As per Global Market Insights, the overall market size for chatbots worldwide would be over $1.3 billion by 2024.
Gartner says Artificial Intelligence (AI) will be a mainstream customer experience investment in the next couple of years. 47% of organizations will use chatbots for customer care and 40% will deploy virtual assistants.
The top industries profiting from chatbots are real estate, travel, education, healthcare, and finance
Customers prefer business offering bot support. 47% of users are open to purchasing items through a bot.
Google Trends says that the search number using chatbots has increased by 19 times in the last 5 years.
40% of millennials use chatbots on a daily basis.
The AI based Chatbot and its Potential Market in India: An Overview on the Emerging Role of Chatbot in Education Industry
A chatbot is an artificial intelligence (AI) software equipped to converse in a spoken or written natural language based on pre-fed question answers. According to Google, already, 30 per cent of queries in India are voice-based.
The growth of Chatbots is positively impacting Education Industry in many ways. It is helping the sector in scaling and improving student interaction level, understanding their interests and informational need for developing robust query handling system and aligning resources accordingly.
Chatbots technology has evolved drastically over the period of time. It is fast becoming a preferred channel of managing customer relations. While the education sector is yet to utilize the full potential of chatbots, yet its growth has so far brought positive changes in the colleges and universities where it is being implemented.
Like most other countries, India too is widely using this upcoming technology in various industry sectors for building direct connect with customers. The technology is helping reduce average handling time of queries. Although most people in the country still prefer to talk to a live person instead of bots but the changing trend towards chatbots can surely be seen
Today, you log on to educational websites, most of them would have chatbots for creating an initial connect with their target audience. A majority of educational institutes see the benefits of using chatbots for enhancing customer service.
India has always been at the forefront of technology advancement and adoption. When it comes to chatbot, here also we are at par with global practices to compete and position.
Millenials today are very tech savy. The outcome of digital revolution, has been favourable for them. They are open to interact with digital assistants for an improved experience with chatbots. Major companies in India including e-commerce companies, banks, insurance firms, travel companies and educational institutes have already started implementing chatbots successfully.
Benefits of Using Chatbots in Education Industry
The most obvious benefit chatbots claim to offer in an educational set up is improving engagement across the entire communication cycle with prospects.
There are prospective students who love to strike a conversational chat through chatbots for getting the right personalised content. Chatbots for education industry are designed primarily for handling queries of young aspirants and guide them through appropriate information. Not only this, the technology also helps to capture leads and bucket them in pre-classified groups to identify customer segments. They provide conversational experience to millennials across digital platforms.
Related Blog: Future of Robotics Assistance In Higher Education
Through Chatbots, aspirants can get information about fees, courses application processes etc. Chatbots can be integrated with the search feature on the website and queries can be routed to human operators, if needed. Aspirants can ask for soft copy of the brochure, check their application status. Chatbots are expected to educate prospective students by providing a customized solution to their queries.
Armed with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology, this self-help customer interface helps build end-to-end connect with its users. Besides, it is easy to track usage performance of chatbots with the help of detailed analytics dashboard that these platforms provide. So, your college can actually analyse the level of customer satisfaction being achieved through chatbots.
Future of Chatbots in Education Industry: Challenges Facing Chatbot Market
For educational entities, chatbots will indeed be the next paradigm shift. However, the chatbot platform has still to go a long way. Although, the chatbot market in India is helping colleges and universities respond to the scale of queries generated yet it can still be better in terms of personalization of content.
Students are always looking for personalized interaction with the college with better outcomes. This is the basic challenge. How AI driven chatbots can be made more holistic to provide information based on user need. The success of chatbot will depend on its ability to interact in a more conversational style instead of type casted one.
Another thing, particularly in context of our country, can AI-based chatbots handle the ambiguity in Indian communication, where a single sentence can be delivered with multiple variations in slang, accents, interruptions, colloquial substitutions etc.?
Chatbots that are developed with a clear objective in mind backed with a need based design and architecture will surely strike better connect with the education market. Can chatbots solve linguistic barriers? Translation is not that simple. How to develop chatbots that interact fluently in vernacular conversations. However, as more and more institutions start using this technology and awareness about the product grows in the market, expectations from chatbots will also increase.
Speech experts need to fine tune the technology to suit young students. They need to park larger repository of spoken and written text to understand colloquial nuances and dialects. Furthermore, domain-specific chatbots must be designed with domain-specific words and phrases.
The ones that will succeed will need to start addressing all these challenges well in advance. They should be able to provide customized solutions as per the requirement of each and every institution. Only then, efficiency in outcomes can be achieved. The best product will be the one that meets user expectations across platforms.
Chatbots Concluded
Chatbots can be used to improve educational processes where information sharing, data collection and counselling is involved to facilitae decision making of aspirants. The bot should be able provide qualitative and quantitative inputs to the users for effective relationship building.
Chatbots platform are best suited for quick redressal of queries and customer grievances. Single-window interaction using chatbots can deeply enhance customer relationship management and lead nurturing efforts. They can reduce the overload on counselling teams especially during peak hours of admission season.
AI driven Chatbots can automate key processes of your institute such as query handling, verification of documents collected during admissions among others. They can be gateways to many other AI based interventions in the future. By using this technology, you can aim for cost-effectiveness in marketing budget, improve communication with your prospects, empower your admission workforce with insights and analytics and ensure error-free operations.
Indian education system is going through lot of positive changes using digital interventions. It is helping them transform conventional delivery of education services. Chatbots are a powerful tool in this direction. It is going to prove itself as an important asset for the growth of colleges and universities. With its smart use the education industry is bound to improve outcomes across all levels.
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