The intelligent chatbot captures the customer’s identity, attributes, and engagement data, and any feedback the customer provides — all in real time.

For example, the chatbot determines:

• Date, time, physical location, and device information
• Whether the customer is on the web or a mobile app
• Whether the customer requested to engage with a chatbot or received a proactive invitation
• Where the customer was on the website or mobile app when he or she began the interaction with the chatbot

Using data such as customer profile and preferences, value to the company, location, industry and amount of money spent in the past year gives the chatbot more insights about the customer. This data is gathered from various sources and is typically available in customer relationship management (CRM) systems.

The chatbot develops an understanding of what the customer wants/needs by combining all the data signals. This helps make the conversation contextual and more natural when the customer engages the chatbot.

Customers can invoke chatbots themselves when they need assistance, or chatbots can proactively engage customers.

The chatbot takes each message written or each utterance spoken and runs it through natural language models to understand what the customer said. This interaction is contextual and personalised to the customer. The chatbot achieves this by leveraging information such as the web page the customer was on when they engaged with the chatbot and their customer profile. For example, if a customer is on a bank’s website looking at a page on mortgages and asks the chatbot what the interest rate is, the chatbot will know the customer is asking about the interest rate for mortgages.

Once the chatbot understands the customer’s intent, the response- matching algorithm determines the correct response and assembles it from knowledge bases and CRM systems.

If the customer provides feedback that he or she is satisfied with the chatbot response, the chatbot closes that intent and waits for a new intent. If the customer requests the chatbot to help “pay my credit card bill,” for example, the chatbot will determine the appropriate follow-up actions such as asking the customer for a password and then completing the transaction.