A Look at Chatbot Software Outsourcing Trends

The rise of chatbots

Chatbots are incredibly popular, especially among companies looking for a better customer experience. Chatbots are now relevant in most major industries. Advances in their accuracy, usability, and accessibility make them more useful than ever for businesses. Studies suggest that chatbots will be engaged in 85% of all types of business-to-customer interactions by 2020, and the global chatbot market will reach $1.23 billion by 2025. With the industry expecting such prolific growth, many companies are looking to outsource their development services, and the market for making it is competitive.

Chatbot uses

Chatbots are available all day, every day, without the need for breaks, vacations, sick days, or anything else that their human counterparts require. They are also much better at performing repetitive tasks that would otherwise require a paid employee. This, along with their reliability and accuracy, makes them ideal for handling online customer interactions. And in today's market, that means messaging apps.

By 2019, more than 25% of the world's population will use mobile messaging apps. Chatbots are increasingly used in this area, rather than through websites or telephone services, and it's not hard to see why. Consumers trust Live Chat to interact with many businesses, but currently, 21% of live chat conversations go unanswered. Calls that employees answer have a typical wait time of more than three minutes. In an era of expected instant gratification, this drives customers away. Chatbots solve this problem by providing scalable, immediate, and reliable customer service for use in any medium, but especially in messaging apps.

Outsourcing development services

As many companies deploy or plan to deploy chatbots, the software outsourcing market for chatbot development is flourishing. Outsourcing is popular for a few key reasons:

• Saves time in development
• Provides access to advanced technology and a core team of qualified experts
• Does not require extra company resources
• Less overall risk to the company

Chatbot development services are provided by third-party companies that offer the advanced programming and structured maintenance required. Choosing the right software outsourcing company, however, is not a simple task. Any company looking to hire a team to meet its chatbot needs should consider:

1. What are the required bot features?
2. What is the budget?
3. What are the technical capabilities of current staff?

With the answers to these three questions, any company can narrow the outsourcing market to only those who provide applicable services.

Outsourcing Technical Aspects of Chatbots

Outsourcing chatbot development services doesn’t have to be a one-size-fits-all solution. Individual aspects of chatbot development can be outsourced depending on the company's needs and skills. Below, we detail some of the main technical possibilities for chatbot development.

Natural Language Toolkit

What?

The Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) is a set of programs and libraries for symbolic and statistical natural language processing (NLP). It is written in English, for Python. NLTK includes graphical demonstrations and sample data and is accompanied by a book that explains the concepts underlying the language processing tasks supported by the toolkit.

Who?

There are many Python-based chatbot providers, including IBM Watson Conversation Service, rasa NLU, Microsoft's LUIS, Pandorabots, and ChatterBot.

Why?

Python is an incredibly versatile tool. It is also one of the easiest languages ​​to learn for a beginner, thanks to its consistent syntax and human-like language patterns. These characteristics ensured that when Python was first released, it was applied to a wide range of cases while expanding its reach into scientific computing. This has resulted in the creation of a wide range of open source libraries that have benefited from years of development.

Developers wrote the progenitor of NLP integration in Python, and the release of NLTK in 2001, five years ahead of its closest competitor, secured its position as a comprehensive resource for helping chatbots utilize the best functions of NLP.

Python development outsourcing

Outsourcing Python-based chatbot development can save a company crucial time and money. There are three stages of chatbot development: implementation, integration, and administration. It would take a software outsourcing company about 14 weeks to complete these three steps, and this is based on a 40-hour week for its developers. Costs depend on the type of chatbot, but the range is $25 to $100 per hour.

While such a high fee for three and a half months may seem like a lot, this is much less compared to paying a developer's full-time salary to work in-house. And cost isn't the only factor here; Finding qualified AI developers is a huge challenge.

JavaScript

What?

Another option for chatbot development, JavaScript (JS) is a high-level interpreted programming language. JavaScript is dynamic, weakly typed, prototype-based, and multi-paradigm.

Who?

The second most popular language after Python for bot development, several providers offer JS-based (or partially JS-based) solutions. Among them are Stanford NLP, Apache Open NLP, and Microsoft's LUIS. Stanford and Apache solutions support chatbot development through tooling or when calls originate through APIs.

Why?

JS proponents swear by it for its simple parsing and fast processing time, and many argue that its features are more than sufficient for simple chatbots. It contains several libraries including ML packages such as Weka . Python suffers from a lack of clarity, making the search for answers similar to finding a needle in a haystack, while JS has a huge volume of documentation to support it.

As a long-established language, JS has a lot of information and clear examples available. Ambiguity in a programming language is not beneficial to ensuring chatbot accuracy, and JS helps resolve this issue. However, Weka struggles compared to Python in terms of level of support and versatility.

JavaScript Outsourcing

In addition to the time and financial constraints of building an effective chatbot, complexity is an additional reason to outsource JS chatbot development. JS cannot be easily learned on the job by a non-technical person, and finding qualified developers is difficult. This makes outsourcing often the only reasonable choice.

AI Trends in Chatbots

Developments in NLP mean that machines can understand human language as it is spoken or typed, and NLP is one of the key components of artificial intelligence (AI). Consider how complex programming instructions need to be and how imprecise human language often is. Humans rely on their ability to interpret meaning from context, as well as understand local variations, accents, slang, and dialects.

While NLP is still far from perfect, ML algorithms ensure that we are getting closer and closer to a point where it will be impossible to tell whether we are talking to a human or a computer. These algorithms monitor and extract insights from each conversation, learning how to be better next time. This adaptive capacity is what drives chatbots, so they too can learn from context and experience. So while it's possible to build a chatbot without using AI, all good chatbots rely on it.

Advantages of Conversational AI

There are many advantages to using conversational AI:

• Cross-platform integration
• Better engagement with users
• Better user experience and decision support
• Increased user attention

AI Outsourcing

The potential enterprise market for AI services, software and hardware is impressive. Forecasts point to $57.6 billion by 2021. But incorporating AI into an existing business can be a challenge, especially for large companies with complicated legacy systems. Outsourcing offers some important benefits that companies cannot ignore when considering a move into this field.

1. Access to Talent

Outsourcing provides access to global talent pools. AI data scientists earn seven-figure salaries and are highly sought after. Outsourcing offers the ability to tap into expert skill sets without costly expense or time spent hiring. Outsourcing companies help companies choose the appropriate technology for their organization more efficiently. And thanks to their experience, tried and tested models are faster to implement when compared to creating them in-house.

2. Low risk

Planning AI projects without prior experience can result in costly mistakes. External providers draw on experience to identify the right approach for each business. If an outsourced AI solution does not perform well, the cost and risk burden will be significantly lower than the in-house alternative. And if a project isn't working, the organization can abandon an external data company whenever necessary.

3. Lower costs

Trying to replicate the scale of previous data and knowledge in this field is a huge cost inefficiency, if it is possible at all. Outsourcing may be the only cost-effective way to access AI expertise.

Outsourcing non-technical aspects of chatbots

In addition to the technical aspects, companies can also outsource other aspects of chatbot development. Chatbot copy is the language through which your chatbot speaks, and businesses have the opportunity to personify their brand with clever copy. Their speech patterns, the words they use and how they respond to a request – in essence, the bot's personality – can be written by professionals and tailored to match the brand's core message. Outsourcing chatbot copy is critical to maintaining that unique voice while addressing fundamental functionality.

Focus on customer support trends

89% of users prefer information discovery through bots over information discovery through websites. Customer support is the number one area for chatbot success, and this comes in many forms:

Call centers

Unlike people, chatbots can scale on demand to handle any level of call volume. No call volume is too high, and as such, chatbots will eliminate wait times for consumers.

Customization

On traditional e-commerce sites, shoppers can select products but receive little to no advice. However, with chatbots, websites can advise consumers and help identify suitable products while shopping. This increases overall sales as well as customer satisfaction.

Accuracy and timeliness

Chatbots contain all the information they need, so there are no worries about the accuracy of the information, waiting for a human customer service representative to find the relevant information, or being unable to find the relevant information. Chatbots respond to customer needs faster and more reliably than ever before.

A high potential technology

There's no doubt that chatbots are revolutionizing the way companies interact with their customers (and, to some extent, each other). As with any new or emerging technology that threatens jobs, there is some concern that the rise of chatbots means the end of traditional roles, especially in sales, customer service and customer support. One study estimates that AI will impact 25% of all jobs by 2019.

But there is hope for humans. As menial and repetitive tasks become automated, more creative roles become necessary. This is especially true for those with well-developed “soft” skills such as leadership, teamwork and flexibility. For those willing to adapt, a future with more interesting and rewarding roles is not far away.

Businesses will also need to adapt as chatbots and the use of AI in all aspects of life increase. Those who are slow to develop their technological capabilities, or who are unwilling to change the way they interact with customers, will suffer the consequences of falling behind. Consumers opt for the easiest, most user-friendly interface, and that now means well-executed chatbots. Companies that cannot provide the same immediate, accurate and personalized service as their rivals will not last long.