Chatbots and Service Industry - Towards a better customer experience

While there are some imperatives for implementing an AI-based virtual assistant in your organization, the entry barrier is much lower than many believe. Chatbots and Service Industry can go together till long extend to solve customer queries efficiently saving human cost and giving customers a pleasant and personalized experience.  Below are some of the major industries where Chatbots have entered to change the customer experience extravagantly.

Chatbots in Restaurant and Retail Industries

Famous restaurant chains like Burger King and Taco bell has introduced their Chatbots to stand out of competitors of the Industry as well as treat their customers quickly. Customers of these restaurants are greeted by the resident Chatbots, and are offered the menu options- like a counter order, the Buyer chooses their pickup location, pays, and gets told when they can head over to grab their food. Chatbots are not only good for the restaurant staff in reducing work and pain but can provide a better user experience for the customers.

Chatbots and Service Industry – Pizza Hut chatbot

Chatbots in Hospitality and Travel

For hoteliers, automation has been held up as a solution for all difficulties related to productivity issues, labour costs, a way to ensure consistently, streamlined production processes across the system. Accurate and immediate delivery of information to customers is a major factor in running a successful online Business, especially in the price sensitive and competitive Travel and Hospitality industry. Chatbots particularly have gotten a lot of attention from the hospitality industry in recent months. Chatbots can help hotels in a number of areas, including time management, guest services and cost reduction. They can assist guests with elementary questions and requests. Thus, freeing up hotel staff to devote more of their time and attention to time-sensitive, critical, and complicated tasks. They are often more cost effective and faster than their human counterparts. They can be programmed to speak to guests in different languages, making it easier for the guests to speak in their local language to communicate.

Famous Travel companies like Expedia.com, Kayak, Skyscanner have launched bots of their own on Facebook Messenger and Slack, which helps the travellers to book their hotels. Even Travel related companies like Hyatt Hotels, Booking.com, Uber etc. have integrated with Facebook Messenger.

Chatbots in Health Industry

Chatbots like ‘HealthTap’, Amazon’s ‘Alexa’, ‘icliniq’ are some of the examples of Chatbots evolving in Health Industry. Chatbots are a much better fit for patient engagement than Standalone apps. Through these Health-Bots, users can ask health related questions and receive immediate responses. These responses are either original or based on responses to similar questions in the database. The impersonal nature of a bot could act as a benefit in certain situations, where an actual Doctor is not needed. Chatbots ease the access to healthcare and industry has favourable chances to serve their customers with personalised health tips. It can be a good example of the success of Chatbots and Service Industry combo.

HealthTap – An example of Chatbot in Health Industry

News Bots

Famous News and Media companies like The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Fox news, etc have launched their bots on Facebook messenger to help you receive the latest news on the go.

CNN- News Bot

Chatbots in E-Commerce

Mobile messengers- connected with Chatbots and the E-commerce business can open a new channel for selling the products online. E-commerce Shopping destination “Spring” was the early adopter, as it was one of the Facebook’s launch partners. E-commerce future is where brands have their own Chatbots which can interact with their customers through their apps, Facebook messenger or any other messaging apps.

Spring – An example of E-Commerce Bot

Chatbots in Fashion Industry

Chatbots, AI and Machine Learning pave a new domain of possibilities in the Fashion industry, from Data Analytics to Personal Chatbot Stylists. Fashion is such an industry where luxury goods can only be bought in a few physical boutiques and one to one customer service is essential. The Internet changed this dramatically, by giving the customers a seamless but a very impersonal experience of shopping. This particular problem can be solved by Chatbots. Customers can be treated personally with bots, which can exchange messages, give required suggestions and information. Famous fashion brands like Burberry, Tommy Hilfiger have recently launched Chatbots for the London and New York Fashion Week respectively. Sephora a famous cosmetics brand and H&M– a fashion clothing brand have also launched their Chatbots on Kik.

H & M chatbot

Chatbots in Finance

Chatbots have already stepped in Finance Industry. Chatbots can be programmed to assists the customers as Financial Advisor, Expense Saving Bot, Banking Bots, Tax bots, etc. Banks and Fintech have ample opportunities in developing bots for reducing their costs as well as human errors. Chatbots can work for customer’s convenience, managing multiple accounts, directly checking their bank balance and expenses on particular things. Further about Finance and Chatbots have been discussed in our earlier blog: Chatbots as your Personal Finance Assistant.

Chatbots in Fitness Industry

Chat based health and fitness startups like FitCircle have also launched a Facebook Messenger Chatbot, to help their customers get personalised health and fitness tips. Tech based fitness companies can have a huge opportunity by developing their own Chatbots offering huge customer base with personalised services.

One of the example of Fitness Chatbots

Companies across a wide variety of industries are building these tools on popular messaging apps like Slack, Facebook Messenger, Kik, etc. as well as on their own apps and websites. Above are the majority of the industries where Chatbots have already entered, but that doesn’t mean that this is it. Chatbots and Service Industry together have a wide range of opportunities and small to big all size of companies can build their own bots to reduce their work and help their customers better.