Customer Engagement Technology - ChatBot

A Chat-Bot is a robot or a software program that users interact with in a conversational way using text, graphics (cards), or speech. It can be a bot that provides simple question and answer dialogs. Or, a sophisticated bot that allows people to interact with your business and services in an intelligent manner using pattern recognition, pattern matching, state tracking and artificial intelligence techniques.

A Chat-Bot simulates a conversation as if a human is replying to your customer. The bot is intelligent. It doesn't only search for exact words or sentences, but also uses artificial intelligence and LUIS (Language Understanding Intelligent Services) to find synonyms, translations, and understand your customer intentions.

For example, if a customer is asking the bot about a branch address of your business, they can ask this question in many ways as follows:

• Where is Cairo branch?
• What is the address of Cairo branch?
• Where is Cairo's office located?

At the end, the bot will understand that the customer is asking about the address of Cairo branch. How? The bot can map any received questions to a knowledgebase that you compose and retrieve the correct customer response.

Furthermore, you can create a hierarchy of questions to instruct the bot to answer question A with answer 2, then take the customer to question X. This way, you will be able to create a map of questions & answers to cover all expected customer questions according to your business.

Here is another example of a real-estate Chat-Bot that organizations can utilize to fully answer all customers inquiries. They can even use it to select and book a specific apartment. View the demo video:

The same Chat-Bot can be published as well on the social media like Facebook, Skype and other different channels. This helps you to create an Omni-Channel experience for your customers. Furthermore, the Chat-Bot can integrate with your backend systems so you can utilize it for multiple business needs.

For example, it can help you in retrieving the status for a specific customer request, or in getting an apartment availability form your backend system, or others. In short, the bot can be dynamic and interactive; not merely a tool that works on a static knowledgebase.

Certainly, a Chat-Bot doesn't replace live agents chats. Both should be working interchangeably. The optimum approach is to have all your direct questions automated through the Chat-Bot. If a customer doesn't find an answer to a question, he/she will be redirected to a live chat with a human agent within the same user experience. Customers will not feel a sudden or abrupt move from live chat to Chat-Bot. 

Link Development has developed a Chat-Bot that tackles and solves all above challenges. We utilized our Live Chat component (Bubbles) and integrated it with Microsoft Azure Bot framework in a seamless experience to have both components in the same place. Multiple organizations have deployed our intelligent Chat-Bot and are witnessing positive outcomes.

The below diagram illustrates Link Development's Communication framework for the Chat-Bot: