Chatbots

Chatbots are changing the way we engage with technology, people, and organisations, becoming a part of our everyday life.

Image of a smiling person sat on a sofa using a chatbot on their mobile phone

What is an AI chatbot?

At its core, an AI chatbot is a computer programme designed to simulate conversation with human users, typically through textual or auditory means. AI chatbots leverage advanced technologies such as natural language processing (NLP), machine learning (ML), and artificial intelligence (AI) to understand and respond to user queries in a human-like manner.

These chatbots can be deployed across multiple platforms, including websites, messaging applications, and social media platforms, allowing organisations to engage with customers, employees, and students wherever they are.

  • 74% of online users prefer using a chatbot to answer their straightforward questions
  • 80% of consumers that have had an interaction with chatbots report the experience as positive
  • 134,565,694 individual chats were completed by ChatBot in 2023

Benefits of chatbots

24/ 7 support icon

24/ 7 support:

guarantee that ‘someone’ is always available to provide support when people need questions answering

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Reduce the strain on your support teams:

by getting a chatbot to answer simple and frequently asked questions, it relieves time for your support team to focus on other priorities

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Quicker response time:

as chatbots are available 24/ 7 to respond to enquiries, users can get faster responses and don’t have to wait until a person is available

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Improve your customer insights:

the data generated through people interacting with chatbots can be stored to build a more sophisticated insights on your customers

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Better engagement and user experiences:

provide more personalised support and make experiences more interactive by using the information people provide to tailor their experience

Build your chatbots with Microsoft Azure

Leveraging Microsoft Azure as a platform can ensure that the chatbot developed is scalable and can grow with your organisation and any increases in demand for your services or support.

However, it also enables you to build bots with more enhanced capabilities such as sentiment analysis and take an omni-channel approach to ensure that when required, the conversation can be naturally handed over to a human (either via web chat or transferred over the phone).

By harnessing the capabilities of Microsoft Azure, organisations can unlock the full potential of AI chatbots to drive customer engagement, improve operational efficiency, and achieve their objectives.

Features of Microsoft’s Azure AI Bot Service

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Quickly generate bots:

through a low-code graphical interface, you can make, test, and publish your own bots

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Proactively improve your bot applications:

use your bot’s telemetry to notice future topics and improve to meet user needs

Get answers, inspiration, and summaries icon

Build multimodal and multichannel experiences:

integrate your bot with other channels your organisation uses, like telephony and Microsoft Teams

Centralised management ensures safe scalability:

remain compliant and in-line with governance by deploying your bots securely

How is your industry currently using chatbots?

We’re noticing that different sectors are utilising chatbots for a variety of use cases to generate better engagement and end user experiences, provide quick and constant support, and streamline your workforce operations.

Administrative work takes up a big chunk of healthcare professionals’ time and chatbots can assist with giving some of that back. Chatbots in healthcare are currently being used for scheduling appointments, updating patients’ medical history, and notifying patients with prescription refills.

Chatbots play a major role in retail and e-commerce as more people turn to online shopping. Chatbots help boost customer conversations, reduce sales cycles, quickly answer customer queries, and increase sales.

As they’re available 24/ 7, chatbots can provide customer service to consumers outside of typical banking hours. Chatbots in banking are also utilising the data captured via chatbots to have more data-driven insights to better improve their user experience.

Chatbots have provided solutions to students, parents, and teachers alike. Schools are able to mass share information and learning materials to students and parents, collect feedback and streamline sign-ups and registrations, and support by answering FAQs.

As more homeowners are using your websites to explore new properties, it’s important they’re able to engage with you. Chatbots are allowing them to make enquiries, schedule visits, and upload and share documents.

Image of a patient using a chatbot on their mobile phone
Image of a person using a chatbot on their mobile phone
Image of a person using a chatbot on their mobile phone
Image of a teacher using a chatbot on their mobile phone
Image of a person using a chatbot on their mobile phone

Chatbot frequently asked questions

Chatbots utilise Natural Language Processing to interpret and respond to user inputs in a human-like manner. By analysing text or speech inputs, chatbots can identify the user’s intent and generate an appropriate response based on predefined rules or machine learning models.

Chatbots are a conversational tool that enables organisations to efficiently complete routine tasks. They’re typically used to streamline support for users by providing instant responses to inquiries, FAQs, and common issues.

The Azure AI Bot Service is a development environment tailor made for creating bots. Its integration with Power Virtual Agents, a fully hosted low-code platform, enables developers of varying technical skills to design conversational AI bots effortlessly, without requiring any coding.

Talk to our AI and Chatbot Specialists today

Arrange a free chat with one of our AI and Chatbot Specialists about how organisations in your sector are currently benefitting from chatbots and how they’ll help drive productivity, user experience, and better engagement.

You can also email us at [email protected] or call 01904 562200 – whatever works best for you.