follow.
By 2029, chatbots are going to be indistinguishable from humans. This is a prediction made by Ray Kurzweil, and with the latest developments, he is probably going to be right. In the infographic below, read about the history of chatbots, and how companies are using them to reduce the cost of sales queries. Is it time to use them in tandem with your job scheduling software?