Businesses Moving To Chatbots, AI; Away From Mobile Apps

A quarter of customer service and support operations will include virtual customer assistant or chatbot technology within two years, an increase from less than 2% last year, according to recent predictions from Gartner.

More than half of businesses already have invested in virtual customer assistants for customer service, according to the research firm.

"As more customers engage on digital channels, VCAs are being implemented for handling customer requests on websites, mobile apps, consumer messaging apps and social networks," stated Gene Alvarez, managing vice president at Gartner. “This is underpinned by improvements in natural-language processing, machine learning and intent-matching capabilities.”

Gartner made additional predictions for the next two years. Among them:

  • By 2020, 30% of all B2B companies will employ artificial intelligence
  • By next year, 20% of brands will abandon their mobile apps
  • More than 40% of all data analytics projects will relate to an aspect of customer service by 2020
  • Augmented, virtual and mixed reality immersive solutions will be adopted in 20% of large companies as part of their digital transformation strategy by 2020

After implementing virtual customer assistant technology, businesses report a reduction of 70% in call, chat or email inquiries, according to Gartner.

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