BENGALURU: In a move that could provide faster and more reliable information on health-related queries, pharma major Lupin has launched a chatbot, ANYA. The chatbot, launched at the 46th annual meeting of the Research Society for the Study of Diabetes as part of their disease management, is trained to help patients with medically verified information on concerns related to ailments. In the initial leg of its digitised journey, ANYA will address queries related to diabetes.
The chatbot is currently hosted on Facebook Messenger. Users can search for @askanyabot on Facebook Messenger and start chatting, or visit Lupin’s Facebook page ‘Shaping Health’, where they automatically get a chat pop from the bot. ANYA will also have its own Facebook page.Recent research estimates India to have had 72 million diabetes cases in 2017 and predicts the figure would burgeon to 134 million by 2025. Though patients today are technologically advanced, there is still a lack of trusted and comprehensive sources on disease-related information.
ANYA intends to bridge this gap, the company say.
Chatbot market here to stay Size of the chatbot market is estimated to grow from 700 million in 2016 to 2.3 billion by 2020, according to data-driven marketing company Hansa Cequity’s ‘Customer Experience Trends Report 2019’.
According to the report, Application Programming Interfaces (API) will play a key role as a revenue driver for brands. To utilise this fully and focus on creating superior experiences for customers, organisations need to have a seamless integration of APIs in their business goals, and not just focus on operations and applications. Conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI) enabled products and services are becoming a real world phenomenon, as technology and human touch come together, it stated.
Another game-changing trend in marketing, the report observed, is the emergence of conversational chatbots that understand human emotions and languages, and serve as a digital companion to consumers. Eighty per cent of companies surveyed plan to launch their own chatbot by 2020 to enhance customer experience (CX), it said.
“We observed that Customer Experience has become a boardroom agenda and organisations are leaving no stone unturned to up their CX quotient through innovative use of technology. However, it is critical that organisation departments from front-end sales to back-end developers must align with a common CX goal. Companies need to focus on having a synergy between data, analytics, technology, digital, product, marketing, sales and customer service teams to provide a unified customer experience,” said S Swaminathan, CEO and co-founder, Hansa Cequity.