A conversational chatbot app is a computer program that helps simulate conversations with users through voice or text input. This app meets varied requirements and can be used as a personal assistant, customer support, and even an entertainer.
With a chatbot app, you can develop a robust relationship with your customers by resolving all their issues and giving answers to all their queries. This is what the chatbot app is usually used for.
According to Gartner, by adopting virtual customer assistants, organizations had experienced reduced chat, email, and chat inquiries to about 70%. Over and above that, in 2023, top giants like British Airways, Starbucks, eBay, and LinkedIn chose to use chatbots. So, why lag and wait more? Tie your shoelaces, and let your customers reap the benefits of chatbot apps for their businesses.
Developing a chatbot app may sound exciting and an easy easy job, but letting you know it can be a daunting task also. Not to fret, it’s not for you, but the one for whom AI and natural language processing are new or something unusual. That’s why, before your kickstart, you should have a solid understanding of the chatbot app, its development steps, cost, and a lot more.
What Is A Chatbot App?
A chatbot app uses voice or text commands to mimic a human chat. It sends automated messages, synthesizes voice, and provides decision buttons. Some AI-powered chatbots are best at recognizing users’ intent and providing the apt and right replies.
What Can Chatbot Apps Do For Your Business?
Chatbots effectively resolve customer issues around 87% time. Using these apps, you can get solutions to complex issues and questions. Thus, such apps can enhance your customer interactions and customer satisfaction. Chatbot apps are best for varied industries, be it eCommerce or Telecom.
Why Should You Develop a Chatbot App – The Latest Market Statistics Will Show
- Around 77% of customers agree with the fact that in the next five years, chatbots will elevate companies’ expectations.
- In 2022, the chatbot market will be valued at approximately $77 million.
- Statista also reported that in 2018 the chatbot market reached $40.9 million in revenue, which is likely to be $454.8 million by 2027.
- Chatbot worldwide has been split into AI, Human Intelligence, and Marketing. Marketing is expected to grab a significant market share, rising at a CAGR of 23.7%.
- Globally, every enterprise, especially travel and hospitality firms, uses chatbots to let users make common inquiries or complete bookings.
The figures above might have unveiled the growing possibilities of chatbot app development and how they are benefiting varied industries with increased sales.
Below are the top reasons that will reveal that why one should develop a chatbot app:
Boost Brand Interactive And Make It Accessible 24×7
With chatbots, worldwide businesses can avail services round-the-clock to their customers, which is much more advantageous. The bot aids the site visitors across all the product buying steps or helps them respond to their queries. Simultaneously, chatbots manage to handle various customers without compromising speed, making an error, or pausing the process.
Optimize Back-End Operations
A chatbot app deployment can help streamline the internal workflows of your businesses. One of the widely-recognized giants, JP Morgan, squeezed around 360,000 hours to only seconds that layers usually spend reviewing loan contracts. And what helped them was the deployment of a contract processing bot.
Analyze Customer Data
By mining the users’ inputs, bots become smarter with time. Using this data, users can optimize their mobile and online customer experiences. For example, they emerge with the details and products they are seeking.
Key Chatbot Features You Should Include in a Chatbot App
Rich Messaging
Your chatbot can appear to be useful for users if it responds to users with links and images. Retail chatbots will find this chatbot valuable as it will help their consumers find the products easily.
Cross-Channel Seamless Communication
With a bot app, customers can experience a seamless experience regardless of the place of interaction, be it a mobile app, messenger, browser, or Google Assistant. Thus, you need to set up your chatbot as a platform-independent solution.
Integrations With External Systems
If you have your infrastructure well-integrated with a conversational agent, it will help you save the efforts you invest in performing dull manual jobs like account balancing, CRM updates, and more. So, be sure the chatbot app you develop should be capable of performing seamlessly with various software with the assistance of APIs.
Accessible
Akin to mobile and web app development, you should keep track of accessibility while developing a bot app. It covers zoom-in, keyboard navigation, screen reader support, etc.
Actions
Chatbots are always set to respond to commands, like finding any past message using the tracking number or sending an email. And this is the best part we can tell about a chatbot.
Secure
A chatbot demands adherence to best practices of cybersecurity, as most of them are capable of executing payments now and handling PHI. So, PCI, HIPAA, and more regulations apply.
Human Handoff
Undoubtedly, we can say there will be an edge where these bot apps will quit. In such a case, be sure the human agent can assist.
How to Develop a Chatbot App From Scratch – Steps to Know
Step 1: Identify the Chatbot Type You Want to Develop
You need to ask a few questions to yourself before you start with the chatbot app development:
- Why should you build a chatbot app?
- What will your app do to help prospects and customers?
Such types of questions will let you know your choice for a bot type, an advanced AI-enabled one, or a rule-based chatbot with predefined replies.
Step 2: Choose a Channel
You should follow your prospects and make your chatbot available for the platforms that your customers find easy to use, be it a Facebook Messenger bot or a standalone mobile app.
Step 3: Choose The Technology Stack
When you target developing a chatbot app aiming at your customer issues, you need to choose the right bot’s tech stack. You should go with a framework and design your bot from your chatbot developers.
Step 4: Design The Conversation
Post you choose a tech stack; you should develop a chatbot sketching the conversation flow. You can ease the process by opting for the DIY platforms.
Step 5: Train The Bot
After developing a chatbot app based on the rules, you can move on to step 6, testing. But, if yours is AI-powered, you need to train your bot on a huge amount of data set. First, understand your users’ intent, and for that, teach your bot every distinctive variant that customers can ask. You can do that by training your bot on current data sets, like support tickets, emails, etc.
Step 6: Test The Chatbot
You can test your bot, whether it’s helping humans with resolving their issues or giving answers to their queries.
Step 7: Deploy And Maintain The Bot
A chatbot deployment usually doesn’t demand a lot of hours. You need to make sure that every endpoint is linked and that the bot is integrated with your complete infrastructure.
How Much Does It Cost to Develop a Chatbot?
You can develop a basic, rule-based chatbot at an affordable price. However, the cost of chatbot apps that are power-packed with AI technology will start from $30,000 and will go up depending on varied factors. Like, the type of app you want to develop and the features you need to include affect the cost of chatbot app development. You must discuss with experienced Chatgpt developers to have an exact cost estimation. Also, hire dedicated developers from reputed firms if you looking to outsource it to avoid.
Conclusion
Let’s just take a quick recap of this post while wrapping up. A chatbot app is gaining popularity and boosting business revenue.
Per the reports by IBM, per year, businesses invest around $1.3 trillion to meet customer demands and resolve their issues. Chatbots appeared as a savior reducing the cost of customer support by about 30%. You can choose to develop for your clients belonging to varied industry verticals.
To make your app successful, hire a chatbot app development company if you need assistance. From development to deployment and maintenance, the company will support you in the entire app development journey. Besides, be sure your app catches up with success providing the users with the right and apt answers to their queries.