Nothing is more popular than that which is easy. Modern-day consumers want maximum results with minimum effort. Across industries, providers are meeting the demand by offering almost anything on Earth through the effortless click of a button. In 2022, it is futuristically easy to acquire groceries, stocks, taxis and entertainment. In stark contrast, travel seems trapped in the 20th century.

At Sofbang, chatbots and artificial intelligence are two of our key areas of focus. As more and more businesses leverage chatbot technology and machine learning to streamline operations during this tough economic time, we're constantly getting the question, "How does retraining the bot to make it better over time work?" We're here to answer that question in a very specific way. A center of excellence (COE) is a framework for continuous improvement that involves a dedicated team, a repeatable, data-minded process, and the right technology to enable agile changes and provide strong orchestration. A COE team develops, refines, and strengthens their core area of focus through data study, applying emerging best practices, and communication with employees and clients about evolving needs.

Want your chatbot design to deliver genuine customer engagement? Build it properly, writes Matt Grobler, pre-sales engineer at Inovo. Well, not unless they've been integrated intelligently and strategically to create a seamless customer journey. By 2022, Gartner predicts that 70% of customer interactions with businesses will involve emerging technologies such as machine learning (ML) applications, chatbots and mobile messaging. Chatbots are a bit like magic in that they are powerful tools in the right hands.

The idea of using chatbots may seem a little daunting at first. You may be thinking that there's no way your business could ever successfully utilize one, that it's way too complicated, and it won't really help the bottom line of your business -- it's simply not true. Chatbots are not as complicated as you might think. We're here to help give you the information you need to leverage this technology, and we'll also demonstrate how chatbots can absolutely improve your bottom line by automating conversations throughout your business. Below, we give you the basics of chatbots, help you articulate your goals, create a plan with some good old-fashioned chatbot strategy, and share industry best practices.

There's a real contender emerging in the digital marketing arena and it's threatening to put the reigning champion, the Email Drip Campaign down for the count. With the release of Facebook chatbots back in 2016, marketers began to realize the awesome potential of chatbot funnels to transform the way we market to our target audiences. Email drip campaigns present problems in delivering targeted content to consumers that chatbot funnels seamlessly address. Chatbots are AI-driven programs that allow marketers to automate customer interactions, nurturing leads through the marketing funnel without any actual human intervention. Another benefit of AI chatbots sure to bring email drips to their collective knees is that they--much like human salespeople--organically learn and evolve with each interaction, that is, they build upon each previous interaction, improving their ability to interact naturally with customers and to address customer needs with each and every conversation.

When it comes to utilizing chatbots, there are plenty of resources out there to tell you what you should do, our own blog included. But as with anything in business, it's just as important to know what not to do as it is to know best practices. By learning from the many common mistakes made by others, you can hopefully avoid going down the same wrong paths with your own chatbot initiative. That said, let's dive into a few of those common mistakes below. Chatbots are great, but only if you're using them the right way and for the right purpose.

A proper chatbot strategy can be helpful to determine investment and forecasted gains, unify the approach across your business, and gain stakeholder buy-in. Smart virtual assistants or chatbots are here and a reality for enterprises everywhere. By offering a closed-loop approach to better customer engagement, bots offer new advantages for businesses looking to get ahead of the competition to capture new, repeat, and referral business, and even reduce operational spend in doing so. Bots turn the traditional, frustrating digital experiences your customers are used to into conversational, personalized, and instantly gratifying engagements, resulting in smarter, higher-value purchase and service interactions. Artificial intelligence (AI) powered enterprise chatbot solutions are the future!

Alexa, why do I need a chatbot? By the year 2020, we will be having more conversations with bots than our spouse and 80 percent of brands will use chatbots for customer-centric interactions. If you have not added a chatbot strategy in your marketing plan, the time is now. By definition, a chatbot is a computer program designed to simulate a conversation with human users, especially over the Internet. Chatbots allow brands to create intimate connections and stronger relationships with your customers and audience in general.

Chatbots are quickly becoming an integral part of an organization's customer experience strategy. Consumers love simple self-service and businesses love efficiency. But far too many businesses stop short of implementing chatbots because they fear the onboarding process. They believe that in order for a chatbot implementation to work correctly, it will need mountains of data and the staff will have to devote a ton of resources to training the technology on how best to respond to customers. As with many things, bigger does not always mean better when it comes to AI-fueled chatbot solutions.

Adelyn Zhou is a founder and CMO of TOPBOTS, a platform specialising in connecting large enterprise companies and small businesses to bot and artificial intelligence (AI) service providers and vendors. TOPBOTS helps their clients implement an AI strategy and also lead interactive workshops to train personnel in this new hot field. Here she explains how publishers should be developing chatbot strategy. A chatbot is a computer program that you can talk to using your voice (like Siri or Alexa) or text (as in Facebook Messenger or on Slack). Chatbots and bots vary in their levels of sophistication.