What Chatbot Trends Will Dominate Businesses in 2022?

Chatbots will help businesses save more than $ 8 billion in 2022, according to CNBC’s “Chatbot Statistics Report.” Chatbots aren’t new, but their capabilities are expanding, and automation and cognitive intelligence make them increasingly human-like.

While these bots make life easier for customers, from a business perspective, they are helping them expand at a rapid rate without having to rely on increased customer support staff.

Why Are Chatbots Becoming Essential for Businesses?

Chatbots are software applications that can communicate with people through live chat or other messaging platforms. Its user interface can be text-based, voice-based, or a combination of both. Artificial Intelligence (AI), allowing them to offer a more natural and personalized user experience, powers most of today’s chatbots. Businesses with high customer engagement have discovered the benefit of using chatbots for user interactions.

In 2022, based on customer interactions, these smart robots will be more widely adopted in the workplace. In fact, Gartner predicts that 70% of white-collar workers will interact with chatbots to speed up their work.

What Will Be the Top Trends for Business Chatbots in 2022?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing chatbots by mimicking human thinking and decision-making. According to Gartner, by 2022, AI will handle 70% of all contacts with consumers. But not only in customer service, but a large number of new trends will make their presence felt in more business processes.

Trend 1: Chatbots Will Handle More Payment Processes

Chatbots for customer service will provide options to include payment alternatives. It will be as simple as a customer sending a text message, for example, “I want to buy the latest iPhone” on an e-commerce site and the AI chatbot will guide you through the selection process, to the final payment. When a user submits a request, the bot will issue an API request and provide a payment link to complete the transaction.

By connecting to the payment infrastructure, businesses will be able to provide chatbots with enough data to drive conversation-driven upsell to consumers. The same can be used to provide updates on a user’s transaction data, payment confirmation, expense records, etc., resulting in a high level of customer trust and retention.

Trend 2: Voice Bots

According to a Forbes article, voice searches will account for more than half of all queries in 2022. Digital users prefer messaging services with voice and text interfaces.

With the increasing human dependence on these bots, there is greater adoption of voice-enabled chat functionality, particularly in industries such as insurance, tourism, and education. Natural Language Processing (NLP) also works with different dialects and is enabled with intentional pauses in human speech.

Virtual assistants that use voice capabilities differ from the technology used for chatbots. Voice Bots require speech recognition and synthesis ability to understand the speaker’s intent, convert it to text for processing, and then return a vocal response. All in a matter of seconds.

Trend 3: Bots That Are More Human

Chatbots that are becoming more “human” are already widely used. In fact, conversational AI bots powers many of the messaging customer support platforms and customers are often unaware that there is no human on the other side. According to forecasts, companies will build emotional intelligence bots to add soft skills and make the bots show more “empathy.”

Chatbots are expected to be more aware of a customer’s emotional condition in 2022, based on industry predictions. As a result, organizations will develop chatbots that will respond to consumer demands or questions based on their emotions identified by sentiment reading software.

Trend 4: Intuitive Analysis and Knowledge Increase

A report by Accenture highlights that 56% of companies say that chatbots are disrupting their industry with their analytical capabilities. It is impossible to correctly predict user behaviors and experiences without deeper integration of AI chatbots into business processes. 2022 will be a great year to launch chatbot insights and analytics as nearly all of the company’s operations are shifting to these virtual assistants.

These chatbots keep track of questions asked, answers provided, and requests sent to agents. Organizations will be able to use this data to improve services in real time.

Trend 5: Multilingual Chatbots

Suppose a customer speaks Italian and is not very fluent in English. When you are chatting with a chatbot, wouldn’t you prefer the option of choosing a language in which you are comfortable to explain your query and get a response in the same language? Chatbots that do this will get an instant positive reaction from the companies that employ them.

Organizations are realizing the importance of multilingual chatbots in improving their localization efforts and expanding their reach. NLP chatbots will be equipped to automatically identify the user’s language or even use IP addresses to identify geographic locations.

What Will the Future of Business Chatbots Look Like?

Millions of users will prefer voice-enabled conversational AI to interact with businesses on all digital platforms. In addition, the different chatbot applications will no longer be isolated, but companies will be able to establish an intranet where they can easily exchange information and collaborate. Meanwhile, AI chatbots will continue to increase user engagement and improve customer service.