In the past few years, we all have interacted with chatbots in some or another form. And looking at trends, the usage of chatbots will increase further.
Today, we’ll discuss chatbots and how they’re going to benefit the education sector.
With an ever-changing working environment, more and more people are seeking additional education or technical training, either to remain relevant or to stay ahead of the competition. And as a result, a plethora of educational institutions are coming into existence. With an increasing number of players in the market, whether someone is a new player or an established player, acquiring a new customer is always a challenging task.
Similar to many other sectors, getting pre-qualified leads in the education sector is quite an arduous task. Today’s customers have multiple options, be it in selecting an Executive program for an additional qualification, or choosing a pre-school for their kid’s admission, or perhaps customers who are interested in acquiring new art forms such as singing, dancing, playing musical instruments.
Customer’s Buying journey
Customer’s buying journey has changed drastically, thanks to the internet and a mushrooming tech called “Chatbot”. To reap the benefits of this tech to its full potential, one has to have an understanding of how a chatbot can be a blessing in each stage of the consumer buying process. Let’s dive into that.
Whether a consumer is buying a physical product or a services product, they tend to go through the various stages (consciously or unconsciously). Each stage has many sub-stages. Identifying and targeting those stages to craft the marketing strategy will definitely impact significantly in the outcome.
Tradition customer’s Journey has 3 stage
Awareness stage
Consideration stage
Decision stage
To be ahead of the competition, businesses have to focus on how they can make life easier for their potential customers with the use of the latest technology like Chatbot.
Awareness stage:
Awareness is the first and foremost stage of the consumer buying journey. It is the most crucial stage for both consumers and service providers. We can label this stage as a problem recognition stage for a consumer whereas an opportunity for the businesses. In the awareness stage, potential customers are likely to realize their needs and do a little bit of research on their needs.
Over the years, businesses have engaged in different kinds of traditional advertising such as television advertisements, Billboards, newspaper magazines, etc to spread awareness about their product. But from the last few years, advertisers are replying more to online advertisements on various platforms like Facebook ads, Google ads, etc. the most important reasons to choose Online/digital advertisements over traditional advertisements are
The accessibility of high-speed internet made more and more people available online than ever. So these Digital ads become self-nominated.
Digital campaigns are more measurable than the traditional advertisements
It is a cost-effective option with higher returns.
All these advertisements are good but they all have one flaw, they are one-way communication. To increase engagement with visitors/potential customers, a business needs a better option other than just navigating the customer through a tiring website. Chatbot can be the best tool to have two-way communication.
Let’s take an example of an Education institute or learning center,
Let’s assume an Educational institute is running a targeted campaign over Facebook or any other digital platform to spread product awareness. The potential customer came across that ad and he/she is curious to know more about it. To satisfy his/her curiosity, potential consumers are likely to turn to a very platform on which they encountered the ads. The chatbot can be very useful to answer customer queries and gather important information like course details and personal information which helps the sales person to reach out to the customers.
At the awareness stage, its marketers’ job is to drive the customer to the chatbot and the chatbot will handle the rest. Marketers can link the chatbot with a Facebook page or they can share a link to the blog.
Consideration stage:
As we move forward in the consumer buying journey next stage come is the “Consideration stage”.
Till now, consumers realized their need and made some research about it, This is the stage where potential customers seek some fundamental information like Fee structure of the course, duration of the course, batch timing, etc. This stage is all about seeking various information. A quick and reliable response will always help increase the customer experience as well as the company’s overall image. Chatbot ticks all both boxes. It generates quick and reliable responses repeatedly that too 24*7. Many people avoid facing a representative because of a number of reasons. The chatbot will help those potential customers to access the required information at their convenience. Moreover, Business owners will get the notification whenever a lead is being generated, This will help them to attain the consumer requirement quickly and to make follow up based on that.
One of the good chatbot examples is PK- Educations Chatbot, it’s an Al -Chatbot developed by Pragnakalp Techlabs. PK-Educations is a very basic lead generation chatbot that is integrated on various chat channels such as Website, Google Assistant, Facebook Messenger, Telegram. PK-Education helps business owners to have better customer engagement across the chat channels.
So coming back to the consideration stage, it is the stage where chatbot comes most handy and makes an actual difference. As we stated earlier, consumers make lots of research regarding products and services. It’s the time when new potential loyal customers make or lose the business.
Chatbot also helps the business to scale up the cold calling by automating the prospecting. At this stage it’s a marketer’s job to convey that the particular product or service is best suited for the customer and knowing the fact that no “one product” fits for all, it becomes important to understand the customer’s requirement and suggest the product or services accordingly.
Decision-Making stage:
Supposedly the last stage in the Buyer’s journey, the “Decision making”. It’s a step where customers generally add up all the aspects of the business and compare with others (consciously or unconsciously) and take the decision. It’s a time when businesses pitch the product. With well-crafted dialog and flow, a chatbot can help businesses and customers by suggesting the product according to their response and even schedule the demos if required.
Also, there are chatbot that helps the businesses to manage the Admission process through the chatbot itself which help in scaling the activities with lesser efforts
When it comes to the education industry, Chatbots are an excellent way to nurture the consumer at every stage of the buying process. Many studies are suggesting having positive experiences when they are talking to a chatbot. It is a great way for any organization to communicate with its customers. Chatbots can also help educational institutes to learn more about their prospective customer, and they can help businesses to deliver the primary information quite effectively.
Making smarter decisions about your business processes is critical to ensure lower time-to-market and high ROI. Future fit technology executives know the importance of optimizing business operations efficiency and workflow processes to remain ahead in the competitive landscape.
Whether your organization is small or large, now is a good time to create automation opportunities by integrating the Robotic Process Automation model into your existing processes. And start streamlining business operations ranging from automated emails to optimizing customer services that enhance the business value & ROI.
This blog post has outlined the best business automation ideas that any organization or department can get started with.
Accounting Tasks
Most accounting processes are time-consuming and need manual intervention. By automating all possible steps involved in the task, organizations can save time, reduce errors, and enable teams to spend more time on strategic work instead of a host of repetitive tasks.
Take accounts payable (AP), for instance. Several organizations are still manually handling their accounts payable (AP) processes. Integrating RPA for the processing and payment of invoices saves time and money. It also eliminates data errors and helps mitigate fraud risks through a system of “touchless” controls that happen behind the scenes.
Data Backup
Today almost every business across the industries is data-driven. Therefore, it becomes critical for companies to ensure data privacy, accuracy, and safety. Moreover, an unsecured website is vulnerable to cybercriminal activity. And this is possible with RPA bots.
Automation benefits many data management software that expand data backup possibilities. So an automatic backup process not only protects your valuable data but also enhances your customers’ trust.
Not every business knows how to integrate automation solutions for data backup. This is when top RPA automation companies can help. They offer comprehensive and customized RPA automation services solutions to businesses across the industries.
Email Automation
Email automation makes the email process seamless for marketers and eliminates repetitive manual efforts.
Most employees spend hours of their day reverting to emails, many of which are irrelevant to their regular responsibilities.
Businesses organize their piles of daily emails and respond to relevant messages quickly and efficiently by automating the email process.
Onboard New Workers
Onboarding new professionals is a continuous task in any business. And no doubt, it is pretty lengthy that goes for several weeks and a daunting process that requires a lot of paperwork.
Onboarding is essential for ensuring continuous involvement for recruiting teams, hiring managers know-how to carry out tasks to predefined business standards, and being clear on what processes are required to implement.
With robotic process automation solutions, you can easily send documentation, approve permissions, and provide workers with the relevant training.
Automation also minimizes the risk of errors and data leaks — if you do find any errors, you can correct them with ease and quickly for the next person you onboard.
Generating and Distributing Report
If spreadsheets and reports are a critical part of your everyday business operations, automating report generation and distribution will streamline your process in less time and effort hassle-free.
Businesses can use robotic process automation tools to generate automated reports and distribute this information, and recipients can analyze historical data, forecast future performance, and make optimal decisions.
Meetings Automation Platform
Managing and organizing the events and activities, creating a calendar, and setting up meetings have traditionally been handled manually. But several different automation platforms have made it easier to deliver seamless internal and customer engagements.
Automating meetings using automation platforms (MAPs) can optimize the communication process before, during, and after the session and meet the company’s business objectives.
Immediate Response to Contact Forms
After submitting a contact form through a business website, users expect a fast response. However, if they don’t receive any response, it makes them feel like the message has been lost in a void. And they move to another business website offering the same services.
Even if you do revert finally, the possibility of converting the lead has already dropped.
An easy way is to send a thank-you message that assures your prospect customer that someone from your team will be contacting them soon.
Credit Card and Loan Approval
Leveraging automation benefits in carrying out the credit card application approval process is a win-win deal for banks. Usually, credit card processing and loan approvals take an extended period to validate the customer details before approval.
Banks can quickly streamline the process and approve/disapprove the application faster by implementing robotic process automation tools and saving time from investing in manual and repetitive tasks.
What’s Next?
With this business automation process, organizations can optimize workflows and operations efficiency. Moreover, it enables you to reduce the human labor required and eliminate repetitive tasks. Business automation factors optimize a company’s workflows and make the processes efficient, faster, and seamless.
So, make sure to integrate automation opportunities in your existing processes and stay ahead in the competitive landscape.
In today’s competitive market, businesses must ensure that their brand creates a unique experience for customers.
Chatbots allow customers to engage with your brand on the internet and get information and suggestion on products or services. All this without getting bogged down with repetitive tasks like waiting on hold or being directed from one department to another.
This means that customers get information faster, translating into more sales and better relationships with your company overall.
Let’s take a real-world example to see how it would work. If a customer orders flowers for a wedding on Wednesday, the chatbot will be available round the clock over the weekend in case there are any issues or changes that need to be made on your order, or maybe you want to track your order or order something extra.
Being a fast and effective way to enhance your brand experience, chatbots help increase customer satisfaction and help your company stand out from the competition.
What is a Brand Experience?
A critical aspect of branding involves creating an experience for your customer that makes them feel cared for and special.
A key to enhancing this feeling of caring and compassion is how you communicate with them in a memorable manner, like say sending a personalized letter or email or giving pleasant customer service.
It should be quick, personalized, friendly, and show you really do care about their needs as a consumer by sharing news about what’s going on in the market so that it pertains directly to them.
That way, you provide the assurance of being there whenever they need you which will instill good feelings towards your company long after they’ve received it.
‘Brand Experience’ incorporates all channels and touchpoints with customers where your brand exists. It is not just a branded website or ad campaign, but rather everything your consumer comes in contact with — be it real or virtual.
Everything you do should enhance your brand experience by engaging your consumers along every step of their journey with you. If done right, an exceptional brand experience can create customer loyalty for life.
Why is Brand Experience Important?
‘Brand Experience’ is a term that describes how people relate to your brand and all of its touchpoints throughout their lifetime-from first impressions to long-term relationships, whether direct or indirect.
The brand experience aims to help create consistent and memorable customer experiences that positively affect your business.
According to a study by McKinsey, COVID-19 has forced companies into investing and providing digital services for a better customer experience. 80 percent of companies believe that their core business model should be digitized to remain economically viable
A strong brand experience is more important in the post-COVID era when businesses’ inability to scale up support services resulted in a poor customer experience, reduced sales, and negative word of mouth.
Businesses can overcome these challenges by investing time and money into marketing automation tools (particularly chatbots) so that customers have all their questions answered before making a purchase.
If done right, chatbot marketing can transform lead generation from an intrusive affair into a fun and engaging conversation that both parties enjoy.
By intelligently responding to each question at the right moment, businesses can remove stress from customers’ buying decisions and build strong connections between consumers and their brands over time.
How can Chatbots Elevate Customer Experience?
Modern chatbots have evolved from being robotic (and no code) to highly conversational, giving customers a personalized, humanizing interaction that sets your brand apart from the experience it offers.
Developing an advanced customer experience requires nothing less than reinventing and reimagining your company’s approach to interacting with consumers.
With chatbots, brands can maintain a consistent, free-flowing, and positive customer experience.
Here are some principles one should focus on to offer a better customer experience using chatbots:
Language: By speaking language as your target audience, you show that you value what they have to say and make sure everyone can connect in a meaningful way. This can be achieved by doing simple things like using catchphrases like How you doing?”, millennial lingo, etc.
Design: By giving it character, e.g., a mascot or friendly face, helps businesses get a longer recall value. Besides being warm and welcoming, customizing the design of your bot not only increases engagement but also gets people talking about your brand. Big tech companies are investing heavily in this as well. You would definitely remember the Salesforce characters from their site, or the famous Microsoft Office assistant Clippy.
Brand consistency: Designing your chatbot to be consistent with your brand colors, themes, mission, and tone of voice helps establish trust right away with potential customers because it proves you know exactly who they are. These things usually should not change, and even if it needs to, there would need to be a rebranding exercise that covers all aspects of it, including the brand experience on the chatbot.
Tone: The tone of communication will help you get better engagement with your chatbots. Depending on the target persona that would be visiting your website you can determine what should the tone of the conversation flow be like in your chatbot, i.e., friendly, professional, witty, etc. The dominance of Apple Siri has shown easy it is to get the brand to be viral with witty and informative answers to questions. During its launch screenshots of witty replies from Siri went viral over the internet.
How do Chatbots Help Improve your Brand?
As technology expands and becomes a huge part of daily life, chatbots have become a fun and useful way to communicate with your customers. If you’re trying to figure out how to market your brand, a chatbot can be a quick way to find out what needs changing or what people love about your business!
Let’s take a look at how chatbots can help your brand grow.
High brand recall
By leveraging chatbots to interact with your website visitors and potential prospects, you can create awareness about your brand. People will remember your brand better when they have such a unique experience with it.
For example, HFDC bank in India uses Eva (an AI bot) for customer support. It had launched it across its website with a visual mascot-like appearance of a lady. With the positive response the bank received, in terms of user adoption as well as users sharing its benefits via word of mouth, they’ve seen a self-propelled push towards self-service.
This helps them in creating higher brand recall value, meaning more people know what Eva is and what it can help them with. And as more millennials join banks, they are more likely to engage and refer Eva.
Increased brand loyalty
When there is such an overabundance of brands, it is sometimes difficult to keep consumers interested and coming back for more. It can be challenging to get consumers to choose your brand over other well-known competitors. Here’s where chatbots can help.
As chatbots are easy to interact with and available round the clock, users develop a positive relationship with the product. This results in customers spending more time on your website and engaging with your content, which translates into higher brand awareness for both you and your business.
Moreover, when users are happy with how easy a chatbot is to use, they’re likely to recommend it to others — and brand loyalty increases as a result. In addition, brand loyalty can decrease churn rates. Customers who stay loyal tend to spend much more money than those who don’t!
As a result, it helps businesses get better Customer Satisfaction(CSAT) and Net Promoter Score(NPS) scores, ultimately helping them get better referrals from customers.
Welcoming and friendly
Chatbots are more proactive in their interactions with users, meaning it immediately initiates conversations with users when it feels there is a need for it. Unlike humans, where availability is what determines how many users you can talk to.
And not just the welcoming nature of the chatbot, but even while interacting with users its personalized approach of talking with users using their names or a tailor-made path helps improve the brand experience.
Personalization coupled with the use of GIFs, emojis, and short sentences helps make conversations more comfortable and easy in a consistent tone creating a sense of familiarity that fosters trust with your users.
Builds trust and credibility
Having bots help humans achieve their goals builds a sense of trust among customers. This sense of dependability and safety adds value to your service quality perception.
For example, if a chatbot solves a critical problem for you in a matter of minutes, you are bound to remember it for a long time. This increases your trust in the brand and builds the credibility of that particular brand.
This is what keeps customers coming back again and again because they know they’ll get their questions answered correctly (and quickly). And if customers have a happy experience, it builds loyalty and leads to higher conversions and more sales!
Reaching new audiences
Chatbots can help you spread your brand’s messaging far and wide by letting you reach audiences on new platforms such as Facebook Messenger, Slack, WhatsApp, and more through word of mouth.
With positive interactions, you can expect to hear about bots and their pleasant experience from your colleagues, friends, or family. Establishing customer trust and loyalty helps you by opening a lot more doors.
How can WotNot help in Customizing your Chatbot?
As your organization becomes more complex, and demand for personalized experiences grows, chatbots will become even more critical in providing exceptional customer service and support. From being a simple and easy-to-use product, it gets transformed into a sophisticated product.
Our team helps you build custom bots on demand, saving both time and money when implementing a bot strategy.
Here’s how WotNot is helping organizations of all sizes in improving its brand experience:
Tailor-made bots
Building chatbots is a complex process involving several activities like research, interviews, design, development, and optimization.
Once your business objectives are shared, our highly experienced and creative conversation design team gets to work in understanding your current experience at great length before getting started in building a tailor-made chatbot to solve the business challenges.
You can expect to eliminate the learning curve involved in A/B testing conversation flows if this service was not availed. Time to success is critical for every business, and we help you achieve that.
Customized chat widget
The experience of a user with a chatbot is defined not just by the conversation flow, but with several other aspects like the color, typography, design, transitions between messages, etc.
Hence tailor-making a chatbot for improved brand experience requires these factors to be worked on.
Chatbots will help you deliver your distinct vibe, just like good marketing should. Our team works hand in hand with your brand team to ensure that the chatbot encompasses your current branding for a better brand recall.
Experience and expertise
Don’t let anyone tell experience doesn’t matter. In marketing, you learn things by constantly experimenting with various hypotheses and reviewing what is working and what is not.
Having delivered over 3000+ projects, our team has collected a fair amount of dos and don’ts on building a chatbot catering to a certain use-case.
This is not to say that you cannot build a bot on your bot, you definitely can, however, to achieve your objectives, you would probably require to iterate a few more times.
After all, there are no proven chatbot marketing techniques out there that you can simply copy and implement. As every business is different, it requires a customized approach towards interacting with its users.
Conclusion
Chatbots will dramatically change how we interact with businesses, and we need to prepare for that future now. Although COVID has passed, its ripple effects are here to stay.
Businesses are more likely to find more digital research being performed by their customers before having a walk-in to their offices or stores. And in addition to it, to get better ROI from their advertisement campaigns, this would be really crucial.
To wrap things up, chatbots are definitely going to be a frequently seen tool in the marketing tech stack of businesses in the years to come. The marketing trends in 2022 show that the shift is taking place.
Sometimes we do not focus on small things. In this case it is just a small thing to focus on.
Before entering the global variable you must enter the equal sign to assign a global variable to the dimension. If you do not enter the equal sign, you can create a new global variable, but it will not be assigned to the dimension.
That is the only reason why solidworks do not change the dimensions in part as changing equations.
Because not using equal sign means technically we are not linking the global variable to the equation. This is just a kind of learning that how these small things plays an important role.
Let’s imagine a dream where we are all living in a life simulation…
IMDb “Black Mirror” Fifteen Million Merits
Most of you know how Meta could change our world (if not, take a look at this short video: Everything Facebook revealed about the Metaverse). In fact, many other companies will try to make it. Interaction with virtual worlds is already here, there are plenty of cool devices we may use to dive into another reality.
I’m a game developer professional and most of my time I’m spending on designing AI behaviors for my games (from chess AI to AR assistants). I’m not going to tell you about the virtual worlds in this post, but about the artificial intelligence inside. And it’s not only about games, it’s about an advanced interaction with virtual worlds, about how the system could work. Here you will find some basic understanding of how AI could be used in the metaverse and its purpose.
What could AI give in the metaverse?
Almost everything starts from a brand new experience ending having a child in virtual reality.. wow, what? Have I said you about having a child in VR? Yeah, sounds crazy, but I’ll break it later so you will understand more, little spoiler: it’s almost not possible for now.
The main limitation in appearing metaverses in our life is a small number of users who have VR/AR headsets. And that’s logical, people don’t want to use big and heavy helmets with lenses which could give you a headache after just a few hours of staying inside. What can we give people to join these worlds? How do share this experience with more people? How to move the world from using PC to VR/AR? I’m sure blue-chip IT companies are thinking about answering these questions. I’ll try to answer another question, what AI could give us in those virtual worlds and extend our experience? I hope this writing will be useful for developers and gamers who someday will join virtual worlds. Who knows, perhaps my writing will be seen many years later when we all will be joined into the new MetaWorld.
Meta presentation about metaverses
Alright, AI or artificial intelligence is basically a collection of behavioral instructions based on decisions (predicted or hardcoded) in electronic devices (it could be robotics, games, or some hybrid machines, etc.).
In games, we have AI that should give us the most fun from the game. Let’s remember the Mario series, there are plenty of different NPC’s you may see during the gameplay, such as Goomba or Hammer Bro. They all have different behaviors. Without enemies, the game would be too boring.
In hybrid machines or robotics, AI usually plays the role of assistants in doing typical, monotonous work or dangerous for people’s health (like observing active volcanoes or working with radioactive liquids).
Well-designed futuristic sketch with Microsoft Hololens.
AI in the metaverse (it could be AR, VR, XR, or any other types of presenting metaverses where we may feel deeply integrated. In fact, the PC game Second Life is counting as a metaverse game too) could be any of mentioned above. Imagine a game shop seller, a robotic system that investigates volcanoes, a virtual teacher, a cameraman at a concert, your personal fitness trainer… and put everything into one world. Or separate it. How you wish, your possibilities are infinite (at least for now, when everything is still under development and we’re not having strong restrictions in creating virtual worlds).
What about usage?
Sure, if you’re a developer or a content maker, willing to create some kind of AI in a brand new meta world (let’s imagine it already exists and millions of people are dived into it) it’s totally possible for you to sell goods through a metaverse. How would you profit from implementing AI? What type of AI should you choose?
First of all, we need to have a specific goal for your business. Could you sell virtual goods or NFT’s? Skins, new weapons, or maybe you’re 3d artist or fashioner who wants to sell your own t-shirt to be worn in a virtual world? Would you sell it by yourself or just let it fly on a banner? Of course, if you’re a digital representer of Lui Vuitton perhaps people will know this brand, but competitions haven’t been canceled even in metaverses. Anyways even for big companies. Who are your sellers? Who are your promoters? Do you think it’s a good idea to hire a seller that would help buyers to determine if shorts would be a good fit for a specific hat? I think no one will do that. It’s not fun. It’s not what people would do in virtual worlds. So put an NPC! Alright, you’re getting security too. Just pay small fees for their usage. How would you benefit from them? In the same way as in real life.
Have you ever seen animators? In my origin country, there are many. Could we make them as funny AI’s in virtual worlds? Sure.
The needs of AI’s in business will depend on how detailed will be made those worlds. Will it have a teleport to reach big distances or do you need transport? If you need transportation, do you want to drive a car and spend time on it or you would better call your AI assistant to bring you to the target?
Conclusion
Alright, we see that metaverse could extend our horizons of imagination, share more knowledge, sell brands and goods, give people a chance to touch some virtual creation. Isn’t it cool? We’re diving into another world, the era of virtual reality, so everything around this technology will be improving every year. Remember the time when the internet and personal computer just came into our world. How it was and how it looks nowadays. Just give metaverse a little more time to let people understand the whole concept, how it should work and how to develop it user-friendly and useful.
I’d like to share more info about the practical development of AI in virtual reality and how to develop your own VR Tamagotchi in Unity. So stay tuned!
Feel free to write your questions and subscribe to my social media: Instagram: stan.kryvenko LinkedIn: sgkryvenko
AI Role In The Metaverse was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
Have you ever wondered how companies like Apple always stay ahead of the curve? They seem to have a crystal ball because they are always ready with a new product as soon as a trend hits! Well, they use a technique called Deep Web Scraping. Keep reading, and we’ll explain what Deep Web Scraping is and how to use it in your business.
What Is Deep Web Scraping?
If you know the basics of SEO, then you know that search engines use AI to crawl the web and collect data on public internet pages. This is called Web Scraping, and it’s been around since the ’90s when search engines first existed. Deep Web Scraping crawls public web pages plus pages on the Deep Web to collect data. The Deep Web is simply pages that need a login to access. Search engines cannot access them because they are behind a paywall or exist in a private database. Examples of the Deep Web include:
· Social media platforms
· Membership sites
· Online newspapers that require subscriptions
· Internal company webpages
Deep Web Scraping allows businesses to obtain better quality data for their market research because they can access the social media platforms where trends start.
How Does Deep Web Scraping Work?
You don’t need to employ a team of people to stare at social media platforms for 8 hours a day; Deep Web Scraping is most effective when conducted by AI. You can tell the Deep Web Scraper what information you seek and where it should look for it. Then it simply runs in the background, depositing the information in your designated folder.
How Can Deep Web Scraping Improve My Business?
One of the most popular uses of Deep Web Scrapers is to collect data to inform marketing and product strategies. The Deep Web Scraper provides information about what customers are saying about your business online.
Deep Web Scraping could even be used to examine how consumers view your competitors and your industry in general. This data could be valuable in helping you stand out from the competition by addressing pain points and adding extra pleasure points to your products. All of this data is available for a fraction of the cost and man-hours of other market research methods. Let’s take a look at the three main ways businesses use a Deep Web Scraper.
Price Tracking
Deep Web Scrapers are popular amongst e-commerce business owners because they allow real-time monitoring of pricing. You can gather information from customer reviews as to how your product compares to competitors and if your product offers value for money. Some Deep Web Scrapers can even make pricing requests from your competitors and retrieve detailed information about pricing and shipping.
A 2018 report showed that price tracking is one of the top 3 uses of Deep Web Scraping by businesses. Using Deep Web Scrapers in this way allows businesses to find the right price for entering the market with a new product and to receive real-time notifications of competitor’s promotions.
Market Research
Deep Web Scrapers pull data from numerous sources to allow you to monitor market trends. You can spot emerging trends before they happen and use the data to inform your product development. Wouldn’t you love to have a product ready for market as soon as a trend hits?
The above infographic was created as a result of Deep Web Scraping property rental listings from Craigslist. While this data was used for a research study, you could create a similar data set in your business to narrow your ideal customer type even further. You could find the interests your best customers have in common and make sure your ads only get in front of prospects who are primed to buy.
Content Analysis
Many business owners use Deep Web Scraping to inform their content strategy. The Deep Web Scraper will analyze what your target market is talking about and how they talk so you can create more effective content. This provides you with the opportunity to engage with your ideal clients on a personal level and be at the forefront of new content marketing techniques.
Apply It To Your Business
Now that you understand Deep Web Scraping, you may be wondering how to implement it into your business. There are a number of Deep Web Scrapers on the market, each specializing in different things. So first, you need to get clear on what you want the Deep Web Scraper to do for your business. The three uses we discussed above are the most popular, but many businesses use it for contact scraping to produce a list of leads or collating data to inform calculations. For example, a logistics company may collect data on weather, road conditions, and events to calculate delivery times.
The uses of Deep Web Scraping are as endless as the data it allows you to collect. You can use it to inform many aspects of your business; product development and marketing being the most popular.
Follow us for more practical advice on how AI can improve your business systems and profitability.
Customer service has always been important, but as the economy becomes more competitive, it is even more important that clients have a smooth interaction with your company. That’s the only way to retain customers and continue to grow in this economic climate.
Making sure customers have an amazing interaction with your company should be priority #1. They’ve written in with a problem or question, and want answers fast. If they don’t get it, they won’t stick around long.
There are two major options for companies: chatbots and humans.
Both present costs and benefits, and it’s important to weigh them against each other. Chatbots are relatively new to the customer service world, but they’re quickly becoming a popular way to provide highly efficient real-time service.
The global chatbot market was estimated to be worth $396.2 million in 2019 and is projected to reach $1.95 billion by 2027. That is extremely rapid growth and is a sign of things to come on the AI front. But it makes sense when you think about the total scope of customer service and sales. If chatbots can help make these functions work better and for lower cost, the value is technically limitless.
They can often be programmed to use natural language processing to ensure the chatbot provides the best answer possible. There are also specialized chatbots designed for tasks like booking airline tickets or requesting restaurant reservations. Each of these options has certain situations where it is more useful.
Strengths Of AI Chatbot In Customer Service
Chatbots are changing how customer service works, largely because of the different economics of running a chatbot vs. a living employee.
Reduced Cost
Chatbots require less upfront financial and time investment than humans do. One chatbot can service a lot more customers than a single customer service representative, which means they scale very quickly. They also require less training, and may only need minor tweaks to their business logic from time to time.
No Language Barrier
Chatbots are capable of speaking in any language, so there’s no language barrier or new hiring necessary in order to service a certain language.
Better Response Time
Chatbots don’t need to make decisions about how to respond and are able to provide an identical customer service experience whether a customer is asking about a general question or an extremely specific one. This can make them seem like they’re more attentive and responsive than actual human employees.
Available 24/7
Of course, as a programmed entity, chatbots are available 24/7. Chatbots are also cheaper to operate than human employees since it’s not necessary to provide them with food, clothing and shelter.
Machine Learning Technology
Chatbots can also benefit from machine learning technology. When a chatbot receives input from multiple users, it can learn how to respond to specific questions based on past responses. This makes it possible to build a single chatbot in which different users will get different answers depending on their individual needs.
Strengths of Humans in Customer Service
As much as you’d like to automate your customer service, humans can still do some functions better than artificial intelligence.
1. Empathize with the customer
Empathizing with customers is key because they’re more likely to interact with you again if they feel they’ve been treated properly. If they feel as though their concerns have been addressed, they’re less likely to complain about products or services on social media or elsewhere.
2. Provide culturally sensitive customer service.
If your company or product is targeted at a particular audience or market, then it’s important to be sensitive to their needs and concerns when delivering your product or services. This can mean providing translations for international customers, for example, or adopting policies for American consumers so that they’re understood in their native tongue.
3. Deal with human emotions on the fly.
Some situations call for a level of emotional intelligence that people aren’t born with but can develop through training and practice. Customer service agents must be able to deal with high-pressure situations like when a customer is angry or disappointed, and chatbots are not (currently) able to handle those situations.
When to Use a Chatbot
Taking all this information into account, there are 3 situations where it makes the most sense to use chatbots.
Chatbots never sleep, so you can be sure there’s always someone there to answer a customer’s question, even if it comes in at an unreasonably late time. The same applies for when all your customer service representatives are overloaded.
If a potential customer arrives ready to buy, a chatbot can facilitate the sale while providing personalized recommendations along the way. If people are going to buy online, you may as well use chatbots to provide a streamlined and personalized service.
One thing we can say for sure about bots is you’ll never have one quit or struggle with training. So as you are training up your human agents, use a chatbot to handle the extra capacity. This way, you can scale more quickly than if you just trained one representative at a time.
Comparison of chatbots and humans based on their strengths
Based on this analysis, there are 4 key areas where chatbots excel over human representatives:
No Maintenance Costs: Chatbots don’t require training, office space, employees, or anything else. Once they are set up, they are good to go and it is up to you if you want to improve on them.
Simple Setup: They’re also easy to set up, which means you don’t have to spend a lot of money on hiring someone.
Faster Responses: Chatbots have lower response times and are always available.
Infinite Scalability: One chatbot can service nearly unlimited customers at the same time.
Industry Use Cases of Chat Bots
Customer service is relevant in nearly every industry, but we’ve found that there are specific areas where they can be leveraged for significant returns:
Banking
Anyone who’s ever had to deal with banking customer service before knows what a hassle it can be. Chatbots can streamline the process and handle frontline customer support. Already, banks around the world are adopting chatbots and seeing great results.
SaaS Companies
Driving more sales is the top priority of almost every organization. However, depending on the long-term value of a customer, certain courses of action may end up being impractical. SaaS companies generally have a lower customer LTV and also lower customization required, so a chatbot can effectively serve leads and create a high-level win for the company.
E-Commerce
Brands are realizing that email marketing has nothing on the engagement levels of SMS notifications and chatbots. Rather than using chatbots just for customer support, they can be a key part of the funnel by notifying users when their shipment has been posted or delivered, or by collecting feedback on the company. This feels more personalized than a form email and can upsell a customer, thus directly contributing to the bottom line and fitting into the marketing funnel.
The Future of Chatbots
It’s easy to think of chatbots in the context of simple business processes like lead generation or customer service, but it’s quickly becoming clear that this machine learning technology has not even skimmed the surface of what it can do for humanity.
For example, studies are already being done on how a chatbot could help patients with dementia or Alzheimer’s. This alone should get you thinking about the interactions you have on a day-to-day basis, and how they could be streamlined or used to improve your life (or the life of those around you).
Another example that is less grandiose is how chatbots are being used for branding campaigns. Marvel ran a campaign for Guardians of the Galaxy (and Spiderman, soon after) that allowed fans to interact with the chatbot. This sort of interactive experience is exactly what users are geeking out over. And excitement leads to sales!
Finally, for anyone who has ever stayed up late trying to match their symptoms up to an online diagnosis, there are now chatbots to help with this. As telemedicine continues to expand, we expect this functionality to improve significantly. Soon, users will *want* to deal with chatbots for the first few minutes because they’ll know it gets them better outcomes.
How Chatbots And Human Agents Can Work Hand In Hand
Making customer service a competitive advantage is a major priority for companies right now. Technology has streamlined so many processes that now the experience has become much more important for keeping customers. The biggest problem with chatbots is that they still require a level of human input, and while they’re getting better at understanding what you’re saying, there’s no guarantee that they’ll pick up on every nuance or question right off the bat.
That means it’s important for companies to keep monitoring their chatbot systems for new questions and patterns and respond accordingly. This is the “combination” approach, which we recommend.
Chatbots are a popular tool for customer service because they’re cheap to design and run. Since there’s no human interaction, the interface is simple — you just type in a question and get an answer.
However, in some ways, the market hasn’t caught up yet. People still prefer the human touch over machines, as demonstrated by this 2018 study showing that ~50% of UK respondents and ~40% of US respondents said they’d prefer to speak with a person. We’re sure this number has shifted by now, but that is still something to be aware of when implementing a chatbot strategy.
Humans are still better at many things, including emotional intelligence, which makes them better listeners and communicators. One of the great benefits of humans is that they can adapt to your needs over time. They may not be able to provide a perfect answer every time, but they’ll learn your preferences and anticipate what you want next.
Chatbot vs. Human — Who Wins?
Chatbots are a trend that is likely to continue for the foreseeable future. Customer service representatives, however, are not going anywhere anytime soon. There are pros and cons to both, and it’s important to know all of them before deciding which one to use in your business.
In general, chatbots are a great way for customer support to cut costs. There are many situations where there’s less need for an actual customer service representative. This is a chance for companies to save money by not paying someone to actually handle client questions.
Chatbots may not be taking over the world and obsoleting human representatives, but they are making a dent in the customer service industry. They’re already being used in various fields, from banking to online shopping. They can be programmed to a specific task and can make your business run better. For more information on how a chatbot may be able to help your company, start a conversation with Kommunicate today.
At Kommunicate, we are envisioning a world-beating customer support solution to empower the new era of customer support. We would love to have you onboard to have a first-hand experience of Kommunicate. You can signup and start delighting your customers right away.
From traditional IVR systems, still very common in customer service, to voice assistants on Alexa or Google Assistant — voice technology is nowadays part of everyday life, and it will continue to gain importance in future. The component stack of a typical voice assistant includes speech recognition and speech synthesis, apart from the usual conversational components like NLU (natural language understanding), dialogue management and NLG (natural language generation).
Botium Box enables companies to implement a holistic test strategy for voice assistants on all levels of the component stack. This article focuses on the speech recognition part and shows how to build a regression test suite based on audio files, transcription files and word error rate verification.
Continuous Speech Recognition Testing
The big cloud service providers Google, Amazon, Microsoft and IBM all provide high quality speech services with the best recognition rates on the market. But even with those cloud providers, some make it possible to add your own optimizations by uploading additional training data — this is often used for improving recognition rates for domain-specific vocabulary. Apart from the big cloud service providers there are also a number of free software packages available like Kaldi (for speech recognition) or MaryTTS (for speech synthesis), which companies install, train and operate on their own infrastructure.
Continuous speech recognition testing has most benefits for voice assistants using an optimized cloud speech service or completely self-trained language models. As part of a voice assistant test strategy, the quality of the speech recognition should be verified continuously, as all the other stack components. This article will show how to set up a continuous speech recognition test suite.
Configure Speech Services in Botium Box
In Botium Box, switch to the Voice Services section in the Settings menu (from the user icon on the top right).
Speech Recognition (Speech-To-Text)
In the Speech Recognition list, we register the speech service (including credentials) and the language and to use. Depending on the speech service there are additional parameters required — for example, for cloud services like Google the credentials are required.
Botium Box allows very fine grained control over how the speech service is used with the Custom Engine Configuration field. For example, to select your own customized Azure speech model:
{
"speechConfig": {
"endpointId": "xxx-yyyy-zzzzzzzzzz"
}
}
It is possible to immediately test the speech service configuration by using your own microphone.
Speech Synthesis (Text-To-Speech)
In the Speech Synthesis list, we register the speech service (including credentials), the language and the voice to use for synthesizing audio from text. Depending on the speech service there are additional parameters required — for example, for cloud services like Google the credentials are required.
Again, you can test the configuration by listening to a first example.
Custom Speech Engines
Botium Box is using the open source Botium Speech Processing software stack (see Github project). By using the Github source code as base it is possible to add your own custom speech recognition or speech synthesis as well as voice effects to your Botium tests. Be prepared to do some Node.js coding!
Prepare Chatbot for Speech Synthesis and Recognition
Next we will create a chatbot in Botium Box with the Speech Synthesis & Recognition connector. In the Chatbots section, register a new chatbot, select the technology from the list and the previously configured speech recognition and speech synthesis profiles.
The Speech Synthesis & Recognition connector is a very slim Botium connector that is capable of doing simple 2-step conversations:
use pre recorded audio file or synthesize audio file for a given text with a given voice
send this audio file to the speech recognition engine and show the text results and WER
The configuration can be tested immediately with the Say Hello or even with the Live Chat. You can either enter some text in the live chat for which voice will be synthesized, or you can record your own voice as well.
Prepare Test Set
As the next step we have to prepare a Test Set. A Test Set in Botium Box is the container for the test data itself as well as the configuration of how to interpret the test data to inject it into the Botium testing pipeline.
Usually, in Botium Box test cases are defined in the scripting language BotiumScript, conversation flow tests as well as NLP tests and other test types supported by Botium. In the case of speech recognition testing, it is not required to use BotiumScript: for testing speech recognition labeled audio files are sufficient to build up the test cases.
Audio files have to be uploaded as wav or mp3 files to Botium Box
Botium looks up the expected transcription …
in a file with the same name but with extension .txt instead
in a CSV file transcript.csv
from the file name itself
In the Test Sets menu, create a new Test Set and navigate to the Media Resources Settings. In the Audio File Usage field select the option Use all audio files as Test Case input, and read transcription from file.
The Default folder for attachment files is the folder in Botium Box where we will place our test audio files in the next steps. You can navigate there by clicking on Open in File Browser to show a now still empty folder in the Botium Box File Browser.
Gathering Test Data
As always, a test strategy is only as good as the quality of the test data. Depending on your goals there are some ways to gather test data.
Labelled Reference Audio Files
If you are working on your own voice assistant you most likely already own reference data in the form of labeled audio files (audio file + expected transcription). Botium expects the expected transcription in a separate text file named after the audio file, or in a separate CSV file.
For example, consider there are a couple of labeled audio files:
F01-hello-how-are-you.wav, expected transcription “hello how are you”
In Botium Box, open the Default folder for attachment files of the Test Set you created above in the File Browser.
Upload the two audio files
do either of the following
Place two additional text files in this folder
F01-hello-how-are-you.txt with text content “hello how are you”
F02-hi-whats-up.txt with text content “hi whats up”
Or place a file transcript.csv in this folder
you can prepare this file with a text editor or with a spreadsheet like Excel
F01-hello-how-are-you.wav;hello how are you
F02-hi-whats-up.wav;hi whats up
Now Botium knows what to expect when sending the audio file to the speech recognition engine.
Synthesizing Speech
Another way to start testing your speech recognition is to synthesize audio files from text. Botium Box has the Voice Wizard to support you in doing so. Paste the text for which to generate the audio files, select the voices you want to use and the output folder. The Voice wizard will place the audio files as well as the transcription files right there.
When opening the folder now in the File Browser, you can see a bunch of audio files — one for each line of text and voice — as well as one transcription file per audio file, ending in .txt.
This is by far the quickest way to generate audio test data en masse.
Record Speech
For smaller scale projects it might also be feasible to record your own voice and use it for testing the speech recognition. The Voice Wizard also has the option to record an audio file and place it in the Test Set folder.
You will have to add the transcription files manually if choosing this option.
Run Speech Recognition Test Session
Now that we have everything in place for a first test run — the connection to our speech recognition engine and the labeled test data — we run a first test. For this we create a Test Project — in the Test Projects menu, register a new Test Project, select the Chatbot and the Test Set we created in the previous steps and click on Save.
Now click on Start Test Session Now to start the first test session. A few minutes later you can already start to inspect the results.
You can see the list of audio files where the speech recognition matched the expected transcription, and the ones where it failed. You can dive into the results, listen to the audio files and view the result details on a JSON code level (use the <> button).
As expected, most of the tests pass now, as we are using the best quality audio files we can get — labeled reference data, your own voice recordings or even synthesized voice, which is per definition extremely clean. We can now add some noise to the audio files to challenge the speech recognition with real-life scenarios.
Humanification: Adding Noise
In Botium Box, the term Humanification is used to describe the application of algorithms to introduce noise into the test data. For text-based testing, this means to consider typical human behaviour patterns and typical human flaws like typographical errors, case insensitivity, whitespaces (or lacking of whitespaces), using emojis and others. For voice based testing, noise can be indeed noise — like adding some environment-specific background noise.
Voice Effects Pipeline
Switch to the Voice Services section in the Settings menu (from the user icon on the top right). In the Voice Effects list you can configure your pipeline of additional noise layers to apply to an audio file. There are several common audio effects available to simulate real-life environments:
Adding background noise
Make it sound like a low-bandwidth GSM phone call
Simulate a slightly interrupted phone line by adding breaks
… and more
Clone the Test Set from above and add something with “Noise” to the name. This Test Set is initially empty, but has the same settings as the above.
Verify that the Audio File Usage field is indeed set to Use all audio files as Test Case input, and read transcription from file.
Apply Noise Effects
In your clean Test Set, open the Voice Effects section in the Voice Wizard. Select the folder where you placed your audio files before and select the noise profile from above. In the Output Folder, select the media folder from your new noise Test Set you created in the previous step. When clicking on Apply Voice Effect, Botium Box will run all of the audio files in the selected folder (including subfolders!) through the voice effect pipeline and place the resulting audio files in the output folder.
Now create a new Test Project for the new Test Set with noise, and start a first test session.
Again, you can inspect the test results after a few minutes to check if the applied noise makes the speech recognition struggle.
Congratulations, you can now run the speech recognition tests with your reference data and with the noisy data over and over again — it makes most sense when you retrain your speech recognition of course.
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Bonus: Check Word Error Rate
In many cases, you might not actually be interested in the exact transcription of the audio file, but rather if certain quality criteria about the transcription are met — this is where the word error rate comes into play. It’s a measure of how many words in a single transcription have been recognized correctly — for a perfect transcription fully matching the label it is 0, and the value is between 0 and 1. Depending on your requirements you might consider a word error rate of 0.1 (one wrong transcription out of 10 words) ok. Botium Box can verify the word error rate on a single utterance level instead of the exact transcription.
First, switch the value of Audio File Usage in the Test Set settings to Use all audio files as Test Case input, and calculate word error rate from transcription from file — this will Botium instruct to calculate the word error rate, instead of asserting on the exact transcription.
Currently there is no special Word Error Rate asserter in Botium Box, but we can tailor the Generic JSONPath Asserter for doing this. In Botium Box, in the Settings menu open the Registered Components section. Register a new component there, name it Check WER and select Test Case Asserter as Component Type.
As Component Ref Code, use WER and in the Component Source field enter JsonPathAsserter. This will instruct Botium to use the Generic JSONPath Asserter for this component. Enable the switch Register as global scripting component to make Botium use this asserter for all test cases. Finally, in the Component Configuration, we tell Botium the JSONPath expression which we expect to match the speech recognition response.
If we expect a perfect word error rate of 0, we can enter this expression:
{
"path": "$.response..[?(@.wer == 0)]"
}
If we are fine with a word error rate of exactly or below 0.1, this is the expression to use:
{
"path": "$.response..[?(@.wer <= 0.1)]"
}
We now have to tell Botium Box to use this asserter in our tests. Save the registered component, and navigate to your Test Project. Open the Test Execution section in Settings, and add the Check WER component to the Involved Registered Component(s) field.
When now running a test session, Botium will not assert on the exact transcription anymore, but it will instead use the Check WER asserter to fail a test case if the word error rate is above 0.1 — you can inspect the detailed results in the test session again:
Bonus: Speech Recognition Regression Tests
When regression testing a speech model, often the word error rate itself is not the main criteria — but to make sure that the transcription for some reference audio files is always the same, before training a new speech model and afterwards. With this it is possible to tell if the newly trained speech model has any obvious defects.
In these cases you most likely have a library of reference audio files, labeled or unlabeled. In this use case we can start with the unlabeled audio files to build up a regression test suite.
Create a new Test Set, set the Audio File Usage to Use all audio files as Test Case input
Upload your unlabeled audio files to the media folder of this Test Set
Start a first test session — Botium Box will send all the audio files to the speech recognition engine and accept any transcription
In the Downloads section of the test result, download the full transcript as CSV file and open it in Excel
In this CSV file, we are only interested in the columns named testCaseName (which contains the file name) and convoStepActual (which contains the transcription). Filter the convoStepSender column on the value bot and hide all other columns except the two mentioned ones. Copy the remaining data as file transcript.csv to the folder with your audio files in Botium Box.
When now switch the Audio File Usage field to Use all audio files as Test Case input, and read transcription from file, Botium will read the expected transcriptions from this file and any changes in the transcription for your reference files will popup up in the test results.
