Influence of Chatbots on the Future of Web Development

It is considered as the latest trend in web development industry, yes, we are speaking about Chatbots. You run a brick and mortar store, but unless you don’t have a good salesperson to communicate with the customers, your business will not warm up. Quite similarly, you might have used latest trends and technologies for building your website, but unless and until your web store doesn’t address customer queries you will not see your sales grow. I know, we have customer service support, dedicatedly hired to do that. But how efficient is that choice? I mean, people seek solutions and they expect it to be accurate, quick and to the point. And no matter how exceptionally good the service might be, but things don’t always fall into place, after all, even they are humans, right?

Tech giants like Facebook and Microsoft are attracted towards bot revolution. They find future in bots. They find bots incomparable to human resources. There is no doubt they are embarking on a path to empower their business through plunging into the bot space. And if you are running a business, you should do the same by having bots on your website to serve your customers.

Why might a Website need Chatbot?

A website is developed and you are happy that your business is serving customers 24X7, but still, you find your audience is not happy with your service, why is that?

Now, wait. A website will give your business 24X7 visibility (only); it doesn’t mean your customers are getting the actual service right? Again, I’m going to say the same words, the customer service providers, how efficient are they? Or how accurately will they be able to address each and every query?

Questions as such will make you doubt your service quality towards the customers.

Chatbots can be an ideal solution for this.

And trust me, in this modern day and age, the web developers will not find it challenging to integrate a chatbot into the website.

Understanding Chatbots

It is the rise of machines.

A chatbot is a computer program written to communicate with the humans.

And according to Borisov’s definition, “A chatbot is a computer program that is capable of having a human-like conversation with a user by receiving and sending text messages for the purpose of automating a business process.”

In one of the conferences, addressing the developers Microsoft CEO Sathya Nadella said ‘chatbots will revolutionize computing’. It can be websites, applications or desktop apps; he motivated the developers to use bots as the NEW interface.

In future, a website developed sans AI-powered bots will definitely struggle to keep customers for long vowing to the quality of service provided as compared to other websites using the technology.

Impressive Numbers about Chatbots that you should know

• According to 21% of consumers, chatbots as the easiest way to contact a business. (Source: ubisend, 2017)
• 95% of consumers believe ‘customer service’ is going to be the major beneficiary of chatbots (Source: Mindbrowser, 2017)
• In 2016, the chatbot market was valued at $703 million. (Source: Marketsandmarkets, 2017)
• By 2020, it is predicted that over 80% of businesses is to have some sort of chatbot automation implemented (Source: Business Insider, 2016)

Web developers should care for these exotic numbers because through the last point it is quite clear that their web services should involve bots no matter what.

Impact on Website Development

More particularly I would like to address it as an impact on web interactions.

1. Browsing & Navigation to be Replaced with Conversation

You have developed an e-commerce website inclusive of a good navigation structure; the search tab and other stuff to make sure that customers don’t find it difficult to reach the product they desire.

Now, what happens when you replace all those elements with a bot?

For customers, it will be as similar to visiting a shop in person, where he will find a salesperson to guide him to the actual product. The bot will carry out human-like conversation giving you personalized shopping experience.

For customers, it is a real-time experience.

2. Understanding Natural Language Processing & AI Principles

Website developers should start looking beyond the conventional backend programming languages and start getting familiar with machine learning and NLP.

Developers should know that their future lies in these natural language processing algorithms. The technology is all about learning the patterns and performing tokenization, entity recognition, normalization, speech tagging, dependency parsing, and intent and sentiment analysis for designing an intelligent chatbot for the website.

3. Developing Conversational UI

Adrian Zumbrunnen and uxdesign.cc, visit these two websites and you will get a clear picture of what it is to have conversational UI.

Webs developers have some real challenge here. From avoiding conventional graphic elements to designing a bot that speaks human language, they have a lot to learn and implement to give novice users an option to have a human talk with bots and have an exceptional online experience.

4. Integration with best Bot Development Frameworks

For web-based chatbot, currently, we have Microsoft bot framework, Wit.ai, API.ai, and Aspect CXP-NLU. A bot development framework basically consists of a Bot Builder SDK, Bot Connector, Developer Portal, and Bot Directory.

Web developers should look for a framework that is event-based, flexible and built on proven technologies to overcome shortcomings that are basically found in bot development platforms.