Why are Enterprises Moving to Instant Messaging? Top Conversational AI Platforms for 2021
Why are Enterprises Moving to Instant Messaging? Top Conversational AI Platforms for 2021
Not so surprisingly, people today are more active on messaging platforms than on conventional mediums like on Email or call. According to the Gartner report 2021 Planning Guide for Customer Engagement, Enterprises and SMBs need to focus on the adaptation of cloud-based AI-driven technology to drive the effectiveness of self-service.
Today, more than 2.1 billion people use Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, or Messenger every day. WhatsApp recently announced that it had in excess of 2 Billion users — the majority of user reside in India.
Messaging platforms are popularly used to interact with acquaintances, particularly friends, family, or co-workers for informal and formal interactions.
If you’re in Indonesia, you’ll notice meeting updates and other annoying details of it are shared on WhatsApp. It is also customary for your cab driver to connect with you on WhatsApp. Business and ease, all mixed up on a messaging platform.
While a large number of media companies and marketers are still investing in legacy platforms like e-mail and ticketing systems to engage with employees and customers, here are some noteworthy points that will potentially change the game:
- Monthly Active Users (MAU) on messaging apps like Whatsapp, WeChat, etc are massive and this number is growing rapidly due to the ease of availability of data and devices.
- 66% of consumers want to interact with brands on messaging apps (The app of choice depends on geography). People believe this is a faster medium to get immediate resolutions – Twilio
- Initially, the messaging apps were focused on increasing their user base. More recently, we’ve noticed that new features such as payments and even a built-in NLP capability have been added so the apps can standalone.
Regardless of the device used, Android or Apple, people prefer to keep limited applications on their smartphones since it is cumbersome to keep switching from one channel to another. Take, for example, the Facebook Canva which is a landing page facility used by marketers inside the Facebook app. It disallows drop-offs that may be caused during the transition from Facebook to an external website for the sake of lead capture, thus reducing a step in the user acquisition journey.
Messaging apps are becoming vital for businesses to better connect with prospects, offer seamless support, and provide quick service.
Companies also use enterprise messaging apps like slack, hangouts, etc to better manage their employees. Employees can schedule meetings, apply for a holiday, request reimbursements, and more with the help of a virtual assistant.
Organizations have to modernize not just their customer engagement technology but also the way the team interacts, to not only keep up with the customer expectations but also to adapt to the “new normal” of distributed customer service teams. Modernizing both customer and agent capabilities is key for those organizations to reinvent themselves or rescale to new heights.
The benefits of automation reflect almost immediately and dramatically. It is estimated that by 2025, 10-15% of jobs in three sectors (manufacturing, transportation and storage, and wholesales and retail trade) will have a high potential for automation. There is a good deal of automation firms today working on groundbreaking technologies to build chatbots beneficial for the growth of enterprises. Particularly, we’ll take the following 4 popular players in the field and put down some key features they possess and lack.
#1. IBM Watson
Named after IBM’s first CEO and founder, Thomas J Watson to answer queries on the quiz show Jeopardy, Watson was created as a question answering (QA) computing system. It uses advanced natural language processing and machine learning technologies for fetching information, knowledge representation, and automated reasoning, to the field of open domain question answering. Watson has been one of the earliest to automate various business functions however it is missing some of the most crucial integrations today, for example, Microsoft teams, slack, and even WhatsApp. The support for multilingual languages and the capability of sentiment analysis to route to an agent when necessary aren’t provided either.
Humanizing the bots today is one of the important features that people say conversational AI lacks. With missing capabilities, enterprises that need to jump off the books will have to consider their options.
#2. Yellow Messenger
Yellow Messenger is a cognitive engagement cloud, offering various cognitive business functions like customer engagement, customer support, enterprise automation, and HR management. They have a range of channel integrations from Whatsapp for business, Google Assistant, Alexa, to Slack, PowerBI, and more.
With multi-lingual support, pre-built contextual response, prediction modules, self-learning systems, and many other sophisticated, proprietary tech, Yellow Messenger has successfully catered to clients across the globe. Founded in 2016, in Bangalore, India, Yellow Messenger is a horizontal platform that takes on unique use cases for businesses. Recently funded by Lightspeed venture capital firm Yellow Messenger aims to utilise the funds for developing better products and sourcing new talent.
Also, named the leading Conversational AI Platform in Gartner’s 2021 Planning guide for Customer Engagement.
In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, Yellow Messenger has also launched a chatbot in association with the National Health Authority to distribute the right information about the virus.
#3. Intercom
Founded in 2011 in San Francisco, CA, Intercom has come a long way in building customized bots for various companies focused on targeted answers. They helped House Call Pro grow from the time of its launch to 10,000+ customers today. Expensify, another client of theirs, found improved support and sales. Similarly, Baremetrics increased their billing by 30% with intercoms innovative products.
Conversational AI is transforming the way brands interact with consumers. Which process according to you, can be automated in your organization to save your expenses and maximize growth? Comment below.
#4. Dialogflow
Dialogflow by Google, initially called Api.ai and Speaktoit, was best known for its virtual assistant created for smartphones. While their voice assistants are supported across a bunch of devices ranging from wearables to phones, their language support is limited. It lacks self-learning capabilities. It cannot search the database for answers to queries for resolution. With their new chatbot release, Meena, we hope to see a wider spectrum of competence since it is open-sourced. Meena boasts to be the very first humanized AI.
2020 was a crucial year for AI. Automation will truly take off and conquer cubicle jobs in 2021. It will save a tremendous amount of revenue and time for organizations. How will you use automation to solve pressing business problems? innovatively?
Image Credit: tim samuel; pexels
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