How e-Commerce Chatbots can Transform Any Business Date:   Tuesday , February 21, 2017 Headquartered in Bengaluru, niki.ai is an AI powered technology platform that leverages natural language processing and machine learning technologies to converse with the users over a simple chat interface, and processes their orders with its partner businesses within seconds. Chatbots are becoming the next big thing in the Mobile world. Customer service is becoming really fast paced and consumers do not have much time; they want their answers immediately. If the company fails to provide the attention that their customer is seeking for, they would quickly opt for any of your competitors. Customers also demand personalized recommendations to help them discover services and products better. Hence, to keep up this intensive demand, companies need to have sufficient human capital. This is the void that chatbots are made to fill. These chatbots are basically applications that are designed to respond to conversational language. With the use of chatbots (aka messaging bots) companies have taken their part of customer interaction and interface to another level. Through these chatbots, companies can create various services such as online ordering, while making it all as simple and convenient as one might be actually conversing with a human. Since bots have the ability to interact with humans, they have opened new avenues for business that have call centers. The technology allows the businesses to automate their call centers and decrease the burden of massive hiring. For e-Commerce companies, call centers are an essential part. With the use of bots, companies can increase initial customer outreach and interaction, and in turn increase customer retention and satisfaction. A correct balance of bots and human capital can create most valuable combination possible for all the companies. The concept of bots is not something that has come up recently. It has been there since quite some time, but the reason why it is catching up so rapidly is the new developments made in the field of AI technology; the major developments being voice recognition and Natural Language Processing (NLP). To make it simple for anyone to understand what this actually means, we can say that in order to ensure that your computer understands what you mean, it needs to understand what you said. The answer to this has been made possible through voice recognition which involves a complex process such as audio sampling, speech recognition, recognition of individual sounds, and the ability to convert all of it into text. Now with the help of technology, this entire process has been simplified to such an extent that it no more feels like you are conversing with a machine. What comes next is NLP. Once the computer converts speech to text, it needs to understand what you mean so that it can reply or give an answer to your query. This process is called Natural Language Processing (NLP). Apart from aiding in the customer service, Chatbots are gradually being integrated by majority of mobile applications owing to its utility and convenience for the customers. For companies in various sectors, it is becoming very essential to have a seamless and interactive user interface for their mobile application. e-Commerce companies can let their customers browse and complete transactions on their app on chat. One of the most famous Indian startup in this field of conversational commerce is niki.ai, an AI powered chatbot that helps users shop on chat. These have two-way benefits, both for the company as well as the customer. For the customer, bots fill the gap by making user experience better by easing the ordering experience instant and simple. Companies who integrate these can have increased customer base owing to the better user engagement and enhanced app experience. By integrating chatbots, the companies will be able to keep up with the diverse and ever growing demands of their customers, without even spending exponentially on their customer service. Chatbots can transform the way companies work, owing to the immense amount of benefits. Many companies have already integrated bots into their apps and are witnessing growth. The reason it is not being very rapidly embraced by many is the investment that it requires. Apart from the investment factor, this integration is time consuming and is a resource hungry process. But now even this has a solution. Companies like Niki.ai have worked on a software development kit (SDK) that helps one to integrate the chatbot into their apps easily and instantly. Through the SDK, in less than three hours of integration effort, the partner company can replicate the entire transactional experience across services over a chat interface and add value to their consumers. To the businesses, it provides a plug and play technology that can be easily integrated everywhere including operating systems, on messaging platforms messenger, on whatsapp and on the brand\'s applications (app and web). The underlying idea is that the companies should not only come across just as a mere service provider, rather a knowledgeable friend too who can assist the customers, and make their interaction with the app as seamless as possible.