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You are here: Home Focus Avi Ben Ezra explains why European countries now embrace Chatbots

Avi Ben Ezra explains why European countries now embrace Chatbots

02 May 2019, 16:05 CET
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Europe is one of the regions that benefited the most from Chatbots - with more SMEs than ever starting to migrate towards full adoption of AI and Chatbots.

Chatbots in Europe

Avi Ben Ezra, the CTO of SnatchBot, a market leader in this industry, recently shared some insight on both the global and European markets. He said the following: "In Europe we have ageing populations with staff shortages predicted for many industries. Chatbots will alleviate this problem. European countries with call centers abroad were also plagued by mafias that infiltrated call centers to conduct credit card fraud – chatbots are also solving this as a major security problem. We also have the opportunity to reduce our carbon footprint by slashing the number of people who travel to call centers for work on a daily basis, as more chatbots roll out into the market. The main thing is that we have a responsibility to help retrain people for other careers – therein lies the opportunity to rebalance the workforce".

It is clear that Ben Ezra and his team have been rather active also in France, where they reported on some interesting activity in the region. They are active way beyond the business sector and are also knowledgeable on government sectors, for example defense, as reported in the news. With this in mind, let's take a deeper dive into the world of chatbots:

Chatbots as artificial intelligence entities

Chatbots are merely computer programs that will simulate their sessions with humans and they do this by making use of artificial intelligence. These artificial intelligence entities can completely change the way in which people interact with the World Wide Web. Chatbots are not a new invention, they have been around for a long time. There have been many customer service related robots that have been used primarily to navigate people through the intricate phone trees which seems to be an integral part of the structure at large corporations. Many people may have encountered chatbots during the early 2000s especially in relation to all those fake accounts on AOL. We have come a long way since then. We now have access to chatbots which is a lot more sophisticated. These modern artificial intelligence entities make use of a very high level of artificial intelligence. In fact, artificial intelligence is now so advanced that many chatbots today is just about indistinguishable from human beings.

Chatbots are incredibly versatile

They are so popular and widely used because they are so versatile. Most of the currently available chatbots can be used to perform a wide variety of complicated functions. They are frequently used for consumer interaction and customer service. They are also used in a wide variety of marketing and advertising initiatives. The first chatbots date back to the 1950s but their most recent offspring have gained tremendously in popularity with the introduction of branded chatbots on the Facebook Messenger application. There are many different chatbots available today. One kind of chatbot is the informational kind? There is also service or branded chatbots. Some of the most popular informational chatbots of Amazons Echo, there is also Siri and Cortana. The primary purpose of these chatbots are to help people to solve all of their different needs. There are other chatbots who are specifically designed to be used for marketing and sales.

Chatbots are amazing when it comes to customer service and security

Consumers can get extremely irritated when they make contact telephonically with a large Corporation and they are forced to listen to some kind of opera music for several minutes. It can happen that people have to wait for as long as 15 minutes for the dubious honor of having a conversation with some customer service department employee. Thereafter it might take them between five and 10 seconds to ask the question relating to their needs. The reality is in this modern age in which we are living there are still many businesses that have horrible customer service. This has never been the best way to serve loyal customers. People are getting impatient and they are getting angry. A chatbot is unlikely to carry out credit card fraud or cause human-linked cybersecurity issues – and certainly not prone to issues like cyberextortion.

Catering to a new generation

It is especially the younger generation who have been introduced to technology very early on that will simply not tolerate unnecessary time wasting. Increasing numbers of young people are now doing most of their business online. They make use of online banking, online shopping, order their food online and many other things. They simply do not want to spend their time on the telephone waiting to speak to someone who will ultimately provide them with very little value. One gets a more comprehensive understanding when it is considered that most of the customer service calls relate to issues which are very simple to resolve. And this is exactly why chatbots are without a doubt the superior solution. The need for extended waiting times is now eliminated because it is now possible to simply message a customer service chatbot and receive your answer just about immediately. The reality is that businesses who are innovative and who provide chatbot related services to their consumers will significantly improve the experience of their consumers and this will result in increased consumer satisfaction as far as your brand is concerned.

Conclusion

Chatbots can be highly beneficial to the marketing strategy of almost any business – especially when integrated with pay per click programs.

Research has shown that chatbots are perfect for the purpose of analyzing customer data. They can help your business to improve marketing strategies and to optimize sales because of the information which has been collected when customer data was analyzed. It is now entirely possible to have a chatbot which has been specifically programmed to monitor data from consumers and which can also track purchasing patterns. Having this information can be highly beneficial and it can help businesses to adapt their marketing efforts and to treat certain products differently. They will also have a better understanding of which products is more popular and should, therefore, receive a greater marketing share. Other products might have to be relaunched using different strategies in order to increase their popularity among consumers. One of the primary benefits of chatbots are the fact that your company will save a lot of money because it would no longer be necessary to employ an analyst. This will be done more effectively by your chatbot and the collected data will be more useful because it will not contain a bunch of human errors. Europeans have more to gain from leveraging this technology than any other region – as it has more problems to be solved through AI.

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