You may know this already: the adoption of chatbots has been steadily on the rise for years now, as they’ve been helping businesses — not only increase conversions and sales — but also improve customer experience and customer satisfaction.
If you’re curious about the state of chatbots, we have shortlisted 33 chatbot statistics and trends to give you an idea of what a chatbot can do for your business.
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What is the future of chatbots?
According to research, the global conversational AI market size is expected to grow from $4.8 billion in 2020 to $13.9 billion by 2025, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 21.9 percent.
So, in 2021 and the years to follow, the prevalence of chatbots will increase significantly, not least because the necessity of any business having a digital presence became obvious during the pandemic. Customers have also embraced online shopping and transactions more than ever before, and will expect online service — automating online help will increase efficiency and improve service.
Now, let’s see the chatbot statistics and trends.
33 chatbot statistics and trends
1. By 2022, 70 percent of white-collar workers will interact with conversational platforms daily. (Gartner)
2. The global chatbot market size was estimated at $430.9 million in 2020 and is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 24.9 percent from 2021 to 2028. (GrandView Research)
3. By 2023, Juniper forecasts that over 50 percent of the chatbots accessed will be through discrete apps, with complete bot integration overturning the makeup of current app functionality. (Juniper Research)
4. In 2019, there were over 40 million active businesses messaging people across the globe, exchanging over 20 billion messages each month. (Messenger News)
5. According to predictions, in 2021, at least 50 percent of enterprises will spend more per annum on bots and chatbot creation than traditional mobile app development. (Gartner)
6. The projected value of ecommerce transactions through chatbots by 2023 will be $112 billion (Juniper Research)
7. In a 2019 CIO Survey, respondents identified chatbots as the main AI-based application used in their enterprises. (Gartner)
8. Seventy-seven percent of customers say chatbots will transform their expectations of companies in the next five years. (Salesforce)
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Why do customers love chatbots?
9. Ninety percent of customers rate an "immediate" response as important or very important when they have a customer service question. Sixty percent of customers define "immediate" as 10 minutes or less. (HubSpot Research)
10. Sixty-five percent of people believe that customer service that uses chatbots will perform better at friendliness and ease of use, 62 percent at speed, and 55 percent at effectiveness and accuracy. (Aspect)
11. Forty percent of shoppers don't care if they're helped by an AI tool or a human, as long as their question gets answered. (Hubspot)
12. Sixty-nine percent of consumers like using chatbots because of their ability to provide quick replies to simple questions. (Chatbots Magazine)
13. Forty percent of c-commerce (collaborative commerce) buyers surveyed globally say that chat was how they first started shopping online. (Facebook IQ)
14. Eighty percent of people who have interacted with a chatbot say the experience was generally positive, but 36 percent of consumers think chatbot accuracy needs to improve (Uberall)
15. Nearly one-quarter (22 percent) of respondents said they trust chatbot recommendations for product purchases. (Cognizant)
Benefits of chatbots for business
16. Businesses spend $1.3 trillion on 265 billion customer service calls they receive each year, and chatbots can help bring down these costs by 30 percent. (IBM)
17. Fifty-six percent of companies say conversational bots drive disruption in their industry, and 43 percent report their competitors are already implementing the technology. (Accenture)
18. Virtual customer assistants help organizations reduce call, chat, and email inquiries by up to 70 percent. (Gartner)
19. Sixty-three percent of consumers believe businesses should be on Messenger (Chatbots Life)
Chatbot industry statistics
20. By 2023, the banking, retail, and healthcare sectors will save 2.5 billion customer service hours by adopting chatbots. (Juniper Research)
21. Chatbots will save banking, retail, and healthcare industries $11 billion annually by 2023. (Juniper Research)
22. Two-thirds of surveyed bank customers felt that an AI-powered chatbot would be useful in assisting them and 44 percent would rather communicate with a chatbot than a real person, assuming it could answer their questions as reliably as a live agent. (Humley)
23. The top five industries profiting from the incorporation of chatbots are real estate (28 percent), travel (16 percent), education (14 percent), healthcare (10 percent), and finance (5 percent) (collect.chat)
Global chatbot adoption statistics
24. USA, India, Germany, the UK, and Brazil were the top five countries for chatbot use from 2017 to 2019. (Collect Chat)
25. Eighty-two percent of Indian customers surveyed have messaged a business to make a purchase or reservation. (Facebook)
26. In 2019, consumers in Australia, the UK, and France reported the highest levels of chatbot usage, with more than 70 percent of respondents having used one to interact with a brand in the past year; the US and Germany are just over 50 percent. (LivePerson)
Why a chatbot is a customer service agent's best friend
27. Ninety-five percent of customers believe that "customer service" is going to be the major beneficiary of chatbots. (Invesp)
28. Ninety percent of businesses have recorded quicker complaint resolution after using chatbots. (MIT Technology Review)
29. The AI-powered conversational agents can address up to 80 percent of commonly asked Tier 1 support questions. (IBM)
30. Sixty-four percent of agents with AI chatbots are able to spend most of their time solving complex problems, versus 50 percent of agents without AI chatbots. (Salesforce)
Chatbot trends to watch
1. Increasing adoption of chatbots
We said it before, but we’ll say it again: the chatbot market is on the rise. This means more and more businesses will deploy chatbots in the next few years, especially via messaging apps or social media platforms (remember Facebook once said there were over 300,000 bots on Messenger alone). Customer awareness of artificial intelligence tech in customer service is also expected to rise.
This means that simply having conversational AI won’t make a business competitive, but it’ll be rather a way to keep up with competition. The real competitive advantage will lie with how well chatbots work for improving customer experience.
2. Chatbot technology will become more advanced
With machine learning, natural language processing (NLP), and deep learning getting more and more powerful, so will chatbots. Much of the conversational AI out there can already learn on the go when conversing with customers — and its abilities will keep improving. This will not only make bots better at customer engagement, but it will also enable service teams to get more insight on customer behavior.
Also, the ability to understand voice commands and synthesize speech already exists with the more advanced AI, like Siri or Alexa. This technology may also be used in voice bots for customer service, enabling better accessibility and convenience.
It’ll also be interesting to see if businesses start adopting gesture recognition technology paired with chatbots (e.g. in mobile apps).
3. Chatbots will be part of bigger solutions
AI chatbots are often used as a standalone solution or alongside a live chat app. But, with omnichannel trends telling us that businesses will increasingly try to unify customer touchpoints and data, chatbots will also become part of a whole customer support framework.
For example, chatbots are highly compatible with knowledge bases and help centers — they can instantly deliver resources like how-to articles, use cases, case studies, and more to customers. Bots can also work with live chat, video chat, cobrowsing, and email.
It’s all for customers
Even without our collection of chatbot statistics and chatbot trends, you could bet your money that customers want an easy, quick, and effortless customer experience. And chatbots offer a lot of what customers need — streamlining service, responding almost immediately and being available 24/7 to cater to customers.
Although we have a long way to go to perfect the function and understanding of chatbots, people welcome their possibilities. Implementing or improving customer service chatbots may be the next big thing for your customer experience.