How Do Chatbots Work?

Chatbots are becoming increasingly popular on the internet as more and more brands and businesses utilize them in daily operations. As a result, you are likely to be hearing more about these clever pieces of technology as time goes by.

Chatbots are going to be a key piece of technology in 2018 and are going to help businesses automate many aspects of their operations, such as customer service. Understanding how they work will help you appreciate just how much of a good thing chatbots actually are.

A chatbot’s job is similar to that of a human – helping to man a help desk. When a customer opens up a new chat with your business and asks for assistance, the chatbot can immediately respond and work on quickly resolving that customer’s issue.

For example, if a customer typed in “What time does your store close?” the chatbot would be able to instantly pull that information from a databank and answer the customer’s question in the same way a human would, only faster and without the need to pay the chatbot. Companies like Nordstrom have long since begun to take advantage of this, as they introduced chatbots into their online customer service to provide their shoppers with instant assistance.

Chatbots are a form of artificial intelligence supported by programming, learning through machine learning, and using natural language processing to respond to humans. Chatbots can either function on machine learning and use artificial intelligence to its full extent, or function on structured questions.

The problem with the latter is that chatbot cannot learn from previous interactions with humans and can only answer pre-set questions, meaning they aren’t as useful and can be frustrating for customers.

No matter what you think about them, they are here to stay, and they are only going to be used more by major companies as they become more advanced and more cost-effective. If you want to learn more about chatbots, check out our infographic below!