Chatbot in Malaysia: How does it impact your business?

Chatbot In Malaysia

Building chatbots for the region

Automate, Engage and Convert with Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Chatbot technology is no longer a stranger in most sectors in Malaysia. The adoption of this technology accelerated massively since 2016 globally.

By 2020, 80 percent of businesses intend to build a chatbot to serve their customers, more so for brands with customer-facing products.

Chatbot in Malaysia

CIMB EVA appeared when one search for the term "first chatbot in Malaysia" on Google but we think there were a couple more a few years before EVA came about. Needless to say, Air Asia's AVA would have been one of the most used chatbot among fellow Malaysians to resolve common challenges such as flight cancellation, bookings, in-flight meals and so on.

Little innovation has been added to these popular chatbots since their implementation back in 2019. This forms the impression whereby AI Chatbot is a tech fad, which does not really address customers pain points effectively. This did not stop other companies such as PETRONAS Dagangan, PLUS, KLCC Convention Centre and more to leverage on this AI Chatbot technology for digital customer experience.

According to Yahoo Finance, Asia Pacific is expected to hold the largest Global AI Chatbots Market share from now until 2028 hence we will be seeing an increase in Malaysian small and mid-sized businesses integrating chatbots into their customer service processes.

Unconventional Chatbots in Malaysia

SKYE, the AI chatbot for KL CONVENTION CENTRE

Skye, The Centre’s virtual assistant, streamlines interactions between users and services, improving the experience for users. Skye assists users in choosing the right facility for specific events and captures feasible sales leads on behalf of the marketing team.

Affin Hwang appointed XIMNET Malaysia as the AI Chatbot Solution provider

NADIA, the ai chatbot for AFFIN HWANG AM

NADIA (Not Another Digital Investment Advisor) is one of the pioneering AI Chatbot solution in the financial industry. As the corporate website’s virtual assistant, NADIA is responsible for addressing the Call Centre’s FAQs such as check balance, latest transaction, and account details.

Petronas Dagangan Berhad has been our client since 2012. More about Petronas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petronas. Petronas Dagangan Berhad, Scope Of Work - Digital Strategy, Web Design, Web Application Development, API Integration works, Site Maintenance, XTOPIA Content Management System

MEVA, the AI chatbot for PETRONAS DAGANGAN

MeVA, MyMesra’s virtual agent is the first in the world that can switch between languages within the same conversation session. MeVA streamlines interactions between users and services, improving the experience for users throughout the whole conversion journey.

Should I use chatbot for my business? Let’s take a step back to go through some undeniably popular benefits of AI Chatbot for businesses:

Always-On

Instead of relying on a large group of 24/7 customer support agents, AI Chatbot is a fantastic way to provide around the clock support if you are serving customers across the globe. This technology allows us to automate repetitive tasks so live agents can assist more complex cases rather than spending most of the time addressing time consuming simple tasks.

Higher Conversion

AI Chatbot serves as a great addition to a website, especially for e-commerce. Customers can get quick facts from you in the decision-making process, making the overall buying experience much easier than before. With automation, AI Chatbot helps us to make orders or transactions possible without any human assistance.

“Ironically, a lot of people think that they’ve never used a chatbot, they’ve never experienced it, when in fact they have. Because Siri and Google and Alexa and all those voice-activated speaking bots, if you will, those are actually audio chatbots.”

— Kelly Noble Mirabella, Spiderworking

High Handling Capacity

From 10 to 100 questions at a time, an AI chatbot can answer them in fast and accurate manner. On top of that, customers who prefer to take their time in the evaluation process can freely ask as many questions as they want without feeling unwelcome.

Data & Insights

A huge advantage of using AI Chatbot is its ability to capture customer behaviour insights accurately. Data gives insights into how consumers interact with brands and products throughout the consumer decision journey. On top of that, other possible information such as demographic data and personal interests help companies learn who their customers are. Successful businesses use these inputs and respond by providing unconventional digital experiences to their customers.

Chatbots saw a 92% use increase since 2019, making it the brand communication channel with the largest growth.

— 2020 State of Conversational Marketing

So, how exactly should businesses leverage AI chatbot technology?

There is no shortcut in developing a successful AI Chatbot. Much evaluation and internal engagement are required to determine the success of its implementation. With the experiences we have gathered as a team, we discovered that the following must be considered ahead:

1. Set your priorities right

Be goal-oriented in your approach by identifying your business pain points and opportunities. Here’s the most important question businesses should ask themselves before getting started:

“What are you trying to solve?”

Whether it is managing product enquiries or assisting customers to check account balance, a good AI Chatbot focuses on its key tasks. This helps businesses to improve productivity by responding to pain points or opportunities more effectively.

2. Form realistic expectations

Most businesses expect AI Chatbot to know as much as Wikipedia, and more. That is not what it should be. An AI Chatbot is only as good as what it is trained to do and its knowledge base should be designed around your business and your customer needs. This helps to increase response accuracy on what truly matters. Focus on your user journey flow and keep the conversation within what is relevant. When your AI Chatbot is able to solve 80% of your customers’ needs, it is a winner.

3. Build one-to-many AI Chatbot

Customers tend to reach out to businesses through various channels from websites to social media platforms. These channels hold different strengths and challenges, which makes building one AI chatbot to fit all an incredibly challenging some time ago.

With Meta owning most of the popular platforms such as Whatsapp, Facebook and Instagram, you can now build one that works for most if not all of them. While it is not without limitations imposed by each platform, an attempt at such unified approach can make training and performance tracking much more effective and cohesive for business in the long term.

4. Expect iteration and training

AI Chatbot can only improve when it gets more unsupervised conversations to learn what is important in serving your customers hence businesses should anticipate the need to train and iterate in the initial stage of the launch. The sooner your AI Chatbot is made available to the public, the faster it can achieve its best performance. Adopting this agile method allows you to identify the market opportunities and respond to it faster than your competitors.

5. Understand the technology limitations

One of the biggest misconceptions about AI Chatbot is that it can self-learn and improve without human intervention. That is not the case. For most businesses, intelligent and hybrid chatbots need to be developed and trained by humans. Such supervised learning is still essential for accuracy because true machine learning currently requires large amounts data and very few businesses have enough of data to use machine learning meaningfully. Instead of fully relying on your AI Chatbot to run on its own, businesses should always run regular reviews of what it has learned.

“To the user, chatbots seem to be “intelligent” due to their informative skills. However, chatbots are only as intelligent as the underlying database.”

— Peter Gentsch

Moving beyond customer service

As a small business or large enterprise in Malaysia, AI Chatbot has a role to assist businesses in many ways beyond customer experience. The technology is seen to manage HR matters, business process automation as well as website concierge and assistance.

Throughout the years, we see promising technological advancements in Artificial Intelligence. Chatbot has moved beyond its conventional keyword-based approach to fully relying on Natural Language Processing (NLP) in building conversations.

With AI Chatbots becoming more intelligent, we will see new opportunities where the technology will bring seamless customer communication in small businesses as well as enterprises.

By 2022, 90% of queries will be handled by chatbots

XIMNET is launching our new product soon, an exciting and innovative codeless AI Chatbot builder, XYAN.

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