Chatbot’s have been around as early as 2016 since Facebook enabled developers to place chatbot’s on Messenger.

However, the COVID-19 pandemic changed consumer behavior drastically and paved the way for a rise and increase in the market for the chatbot industry.

In order to stay afloat and adapt with the shift in interaction towards customers many brick and mortar shops had to turn into ecommerce stores and go digital.

Implementing chatbot’s to support customer interactions making them personalized and improve customer experience while lowering costs.

58% of businesses invested in conversational marketing tools to respond to Covid-19 customer support challenges.

The recent trends have shown that rather than conversing with humans customers prefer using chatbot’s to interact with when visiting a website.

Here’s how chatbot’s will transform customer experience in 2022 and beyond:


1. Customer Preferences

74% of internet users prefer using chatbot’s when looking for answers to simple questions or to handle minor issues. As long as the chatbot responds to their questions in real time and helps them resolve their issue quickly they’re fine with interacting with a chatbot.

However, 23% of consumers still prefer face-to-face interaction when the bot is incapable of solving their issue or unsure in issues such as such as with payment disputes or complaints it would be better to handover to a real-human.

Statistics show that about 65% of consumers feel comfortable handling an issue without a human agent and 69% of consumers prefer to use chatbot’s because they provide instant responses.

According to Business Insider, 82% of consumers claim that instant responses to their questions are critical when contacting brands.


2. Chatbot Usage

Chatbot’s are the perfect solution for the younger generations who are keen on technology as well as for the older ones who prefer to handle support issues independently.

Forbes said that about 60% of millennial have used chatbot’s and 70% of them had a positive experience. Virtual customer assistants help organizations reduce call, chat, and email inquiries by 70% and 57% of executives at Accenture said that chatbot’s bring significant ROI with minimal effort.

Fortune Business Insights stated that 58% of websites that use chatbot software are for B2B companies meaning that the chatbot market will reach $77 million in 2022.

Chatbot’s have the power to reduce the volume of traditional email, chat or phone traffic; reduce costs and increase customer satisfaction by providing quick answers to questions that are tailored to the customer, or guiding customers through automated processes. Looking for ways to continuously improve the experience chatbot’s can deliver and ensuring they are connected to human-assisted channels to truly transform the customer experience in the future will be beneficial.


3. Chatbot Market Statistics

The rising popularity of messaging apps and the high demands of customers in the banking, health, or wellness industry gives the chatbot industry a boost.

The advancements in chatbot technology and machine learning enable chatbot’s to deliver a more personalized customer experience. More brands use them to promote their products and services, generate leads, and boost website engagement.

According to Insider Intelligence they're proven to lower operation costs, business owners worldwide are more eager to implement them on websites, and messaging platforms such as Facebook Messenger or Whatsapp, as well as on mobile apps.

  1. North America is the center of chatbot startups. The chatbot market has accounted for the largest share with 40.4% of the market size.
  2. The chatbot market is supposed to amount to $454.8 million in revenue by 2027, up from $40.9 million in 2018. (Statista)
  3. In 2021, there was a 43% rise in the number of chats compared to 2020in 2021. (LiveChat)
  4. A study shows that 67% of internet users have used social media, live chat, or texting to contact customer service and 56% of customers prefer to message rather than call customer service.
  5. 83% of customers are satisfied while being served by a chatbot in the Insurance industry. (Live Chat)
  6. 82% of companies that use conversational marketing tools say that Chatbot’s are essential elements of their sales and marketing strategy.
  7. 17% of businesses want to achieve their marketing and lead generation goals using chatbot’s. (Tidio)

Particularly in a B2C environment, Chatbot’s will increasingly come to integrate into every stage of the marketing and sales funnel in 2022 and beyond. What will be interesting to see is the expansion of chatbot’s into the Middle and Top levels of the marketing funnel to assist customers with their questions relating to the consideration and decision-making part of the customer journey.


4. Social media and messaging

Social media is changing how people communicate, influencing the frequency, time, and duration of interactions. Their new communication habits translate into new ways to reach out to businesses. This shift became a real challenge for brands and chatbot’s help face it.

  1. 1.4 billion People use messaging applications and are eager to communicate with chatbot’s and 55% of consumers are willing to interact with a business via messaging apps to solve a problem. (HubSpot)
  2. According to Statista YouTube (62%) and Facebook (61%), and Whatsapp (52%) are the most popular social networks.
  3. A survey conducted by Business Insider states that Conversations between brands and customers via Facebook Messenger have a 30% better ROI than retargeting ads.

5. Benefits for business in sales

The trends show customers jump from one channel to another while searching for products. This means that the more touch points you offer, the greater the chance the customer will stumble upon your offer and select your products.

Customers expect brands to respond to their sales inquiries instantly, and chatbot’s can help achieve that goal.

Statistics show that Brands have started reaping the benefits from their chatbot’s already as:

  1. 41% of all business chatbot’s are used for sales purposes. (Intercom)
  2. 35% of business leaders declare that virtual agents made it easier to close sales deals. (Intercom)

    3. 67% of US millennial’s are willing to buy from providers that offer chatbot support.

According to Rakesh Reddy Chairman and CEO of Acuvate Software of LinkedIn and Roman V. Yampolskiy an Associate Professor, University of Louisville the power of chatbot’s will increase exponentially in the coming months and years, performing many more tasks, answering many more queries for the ease of the user. From spotting the right products to buying and using the product at ease, chatbot’s will start personalizing responses by understanding preferences, conditions and recommending the right products and best places to buy.


6. Voice

Chatbot’s need to become more “human”. Even really well designed, smart, AI-driven chatbot’s can be boring, if they are only text based.

2022 will likely usher in real advances in the convergence of voice and VR with text.

Brands such as Google and Amazon fuel the voice trend by creating more personalized and approachable interfaces and many others are following in their footsteps.

  1. 16% of Americans have used voice assistants like Alexa or Google Home for shopping. (Chatbot’s)
  2. 20% of searches in the Google App are now done by voice. (Think with Google)
  3. 43% of voice device owners use it to shop. (Review42).
  4. The most popular voice searches on smart speakers are asking for music (70%), the weather forecast (64%), fun questions (53%), online search (47%), news (46%), and directions (34%). (Adobe)
  5. 28% of consumers call a local business after doing a voice search. (BrightLocal)

7. Chatbot industry & AI technology forecast

Chatbot’s have become well established in customer communication, though companies are still learning how to make the most of them.

  1. By 2023, chatbot’s are to save banking, healthcare, and retail sectors up to $11 billion annually. (Business Insider)
  2. Over 50% of enterprise companies are predicted to spend more money on chatbot development than on mobile app creations by 2021. (Gartner)
  3. 25% of travel and hospitality companies worldwide use chatbot’s to enable users to make general inquiries or complete bookings. (Statista)
  4. 23% of customer service organizations are using AI chatbot’s as their brand communication channel. (Salesforce)
  5. The worldwide chatbot market has been divided into Marketing, AI, and Human Intelligence. Marketing is predicted to get the most significant market share, growing at a CAGR of 23.7% by 2030.

If the predictions are accurate, retail spend on Chatbot’s is expected to exceed $140 billion by 2024. This investment in AI tech by retail is primarily focused on reducing customer friction, leading to memorable experiences.

Companies that are successfully delivering world class digital experiences listen to their customers and their customer service agents to find those business processes that could be easily handled by AI while allowing the workforce to have more meaningful engagements with the customers.

Encouraging customers to shoulder routine tasks like Q&A, tech support, product registrations, and appointment scheduling allows employees to focus on higher-value work. This approach is attractive because it promises a permanent reduction in labor costs.

In 2022, the use of chatbot does expand into areas where they can help the company create more value for their customers. The more value chatbot’s create for customers, the more valuable they are to a company’s brand.


The Conclusion:

Chatbot’s have become a part of our expected experiences as customers. It is crucial that organizations create internal Customer Experience teams working hand in hand with employee and customer experience experts for an external perspective to ensure as much of a natural real ‘human conversation’ as possible with the chatbot’s.

If deployed correctly, the convenience and accessibility of chatbot’s could transform customer experience in 2022 in the most positive ways.