Chatbots will save the customer service industry over $8bn by 2022
- Tuesday, May 9th, 2017
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Chatbots are set to save the customer service industry over $8bn (£6.2bn) by 2022, up from just $20m this year, with the healthcare and banking sectors benefitting the most.
According to a study from Hampshire-based analyst Juniper Research, the banking sector is most suited to an immediate rollout of chatbots compared to other industries because banking queries tend to be more linear and simple. Juniper forecasts there will be an over 90 per cent success rate of bot interactions within the sector in 2022.
Furthermore, the healthcare sector can benefit from chatbots by reducing the strain on staff – saving time and money – and provide immediate diagnosis. Juniper believes the success rate of bot interactions within healthcare will move from 12 per cent currently to over 75 per cent by 2022.
“We believe that healthcare and banking providers using bots can expect average time savings of just over four minutes per enquiry, equating to average cost savings in the range of $0.50-$0.70 per interaction,” said research author Lauren Foye. “As Artificial Intelligence advances, reducing reliance on human representatives undoubtedly spells job losses.”
Juniper also expects SMS chatbots, though generating less revenues than app-based bots, to offer a universal messaging service for the likes of governments in times of emergency. In addition, Juniper says that application-to-person (A2P) messaging providers will adopt chatbots to offer information to consumers, predicting there will be more than 100bn interactions by 2022.