voice assistants Archives - BotCore

How is Conversational Search transforming the digital shopping experience?

Abhishek Shanbhag — Fri, 02 Apr 2021 09:53:00 +0000

How is Conversational Search transforming the digital shopping experience?

Research by Forrester says, “Search is a primary tool for customers throughout their life cycle. More than 90% of the consumers use one of the search channels offered (mostly general Internet searches, but also searches on retailer sites or social platforms) when discovering, exploring, or engaging.”

However, there hasn’t been a significant transformation in the way we search for products online. The process involves entering keywords, checking-unchecking filters, navigating through hundreds of search results, and going through technical product descriptions, and is undoubtedly tedious. Simply put, traditional search lacks personalization and takes the joy out of shopping.

If your organization is planning to reinvent the digital shopping experience for consumers, increase conversion and brand loyalty, you may want to consider adopting Conversational Search.

Let’s explore further.

What is Conversational Search?

Conversational search leverages AI to understand the customer’s needs and provide product suggestions accordingly.

Through chatbots, voice bots, or retail web portals, the customers are asked a series of questions that help narrow the search results to fewer product options. On the flip side, brands get valuable insights into customer preferences and product performance across channels and geographies.

Thus, conversational search overcomes the limitations and challenges of traditional product search, which are as follows –

An overabundance of choice – The overload of product choice is certainly overwhelming. Think about the last time you searched for “concealer for freckles,” and the website presented hundreds of results. You then had to filter the product range by gender, skin type, price, and much more to get another long list of options to choose from and buy. Felt like abandoning the cart, right?
Technical product descriptions – Often, product descriptions are filled with jargon that consumers might not understand, and hence they fail to conclude if the product is the right fit for their requirements.

And, of course, the fear of losing out on a better product hinders the consumer’s decision-making capacity.

Conversational search engages customers in more interactive, intuitive, and personalized shopping experiences and helps convert “searchers to buyers.”

Conversational search and chatbots

AI-driven chatbots facilitate conversational search by understanding context and intelligently guiding the customers to the right products via text-based dialogue.

In this way, they shorten the sales cycle. Moreover, their machine learning abilities enable them to comprehend customer needs better, send suitable recommendations, and upsell complementary products.

Take the example of eBay.

eBay ShopBot for Facebook Messenger is a personalized shopping assistant that makes shopping with eBay a breeze.

The bot asks questions to understand the shopper’s intent, sends product recommendations, and helps customers find the best deals amongst the 1 billion listings on eBay.

ShopBot is especially useful for customers looking for specific products, which they may not easily find through a traditional keyword search.

Conversational search and voice bots

Voice bots, like Alexa, Cortona, Google Home, and Siri, are intelligent voice assistants that can be accessed through speakers, smartphones, and other devices.

The bot can understand the intent when the user utters a command and locate the desired products or services. Therefore, voice bots provide a hands-free, hassle-free, and comfortable search and shopping experience to customers.

Coming back to eBay’s example. Since the chatbot is built for Google Assistant, shoppers can use it through their phone or speaker to buy products at the lowest prices by saying, “Ok Google, let me talk with eBay.”

Conversational search and retail portals

To help customers sail through the myriad of products online to find the right one, many retail websites provide personalized conversational search experiences.

Let’s take a look.

1. KitchenAid

KitchenAid has built conversational search solutions across eight product categories, which guide customers to the products that best suit their needs.

The solution asks need-based questions, post which it suggests mixer grinders. Shoppers can customize their mixers according to their requirements. Additionally, KitchenAid can upsell additional products by recommending add-ons and also gain insight into customer preferences and behavior.

2. 3M

3M leverages conversational search across 5 product categories and 3 languages to help customers buy personal protective equipment based on usage and risk management.

For instance, 3M’s safety eyewear advisor asks users whether they need eye protection for “general use,” “flying solid particles, ”chemical hazards,” or “welding/blue light/improved contrast.”

Conversational search also helps 3M gather valuable insights into buyer personas.

How can Acuvate help?

At Acuvate, we help clients deliver conversational search experiences through AI-powered chatbots built with our enterprise bot-building platform called BotCore.

BotCore is a low-code platform, hence chatbots can be built within a few weeks, across different channels with channel-specific API. Our bots support multiple languages to help you reach a global consumer base.

Let’s take a quick look at an example. Shopping for skincare products is a complex process. Hence, Acuvate built SAL, POND’s Facebook Messenger bot that was launched across nine countries.

SAL customizes product recommendations across four major skincare areas – spots, pimples, wrinkles, and uneven skin tone. Customers need to upload a selfie and fill in a quick survey. Post which, SAL delivers a personalized skin diagnosis and suggests products based on the customer’s skin type and needs.

Over time, SAL has generated 98% positive customer reviews and 15 times higher purchase intent among customers.

To know more about BotCore, please feel free to schedule a personalized consultation with our chatbot experts.

The post How is Conversational Search transforming the digital shopping experience? appeared first on BotCore.

Why Voice Bots Are The Future Of Contact Center Customer Service

Abhishek Shanbhag — Thu, 05 Nov 2020 11:31:00 +0000

Why Voice Bots Are The Future Of Contact Center Customer Service

2020 is the year of customer service transformation. The unique challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic caused a wave of uncertainty and panic among consumers.

Customers’ natural tendency to prefer voice call support over other self-service channels in times of crisis led to unprecedented call volumes and put tremendous pressure on traditional IVR systems, support agents, and their ability to respond and address all queries. This led to longer than usual wait-times, with calls dropping automatically after a few minutes, thus increasing customers’ frustration levels. Moreover, most customers were unwilling to go through extensive IVR menus and frequent agent transfers or repeatedly ask the same query to get the right support.

Additionally, voice-based channels are not only difficult to scale but are costly too, as traditional voice interaction, on average, costs $15 per exchange. Yet, voice as a medium to provide customer support isn’t going anywhere but is undergoing a massive change with the emergence of AI-powered voice bots.

In fact, Gartner predicts that by 2023, 25% of customer interactions will be via voice.

So, let’s explore what voice bots are and why they are the future of contact center customer service.

What are voice bots?

A voice bot is a computer program that understands spoken natural language and uses synthesised voice to converse with people. AI-powered speech recognition technology enables voice bots to recognize users’ spoken queries and respond to inquiries using text or voice.

In other words, voice bots are computers that can speak with people.

These bots are a scalable way to provide engaging, personalized, and interactive human-like support and ensure speedy resolution for your customers. Moreover, they ease the burden of human agents, allowing them to focus on more productive, higher-value work and pressing customer issues.

For example, you want to book a flight. Now, instead of going through the myriad of traditional IVR options, simply call up the contact center and say, “I want to book a flight to New York.” The bot will ask you for other details, including the date of the journey, preferred departure time, and book for you the flight of your choice, or directly route you to the right agent, saving you the long and tiresome drill of a legacy IVR system.

Hence, voice bots shall pave the way for interactive and wholesome conversational IVR in the contact centers.

Essential capabilities of a voice bot

Here, we list down the core capabilities that a voice bot should have to deliver better conversational experiences.

1. Understand the ‘intent’

Voice bots leverage natural language processing (NLP) to comprehend the semantics of the human language, including grammar, synonyms, canonical word forms, and slang.

Customers aren’t always literal in what they utter. NLP helps extract the intent behind user utterance and helps voice bots understand the meaning behind the words. For example, when a customer says phrases like “sure” or “why not,” the bot must be able to understand that they are most probably saying “yes.”

Hence, intent analysis is one of the most significant capabilities of a voice bot.

2. Allow a barge-in

The ability to pause, listen, and speak accordingly, whenever a customer interrupts an ongoing interaction saying, “Sorry, but that’s not what I’m looking for” or “no, I am not interested in this product,” is one of the best features of a smart AI-enabled voice bot.

3. Streaming recognition

Speedy and efficient resolution is essential for every business. Therefore, a bot must be able to interpret and act at the same pace at which the customer speaks. Slow responses and lags may hamper the reputation of a business.

4. Personalization

When a customer calls a business, they are looking for a fast response. For instance, after reaching a contact center, if customers need to identify themselves through details like account number, id, address, etc., it can really add to their frustration levels.

Therefore, optimal integration with the support desk database is vital for the bot to greet the caller by name, know caller history, identify the likely reason for the call based on past interactions and customer persona, and tailor suggestions based on the customer knowledge.

5. Handover to a live agent

At any point during the conversation, if the bot is unable to answer the user issue or if the customer asks for an agent handover, the bot must be capable of transferring the call to the right human agent or subject matter expert.

6. Keep Learning

An AI-powered voice bot must never stop learning. It should leverage its machine learning capabilities to improve accuracy and continuously learn from past interactions.

Advantages of voice bots

With voice bots, you can reap the following benefits –

1. Provide fast resolution to customers

Research by Harvard Business Review has concluded Customers who have a complaint handled in less than five minutes go on to spend more on future purchases.

Therefore, a customer complaint handled quickly can turn into a potential opportunity for earning more profit. Traditional IVRs force customers to go through multiple options and menus, wait for the next available agent, or try again during regular business hours. However, voice bots offer instant resolution with 24X7 support, even scheduling agent call-backs if needed.

2. Scale up your voice operations and reduce costs

A single voice bot can engage with thousands of customers at the same time and provide personalized support to each user. Moreover, by offloading mundane, repetitive tasks from human agents, contact centers can manage many more support issues than otherwise possible and dramatically reduce costs.

3. Reduce transaction times

When it comes to speed, voice is any day faster and more customer-friendly than typing. Moreover, specific tasks, such as purchases, bookings, and cancellations, can be performed more quickly by bots than humans, hence reducing the overall transaction times.

4. Humanize support staff

Repetitive tasks, the mundane nature of everyday operations, and the pressure to close as many tickets as possible often sap the humanity out of support center agents. With bots taking over most of the repetitive tasks and easing the workload of contact center staff, your support staff can take out the time to deliver human connection whenever needed.

5. Create sales opportunities

Voice bots continuously learn from past interactions and are equipped with natural language understanding (NLU) and synthesis; they can deduce what the customer really means and deliver more contextual, meaningful, and human-like conversations and provide personalized product recommendations. Such interactive voice engagements create opportunities for new sales.

Voice bots - The future of contact center customer service

Voice bots are indeed the future of contact center customer engagement. They lead to an enormous reduction in cost by taking over the resolution of common and repetitive queries at scale.

Moreover, they make personalized recommendations based on the customers’ preferences and previous purchases and enhance revenue through cross-selling and upselling.

The speed, accuracy, and 24X7 availability of voice bots improve first call resolution rates and positively impact customer experience.

At Acuvate, we help clients develop a voice of their own with our enterprise bot-building platform called BotCore, supporting them in delivering exceptional customer support by converting text to lifelike speech using Microsoft’s Azure Cognitive Services.

If you’d like to learn more about the top customer experience trends to watch for in 2021, please feel free to get in touch with one of our customer experience experts for a personalized consultation.

The post Why Voice Bots Are The Future Of Contact Center Customer Service appeared first on BotCore.

How Will Voice Bots Transform The Workplace In The New Normal?

Rakesh Reddy — Wed, 22 Jul 2020 10:37:53 +0000

How Different CPG Companies Are Using Chatbots To Drive Customer Experience

In response to the COVID-19 crisis, businesses have been focused on ensuring strong collaboration for their remote workforce by adopting new technologies such as modern intranets, cloud, and AI.

However, now, when lockdowns ease but COVID-19 continues to loom, businesses need to start thinking about bringing employees back to the workplace while ensuring social distancing and physical safety. Given that almost every surface has the potential to carry and transmit the virus, the way employees interact with the built environment has to be reimagined.

Voice technologies and contactless interfaces can be the key enablers in establishing safe working environments and ensuring customer experience. In this blog, we’ll discuss how companies can use voice assistants in the new normal.

Understanding Voice Bots

A voice assistant is a software that uses voice recognition, language processing algorithms, and voice synthesis to understand voice commands and deliver responses or perform tasks. Voice bots initially gained popularity in the consumer electronics industry with the launch of smart speakers like Google Home, Amazon Echo, etc.

Back in 2016, chatbots and voice bots weren’t a top priority when a company implemented an ERP or HR solution. But now, as more enterprises realize the business benefits of bots, providing an easy-to-use, conversational interface has become a norm. In the past few years, we’ve seen several enterprises deploy voice assistants for use cases like IT helpdesk, HR operations, customer service, sales, etc. By 2021, Gartner, Inc. predicts that 25 percent of digital workers will use a virtual employee assistant (VEA) on a daily basis. This will be up from less than 2 percent in 2019.

Learn more: The Amazing Benefits Of Voice-Enabled Business Intelligence

A 451 Research report has predicted voice bots to become the top investment choice for businesses as their workforce returns to offices. Let’s discuss why.

Voice Bots In The New Normal

1. The Voice-First Workplace

We can’t go about our regular business like we used to amid this pandemic. It’s no longer safe to touch even everyday objects like doorknobs which could potentially expose us to the virus.

Many companies had already been exploring the potential of voice technology at their workplace even before the pandemic. Now, voice technology would have a huge role to play in this redesign of offices. Voice-activated controls can be utilized in office entry and exit points, elevators, meeting rooms, shared office devices to reduce the amount of physical contact needed to navigate in the workplace.

Use cases like integrating meeting room equipment with voice-enabled virtual assistants like Microsoft Cortana, Alexa For Business, Google Assistant will become more popular. With these integrations, employees can give voice commands to perform tasks like managing meetings, and controlling conference room devices and settings – temperature and lighting, etc. Last year, we could have thought of these as “nice to have” but these are now imperative for a safe workplace.

2. Voice technology powering customer service and experience

Social distancing will continue to be the most effective way to prevent the spread of the virus until a COVID-19 vaccine becomes widely available. Thus, retailers will need to ensure business continuity without compromising the health and safety of their consumers by minimizing physical contact.

COVID-19 has pushed automation for all industries, nudging them towards digital transformation. Many businesses such as Amazon have adopted tap card payments to ensure contactless transactions but the physical interaction can be further minimized with voice technology.

Voice automation is being adopted at a rapid rate across multiple locations and industries. Businesses in industries such as airports, restaurants, retailers, etc. have seamlessly adopted voice bots to power their customer interactions while ensuring social distancing and high customer experience.

3. Voice assistants will improve remote worker productivity

Remote workers can leverage voice assistants to improve their productivity and collaboration. Microsoft recently integrated its virtual assistant, Cortana, into its Microsoft Teams app. This integration enables Microsoft 365 Enterprise users to complete communication, collaboration and meeting-related tasks using spoken natural language. They can connect with their colleagues by making a voice query such as “Call Mark” or “Send a message to my upcoming meeting”. Users can schedule meetings, share files, check calendars and more without any keyword stroke or mouse click.

Learn More: Cortana in Microsoft 365

Conclusion

There is no doubt that the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted human interactions all over the world. As businesses reopen their workplaces, social distancing will continue to be the norm. However, one certain thing is that to safeguard the employees, businesses will accelerate the adoption of digital technologies with voice bots leading the pack.

If you’d like to learn more about voice assistants, please feel free to get in touch with one of our experts for a personalized consultation. We’d also be happy to share our success stories and how we can help you implement voice bots for your business .

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The post How Will Voice Bots Transform The Workplace In The New Normal? appeared first on BotCore.

How Voice Assistants Are Transforming The Enterprise Workplace

Abhishek Shanbhag — Fri, 04 Jan 2019 12:39:00 +0000

How Voice Assistants Are Transforming The Enterprise Workplace

Leading industry analysts like Gartner predict that voice assistants are gaining a firm hold in the workplace. It is believed that by 2021, 25% of the entire digital workforce will use a virtual employee assistant. Another interesting prediction that Gartner makes is that by 2021 consumer and business spending on VPA speakers will top $3.5 billion in 2021. All the attention that this technology has received so far, isn’t without reason.

Though text-based chatbots have till date been rapidly deployed by a number of organizations, enterprises are willing to take on the next wave of innovation in conversational AI. A number of organizations today are eager to learn about voice-based bots. Some are even using have Amazon’s Alexa or Google Assistant on the business front.

From scheduling meetings to setting alarms to reading emails aloud to bringing in efficiency and order to the helpdesk to helping make more sound decisions, voice assistants are transforming the enterprise workplace.

Want to know what all a simple voice assistant can do ( and do much better than any human can) for your enterprise workplace? Read on.

voice aI-based knowledge capture

AI-based voice bots can be trained in capturing knowledge from a Subject Matter Expert (SME), transcribing audio, tagging and storing in Knowledge Management systems like SharePoint, Azure, etc.

Enterprises can now leverage an AI bot to tag your documents in ECM accurately, at lower overall costs, and a higher speed. Manually tagging one item costs around $4 to $7 and is highly error-prone. AI bots not only tag your documents but also transform your taxonomy into a living and breathing entity that automatically evolves along with your enterprise.

Learn more: How to Leverage AI to Improve Information Discovery in Your Enterprise

voice-based updates in CRM

If integrated with your CRM systems, voice bots can eliminate the need for manual data entry into CRMs. Consider this scenario. As soon as a salesperson finishes a meeting, he/she can make a phone call to the voice bot and update the meeting notes, opportunity, etc. directly in SFDC, Dynamics CRM or any other CRM system.

Users can have a quick conversation with the CRM voice bot and ask it to update/change the records with the provided specifications. They don’t have to undergo the hassle of logging into their system, navigating throw dashboards, and make changes to the records. Imagine the amount of time saved and increased productivity!

taking notes during the meeting

Let’s consider a simple scenario. You have to take down minutes of the meeting but your laptop battery dies. You’d probably have to take mental notes, half of which you’d not be able to recall later. However, with a voice assistant, you can simply ask out loud to ‘take notes’.

customer support

Voice bots can provide relief from the long IVR menu to customers. They can connect callers to the right department by asking questions like a human secretary. Voice bots transform the live chat experience. They can be integrated with social media apps, emails or live chat windows. Instead of typing lengthy texts, customers can quickly express the problem they’re facing. Transaction times for repetitive tasks like cancellations, booking, and booking can be drastically reduced.

conversational business intelligence

Now, let’s consider a more complex work process. Today, most large businesses store data in their Business Intelligence, LOB and CRM systems. Retrieving and processing information accurately with tons of data to decipher has become manually impossible, making the case for AI voice assistants stronger.

Employers can rely on voice assistants that are integrated with these systems for fetching data and processing information in a matter of seconds.

With intelligent chatbots like Acuvate’s Business Intelligence bot, you can easily access data and analytics within your 3rd party messaging applications like Skype For Business, Skype, Slack, etc. Simply ask “What is my predicted sales” and the bot will respond via text or voice. In this way, decision-makers get all the information instantly with a bot at their service.

time management

One of the basic steps, yet a road less traveled towards productivity, is time management. Most of us find it difficult to properly manage time. Today, voice assistants can help us track our time and utilize it efficiently. And, it couldn’t get any simpler. You can ask your Google Assistant to create time entries by simply saying, “Create a new time entry for 4 hours for Mark Day”. Similarly, attendance bots are also helping employees at the workplace manage their work hours and PTOs better. Be it attendance management, absence management, or shift management, attendance bots help you manage it all easily.

predictive ability

We’ve discussed the capability of AI-enabled voice assistants to quickly provide the right information at the right moment from your data storage systems. Additionally, voice assistants can analyze this data to cleverly predict our future needs or requirements. If your inventory is nearing the finish line, your voice assistant can remind you to restock. If you’ve not turned off your office lights, your voice assistant will let you know. That’s the predictive power of intelligent voice assistants. They’ll utilize data to be of any help that you tune them to be!

wrapping up

Voice is a new innovation in the chatbot ecosystem. Whether it’s a bank that you have called in for resolving your money transfer query or a healthcare service provider who you want to book your next appointment with – bots will be everywhere in the future.

This trend is likely to continue strong, and there will be soon a time when you will no longer need to write full-fledged emails to your HR to explain things like leave policy or payroll. Instead, a voice-based will handle all this for you. As such, employee and customer satisfaction will drastically increase when they get instant responses to all their queries. With bots taking over the workplace, each function will witness an increase in efficiency levels, streamlined workflows, and reduced costs.

As AI continues to fuel productivity, are you joining in the voice and chat technology-enabled bandwagon? Talk to our experts now!

The post How Voice Assistants Are Transforming The Enterprise Workplace appeared first on BotCore.

Chatbots: The Past, Present, And Future

Rakesh Reddy — Wed, 19 Dec 2018 10:42:00 +0000

Chatbots: The Past, Present, And Future

Chatbots currently are one of the most popular AI technologies in the enterprise world.

Bots are being deployed for different functions of an organization – be it engaging customers, training employees, driving sales, providing IT Helpdesk or HR support, generating leads etc. These intelligent machines provide instant service, round the clock – you don’t need to keep your customers/employees waiting 24 hours for the next support agent to come online. 80% of businesses want chatbots by 2020.

However, bots weren’t equipped for intelligent and smart conversations when they were first invented. Chatbots have undergone several advancements in the past few years. The history of chatbots is intriguing, and so is the future. Let’s walk through all that chatbots were back in time, are today, and can be in the future.

the history of bots: where and how it all began

The word chatbot comes simply translates to conversation enabled by bots. As such, there are two components to this word – chat, which means conversation, and bot, which refers to the ‘computational’ element.

ELIZA, a 1964 computer program was one of the earliest examples of chatbots taking shape. Utilizing Natural Language Processing – something that allows computers to understand human language, ELIZA was able to recognize keywords and key phrases (inputs) and respond using pre-written scripts.

Soon after, an ‘intelligent’ version of ELIZA followed. This one was smarter in the sense that if ELIZA could understand inputs from a real person – PARRY could impersonate a real person! Invented by Psychiatrist Kenneth Colby, PARRY was indeed able to impersonate a patient with schizophrenia.

More inventions kept taking place to one-up older, outdated bots. And, the world soon transitioned into times when chatter bots could be openly used by masses. The first and most popular of these humanoids is A.L.I.C.E (Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity) or Alice. It was the most powerful NLP chatbot of its time and was awarded the Loebner Prize three times!

Interesting fact: If you’ve watched the academy-award winning movie ‘Her’, it would be interesting to know that A.L.I.C.E was the inspiration for the movie.

the present state of chatbots: where we are today

Bots were now being deployed by businesses across various industries, all over the world. With the advancements in AI and machine learning, bots have become more intelligent are able to conduct meaningful and personalized conversations. Now, bots could adapt and learn based on the interactions they had with people. They could now process tons of data, rapidly retrieve information, process information, and give the right output/answer in no time.

In a consumer world, chatbot adoption increased because of an increase in the usage of messaging platforms. Consumers now rely on a chatbot for connecting and interacting with their favorite brand, troubleshooting basic issues, purchasing products that have been highly personalized based on their interests and likes, and keeping up to date with the latest deals and discounts on their favorite products!
According to Business Insider, by 2017, messaging apps have ousted social media platforms. You can check the following chart to get the stats and figures on global monthly active users.

chatbots in today’s enterprise

Organizations today are using chatbots for a variety of use cases and the usage varies from industry to industry and function to function. And the benefits chatbots offer are plenty including enhancing customer experience, improving employee productivity, automating mundane tasks, reducing costs and simplifying business workflows.
Enterprises are now leveraging chatbot builder platforms to effectively build, deploy, manage and train AI chatbots.
Let’s dig into some detailed chatbot use cases in the present day scenario.

chatbots for customer service

Customer service is the most popular use case of enterprise chatbots today. Businesses across industries are using customer service chatbots as the first line of support to reduce costs, improve customer experience, and increase agent productivity. Capabilities like 24/7 availability, multilingual support, instant responses, agent handover have made chatbots the most desired AI technologies in customer service.

chatbots for IT helpdesk

A number of enterprises are implementing IT helpdesk chatbots to accelerate response time, improve support staff productivity, automating IT workflows, and to deliver service related information on-demand.

Deploying chatbots can help alleviate your IT help desk challenges by making the whole process less labor-intensive, less complicated, highly interactive, and less costly.

With a chatbot at your disposal to answer basic queries raised by your employees in real-time, your IT help desk staff can focus on more complex and key tasks, thereby increasing your support efficiency!

chatbots for business intelligence

Data is the oil of the 21st century! Many companies today are integrating AI chatbots into their existing BI systems like PowerBI, Oracle, SAP BI etc. to help decision-makers get super quick access all the information and reports they need, in no time.

Simply ask your bot “What is my predicted sales for December 2019” and the bot will generate an accurate response after analyzing tons of data instantly. That too in a format that you prefer (image, graphs, pie charts, etc.)!

Learn More: Business Intelligence Bots, Power BI Bots

chatbots for HR

HR is one of the most popular functions for which chatbots are deployed. HR chatbots simplify and automate workflows throughout the employee life-cycle. Employees can use bots to ask simple or complex HR queries, perform tasks like applying for leaves or giving an appraisal etc. Whether it’s talent management or onboarding or employee engagement or off boarding, chatbots have successfully reduced HR costs in all stages of the employee life-cycle and streamlined the entire process.

Learn more: How Chatbots are Revolutionizing The HR Department

statistics on adoption of chatbots

Chatbots are expected to cut business costs by $8 billion by 2022 – Juniper Research
Furthermore, by 2021, conversational AI-first will be adopted by the majority of enterprise IT – Gartner.
By 2021, 50% of enterprises will be spending higher on chatbot creation than on mobile app development. – Gartner

For more such insights and statistics on the state of chatbot adoption, read through this blog post.

the future of chatbots: where we are headed

As the chatbot technology continues to mature, the future of bots is becoming interesting. Here are a few important trends to watch for:

Chatbot-RPA integration: Enterprises are taking customer and employee experiences to the next level by combining the power of automation from RPA and cognitive intelligence from chatbots. RPA helps chatbots access legacy enterprise systems which lack modern APIs. Bots can trigger RPA robots to perform complex actions without routing to a human agent – increasing productivity.

Voice Bots: Gartner predicts that, by 2023, 25 percent of employee interactions with applications will be via voice, up from under 3 percent in 2019. In the future, chatbots will no longer be just text-based interfaces. As AI-powered speech-to-text and text-to-speech hosted services improve, voice bots will be used for a variety of enterprise applications including conversational BI, IT helpdesk, scheduling meetings etc.

Chatbots will be more human: As key chatbot components like NLP, Machine Learning, sentiment analysis, contextual and language understanding etc. become more advanced, chatbots will be able to conduct much more complex conversations – just like a human does.

There might be soon a time when your bot will be reminding you of your sales meeting scheduled for the day. There’ll soon be times when a smart speaker will take your order at a restaurant. Bots speaking to bots can become the reality of the future. What next? We can only wonder.

If you’d like to learn more about enterprise chatbots please feel free to get in touch with one of our chatbot consultants for a quick consultation!

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exploring the use cases of an enterprise chatbot

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How To Make A Chatbot Intelligent?

Rakesh Reddy — Fri, 09 Nov 2018 09:42:00 +0000

How To Make A Chatbot Intelligent?

Artificial intelligence (AI) has mostly been an obsession for research departments and development shops. Recently, however, the potential business ROI for the enterprise community in the form of amplified customer/employee digital experience extended intelligent capabilities, reduced support costs have become clearer. From addressing simple FAQ’s to making intelligent conversations, chatbots have progressed significantly in understanding and solving problems.

While AI is becoming a new tool in the C-suite tool belt to drive revenues and profits, it has become clear that the deployment of chatbot encompassing specifics of business applicability stands critical.

According to a study, 87% of CEO’s and business leaders trust AI, but employees trust (33%) was cited as one of the greatest barriers to AI Adoption.

One such bottleneck that is toning down the employee’s trust might be chatbots IQ. It’s a fact that chatbot answering basic questions irrelevant to the context and learning from the previous conversations is trolled by smart employees constantly.

There is a high need for the chatbots to deliver more appropriate results by scaling up its intelligence in handling customer conversations.

Though we know that chatbots have a high potential in becoming intelligent, we don’t understand what goes into making intelligent chatbots.

what makes a chatbot intelligent?

Enterprises are, by now, aware that chatbots aren’t smart at the beginning of their deployment. They are made intelligent by leveraging technologies like machine learning, big data, natural language processing (NLP), etc. – which helps chatbots to understand and interpret context, intent and continually enhance its knowledge base.

During the process of becoming smart, there is a high need for an effective chatbot builder platform in place to train it with the appropriate skill matching the organization needs.

Bots built using intelligent platform enables organizations to train, build and launch customized conversational chatbots powered by artificial intelligence.

Know More: A Buyer’s Guide To Choosing The Best Chatbot Builder Platform

four essentials features that can make a chatbot intelligent

# Contextual Understanding

In customer engagement, real-time contextual understanding is essential to deliver meaningful conversations. To have a good understanding of context, a chatbot needs to analyze inputs like time, day, date, conversation history, tone, sentence structure, intent, identity, etc. These inputs are then fed to empower chatbots to comprehend the context in the conversation.

For instance, in the sentence, “Fantastic! Presently the flight is delayed by one more hour”, the customer isn’t happy about the flight being late but it can trick the interpretation of the machine encouraging to commit an error if it is unable to understand the context.

Apart from self-learning, it is wise to provide or feed chatbots with different contexts based on situations, linguistic preferences, persistence, emotional context, etc so that they can utilize the context when required.

# Perpetual Learning

The ability to learn is a pivotal factor in building an intelligent chatbot.

A well-honed chatbot is one that learns from the conversations to enhance its performance metrics. There are 2 steps involved in this learning process. One is handling the end-user appropriately when there is no relevant answer found in the knowledge base and the second is recording learning from the failed conversations. Also, managing standard responses stands a key in handling user frustration.

User modelling, machine learning, and natural language understanding modules can help achieve better conversations and avoid expectations mismatch.

Leveraging neural networks, deep learning, Machine Learning (ML) algorithms and human supervisors ensure the AI chatbot becomes a good learner.

Learning is key to ensure that the chatbot identifies patterns in data it receives and answers to user queries in the most appropriate way. Thus, learning abilities are a must-have if a chatbot is to be made intelligent.

# Seamless Agent Handover

Handling a user when there is no answer dictates the satisfaction scores. Amplifying these scores can be better achieved when the conversation is transferred to a human agent rather than annoying the consumer/employee with the same repetitive questions/responses.

According to a report, 88% of consumers said they expect a natural transition between a virtual agent to a human agent while making a purchase decision or contacting customer care.

It goes without mentioning that humans will remain an integral part of contact centres. However, chatbots automate the triage requests or help in troubleshooting, helping the human agents become more productive.

So the real challenge is to train the bot when to transfer it to an agent. Using the advancements in AI, train the chatbot with user sentiment analysis and preference during an interaction and transition the conversation to a human agent.

# Voice Technology

Voice bots are an integral part of almost every function that focuses on providing a positive customer experience. One can skip the interaction with a complicated UI and ask the voice assistants to do the job. This adds both convenience and error-free interactions with the chatbot reducing the chance of failure. Enable friction-free conversations while freeing up employees to focus on more meaningful work.

With significant advancement in the fields of natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML), voice assistants have become much more intelligent and useful in guiding customers to meet some of their needs.

Utilizing the best of technologies like voice recognition, speech synthesis, and natural language processing (NLP), chatbot parses a spoken phrase and translate it into written text.

According to Comscore, American media measurement and analytics company, more than half of the total searches will be voice-enabled searches by 2020.

With the power of AI and conversational UI, voice assistants can deliver more personalized experiences and can automate interactions by adding intelligence and insight to the conversation.

According to Gartner, by 2023, 25% of employee interactions with applications will happen via voice, up from almost 3% in 2019.

conclusion

Realizing that chatbots are evolving technology in providing intelligent conversations, organizations need to focus on automating their communication system. If your chatbot is intended to address the specific problem then it is better to go for predefined communication flows. This will help you with a pleasant experience and a high conversion rate.

One thing organizations miss out is that a number of complexities involved in making these AI chatbots intelligent. Using advanced intelligent platform you can build a chatbot with ease and can enhance the level of chatbot’s intelligence.

If you’re looking for some personalized guidance on creating and incorporating intelligent chatbot for your business feel free to get in touch with one of our artificial intelligence and chatbot experts. We have built numerous chatbots for different industries like retail, insurance, banking etc. and would be more than happy to do the same for you.

Want to know everything about chatbots in one go? Get your free copy of eBook – Exploring the use cases of an enterprise chatbot.

If you’d like to learn more about this topic, please feel free to get in touch with one of our experts for a personalized consultation.

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Top chatbot use cases in different industries

Abhishek Shanbhag — Fri, 25 May 2018 14:25:01 +0000

Top Chatbot Use Cases In Different Industries

Chatbots are proliferating in every industry known to humans. Almost 80 percent of businesses look forward to investing or deploy in chatbots by 2020. With penetrating adoption rate, the production and implementation of chatbots would also increase.

The interesting part is that Chatbots that come with different abilities and fulfil a different purpose in each industry. We have gathered some use cases for each industry and examples of how they have been deployed. This will help you explore and evaluate how you can use a chatbot for your industry. Chatbots are still emerging technologies and so are the use cases. Here are some use cases.

RETAIL AND CONSUMER GOODS

Customers keep clicking through navigation bars and travel multiple screens to just find that one product that they wish to purchase. A lot of customers abandon carts if this discovery process takes too long. Ta-da! Chatbots fix the long product discover journey for a consumer. The chatbot use cases in retail are more. This is applicable to e-commerce, in-store retailers, fashion, food, and beverages. Either physical or digital, chatbots allow consumers to access product information and make a purchase on-the-go using mobile devices.

Chatbots are a sigh of relief even for employees in the retail industry, especially for the on-field salesforce. 66 percent of their time is not spent on selling. Chatbots undo this scenario and help them focus more on sales. Chatbots assist sales personnel by seamlessly integrating with CRM, BI and LOB systems at the background and provide accurate sales data and real-time alerts. They can analyze and compute at the background to provide personalized customer information that can equip salesforce with highly localized, timely, and relevant data.

The employees of a leading soft drinks company, with operations in Great Britain (GB), Ireland, France and Brazil had a hard time fetching their sales and operations information from their OBIEEE and SAP system. To resolve this they looked for a single window solution which could reduce their time and effort to fetch high-level precise information. Lucy, a sales chatbot helped sales team to query sales and operations related metrics like Net Revenue, Stocks, Trading Contribution, etc., on-the-go.

BANKING

The banking industry has been one of the early adopters of Chatbots. Some of the chatbot use cases for banking begin with personalized banking with an aim to improve customer satisfaction and engagement. Banks have enabled their customers to interact with chatbots to clarify banking queries. They can access and ask for account balance, bank statements, transfer funds, create a deposit, saving and investment advice, and so on. Bank of America introduced Erica, a chatbot for its customers to perform similar functions for them. Customer support and feedback are other areas where chatbots have taken over.

While this is on the customer-facing front, the business side of banking also uses chatbots. Chatbots also perform tasks for banks like contract review and analysis, employee engagement, IT ticketing, parse messages, and password management. We have collated a lot more detailed use cases of chatbots that can empower the banking and finance industries.

LEGAL

JP Morgan Chase launched COIN, a chatbot to manage its back-office operations. It can analyze complex contracts quicker and more proficient than human lawyers. The Chabot use cases in the legal industry are discovered in unimaginable ways. Legal jargon is a language of its own and piles up every day, across multiple document structures. Analyzing these documents is a time-consuming process for humans.

The inspiration for using chatbots in the legal world dates back to the creation of DoNotPay. This is a chatbot built to fight the unfair issuance of parking tickets in the United Kingdom and New York. Chatbots reduce the time to analyze with use of artificial intelligence and exponential power to process natural language.

With machine learning, chatbots have also been trained to be legal advisors for mundane and redundant queries. Legal companies have complex intranets which can now be integrated into a chatbot for a better experience. Legal firms have also started using chatbots for HR tasks such as leave application management, onboarding, and setting up notifications and reminders. You can access our full guide to the application of chatbots in the legal industry here.

INSURANCE

For insurance buyers, confusing jargon and insurance policies have been synonymous. Traditional insurance agents have not been able to fully fill the gap of educating customers with what they are looking for. This is because of the fast-paced regulations and updates that happen within the industry. Magda is a revolutionizing chatbot in this industry which sold insurance policies online.

Chatbots in the insurance sector are taking the avatar of insurance agents, virtual hosts, analyst, insurance advisor, and other roles that can relieve humans to do far more advanced tasks.

CHECK OUT HOW A CANADA BASED INSURANCE FIRM IMPROVED CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE BY LEVERAGING AN AI BOT TO PROVIDE PERSONALIZED RESPONSES

EDUCATION

Chatbots are changing the face of education right from personalizing education, helping people learn new languages, spaced interval learning, student feedback, professor assessment, essay scoring, acquaint a student with school culture and for administrative formalities. AdmitHub created a chatbot to help new students navigate the college transition process. Jill Watson is a chatbot that works as a teaching assistant. Duolingo, on the other hand, is a language teaching chatbot.

In fact, more and more teachers and students are independently trying to create their own chatbots by using platforms like Botcore.ai.

HEALTHCARE

For hospitals and clinics, chatbots have been saving a lot of money. While one category of chatbots performs tasks for receptionists, nurses and interns, another category assists doctors with patient progress reports, checking in on post-op recoveries, assessing drug interactions, and so on. Your.MD is a chatbot used by patients and clinicians. It learns common symptoms and provides recommendations for relevant resources.

A few other advanced areas where chatbots are applied in healthcare are patient engagement, population health management and care coordination, expediting triaging patients, and research.

MANUFACTURING

Manufacturing industry that has been constantly struggling with communications has found a solution. This sector is ruled by assembly lines, distributor, wholesalers, and obscure designers. To connect people and build interaction, manufacturers have fast adopted chatbots.

Vendor management and engagement, HR-related tasks, crew and workplace maintenance assistance, and product recall assistance are some of the areas where chatbots have been used in the manufacturing industry. We have provided a detailed value proposition of how chatbots can help manufacturers.

HOSPITALITY

Chatbots are working towards providing better guest service experience, acting as a personal travel assistant and virtual concierge for hospitality leaders. Chatbots are available 24/7 to provide a positive experience that builds customer loyalty and satisfaction. This quality of chatbots helps the hospitality to keep pace with the rest of the world.

AIRLINE

Travel bots used by the airline industry are deployed to send announcements, for ticketing, facilitate web check-ins, personalized search and purchases, provide flight options, and make other travel arrangements.

OIL AND GAS

Exxon Mobil, a large oil and gas exploration company has used AI bots for hydrocarbon exploration and production. These bots have also helped the company in improving productivity and cost-effectiveness while reducing worker risk.

Shell, a leading British-Dutch oil and gas company has introduced an AI chatbot – LubeChat for its B2B Lubricant customers. The bot provides real-time customer support by providing information about the company products, services lubricants data etc.

OTHER CHATBOTS

While these are some industry-specific use cases, some chatbots are used in many other scenarios. Irrespective of the industry, few functions remain constant. The function that thrives and is most sought after is Sales. SIA, a sales assistant chatbot helps the sales team improve top-line revenue by helping them make informed decisions. It can be added to Skype, Slack, Yammer, O365 and other existing collaboration tools.

Another exuberant function is the IT department itself. The IT helpdesk chatbot uses machine learning to provide answers to repetitive IT support requests, thereby improving help desk response rate. MESH Bot is a Sharepoint Intranet bot that improves intranet adoption rates. HR Bots help in creating a better rapport between the organization and the employees by answering queries and improving operational efficiency.

Chatbots have a variety of use cases but it is important to find a high-yielding use case which can deliver high ROI. Should you need any help with more case studies, get in touch with us, and we will connect you to relevant experts who can share more about the use of chatbots in your industry.

If you’d like to learn more about this topic, please feel free to get in touch with one of our experts for a personalized consultation.

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