Online experiences – mobile or desktop – have a similar set of shortcomings originating from a limited set of UI structures. Here are some of the most common issues with online experiences[1]: difficulty to navigate sites, finding answers to simple questions, finding basic details about the business, time-consuming efforts to find the services, poorly designed smartphone apps, useless search options, inaccessible functions on mobile devices, etc.
Nonetheless, there are ~4.1 billion users on messaging apps[2], and intelligent conversational chatbots are the new interfaces for these apps. They are changing the way businesses and customers interact. Powered by artificial intelligence, those computer programs, when just introduced, held a great promise of enabling close to natural conversations with people.
While the amount of intelligence and abilities to communicate at a human-like level have been largely overestimated across industries, intelligent bots do represent a shift towards conversational interfaces, through which businesses can serve their customers 24/7 in the most efficient manner and at a high rate of customer success. Oracle[3] claims that chatbots could save $174 billion across insurance, financial services, sales, and customer service.
Chatbots may not be the only definitive answer for improving customer service, but they can go far to improve the responsiveness and efficiency of a company’s customer service function[4]. Chatbots are increasingly being implemented in B2B, B2C, and internal communications in the financial services industry. Customer service bots are enabling customers to check balance, transfer money, pay bills, and more. All of this, however, is still the starting (or at most, the transitional) point of the evolution of chatbots in the US, where the vast majority of examples are cases of a rushed jump
