Inspiration of NBA Chatbot to Small Business Chatbots

According to a report on November 26, 2019, technology company GameOn has partnered with the North American Basketball League NBA to launch a new chatbot service through the social media platform Facebook to enhance the fan experience.

This is an example of Facebook Messenger chatbots used in sports. This chatbot especially enhances the personal experience of fans. This will save a lot of time for fans, including searching online for match schedules, related news, teams, player status, and buying tickets, sportswear, sneakers, etc.

For the NBA, they will more accurately aim their target market and carry out corresponding promotions, while saving a lot of labor costs and time costs for customer service, and more importantly, strengthening the interaction and participation of fans, Increasing their satisfaction.

Five Roles Of NBA Chatbots

Wide Coverage

As mentioned earlier, this chatbot is built on the Facebook Messenger platform. Facebook is a platform with more than 1 billion users, so you can imagine how extensive his coverage is. At present, the use of messenger platforms has exceeded social media because of its conversational interaction and timely response.

Save Costs

Using chatbots saves a lot of human costs. These costs include hiring customer service representatives to answer calls and answer simple, repetitive questions.

It also includes labor costs such as sales staff and after sales service.

Increase User Satisfaction

Due to the timely response of chatbots, the waiting time of fans has been greatly reduced, which will greatly increase their satisfaction.

Increase User Engagement
It is also due to the timely response of the chat robot, which will arouse the user's interest and make a positive response.


Provide Personalized Services

Chatbot technology will track, analyze and understand each user's preferences, including their favorite teams, athletes, jerseys, sneakers, and then send them relevant information.


What is particularly worth mentioning here is the personalized experience, which is very important for fans and can save them a lot of time.


Chatbots collect the habits, behaviors, preferences, etc. of each user's browsing on the website, and use data analysis to make more accurate judgments on fans, including which team they like, which players they care about, and what sportswear , sneakers, other sporting goods, etc., and then use the ads on Facebook and related promotion technologies used by chatbots to promote, which will greatly improve the accuracy rate, and will not make them annoying, on the contrary make fans feel valued.

Inspiration of NBA Chatbot to Small Business Chatbots

NBA chatbot is for sports enthusiasts, but the basic technology and functions are generally the same as general small business chatbots. Therefore, as a small business, when considering to develop a chatbot, it is necessary to consider the combination of cost and function, and integrate the strategic goals of your own company, and then propose a corresponding chatbot development plan.

Chatbots can indeed bring huge benefits to companies, but when you are going to build it, need to comprehensively consider all aspects of factors and highlight your priorities, so that chatbots can play a greater role with a limited budget. 

#chatbot #chatbots #business #customerservice #customersupport #NBA 

Source : NBA launches chatbot service with GameOn

Chatbot Helps Intercom to Increase Sales Nearly 70%

This news was published by Intercom on November 21, 2019, with an exact growth figure of 67%. Intercom worked with an independent marketing company to randomly sample 500 consumers and 500 business leaders, including company managers and supervisors.

Companies led by these executives saved an average of $300,000 from their chatbots in 2019, with the most benefit being the customer service and sales teams.

Business Leaders Are Satisfied with Chatbot

35% of company executives believe that chatbots helped them reach sales goals. The top three sales use cases are: collecting information and high-quality lead generation, booking product demos, and engaging website visitors.

These company executives generally believe that the most cost-effective way to express chatbots is to increase customer responsiveness.

Chatbots reduced response time by an average of four times, and chatbots increased their customer support satisfaction by 24%.

Chatbots are also an important part of Intercom's sales activities. They use their own customized chatbot on all key pages of their website, including pricing pages, demo pages and home pages. For example, if you visit their pricing page, their chatbot will trigger after a few seconds asking the visitor how to help. After answering a few questions, the chatbot will provide the most appropriate advice for the visitors, or connect with their sales team representatives to chat with them instantly.

Intercom's customer service team found that using chatbot can reduce resolution time by 50%. Chatbot can easily categorize a large number of incoming chats, allowing team members to free up time to deal with more complex issues that require manually to do.

Consumer Evaluation of Chatbots

But for consumers, they are not completely satisfied. They think that chatbots can't fully meet their expectations.

87% of consumers prefer to talk to humans.

About three-quarters of consumers want to encounter chatbots on the site, but only 15% prefer chatbots because they can talk quickly.

25% of consumers don't care about conversations with humans or chatbots, as long as they achieve the desired results.

When asked about the reason, the respondents’ evaluation of human beings is:

• Can answer a variety of questions.
• Can understand the complex situation.
• Can better "know me".

This is higher than the evaluation of chatbots.

On the other hand, consumers believe that chatbots outperform humans in three ways:

• 24/7 service
• Reduce waiting time
• Quickly connect customer service representatives

In short, most consumers expect chatbots. They usually still like humans, but in some cases they don't care about this difference.

In Conclusion

For companies, chatbots do play a role in reducing costs and improving efficiency. It is foreseeable that in the next few years, it will be inevitable for companies to embrace chatbots.

Although some consumers are not very satisfied with the chatbot, each company faces the problem of high cost, which must be solved, and the chatbot is a good solution. This development trend is unstoppable, and consumers are also driven to accept and adapt to robots.

According to the current consumer’s attitude, chatbots need quickly be improved their intelligence, which is really a challenge for developers. We must reduce costs, on the other hand, must improve the level of intelligence, so that more enterprises can adopt and more consumers accept.

#chatbot #chatbots #sales #marketing #customerservice #business 

Source : Chatbot Trends Report

AppyPie Releases No Code Chatbot Building Platform

AppyPie Chatbot Platform

Another chatbot development platform has been released on Nov18th, 2019. We can call it the AppyPie chatbot development platform because it is a code-free chatbot build platform developed by AppyPie.

AppyPie is a mobile app creator for Android, iOS, Fire OS, Windows Phone and BlackBerry platforms that allows its users to create and earn revenue from different types of mobile apps. It also has its own market to showcase apps created with it. Of course it can also be used to create websites.

The AppyPie platform provides multiple templates for creating applications. Easy to use and DIY is the ultimate goal of AppyPie to serve small businesses.

Now AppyPie has also joined the ranks of developing chatbots for small businesses. With his service tenet, the chatbot development platform is also easy to use.

AppyPie Chatbot Platform Features

No Code Required

This has something in common with other chat-free development platforms that don't require code. Basically, this platform can be used to create a simple chatbot in minutes. To have such a feature, strong artificial intelligence is needed to support it.

Combine Apps And Websites

Appypie is almost the most popular mobile app development platform. The introduction of the development of chatbots is actually a convenience for SMB users, which is the combination of developing mobile applications, websites, and chat bots.

Create Three Types Of Chatbots

Drive Sales, including promotions, product displays, recommendations, to achieve conversion.

Customer Support, which automatically responds to customer questions and saves waiting time.

Customer Service Representative Connection, connect customer service representatives to answer more complicated questions.

According to CEO AppyPie CEO Scot Small, “In this era of artificial intelligence, virtual assistants are becoming one of the best solutions for customer care across industries. So, to help small and medium-sized businesses stay relevant and updated, we have taken a step further and are introducing chatbot builders for our users. With our DIY chatbot builder, SMBs can easily build their own chatbots and add it to their business websites and mobile apps in a matter of minutes and that too without having to write even a single line of code.”

Founded in 2015, AppyPie is a mobile application development platform that can develop multiple languages, multiple mobile applications without code, and currently has the largest market share in the industry.

In Conclusion

The release of the AppyPie chatbots platform will provide maximum convenience for the combining development of mobile apps, websites, and chatbots.

#chatbot #chatbots #chatbotplatform#chatbotbuilder #apps #mobileapp #business #customersupport #customerservice #appypie 

https://www.appypie.com/chatbot-builder

Nearly 60% of Consumers Accept Shopping Online Through Chatbot

The latest news about online use of chatbot shopping is published on November 13th, 2019. This news fully reflects the attitudes and preferences of consumers and online shoppers for using chatbots to shop. Overall, about 60% of people are interested in shopping with chatbots, which is actually 59.05%.

In general, the development of new technologies is changing with each passing day, changing people's lives and work all the time, providing a lot of convenience. For business operators, it can also greatly improve efficiency and reduce costs, thereby further increasing profits. However, there are some doubts about the specific development and use of new technology products. The publication of this news is very exciting news for chatbot developers and e-commerce operators.

According to CISION PR Newsware, this is a survey report by a marketing company based in Washington, DC. The name of this company is called GoodFirms.

According to this market research report,

“88.57% of the participants pick chatbots for simple interactions. About 54.29% of them preferred chatbots for moderate interactions.”

The Popularity of Chatbots Is About to Begin

This is good news for most online stores.

In the current chatbots, it is basically divided into AI chatbot and non-AI chatbots. This kind of "simple interaction" usually refers to non-AI chatbots, which can be used to greet visitors on the website and Facebook Page(mostly) and ask them the services needed, providing them with menus, and other options, and subsequent follow-up.

This provides two convenient conditions for most small and medium-sized online stores.

The first is the popular use of chatbots

Usually such no-AI chatbots, the development costs, maintenance costs, and usage costs are quite low, which means that almost every online retail store can afford it.

The second is to prepare for the upgrade

In the process of using this non-AI chatbots, online merchants will know what their most needed functions are, which will create convenience for future upgrades, and they can save unnecessary functions, save developing time and costs.

Most Consumers Like Smarter Chatbots

We can think that most consumers (about 55%) prefer smarter chatbots.

One of the upgraded projects is to integrate chatbots with artificial intelligence to make them smarter and able to “moderate interactions” with visitors. This “moderate interaction” involves first understanding the more complex human language and behavior. And then respond accordingly, including:

Request cancellation, return, refund, etc.

Provide personalized service and make corresponding product recommendations.

It is clear that smart chatbots will provide better quality and more satisfying services.

According to CISION PR Newsware, GoodFirms has invited more than 300 people worldwide to participate in this market research activity.

“The participants are chiefly males (73.33%). And the age distribution among them was: 17.14% of Generation Z (18-24), 70.48% of Millennials (25-39), and 12.38%.Gen X (40-59). The contributors were interrogated regarding their brand communication preference, for what purpose they used chatbots, their chatbot user experience, usage preferences, and perceived benefits & cons.”

GoodFirms.co is an internationally recognized B2B research, review and rating platform.

#Chatbot #chatbots #business #ecommerce #AIchatbot 

Source : Latest GoodFirms Research Spotlights That Around 59.05% of People Are Fine Shopping for Basic Products via Chatbots

Chatbot Building Platform Introduction for Botsify

Chatbot Building Platform - Botsify

Introduction

One of the AI chatbot builders that is useful for creating bot for Facebook Messenger, Slack and website is known as Botsify, it starts with building chatbots without code. Its feature that allows user data collection in forms makes Botsify different from other chatbot builders. You get the ability of questions customization with text input or collect data such as address, email, location, phone numbers etc. This data is stored in the dashboard, exported to CSV file or sent by email.

Features

Story

The conversational flow between end user and chatbot is known as Botsify’s Story, it is AI supported. In the chatbot, it is the story on which depends the response of chatbot to the expected messages. It is therefore significant to design proper scenario that the chatbot can follow.

The example is about weather, when user ask the weather, bot replies with asking location first, after getting answer from users, bot replies with the weather of that location which answered by the user.

(Example from  Botsify 2.0 —Make Artificial Intelligent Chat Bots and More)

Template

It offers templates for some fields, start with free trial. Some of these are: Wedding Planners, Insurance Assistant, Legal Service, Education Consultancy, Order Food, Freelancer, Digital                 Agency, Travel Booking, Photographer, Book a Table, Feedback Collection, Beautician, Healthcare Center etc.

Conversation Forms - Lead Generation

This is a smart way of collecting user information by chatbots through conversations. Several fields are there for data collection such as Name, location, email etc. Data correction is also validated via API. It offers best answer to user query by selecting keywords combination and similar phrases from query assuring finest conversational experience.

Chat With Visitors from Messenger

It offers private and customized reply to customer on the basis of their comment on your post. It sends direct notification on messenger when human help is required by someone on bot and conversation could also be started directly with users. Previous chat is also available, this is easy for customer service agents to know what happened, what are questions which visitors need to be cleared by them.

Customer Support

With this chatbot platform, you get the ability of making chatbots for instantly answering 80% customer queries for Facebook Page, Livechat of site and WhatsApp. So customers need not to wait for long in the absence of human agents. The chatbot is able to use 140 languages for communication being multilingual.

Integration

Botsify can integrate many popular apps, let’s see some of them.

Amazon Alexa

Custom skill development is now possible for Amazon Alexa with botsify such that you can create and deploy you skill to Amazon. It has features like survey skill, motivational quote etc. The surveys help to get user feedback for services and products with simple survey based on yes/no responses in general.

Wordpress

This integration builds these two benefits.

Build Readership  - The chatbot help you get and reader’s email list, the process is funny  and easy, help you get 300% enhancement in readership.

Build Relationship  - You can send follow up content and interested based articles to make people think you know what they like to read, they feel that they are respected and valued.

Shopify

Shopify is the most popular online store development platform. With Botsify's Shopify integration, online stores can integrate all their products into a chatbot with just a few clicks.

Through chatbots on Facebook Messenger, or through cross-platform plugins, online stores will get more users and increase conversion rates. In addition, the online shop user can be re-engaged to the chatbot through the scheduled message or the broadcast function.

Botsify + Shopify + Facebook Messenger may be your new sales channel.

Zapier

Zapier is a platform for integrating applications, Botsify can work with it, and integrate with hundreds of other applications to automate your work, including Google Sheets, Slack, Twitter and more.

Plans

Botsify provides a free 14 days trial.

Botsify is another good chatbot building platforms, start with the ease of no code, also powered by AI, which makes it possible to create smarter chatbot.

#chatbot #chatbots #chatbotplatform #chatbotplatforms #Botsify

https://botsify.com/

Chatbots Help Restaurants to Solve 6 Major Problems

Restaurant Chatbot Basic Functions

We all have experienced the busyness of the restaurant and there are indeed many problems that need to be solved. With the development of technology, especially artificial intelligence and chatbots, the operation of the restaurant can be greatly improved.

Here are six main problems that chatbots can help a restaurant solve:

1. Recommend Dishes And Take Orders

Many people let the waiter recommend dishes when they eat at the restaurant. This habit has been going on for a long time. In fact, there are many problems in this. This kind of recommendation wastes time for both parties. If the restaurant is very busy, waiters don’t have time to understand your requirements very well. Sometimes even if they have enthusiasm, they can't do it. Ok, these can all lead to unpleasantness throughout your meal.

(1) Restaurant waiters do not know customer preferences. Their recommendations are based on feedback from other customers. If they recommend this dish is salty, but you prefer light taste, or a dish is greasy, and you like light.

(2) People are emotional. Waiters answer the same question dozens of times a day. Who can guarantee that they are not bored? When you are asking them to recommend, they may say any one.

(3) It is not so that the waiters in the restaurant have tasted every dish in their store. It is really difficult for them to recommend it.

Chatbots will solve these problems very well, they always smile to answer your questions with patience, ask if you like salty, light, whether you accept greasy, spicy, etc. According to your description, recommend the right one for you. And you don't have to worry about taking up the time of the chatbot and waiters.

Then you can place an order with one click, and the whole recommendation and order process becomes easy and fun.

2. Accept Reservation

Using a chatbot will make seat reservations easier and save time. Many customers and restaurant operators have such unpleasant experiences. Some customers like to choose a seat and describe it on the phone again and again, they can't make it clear, and the restaurant staffs don’t understand either.

Using chatbot take reservation, the situation would be changed a lot. As a customer, you don't need to describe it at all. You can see every table and seat in the restaurant through chatbot, how many people they suit for, and vacant or not.

For restaurants, there is no need to answer the phone, saving a lot of time and manpower, making reservation easy and efficient.

3. Build Customer Loyalty

Restaurants are trying to retain more guests, giving customers a sense of being valued and respected, and giving them real benefits are the key to retaining them and making them come back.

The chatbot can remember the customer's name, preferences, and implement the following functions,

• Birthday congratulations and offers

• Provide incentive programs

• Random free gifts

When chatbots help you with your restaurant, you can easily retain more customers.

4. Do Promotion

Every restaurant is trying to attract more guests while trying to retain existing guests. This is not easy. From project development to implementation, it takes a lot of time, money and manpower, and sometimes even need hire external companies to help.

With chatbots, the job is easy and inexpensive, it will easily send your customers discount information, new product notifications, and notify other updates, from menu changes to new devices adding, new decoration, etc.

5. Support Customers and Collect Feedback

At present, most restaurants still provide customer support by telephone, and they are no longer available after work. Even the 24-hour restaurant can provide limited customer support.

The chatbot can provide 24/7 customer support. As mentioned earlier, it can take seat reservation and you can also check discount, promotion. These can be done at any your convenient time, you don’t have to call restaurants when they are busy.

Of course, it is extremely easy for the restaurant to collect customer feedback. By analyzing these feedbacks, restaurant operators will adjust their business strategies to further improve service quality and competitiveness.

6. Help Delivery and Take Out

Not all restaurants offer delivery service, but most offer take-out. Whether it's delivery or take out, the biggest convenience of using a chatbot is to reduce the time wasted on the phone for both restaurants and customers, which especially benefits restaurants. Using a chatbot to take orders for delivery and take out saves time and reduces errors.

A typical restaurant chatbot should include

• Recommend dishes
• Accept reservations
• Build customer loyalty
• Do promotion
• Collect feedback
• Help take out

In summary, chatbots play an extremely important role in improving restaurant service and efficiency, and will be used more and more widely in the restaurant industry.

Microsoft Announces No Code Chatbot Building Platform – Power Virtual Agents

Microsoft's No Code Chatbot Building Platform - Power Virtual Agnets

Microsoft announced its Power Virtual Agents on November 4, 2019, a new no code/low code platform for building chatbot that is part of Microsoft's Power Platform, including Microsoft Flow automation tools, which have been renamed For Power Automate and Power BI.

Building on Azure's existing AI and tools for building chatbots, Power Virtual Agents promises to make building a chatbot almost as easy as writing a Word document. This way, anyone can build a chatbot.

According to Microsoft VP Charles Lamanna, Power Virtual Agent is the latest member of the Power Platform series, very focused on the same type of low code, whether it is business users, business analysts or professional developers, anyone can access an AI-driven The dialogue agent can solve problems for your employees, customers and partners very naturally.

Power Virtual Agents can easily handle the entire process of chatbot building, including Slack, Facebook Messenger and other application chat systems. It saves a lot of time, and like a similar AI system, the service learns over time based on feedback from users.

An advanced feature worth mentioning is that if you go beyond the no-code/low-code category in development and need to get the actual code, you can switch to Azure and use its existing resources, which will make the chatbot powerful, reliable, and more Intelligent.

The service can be integrated with tools such as Power Automate / Microsoft Flow to allow users to trigger other services based on information gathered by chatbots.

Lamanna emphasized that the service also provides many advanced analyses for those who use it to build chatbots. For example, with this feature, users can view the topics being asked and where the system can't provide answers. It also visualizes the different text input people provide so that chatbot builders can react to it.

Lamanna believes that in the past few years, chatbot developers have not thought from the user's point of view, and did not really understand the user's needs, so there are many problems in the development of chatbots on the market. "If you hand it over to a developer or An AI specialist, they're geniuses when it comes to developing code, but they won't know the details and ins and outs of, say, the shoe business — and vice versa. So it actually changes how development happens." The advent of Power Virtual Agents will solve these problems.

And Microsoft Power Virtual Agents entered the chatbot development platform market, showing its confidence in the future market, which will intensify the current competition, including with Chatfuel, Manychat, Botify, FlowXO, etc., and consumers will be won in the competition.

More Information

Announcing RPA, enhancedsecurity, no-code virtual agents, and more for Microsoft Power Platform