How chatbots are redefining customer experiences

Since Facebook announced they were opening their platform to chatbots in 2016, there's been a proliferation of companies looking to provide services through the site with varying degrees of success. An immediate hype cycle followed proclaiming how chatbots would change the world before this had to be rowed back. Aspirations ran far ahead of the capabilities of natural language processing (NLP), and instead of presenting users with broad functionalities that were true to the conversational interface, most chatbots were little more than click-button menus and, if lucky, some key-word driven answers. Despite this first failing, many believe there is value in chatbots as they allow businesses to go to where the customer is and already spends lots of time; Whatsapp and Facebook have a combined 2.8 billion users who send over 100 billion messages a day! Brands have sought to use chatbots to go to where the customer is rather than forcing them to an app or website, and reinforcing this, chatbots also present a User Interface that doesn't require the customer to learn a website or app design; conversation is the most intuitive form of interaction.