As per a Business Insider report, consumer retail spends via chatbots worldwide will reach $142 billion by 2024, —up from just $2.8 billion in 2019.
Besides retail, digital consumers are demanding around-the-clock service for assistance in areas ranging from banking and finance to health and wellness. Because of this demand, chatbots are increasing in popularity among businesses and consumers alike.
Why do we need bots in our digital transformation? We need them because they are:
- Intelligent
- Engaging and Effective
- Available 24/7
Digital transformation has given various technologies and platforms to build bots for different purposes and with multiple objectives.
A few essential bots we have seen in the past decade getting acknowledged, used, and optimised are:
- Chatbots: These bots are focused on conversations with humans. The objective is to reduce human dependence by training the bot to bring human behaviour and personality into communication. These bots are used in Customer Support, HR & Admin Support, Line of Business Support, etc. Wherever there is mundane conversation based on rules, past information, trends and learning, we can adapt and implement chatbots effectively. These bots are found doing front desk jobs for many functions and processes.
- Crawler bots: As opposed to chatbots, bots like crawlers work continuously in the background. Their main objective is to fetch data from various sources like APIs or websites continuously. The bots are “good” bots that pull the required data with the guidelines and directives given.
- Transactional bots: These bots are well-known under RPA and BPA technologies. These bots work in the background with humans’ help to perform repetitive, mundane, and volume tasks. They work across systems as and when needed as per the design of the bots. Some of the everyday tasks performed by such bots are: interacting with external systems to accomplish a specific transaction and moving data from one platform to another.
- Informational bots: These bots are referred to as self-service bots. We have seen self-service portals and knowledge management systems to help customers, and employees get common and standard information (from time to time) as and when required. Such bots are used for push notifications, changes, breaking news, announcements, important events, etc.
As bots and automation became mainstream in the current digital transformation, we have seen bots categorised into generalised bots and custom (specialist) bots. Bot platforms started playing an important role in adoption and growth. The term “Bot Platform” is sometimes used interchangeably with “Bot Development Framework“. Development frameworks (e.g., Microsoft Bot Framework, Howdy’s Botkit, Dexter, etc.) are where bots are built and where their behaviour, action, and key objectives are defined.
Rocket Chatbot
Rocket.Chat is an open-source team communication software that offers an alternative to remote communication by replacing the likes of email, HipChat, and Slack. Rocket.Chat positions itself as the ultimate open-source, compliant, customisable, and scalable communication platform.
Here are a few essential features offered by Rocket.Chat:
· Unlimited: Rocket.Chat has the provision for unlimited users, channels, searches, messages, guests, and file uploads.
· Authentication mechanism: It offers different authentication mechanisms like LDAP Group Sync, 2-factor authentication, end-to-end encryption, single sign-on, and dozens of OAuth providers.
· Real-time Chat: Its Live Chat feature allows you to add real-time chat widgets to any site or mobile application. This feature brings more efficiency to team communication and also ensures top-notch customer service.
· Message translation: It utilises machine learning for automatically translating messages in real-time.
· Use across platforms: It can be leveraged for all the platforms with its web, desktop and mobile applications, LiveChat clients, and SDK (Software Development Kit).
· Marvellous customisation: You can alter it to meet your requirements. Incoming and outgoing WebHook integrations can be added to it. The personalisation of user interface can be performed by overriding any of the built-in styles. You get to extract the benefits of its REST API, LiveChat API, or Real-time API.
To view Rocket-chat Pricing and offers, click here
Various solutions built and made available by Rocket.Chat
- Devops
- Omnichannel
- Team Collaboration
- Security
- Remote Work
- Small & Medium Businesses
- Virtual Conference
- Education
zCon experience with Rocket.Chat and comparison with other platforms
| High-Level Requirements | Chatwee | CometChat Go | CometChat Pro | Rocket.Chat |
| Use of Handler | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| SSO | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Member list will be denoted with their handler only | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Admin to set up chat groups | Yes (From their dashboard) | Not sure (Anyone can create group) | Yes | Yes (User could also create group) |
| Admin to see list of all members | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes (in admin panel) |
| Admin to have option to ban member permanently with Notes | Yes (No notes option) | Yes (Notes to be stored on our system) | Yes (Notes to be stored on our system) | Yes (Notes to be stored on our system) |
| Admin to have option to ban member temporarily with end date and notes | Yes (For 15 mins, no notes option) | Yes (We will have to manage entire flow, they provide API to ban and unban) | Yes (We will have to manage entire flow, they provide API to ban and unban) | Yes (Notes to be stored on our system) |
| Remove a member from the group | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Add a member to a group | No (Auto join or password based) | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Manage read/write access | Yes (Guest users can be given read only access) | Yes (Roles are defined, functionality not available for “lite” version) | Yes (Roles are defined, will need to customize at UI level) | Yes |
| Member to Member individual chat | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Group message moderation | Limited (Have to authorise each and every message) | Not sure | Not sure | Not sure |
| Hosting | Cloud hosted | Cloud hosted | Cloud hosted | Internally hosted |
| Integration difficulty | Easy | Easy | Medium | Medium |
| UI customisation | Themes available for widget | Themes available for widget | Need to build UI | Yes, but complex (meteor.js) |
zCon Technical Blog 