People, who have bought Alexa chatbot for their household use, say that they cannot manager life without her. Though initially this gadget appears a bit weird, it soon becomes a part of life. Because this gadget is called Alexa which uses a female voice, it is addressed as ‘she’. She helps the users to track their to-dos and shopping list, reads the news and weather conditions, and plays nearly any song. People get so accustomed to her presence that they cannot imagine life without her. Alexa has becomes an integral part of the user’s life, this is how technology profoundly changes daily habits of users. In fact, Alexa shares a common trait with other habit-forming technologies like Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, Slack, and the iPhone. Many people are already hooked to the Amazon chtbot Alexa.

Siri is a built-in personal assistant chatbot, introduced in 2011 for the Smartphone. Siri can help the user with tasks such as getting information from the internet, scheduling events, setting a timer and making phone calls, among many other things she also answers queries regarding the weather conditions, time of the day, calling a number saved in phone, setting alarm, dictating message, identifying a song, solving basic math problems, reading notifications, increasing or decreasing screen brightness etc. By the way she speaks 21 languages, the latest being Mandarin.

Nir Eyal is an author, serial entrepreneur, and behavioral economist: he calls gadgets such as Alexa, as Hook, and he has also described the Hook Model. At its core, the Hook Model is designed to build products that create habit-forming behavior in a sort of looping cycle that consists of trigger, an action, a variable reward, and continued investment. With her voice assistance, Amazon’s Alexa, keep her users hooked.

Chatbots are used in applications such as ecommerce customer service, call centers and Internet gaming. Especially, the customer call centers of the banks use chatbots which instruct for dialing numbers for specific use such as new debit card, new credit card, billing, lost card, loan assistance, and balance in account etc. these purposes are typically limited to conversations regarding a specialized purpose and not for the entire range of human communication. The term “bot” comes from robot. A bot is an automated application used to perform simple and repetitive tasks that would be time-consuming, mundane or impossible for a human to perform. Bots can be used for productive tasks, but they are also frequently used for wicked purposes.

Chatbots are also known as “conversational agents.” These are software applications that mimic written or spoken human speech for the purposes of simulating a conversation or interaction with a real person. There are two primary ways chat bots are offered to visitors: via web-based applications or standalone apps.

Love them or hate them, chatbots are here to stay. They have become extraordinarily popular in recent years largely due to dramatic advancements in machine learning and other underlying technologies such as natural language processing. Today’s chat bots are smarter, more responsive, and more useful. In near future we are likely to live with them in most walks of our lives.

Today, chatbots are being used for many tasks of human assistance. They are becoming increasingly sophisticated, responsive, and more natural. They are becoming more human. Chatbot named Endurance works with Dementia Patients helping them in synchronizing words, helping them remember names etc. Chatbot Casper helps insomniacs get through the night. They experience a suffocating loneliness when everyone else in the world is resting peacefully. While an insomniac’s mind betrays him with worries and doubts, Casper is someone he can talk to. MedWhat makes medical diagnoses faster. It helps both the doctors and patients.

Disney solves crimes with fictional characters. Why does it use chatbots? There are reasons for that – like getting rid of routine tasks and simultaneous processing of multiple requests from users. Besides, a tremendous speed of processing users’ requests chatbots helps gaining customers’ loyalty. Consumers also benefit from chatbots because they have accepted the fact that technology is part of life. A study presented at the 4th International Conference on Internet Science in Thessaloniki, Greece in November, 2017 identified reasons why people choose to interact with chatbots. According to this research, the main factors that motivate people to use chatbots are: chatbots provide the assistance or access to information quickly and efficiently than human mind. Chatbots amuse people by giving them funny tips; they also help killing time when users have nothing to do.

Also in a topical survey conducted with 5,000 respondents across six countries, 38% said they had an overall favorable view of chatbots compared to just 11% who had an overall negative perception of them (the rest were neutral). Since chatbots are built on all new technology, there are many twists to be worked out and the percentage of people who view them favorably will go on rising significantly. The kind of digital assistance chatbots are offering and the way people are getting hooked to it, makes it is easy to predict that they are here to stay. The future businesses might use them in so many ways; it is unimaginable as of now. But, for sure, the artificial intelligence will be working with human intelligence and we will have to synchronize the two.

Most people these days order products online either from Amazon, Flip kart or eBay. Mobile apps such as Uber, Airbnb, Etsy have become part of life of people globally. In India, Flip kart, Zivame, Snapdeal, Jabong, Shop clues, Foodpanda, Swiggy have become part and parcel of people’s life. Fewer people go out to buy things. The easier consumer’s lives have become, more complex have the marketplace operator’s experience become.

Marketplace operators are unique because they aren’t just serving one base of customers. They connect buyers and sellers, service providers and consumers. They have to make sure that both sellers and buyers experience good product and service with each other. They need to hit liquidity as fast as they can, and they are often challenged by the chicken or egg syndrome; weather to first create supply or create demand, and then balancing transactions at volume. Some marketplaces have existed for a long time. They vary in size and focus, but all marketplaces share certain features. In simplest terms, a marketplace is a gathering place for commercial transactions and it is a clearly defined space where things are bought and sold. To thrive, marketplaces require order, confidence and trust.

Over the past two decades we are seeing the rise of some massive and extremely lucrative marketplaces. An online marketplace is a type of e-commerce site where product or service information is provided by multiple third parties, whereas transactions are processed by the marketplace operator. Online marketplaces are the basic multichannel ecommerce and can be a way to reorganize the production process.

Liquidity is most important: The amount of transactions conducted on a market platform is one of the most important features of a successful a two-sided market. It is about the health of the business, to function well, there must be a significant mass, and a proper balance, of buyers and sellers. Too few sellers or too few buyers will let down by a lack of variety and high prices as buyers move quickly for what limited items are available. Too few buyers and sellers will abandon the market and seek out better places to achieve their sales goals. It is therefore a delicate balance and one that can easily slip out of equilibrium. Getting the buyer-seller right ratio in a global consumer two-sided market is a huge task. Ensuring the global pool of buyers becomes essential where the vast selection of available merchandise and top sellers across the world come for the large pool of eager buyers requires an always-on 24/7 mindset.

Systematic processing is vital: Buyers and sellers are continuously looking for better reliable structure. Let’s look at Airbnb. It is an American company which operates an online marketplace and hospitality service for people to lease or rent short-term lodging including holiday cottages, apartments, home stays (bed and breakfast) and also hotel rooms to participate in or facilitate experiences related to tourism such as walking tours, and to make reservations at restaurants. The company does not own any real estate or conduct tours; it acts like a broker which receives percentage service fees in conjunction with every booking. Like all hospitality services, Airbnb is an example of collaborative consumption and sharing. The company has over 4 million lodging listings in 65,000 cities and 191 countries and it has so far done over 300 million ckeck-ins so far.

As a marketplace curator, they hire people to continuously find and feature best apartments for temporary stay and eliminate the shady ones. It is very difficult to eliminate shady apartments because going to the grass root level is difficult globally. Generally, the best listings are surfaced first as a result of both manual paper work and algorithmic curation. As a marketplace company, manual or editorial license is a big force to retain users. Airbnb learnt this hard way. They discovered this when they replaced user-generated apartment photos with beautiful, professional-quality photos. Even though this strategy did not work, it helped them create helpful guidelines for people listing apartments, which gave them the lift-off they needed. Now, most photos are in fact user generated.

Feedback very important: While Uber has earned an impressive reputation over the years, it has also faced criticism over a few scandals. Some customers have complained that drivers had cheated them out of money and the worst complaint is few incidents of female customers were sexually assaulted by the drivers. Things like these have negative brand impact. Uber faced hassles over such issues.

Most of the cab services apps have rating systems built somewhere into the process for both buyers and sellers. So Uber, Ola, Flywheel and other service providers ask both drivers and passengers to rate their experience at the end of a ride. To actually make this data valuable, however, companies have to use ratings almost invisibly to filter out bad users and continually improve service. But, one fact is users don’t want to spend the time to do the rating and reviews. Customers expect that the company has already removed poorly-rated drivers from the system. Customers assume that a driver with lower than a 3-star rating on Uber will not exist, and as a result, very few riders worry about having a bad experience. The result is that drivers can depend on the system to weed out abusive or deceitful passengers. On both sides, ratings help people trust that they will get what they are expecting. But, in fast-paced world, this doesn’t happen, in services like these, feedback is most essential.

Enabled by algorithms:  The marketplace companies are technologically driven because for them data is everything. They keep track of what customer are browsing and buying. The goal is to improve conversion rates and help the industry become profitable. Internet merchants are teeming with mind-boggling flow of data. For example, Paytm has about 30 lakh visitors every day with about 3 million page views daily. Algorithms help it crunch data on customer preferences and increase sales. Algorithms are the base for all online transaction – payment, ordering, shipping, feedback everything.  Algorithms strengthen the ecommerce companies. Huge amount of money is at stake on customer acquisitions and deep discounts.

Focus is on supply: To be successful, marketplace companies need to focus on their suppliers because the service providers will exist only if the customer receives the product within a defined time. On a flipside, customers are in touch with suppliers as well as marketplace operators depending on who is giving good discount and swift delivery. This can be taxing for a lot of start-up leaders who are focused on pleasing traditional end users. But for buyers, keeping in touch with both is a routine. For marketplace operators after collecting data, they need to take precise action to enforce short ship times. Time is essence for their very existence. Most importantly, when delivery period, quality and price expectations are violated on either side, the buyer is left high and dry, or a seller never receives payment. Therefore the marketplace companies need to have a very human-centric customer service approach. They are heavily reliant on phone calls and personal communications from their ground staff.

Conclusion: All in all, the marketplace firms need a strong foundation of information about the experience of customers and suppliers both. The retail concept of marketplace business has proliferated and is here to stay. It is common that after a time, firms experience a shakeout (an economic condition that results in the elimination of marginally financed participants in an industry) and only the sturdy ones survive. Ultimately, all online marketplaces will survive only if they prove their staying power by offering efficiency and inimitable value to consumers.