Hype isn’t always good, but it definitely served our chatbots well in 2018. In the last two years, the benefits of chatbots for business, both big and small, have been widely discussed.
Of course, not every business needs a chatbot. We’ve talked about this and other misconceptions several times both on this blog and on stage. It is important for us to promote an accurate understanding of the technology itself and the necessity for its implementation into business processes. Thanks to our major customers, we have expanded our experience in chatbot development, as well as the linguistic bases of our chatbots.
The Numbers
The year 2018 turned out to be quite exciting and eventful for Nanosemantics. The figures below attest to that.
Chatbots are still most popular in banking and are often used in the spheres of telecom and HR. This isn’t surprising. These fields entail a great workload on contact centers (customer support), whose employees receive almost identical requests and provide standard answers to them every day. Chatbots considerably ease this burden and leave only nontypical situations for operators to handle.
We conducted an analysis of all of Nanosemantics’ projects in these three fields, which led to the following findings:
Among the projects for Nanosemantics’ clients in these three fields, chatbots in the telecom industry are at the forefront—the highest percentage of customers return to these chatbots for help. HR chatbots have the lowest percent because, as a rule, it’s more likely for customers to have questions regarding their mobile plan or the state of their bank account than for the same people to look for a job repeatedly.
Most of all, users prefer to engage in small talk. They often prompt virtual assistants to tell a joke, ask about their mood, the weather and their personal lives. With this in mind, we try to liven up our chatbots and create unique personalities for each one. It happens rarely, but they can even get angry at particularly bothersome users and tell them to get lost.
Projects of the Year
Last year we successfully developed a chatbot for ecommerce – Decathlon – a French sporting goods retailer. Chatbot named Decabot helps to find goods, answers questions about the methods of delivery and return, payment methods and available services of the company.
Moreover, we have launched the following major projects:
Chatbot in education. We made a chatbot for the Higher School of Economics, Yura Vyshkin, is available on the university’s website and advises users on legal issues.
Chatbot for a bank. Belorusian beauty Zlata, developed for Belarusbank, is the first banking chatbot in Belarus.
Chabot for mobile operators. Chatbot Mia, created for MTS Belarus, is the first bot for a telecom operator in Belarus. In addition, this chatbot has built-in customer loyalty assessment (Net Promoter Score, or NPS), which is a type of KPI for the chatbot.
Chabot in insurance. Chatbot Cardie for BNP Paribas CARDIF consults clients on the company’s products and is available on the website and in instant messengers.
Plans for 2019
Along with new chatbots in 2019 we will share more articles and publications here on the blog, on our social networks and in online media. We will maintain our YouTube channel and fill it with educational content about chatbots. And, of course, our company will participate more actively in industry events and specialized conferences.
We set a high bar for ourselves in the upcoming year. There is always room for improvement, and to keep growing, it’s important to understand how to do so and to have a strong team. We already have both. This allows us to achieve better results this year and pushes us ever closer to our grand visions of the future.