Robot-concierge at the hotel lobby, voice assistants at “smart” hotel rooms, messenger-based chatbots of hotels, restaurants, leisure companies, and travel agencies – they were already common before Covid-19 at such global chains as Marriott, Hilton, Shangri-La Hotels & Resorts, Four Seasons Hotels & Resorts, Domino’s Pizza, Pizza Hut, TacoBell, Burger King and others. Covid-19 did not bring the need for automation, digitization, and robotization to the tourism industry. It only forced the adoption and sped up trends, behavior, habits, and technology usage that were already here in the past years.

The oldest operating hotel in the world according to Guinness World Records is 1300 years old – Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan Hotel in Japan. The hotel has been owned by the same family for 52 generations. Many people, from famous samurai to celebrities and politicians, have visited the hotel from the year 705 until today. Although it is famous for its world record, history, healing hot springs, delicate luxury, and proximity to Mount Fuji, the hotel has a website. This sounds so natural, which hotel doesn’t have a website in the 21st century. Without a website, you do not exist for customers who today are digitally oriented beings that are obsessed with their phones.

The world is moving towards a cookie-less future. A cookieless world is an online world without any third-party cookies being used in it. A cookieless world would eliminate the widely used targeted advertising, tailored content, and tracking of users across multiple sites. Targeting, selling and buying – the whole advertising processes will be generally changed in the cookieless world, especially the targeted marketing campaigns and optimizations. There still be platforms for advertisers to target customers in new ways that comply with the laws, but they are still in the phase of testing. What the business could do immediately to prepare and adjust its sales and marketing strategies and operations is to focus on first party and zero-party data collection and to invest in tools that deliver it such as chatbots, email platforms and others.

Are you considering implementing an AI chatbot on your business website? The website is the most important place of the business’s digital presence, and it is quite essential to be designed well with clear information and an easy-to-navigate interface. Implementing a chatbot with or without AI will upgrade your website so visitors will not only find out information more easily about the company, its products, and services but also get their questions always answered.

You have a chatbot with or without AI and now what? Once you have designed it and implemented it, the only thing left to be done it to show it to the world! So now is the time to promote and popularize it to your customers and everyone who will use it for them to learn about its existence, have immediate access to it and start using it!

Preparation is an essential step in any project, AI chatbot projects are not exception. Planning will help you think about what you need to do before the project starts and make sure that everything is in place for it to go smoothly. A good preparation process will also help you understand what kind of resources are needed in order to create a successful chatbot, how much time it will take and if there are any legal implications that need to be considered.

With the rise of new technologies, we are seeing a surge in the number of chatbots being used in the execution of marketing strategies. AI chatbots are definitely in the future of marketing automation. AI chatbots are not only for automation of repetitive tasks, but they also provide an excellent marketing opportunity for businesses looking to reach new customers and engage the existing ones.

AI chatbots have been used in sales for a long time. Using chatbots for sales and marketing has been the 2nd most popular chatbot purpose after customer service and support, followed by order automation on 3rd place. Chatbots are a cost-effective way to automate the sales process and provide immediate customer service for your customers.

Did you know that customer service is one of the most expensive aspects of any business? For most companies, salaries are usually the largest expenses for a business. People can easily account for 70% of the company’s spending. Customer service and support depends on the time of the employees, yet up to 80% of the questions and tasks that are handled are routine. Customer service cost can get as high as 25% of annual revenues of the business. That’s a huge chunk of the business budget that could be reduced by implementing an AI chatbot!

AI chatbots have long been known and used by large enterprises and small businesses in different countries. Although the first chatbot was created in 1966 and the technology has been used by businesses for 20 years, in Bulgaria many people have not heard of chatbots. Others do not know enough about this technology and its progress and cannot trust it yet. The good news is that in Bulgaria there are businesses and organizations that have been using it for years and rely on the long-term potential of the development of this technology.

The AI chatbot has been helping companies from a variety of industries for decades. The first chatbot, created by Joseph Weisenbaum in 1966, ELISA worked as a psychotherapist. Today, artificial intelligence chatbots are popular globally not only because they communicate very well with people, but also because they help small and large businesses save time and resources to achieve better results in many ways.

Before the pandemic AI chatbots were mainly known as a digital marketing tool and were used for marketing campaigns to engage with customers and collect customer information such as email, phone and more. Globally, in the last few years, banks, insurance companies, medical sector, tourism industry, real estate, governments, and others started using AI chatbots as tools for business development strategies and competitiveness.