Virtual assistants or chatbots are becoming one of the preferred resources for companies in order to optimize their commercial attention. The increasing degree of refinement of these tools, which allows part of customer queries to be automated without suffering their attention, is increasing their adoption.
This will have a direct impact on sales, as noted analyst firm Juniper Research. The forecasts for this company indicate that there will be an average annual increase of 400% in the volume of invoicing that enters via chatbots between 2020 and 2024. Thus, it will go from entering 2,800 million dollars by this route in the accumulated of this year to the 142,000 million dollars that will be invoiced in 2024.
Within the spending forecast for 2024 in these systems, 80% will be related to what Juniper calls “discrete” chatbots, assistants that are directly embedded in a retailer’s mobile application and prevent access through a browser or a messaging application. They are popular because they give organizations control over development and the ability to retain their brand.
By region, 70% of chatbots will be located in the areas of China and the Far East. In the first country alone, more than 80,000 million dollars will be generated through virtual assistants, more than 55% of the total. However, in the context of total spending via mobile or online, billing through chatbots will only represent 4%.
Natural language comprehension technologies, or NLUs, will play an essential role in this promotion. According to Juniper Research, retail will be a key beneficiary of the advantages this tool provides in order to establish chatbots as a reliable sales channel. As development progresses, the processing of human interactions and the generation of accurate automatic responses will be refined.
Thus, this greater effectiveness will determine that more than half of the interactions with chatbots in retail will be successfully completed in 2024, without the need for a human agent to intervene.
