8 chatbot use-cases that actually work today

Overview

Hopefully you already know what a chatbot is. Just in the case, you don't, here is a short explanation. My friend Marcel Pociot likes to put it like this:

You just need to think of a chatbot as a new interface to use your application.

So instead of having a website or app with information where you can look for the one thing you need, you get a chat interface that you can write or talk to - and even have UI patterns like menus, buttons and dialogues. The chatbot is the service connected to this chat interface. It will try to help you with your needs in a conversational way.

While a chatbot could theoretically help you with all kind of tasks, not all of them already work like they should. Today I want to show you 8 use-cases for chatbots that could already bring benefits to you or your company today.

1. News subscription

Your chatbot is an information channel where you can receive all kind of news. This is especially interesting for bots on the big Messenger services like Facebook. Since you already spend a lot of your time on this service, it makes sense to receive information there. This communication also works just one way. So it is not necessary that you can reply to the bot too. There are dozens of newspapers companies out there that already provide such chatbots like: TechCrunch, Der Standard, Washington Post, The Guardian ...

But there is more. In Austria we have the "ORF Wahlbot" which provides live information during election times, which is very useful. I am also a big fan of the Austrian chatbot RecordBird which gets you connected to the latest news from your favourite musicians. Every time there is a new album, song, video or interview, you will be one of the firsts to know about it. It helps me to be always up to date with one of my favourite bands: Paramore :-) 🤘

Of course this also works as just one feature of your bot. At our company we have a Facebook chatbot (German only sry) to give the users some opportunities to get information about us. One of them is the possibility to subscribe to our blog articles. This way the users get notified through the chatbot when a new article was published. Through Facebook this is much more personal than other channels like an E-mail. People love it.

2. Replace a web form

We all know how annoying it can get to fill out a long form. Sometimes it makes more sense to let a chatbot help you with that. With the bot, collecting data, feels more like an interview. You get a question and you provide an answer. It works just step by step and therefor is not that overwhelming like big forms. It's more like a real conversation.

At work we have built a chatbot for an Austrian insurance company called Klickmal. When you scroll down the page, the bot will ask you if you prefer to use him, over the web form, for calculating a car insurance offer. So here the user can decide if he wants to use the default form or the new conversational one. Other companies like Austrian Airlines or Kayak provide their business services on Facebook Messenger too. So instead of filling out forms on the website you can use the bot to search flights and plan your next journey.

3. Portfolio

If you have a portfolio and you're active on a Messenger like Facebook, you can build a portfolio chatbot. It can help people interested in you to get to know you and your work better. There are also lots of startups already building chatbots just for celebrities. It's totally exciting that there are companies just for this use-case.

5. Games

It doesn't matter which platform we are talking about, games just work everywhere. People love to play and especially where they already are. Since most of them are spending most of their time on Messenger, it is a good idea to provide games there too. When we built our first chatbot we wanted to try if chatbots could be helpful in the educational field. This is why we developed NELA. NELA has games that helps you to learn new vocabularies in a fun and entertaining way. Also make sure to checkout Trivia Blast, which is a fun game.

6. Marketing Campaigns

With Messengers it is really easy to send messages, emojis and images in order to connect people. That's why they are great for marketing campaigns. Jägermeister has been using a chatbot for their latest campaign called Jäm Bot. Make sure to check out the video about it.

7. Bring your office tools to your Messenger

Most of the people I know use Slack for their business communication. It is a great tool and has lots of integrations for services you probably use like Bitbucket, GitHub, Jenkis CI and so on. But you can also build custom bots for your Slack team. There is whole list of already available one here. Additionally with tools like BotMan you are able to build custom ones easily yourself. So what information do you need every day in your company? Think about that and probably you just found a new chatbot idea for you.

8. Turn your website into a chatbot

Do you love conversational interfaces and want your website to standout? Then you can try to turn your whole website into a chatbot like Adrian Zumbrunnen did. Love it!🤘