Applications
Although chatbots have been under development for at least a few decades, they did not become mainstream channels for customer engagement until recently. Over the past two years, due to serious efforts by industry giants like Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, IBM, and Amazon, and their subsequent investments in developing toolkits, chatbots and conversational interfaces have become a serious contender to other customer contact channels. In this time, chatbots have been applied in various sectors and various conversational scenarios within these sectors: retail, banking and finance, governmental, health, legal and third sector, and many more.
In retail, chatbots have been applied for product marketing, brand engagement, product assistance, sales, and support conversations. Brand-engagement chatbots offer tips and advice to loyal customers of a brand related to the use of products sold by the brand. For instance, Sephora chatbot advises users on how to select their ideal lipstick. Similarly, TK-Maxx chatbot assisted users in choosing gifts for their friends and family during Christmas 2016. One of the first retailers to explore chatbots for sales was H&M. The H&M chatbot helped users browse through the product catalogue and add products to their shopping carts. Car manufacturers like Tesla, Kia, and Mercerdes have developed chatbots that can help car users with information regarding their cars.
Chatbots have been very successful in the banking and finance industry. Banking was one of the first sectors that experimented with conversational interfaces. Banking chatbots can answer generic questions about financial products, secure banking, and so on, along with providing specific and personalized information about user's accounts. Many global banks and financial service providers including Bank of America, ICICI bank, HSBC, Royal Bank of Scotland, Capital One, Mastercard, and so on have deployed chatbots to assist their customers. Many fintech companies are building chatbots that can act as financial assistant to users. Ernest.ai and Cleo are chatbots that can link to your bank accounts and talk to you about your spending, balances, and also provide tips to save money. Chatbots are also being widely deployed in the insurance sector, where they act as assistants that can get you tailored quotes (for example, SPIXII).
Chatbots are also being used in legal, health, governmental, and third sectors. A chatbot called DoNotPay has assisted people to challenge parking tickets in London and New York in over 160,000 cases. Following this, more chatbots have been developed to help people access justice and legal services: assessment of crime (LawBot), business incorporation (LawDroid), help tenants (RentersUnion), help with legal questions and documentation (Lisa, LegaliBot, Lexi, DocuBot), and find lawyers (BillyBot).
In the third sector, chatbots have been used to spread awareness of issues that charities care about. Stoptober is a Facebook chatbot that was developed by the National Health Services (NHS) in the UK to help smokers quit. Another chatbot, Yeshi, was developed to draw awareness to Ethiopia's water crisis. Chatbots are beginning to make their entry into healthcare as well. Chatbots like Your.MD and HealthTap were designed to diagnose health issues based on symptoms. Emily is a chatbot designed by LifeFolder to help make the end of life decisions (for example, legal documentation, life support, organ donation, and many more).
Chatbots are not only being used to be customer facing but also internally, to face employees. Chatbots, in a sense, are becoming coworkers by helping fellow employees with tasks that are repetitive, mundane, and boring. Messaging services such as Slack and Microsoft Teams have been encouraging chatbots on their platforms to automate office communication. These bots aim to engage coworkers in chat on fun and essential tasks. For instance, there are bots to help coworkers share knowledge (Obie.ai), access other services such as GDrive (WorkBot), set up meetings (Meekan), discuss lunch (LunchTrain), and even help with decision making (ConcludeBot, SimplePoll).
If you are interested in finding out more use cases, I would recommend you to take a look at some of the bot directory services like botlist.co and www.chatbots.org, where you can find more information and inspiration.