Enterprise Chatbot Builder Platform Archives - BotCore

Using AR and chatbots to increase customer engagement

Abhishek Shanbhag — Fri, 05 Feb 2021 07:15:00 +0000

Using AR and chatbots to increase customer engagement

Customers seek personalization while shopping for products. With most of the purchasing happening online, businesses are turning to advanced technologies to facilitate more interactive and engaging buying experiences for their customers.

An upcoming trend is the use of augmented reality (AR) in customer-facing chatbots. Since customers today have grown habitual to communicating with chatbots for queries and product purchases, adding AR to the spectrum opens a whole new world of immersive shopping experiences.

Estée Lauder’s Lip Artist chatbot allows you to upload a photo or click a selfie to try on lipstick shades and immediately see the results. Moreover, the bot acts as a personalized beauty consultant – suggests shades based on your skin type, asks questions about your color preferences and the occasions you are planning to wear the lipstick, and makes recommendations or gives surprise suggestions.
Based on what you like, you can click on “Shop Now” to purchase the lipstick from Estée’s website.

The Lip Artist is one among many examples of how AR is increasing customer engagement in customer-facing bots. So, let’s understand what AR is.

What is Augmented Reality (AR)?

As defined by Gartner, Augmented reality is the real-time use of information in the form of text, graphics, audio, and other enhancements integrated with real-world objects.

In other words, augmented reality is a live view of the physical, real-world environment.

Research shows, 10X marketers that employ AR see a 10x increase in engagement time, increasing retention and effectiveness. As such, 7 out of 10 media planners want to use AR to boost advertising and customer engagement.

When combined with chatbots, augmented reality allows brands the unlimited opportunity to interact three-dimensionally with customers and transform the entire customer journey into a personalized, interactive, and immersive experience.

Let’s look at some real-life examples and success stories of companies, which used AR to boost customer engagement in chatbots.

#1 POND’S

Skincare brand POND’S launched an AI-enabled skin-diagnostic chatbot called SAL, available in Indonesia via messaging app, LINE and Argentina, Columbia, UAE, and South Africa via Facebook Messenger.

SAL leverages a combination of advanced AI, AR, and skin diagnostic technologies to help consumers solve skincare problems across four significant areas – uneven skin tone, spots, pimples, and wrinkles.

Recognizing how confusing it can be for customers to pick the right skincare products, SAL provides them a more in-depth insight into their skin type and recommends the most effective products. Customers need to upload a selfie and complete a short quiz on SAL to receive a personalized skin diagnosis and product recommendations within a minute.

#2 Sephora

Beauty brand Sephora’s chatbot for Messenger helps customers make purchasing decisions on their own with its new offering, “Sephora Color Match.”

In partnership with a company that allows consumers to pick out and match colors using augmented reality, Sephora Color Match gives users the facility to hold up their camera to any face or image. Subsequently, the algorithm automatically detects and presents the identified lip color and other matching products from Sephora’s makeup line.

Additionally, customers can hold up their phones to ads and Instagram photos of personalities they admire, and the chatbot will assist them in finding suitable products to recreate the look. However, the feature is not just limited to faces. If users are looking

for matching palettes and products to complement a dress, they may hold up their camera to the outfit to locate the right products.

#3 Madison Reed

Madison Reed, a company that produces hair colors for an at-home hair treatment, talks to its customers via its Facebook Messenger chatbot, Madi. For customers, it’s like having a professional personal hair colorist right at their fingertips.

Customers need to upload a selfie, and using image recognition and hair localization, Madi identifies the primary hair color and secondary hair tones. She then asks questions about the desired outcome and suggests the perfect hair color, which can be purchased at Madison-Reed.com.

#4 IKEA

With IKEA’s Place app, customers can get a dynamic and immersive experience while shopping for furniture, keeping them engaged and convincing them about the utility of the purchase.

A chatbot built into the app assists customers in navigating the technology. The bot helps them point the camera at their surroundings, wherever they want to place the item in their living space. Customers can adjust the piece of furniture according to where they want to put it and test the shape, size, and functionality before purchasing it. In the AR environment created, they can walk around to look at the item from various angles.

Moreover, the bot comes up with suggestions and asks questions to guide the customer during the process.

The benefits of integrating augmented reality and chatbots

1. Unique selling point

A brand leveraging augmented reality in its chatbot stands out from the competition because it offers something no one else does. In such a case, a mere word of mouth is enough to make the brand “the talk of the town” and attract customers.

2. Increase engagement with personalized experiences

By showing customers how a particular product looks on them, augmented reality adds a touch of personalization to the shopping experience. Retailers can showcase their items more effectively, and the client can see the products more clearly and realistically. This leads to customized and immersive shopping experiences for customers and higher engagement rates for companies.

3. Higher revenue

Customers want to make informed purchase decisions. Chatbots that run on artificial intelligence understand customer needs better. Combine it with AR, and the customer has a memorable experience in shuffling through the various suggestions, trying out the different items, and selecting the right products. Since the customer’s decision is informative and smooth, the possibility of return orders declines, leading to increased revenues.

Final Thoughts

As seen above, using augmented reality in chatbots is the way to go for any industry where buyers require visual inspection and a look-test of the product.

The AR-chatbot customer experience model allows users to take a closer look at a new range of shoes, try out a lipstick or eyeshadow, check how a dress looks on them, and get tailored product recommendations before the actual purchase, all of this while sitting in the comfort of their homes.

Such unique and immersive experiences go a long way in generating buzz around the brand and increasing customer engagement.

To know more about AR in Chatbots, please feel free to schedule a personalized consultation with our experts.

Why The Future Of Chatbots is Low-Code

Abhishek Shanbhag — Fri, 15 Jan 2021 10:33:00 +0000

Why The Future Of Chatbots is Low-Code

Gartner predicts, Low-code application building would gather more than 65% of all app development functions by the year 2024.

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the entire business landscape and compelled businesses to face never-seen-before challenges and develop new workflows. Moreover, an increasing focus on the digitization of the industry drove up the demand for text and voice-based bots that automate day-to-day operations and deliver exceptional customer support.

With the IT department dealing with massive resource scarcity and struggling to develop apps for various business problems, enterprises started looking at smart solutions that allow people with little or no coding knowledge to quickly deploy AI-powered bots for a host of business use cases. No wonder many organizations turned to low-code app development platforms (LCAPs).

Low-code platforms are indeed the future of chatbot development. So, what’s a low-code app development platform? A low-code application platform, or an LCAP, is an interactive platform that leverages a visual interface, such as drag-and-drop tooling and pre-configured templates, to empower users to develop and deploy professional-grade bots within days.

Let’s explore further.

Benefits of building chatbots on a low-code platform

1. Infuses agility

The first and foremost advantage of low-code development is the agility that it allows in business operations because a) it’s quicker to build bots with pre-built modules and templates in a visual interface, b) employees, who are experts in their domains, can easily develop and refine their bots without the need to explain their ideas to others (coders). Research has shown low-code platforms can potentially reduce development time by up to 90%.

2. Reduces development costs

Hiring skilled developers proves heavier on the cost side. Low-code solutions require little or no coding knowledge, so professional and citizen developers alike can quickly build and deploy any app, making it economically viable to create intelligent chatbots for different business use cases, including service desk management, IT helpdesk, HR automation, etc.

3. Allows flexible integration

Low-code app development platforms allow integration with various SaaS-based and on-premise enterprise systems, helping organizations get a single-window view of their data.

4. Encourages innovation across functions and levels

Since low-code platforms enable domain/subject-matter experts to collaborate, develop, and customize their bots, they democratize innovation by not restricting it to a core team or group of individuals.

Seven low-code development tools for chatbots

1. Power Virtual Agents

Power Virtual Agents (PVA) is a Microsoft software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering in the low-code app development space. Microsoft’s Cloud services host the application; hence PVA significantly reduces the need for a conducive environment to deploy and maintain the bots.

Bot Framework and Azure Bot Service and Cognitive Services form the SDK to build chatbots using a guided, no-code visual interface, allowing citizen developers to build and deploy chatbots quickly. PVA greatly reduces the need to have the infrastructure to maintain and deploy chatbots as Microsoft’s Azure Cloud Services does all the heavy lifting of providing a conducive environment to host the application.

2. Chatfuel

Chatfuel is a leading low-code chatbot development platform for Facebook Messenger. Chatfuel supports many languages and allows integration with several third-party apps.
Chatfuel’s built-in guides and predefined bot templates help create bots for automated customer support and sales and marketing activities easily. An analytics dashboard allows users to monitor and analyze several business and chatbot metrics.

3. FlowXO

FlowXO enables users to build both simple and complex AI bots and connect them to more than 100 different cloud apps. FlowXO provides a visual flow editor, supports multilingual chatbots, and allows integration with popular apps, such as Facebook and Slack. Other features include the ability to send emails and attachments and build chatbot widgets for websites.

4. Botsify

Botsify uses an easy-to-navigate drag-and-drop interface that enables users to build template designs for chatbots. Botsify’s chatbots are used by well-established companies, including Apple and Shazam.

The bots integrate with services, such as WordPress, Alexa, ZenDesk, Google Sheets, etc., and can collate user information, track sales leads, and automate sales chats.

5. BotKit

With a semantic chat interface, BotKit’s chatbots imitate human conversations. The platform boasts interesting features like a visual conversation builder and open source libraries.

Other features include activity monitoring, detailed statistics, and flexible API integrations.

6. TARS

TARS is another low-code bot-building platform that democratizes the process of building chatbots with pre-built templates that are easy to edit and customize.

Other exciting features of the platform include – integration with Zapier, file and image upload, custom branding, API integration, and the option to export data to Excel/CSV.

7. BotCore

At Acuvate, we help clients build and deploy AI-enabled chatbots quickly with our low-code enterprise bot-building platform called BotCore.

Fully deployable on Microsoft Cloud, BotCore’s graphical interface with drag-and-drop functionality, pre-built templates, and an integrated Knowledge Graph consisting of multi-functional nodes enable professional and citizen developers alike to create and deploy chatbots in a matter of days.

Some of the powerful features of BotCore include –

BotCore leverages Message Definition Language (MDL) to define bot responses
Technologies like natural language processing (NLP), natural language understanding (NLU), and machine learning enable our bots to understand the context, learn from past conversations, and respond to users in a human-like manner.
Seamless agent handover capability allows bots to handle simple requests while escalating the more complex ones to human agents when needed.
BotCore will enable clients to build multilingual bots that can be deployed across various channels, giving users a seamless omnichannel experience.
Our bots can aggregate the best of Microsoft technologies, including LUIS bots, Power Virtual Agents, QnA Maker bots, and other third-party bot applications.

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

Transforming Omnichannel Customer Service With Chatbots

Abhishek Shanbhag — Mon, 19 Oct 2020 09:31:00 +0000

Transforming omnichannel customer service with chatbots

With the onset of COVID-19, consumer buying worldwide shifted to digital platforms. Digital platforms are increasingly being used to interact with brands, view products, get information, check prices, and make purchases. Moreover, with the uncertainty surrounding the pandemic, they expected a super quick and highly efficient customer service to resolve their queries. They no longer tolerated traditional service approaches like frustrating IVRs, frequent agent transfers, or having to repeat their questions again and again to get the support they required.

Today’s customers desire convenient services through a variety of channels. For example, they may check a product’s features on Facebook, send an email to request more information, make purchases through a website, and seek technical assistance through IVR.

Therefore, an omnichannel customer strategy that integrates all communication channels has become the foremost priority for organizations. It is not only crucial for companies to be present on a particular channel; rather, it is also imperative to adapt to the unique formatting of each customer touchpoint and coordinate communication across channels to create a personalized and holistic brand experience.

A study by the Aberdeen Group revealed that organizations with a sustained omnichannel engagement strategy retain an average of 89% of their customers. In comparison, those without one retain an average of 33% only. Moreover, companies with omnichannel strategies experience 23 times higher rates of customer satisfaction.

An effective way to deliver fast yet personalized omnichannel experiences is through AI chatbots. So, let’s find out how organizations are transforming omnichannel customer service with chatbots.

Omnichannel Chatbots: Build Once, Deploy Anywhere

Customers expect their demands and needs to be met, even when they use different channels to communicate, and that’s where omnichannel chatbots come into the picture.

An omnichannel chatbot needs to be built just once and can then be deployed across multiple channels, including email, customer-facing websites, Facebook Messenger, Twitter, WhatsApp, mobile apps, and even voice assistants, such as Alexa and Google Home, and works seamlessly across all channels.

Enterprises today are using low-code chatbot builder platforms to build and deploy omnichannel chatbots. This means business teams can implement chatbots within a matter of a few weeks and little reliance on IT teams.

Omnichannel chatbots leverage technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, natural language processing (NLP), and natural language understanding (NLU) to comprehend customer queries, learn from past interactions, and store information from each user in a centralized database.

Once the data is collected, the bots access this information in real-time to deliver personalized conversational experiences to customers. Since bots retain the context of the original conversation, customers can easily switch from one channel to the next without the need to start over.

Omnichannel bots make customer interactions smoother and more consistent by –

Functioning seamlessly across virtually all channels in the digital landscape
Engaging in personalized conversations by understanding each customer’s individual needs and situation
Accessing real-time data and ensuring information consistency across all channels
Solving simple to more complex queries
Adjusting to new information and customer preferences over time
Escalating queries to human agents when needed.

Benefits of omnichannel chatbots

1. Improved customer satisfaction

Omnichannel chatbots help organizations increase CSAT levels in more ways than one. Keeping up with the increased use of messaging applications and social media platforms, bots can now be integrated with channels like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, etc. Bots can then assist customers in locating the products that suit their needs, answer questions regarding payment, delivery status, etc., carry out simple transactions on the customer’s behalf, or solve other queries. Or they may transfer the request to a human agent or schedule an agent call-back if needed.

Moreover, bots can handle multiple requests at once to provide customer support at scale, 24X7, and at lower costs.

In addition to delivering passive customer interaction, wherein bots only engage with customers when contacted, organizations can stay a step ahead by proactively reaching out to customers regarding new products or issues they might be facing and improve brand perception in the long run.

2. Fast response

An omnichannel bot can provide an immediate response, within seconds, on any channel it is deployed. According to an Inside sales research, there is a 10x reduction in the odds of retaining a customer, even if you wait 5 mins after the lead makes contact. Given these stats, it becomes prudent for all organizations to provide swift and accurate responses to customers, both current and potential.

By leveraging its machine learning capabilities and drawing insights from already stored data, an omnichannel bot can provide quick, personalized, and consistent answers to customer queries in real-time.

3. Increased revenue

If customers receive exceptional service, they remain satisfied and loyal to your brand and buy more. According to a Harvard Business Review report, a 5% increase in customer retention amounts to an increase of up to 95% in the company’s annual earnings.

The wholesome, interactive, and engaging experience offered by omnichannel chatbots can thus accelerate business growth.

4. Data collection

Omnichannel bots collect customer information from various channels and store all of the data in a centralized database. Such data provides insights into customer buying behavior, past interactions, requirements, etc., allowing companies to plan more focussed and strategic marketing and sales initiatives.

Go Omnichannel Today!

Consumer behavior is evolving, and establishing new ways to connect with them has become more critical than before.

By adopting an omnichannel strategy with the help of chatbots, companies empower customers to engage with them on the channel of their choice and create more meaningful, effortless, and successful user experiences. Establishing consistent support across all channels leads to enhanced customer satisfaction, higher brand loyalty, and greater revenue.

On top of that, the data you collect can help you establish more targeted and improved outreach and sales practices.

At Acuvate, we help clients build and deploy omnichannel bots with our enterprise bot-building platform called BotCore. BotCore’s core capabilities and features include –

With minimum coding requirements and pre-built connectors, it is easy to deploy chatbots, and also differentiate responses across channels by using channel-specific interface elements. A single configuration is enough for deployment across multiple channels.
BotCore’s chatbots support multiple languages, like French, German, Italian, etc. so you can reach and engage a wider consumer base.
Through automatic handling of API requirements, BotCore’s chatbots can connect to various channels, such as Facebook, SMS, email, etc. You need to simply click on the required checkboxes, and the deployment is done.
BotCore’s machine learning (ML) capabilities help chatbots retain the context of the conversation, allowing users to switch channels without the need to begin the conversation from scratch.

If you’d like to learn more about this topic, please feel free to get in touch with one of our enterprise chatbot consultants for a personalized consultation. You may also be interested in exploring our chatbot builder platform (BotCore).

The post Transforming Omnichannel Customer Service With Chatbots appeared first on BotCore.

A Comprehensive Guide To Understanding Chatbots

Rakesh Reddy — Sat, 25 Jul 2020 10:53:51 +0000

A Comprehensive Guide To Understanding Chatbots

What is a chatbot
The past and the present of chatbots
What are chatbots capable of doing?
Important chatbot features you should be aware of
Use cases and benefits
Functions
Industries
Key implementation considerations
The future of chatbots

Chapter 1: What Is A Chatbot

A chatbot is a computer program which can converse via textual or auditory methods. Often regarded as the “darling of the media”, chatbots (or bots) are currently one of the most popular AI technologies. There are also rule-based bots which don’t have AI incorporated in them. However, their relevance is fast decreasing in today’s disruptive world.

Chatbots are the “apps” of voice and messaging platforms that define how users and customers converse with your digital business services and data

Usually built with a Chatbot Platform or Frameworks, bots are deployed on messaging apps or virtual assistants to converse with end-users.

The advancements in Artificial Intelligence and its related components like Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing (NLP) led to the creation of highly intelligent bots with smarter responses in a natural language tone.

Chapter 2: The Past And The Present Of Chatbots

The History Of Bots: Where And How It All Began

In order to understand chatbots, we first need to delve into Artificial Intelligence and how it gave rise to the intelligent Chatbots of today. It all began with Alan Turing asking a simple question in an article titled ‘Computer Machinery and Intelligence’ in 1950. In this article, Turing theorized on whether or not computer systems could think. He also outlined the Turing Test, a method to measure whether one was speaking to a human or to a computer programme. We can note this as being one of the first theories on the capability of AI technology.

Years later in 1965, Joseph Weizenbaum created ELIZA at MIT’s AI laboratory. ELIZA was capable of simulating human conversation by matching user prompts with scripted responses. This innovation paved the way for PARRY, an AI chatbot developed in 1972 by Kenneth Colby. PARRY could simulate the thinking patterns of a person. When psychiatrists were made to interact with PARRY, only 48 percent were able to identify the difference between PARRY and a real person. Ever since then we have seen many variations of AI-powered chatbots which have only gotten more and more sophisticated over time.

The Present Scenario

With the advancements in AI, 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. There are two primary entities of AI that power a chatbot – Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing.

Machine learning is an application of AI, and a scientific study of algorithms and statistical models that provides computer systems the ability to learn and perform a specific task without explicitly trained to do so. With machine learning, systems rely on patterns and inference to learn automatically. With the help of machine learning, chatbots can use historic interactions and the built-in instructions during training, to continuously learn and better themselves.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a component of AI, and is the ability of a computer program to understand human or natural language, as it is spoken/written. NLP helps a bot understand the semantics of the language being used and logically respond using natural language, consistent with the user’s query.

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.

Learn More: Chatbots: The Past, Present, And Future

Chapter 3: What Are Chatbots Capable Of Doing?

Unlike a typical application’s or website’s traditional Graphic User Interface (GUI), the Conversational User Interface (CUI) of a chatbot simplifies business workflows, tasks and much more. Before understanding how chatbots drive value, it’s imperative to understand what chatbots can do.

1. Fetching Information

Chatbots provide users with an easy way to access data or generate reports and facilitate better decision making for both your customers and employees.

Decision makers can easily obtain granular business insights and key metrics right within the actively used messaging app. This eliminates the need for them to log into applications or scan through multiple dashboards or filter data to access the information they require. Instead, relevant information is made available to them right at their fingertips, saving time and greatly increasing efficiency.
Enabling users with chatbots allows them to easily request for information they require through voice commands and basic keystrokes.
Chatbots can easily answer questions via text or any multimedia format, including but not limited to images, graphs, pie charts and so on.

Examples:

Employee to a business intelligence chatbot: “What is the marketing ROI for 2016 and 2017?”
Customer to a banking chatbot: “Send my account mini statement”

2. Send Personalized Alerts

Just like a mobile app, chatbots have the capability to deliver personalized notifications and alerts to customers and employees directly from your enterprise systems. This serves to ensure that your business users are kept updated about various changes and news in the organization. and also engage to get more details by asking questions in natural language.

Here are a few examples of how notifications and alerts can help across a variety of organizations and departments:

An intranet chatbot can send notifications to relevant employees when there is a new document added to the intranet knowledge base.
A sales chatbot can keep users notified about changes in important metrics, including but not limited to MSL, leads, OTIF, payment terms and so on. These alerts can also be customized based on the location of the sales personnel and the specific customer they are about to meet, so they have access to the most relevant information required to make a sale. Chatbots can notify users about a dip in revenue from specific regions or brands etc. As a result, the sales personnel will be able to immediately dive into why it’s happening and take appropriate measures to fix.
A banking chatbot can send alerts to customers reminding them to make payments or to advise them that they have exceeded the credit limit, so they do not attract unforeseen fees.
An e-commerce chatbot can send alerts on incomplete orders. If a customer has items that have been left in the cart, he is reminded to complete the transaction to secure the items he wanted to purchase.
Chatbots can alert users about upcoming ERP downtimes.

3. Perform Tasks

There are a variety of repetitive tasks that have to be performed across organizations for a variety of reasons. These routine tasks can be time-consuming and hamper productivity. A chatbot can easily be introduced to address these tasks and complete them without glitches.

These tasks can involve collecting, modifying, posting information in systems or making form-based data entries that employees and customers need to perform repetitively.

Chatbots also eliminate the need to switch across multiple applications, go through various mundane procedures or depend on personnel to get tasks done. Users can get all their simple, yet repetitive tasks are done, simply by “conversing” with the chatbot via their actively used organization wide messaging app.

Examples:

Employee to a helpdesk chatbot: “There is an issue with my laptop. Generate an IT helpdesk ticket”
Customer to a banking chatbot: “I want to make my credit-card payment”

4. Answering Questions

Most websites are equipped with chatbots that proactively ask visitors questions that enable them to provide a personalized experience and help the user reach exactly the information or page they are looking for.

This same functionality also applies within businesses – from the most simple FAQs to more complex questions, chatbots can be designed to address a wide range of queries from employees across the organization.

Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) enable bots to understand the query and the intent and therefore, provide highly accurate answers.

Well-designed chatbots can also quickly adapt to the office jargon, offering users the most relevant and informed answers to their queries.

Examples:

Employee to IT helpdesk bot: “How do I reset my password?”
Customer: “Can you tell me more about that product?”

Chapter 4: Popular Chatbot Features You Should Be Aware Of

A) Knowledge Base

The knowledge base of the bot is central to its functioning. It supports the following functions:

Creating Guided Conversations: Bot interactions ought to be streamlined so that the outcomes are pre-defined.
Handling Q&A Scenarios: Equips bots to answer all possible queries.
Entity Fulfilment & Actions: This enables a bot to give relevant responses to capture all required entities to perform an action.

b) Broadcasting

When we say there can’t be a bot platform without broadcasting, we mean it. Through broadcasting, the admin of a chatbot can easily send a notification to all the users regarding any important event. This feature of a chatbot platform has gained significance during noteworthy events such as the People’s Choice Awards, World Surf League etc., in which users were kept informed and updated about future events.

c) Effective conversation system

Based on the particular need and situation, the bot should have the ability to initiate a tailored conversation with the user.

An efficient bot would have features such as

Trigger service – Service that an integrating application can use to send a trigger
Message queuing – Trigger messages are queued for large scale message volume
User & channel data store – Triggers can be sent to users on one or more channels that they are connected to with the bot.
Human hand off: The bot should transfer the conversation to a human when the conversation becomes too complex for the bot to handle or upon users’ request.

d) Vocabulary

If the bot gives a standard response with limited phrases, the user may be discouraged from continuing the conversation. An efficient chatbot should have a high range of variable vocabulary and understand familiar user phrases. Chatbots should also be ingested with business/domain specific vocabulary for seamless adoption

e) Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment analysis empowers chatbots with the ability to understand the emotions and mood of the user by analyzing their text or voice input. This helps chatbots to drive the conversation wisely and deliver appropriate responses.

f) Administration

Bots need to be monitored and regulated. They need to be equipped with:

Training Module: For learning and understanding new concepts.
Maintenance Mode: The results of new learning and actions can be tested here.
Logs: This module helps record bot errors.

Learn More: Take Your Chatbots To The Next Level With New Capabilities

Chapter 5: Use Cases And Benefits

Functions

1. Human Resources

Chatbots can be used at different stages of an employee’s life cycle – right from recruitment and onboarding to engaging the employee and fostering retention, in order to optimize the whole process.

- Recruitment

Given the large volume of applications that Human Resources teams tend to receive, keeping all candidates updated in a timely manner is a burdensome task. In all practicality, most HR personnel barely have the time and bandwidth to update rejected applicants especially when they are occupied with sourcing the right ones. Due to this, a majority of the candidates never hear back from their prospective recruiters, lowering the quality of the applicant’s experience.

This creates an opportunity for chatbots to manage and accomplish such repetitive, and time-heavy tasks.

Use Cases

Recruitment chatbots can perform the following functions in the recruitment process:

Parsing the resumes uploaded onto the recruitment portals
Filtering applicants for the screening process by making significant inquiries
Delivering updates about the status of an application
Responding to FAQs, thereby saving the recruiter’s time and efforts for other tasks
Additionally, a chatbot can also conduct and record feedback surveys from the candidate about their recruitment process and gain insights on any areas of improvement.

While these are some of the more specific tasks a chatbot can perform with regards to the recruitment processes, use of recruitment chatbots can also lead to several benefits for the company. The most crucial one being significantly lower costs and time involved in hiring, since a large part of the process will be automated and will lead to higher productivity and efficiency.

Benefits

Deploying AI-powered chatbots can help in reducing the workload of recruiters. Given the complex current hiring scenarios where simultaneous engagement with several candidates is required, automated chatbots ensure seamless candidate experience. With the help of chatbots, you can:

Reduce cost-per-hire
Increase recruitment team productivity
Eliminate paperwork
Enhance candidate experience
Reduce recruitment time by qualifying and disqualifying candidates swiftly at scale
Automate the manual and administrative recruitment work
Keep candidates engaged throughout the process
Reduce missed opportunities
Improve employer brand

In a recent survey by Allegis it was noted that:
58% of candidates were comfortable interacting with AI and recruitment chatbots in the early stages of the application process.
About 66% of candidates were comfortable with AI and chatbots taking care of interview scheduling and peripheral activity.

- Onboarding

Since on-boarding involves performing several smaller activities in a shorter span, automating the same using chatbots can help streamline the whole process. Some of the crucial chatbot use cases during onboarding can be –

Helping HR personnel during initial tasks such as collecting and recording KYC, tax forms, signed legal documents etc. Chatbots can effectively streamline and speed this process by tracking the same for employees and reminding them to submit the required documents on time.
Hand holding new hires through company policies. A large part of initial orientation involves sharing standard operating procedures and company policies, chatbots can severely reduce the HR workload by handling the process and queries online
Apart from orientation, AI powered chatbots can also help relay all relevant information to do with the organization and internal teams. This can reduce dependency on the HR team for sharing troves of information with regards to their teams, roles, key contacts, general organizational landscape, etc.

- Learning and Development

Employee training and development is a key process in the HR lifecycle. It involves providing the employees with specific knowledge and skills to boost their productivity and efficiency.

Chatbots can be used to conduct tests and quizzes to track progress of employees.

Employees often run through the long-cycle of time consuming training sessions and coaching mechanisms. A chatbot that is made available 24×7 allows employees to get trained in an agile mode and round the clock, adding flexibility to their work life. Employees can consume these conversational training modules, in the form of mini-questionnaires and tests.

Training bots also take care of administrative aspects like sending reminders and fixing coach appointments.

By use of chatbots, employees can also track their learning and development goals and remain on par with the company’s goals and objectives.

- Retention and Engagement

Effective employee engagement is perhaps the most dynamic application for a HR bot. By providing a seamless employee digital experience, companies can increase employee retention.

Chatbots offer a solution by providing self-service options to employees. Chatbots enable employees to ask natural language questions such as, “How many holiday days have I got left?”, “What are the company policies on applying for time off?” and other FAQs to the chatbot. This helps them get all the information they need right at their fingertips, without having to wait for the HR team to get back on their queries.

Chatbots act as the first line of HR support for your employees and thereby increase your team productivity. This also reduces your cost-per-contact significantly since the bot takes care of all the repetitive, basic and simple issues.

- Off-boarding / Exit Management

When an employee quits a firm or submits his resignation, there are several HR related formalities that follow.

They are first required to confirm the last date of their employment based on their notice period, account for the leaves used that year, get settlements on their pending invoices, get approvals on their pending receipts, etc.
Finally on the last working day, the formalities to do with the handover are supposed to be completed, like surrendering of company devices & ID cards, settlement of pending accounts, submission of relevant forms & applications and any information that needs to be relayed to important associates, clients or colleagues.
There is also the exit interview that takes place, to get feedback from the employees about their experience at the firm. Given the several significant and meticulous tasks involved, the whole process could take days or weeks to finish.

Since these tasks are part of a time and effort consuming yet pre-fixed, routine process, these can easily be taken up by an AI-powered HR bot. An HR bot can streamline the process by creating forms, all collated in one place, additionally, the process flow can be created such that the subsequent step becomes active only when the step before it is completed. This can help put an end to incomplete documentation and human error.

Apart from the formalities, a bot can offer easy query resolution to do with any key aspect such as leave balance, taxes, benefits, duration of notice period, etc. As for the last step – the exit interview, having an HR bot conduct the same can ensure an honest and unbiased outcome.

Not only will the employees be more candid and honest with a virtual chatbot, but the interview responses can be collated and help analyse retention and other HR challenges in the organisation. Therefore, an HR bot can easily undertake the step-by-step process with minimal supervision and help render off-boarding as an effective and smooth-running process.

Learn More: How Chatbots Are Revolutionizing The HR Department

2. IT Helpdesk

Apart from just HR functions, chatbots are capable of resolving first-level IT issues as well. Just like the HR department, the IT helpdesk is often inundated with routine questions. AI chatbots act as the first line of help desk agents by answering all the basic FAQs. As soon as a request is raised, IT chatbots help the user do basic troubleshooting and in most cases fix the issue and thereby reduce the employee downtime.

If the issue isn’t resolved or the user isn’t satisfied with the outcome, bots provide the option to connect with a support agent – thereby leaving the more complex queries to human agents. Employees can stay updated on the progress of their tickets by asking the chatbots natural language questions.

This leads to faster resolution times, improved incident management, improved security, better handling of outages and ensuring that employees are kept informed with steady and timely alerts.

If the issue remains unresolved or the user is not completely satisfied with the outcome, bots offer the option to connect with a support agent – thereby leaving the more complex queries to human associates.

Employees can then stay updated on the progress of their tickets by inquiring with chatbots using natural language questions. This leads to faster resolution times, streamlined incident management, better security, improved handling of issues and ensuring that employees are kept informed with steady and timely outage alerts.

Use Cases

Check the status of tickets
Answer common troubleshooting questions like VPN or password not working
Ask instructions for common IT issues
Reset passwords for devices and network
Talk to a live agent (human-handoff)
Raise tickets
Fill form fields via conversation
Access the knowledge base
Check on the pending case reports
Look-up case-related information
Receive information on – Incident notifications, New change request notifications, Task notifications, Access request notifications, Asset request notifications and Outage alerts

Benefits

Reduced employee downtime
Provide self-service to employees
24/7 availability
Eliminate calls
Reduce cost per ticket
Answer FAQ
Increase IT staff productivity
Address level 1 issues
Spread awareness about IT policies & initiatives
Modernize incident management
Categorize and route incidents better
Quicker resolutions
Increase employee experience and productivity

Learn More:

3. Sales

Chatbots can integrate with data warehouses and CRM, BI and LOB Systems to perform tasks such as creating new leads, updating lead status, getting visual reports in multimedia formats, updating CRM records etc.

Use Cases

Check the lead status
Ask pinpointed prospect-related queries
Check on the sales KPIs
Get pin-pointed answers of any information available in the CRM or BI systems.
Fill lead details
Send email of the desired dashboard
Set and get alerts about dip or rise in any sales KPI.
Receive notifications about change in lead’s status
Access reports available in the CRM, BI or LOB or DWH systems.
Get links to the desired dashboards

Benefits

Increase CRM adoption
Simplify and automate data entry into CRM systems
Update CRM records quickly
Access customer/prospect intelligence swiftly during calls/meetings
Reduce manual data-entry and administrative tasks for sales reps
Increase sales reps productivity
Enable data-driven decision-making
Increase lead conversion ratio
Stay updated with real-time KPIs and lead intelligence

4. Marketing

Chatbots can gather data about potential customers that equips marketers with essential information to design their products and advertising strategies. They can be integrated with various social media channels and used to reach out to customers of various demographics.

Use Cases

Lead generation
Lead qualification
Book sales meetings
Schedule demos/consultations
Suggest relevant content based on user’s website activity
Capture email addresses and other visitor details in a simplified manner

Benefits

Personalize website experience
Skyrocket visitor to lead conversions
Qualify leads effortlessly and generate only high qualified leads for sales teams
Engage visitors
Gather visitor/lead intelligence
More demos/consultations with potential customers
Eliminate the filling of long forms in landing pages
Grow your email list
Close more deals and accelerate revenue

Learn More: 4 Ways Marketing Teams Can Use Chatbots

5. Intranet/Employee Assistant

Employees can use the company’s intranet chatbot to perform simple actions such as checking on internal company updates, accessing documents, applying for leaves etc.

Use Cases

Proactively take the announcements and news in the intranet to the employee
Get intranet information via natural language questions
Get links to desired intranet documents
Content authors can update content with a chat interface
Get personalized alerts and timely updates
Perform tasks like leave requests, travel settlement requests, IT requests etc.

Benefits

Drive intranet adoption, collaboration & ROI
Personalize the intranet experience. Employees don’t have to swift through unrelated intranet content.
Access intranet resources faster
Reduce intranet redesign investments
Improve employee experience and productivity
Faster intranet content updation

Learn More: Chatbots For SharePoint Intranet

6. Business Intelligence

Chatbots can be integrated with Power BI, SAP Business Objects, Oracle or any other BI tool, as well as CRM and LOB systems or data warehouses, in order to simplify data consumption.

Use Cases

Ask queries about business KPIs and get pin-pointed answers from any information available in the BI system
Ex: What is the top performing product in 2018?
Access reports available in the BI or LOB or DWH systems.
Get links to the desired dashboards
Update records and details
Bot can send email of the desired dashboard
Get visual reports in multimedia formats

Benefits

Simplify the consumption and interaction with data
Drive business intelligence adoption and data-driven decision-making
Get data on fingertips
Ask questions in a natural language tone
Set and Get alerts on any dip in KPIs like low stock, revenue, etc.
Eliminate multiple logins to BI systems and filtering dashboards
Sales and supply chain assistants
Help in Increasing topline and reduce inventory

Learn More: Business Intelligence Bots

Industries

1. Banking & Financial Services

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.

Use Cases in Customer Service

Checking the account balance, transaction history, credit limit etc.
Help in upsell
Finding the nearest ATM or branch
Inquiring about different offerings and products
Generating a mini statement for the desired time period and the interest rate report
Updating contact information
Connecting to a live agent (human hand-off)
Transferring money from one account to another
Suggest money saving ideas
Generating bill payment alerts and Individualized financial advices
Resetting the card PIN

Business Benefits

Personalize banking services
Personalize marketing strategies and drive sales
24/7 availability and customer service
Get customer feedback and measure customer satisfaction
Self-service transactions
Handle FAQ, basic and simple queries
Improve ESAT and customer loyalty

2. Consumer Goods & Retail

CPG and retail companies are increasingly using chatbots to transform customer experience. Chatbots fix the long product discover journey for a consumer by allowing consumers to access product information and make a purchase on-the-go using mobile devices. They can assist sales personnel by seamlessly integrating with CRM, BI and LOB systems at the background and provide accurate sales data and real-time alerts.

Use Cases in Customer Service

Product exploration and discovery
Product recommendations
Product surveys
Check the shipment status
Add items to cart
Place orders
Book appointments
Connect to customer support agents
Provide product related information, and alerts on a new product launch, and suggestions on discounts or coupons or any other sales offers

Business Benefits

Product exploration and discovery
Product recommendations
Product surveys
Check the shipment status
Add items to cart
Place orders
Book appointments
Connect to customer support agents
Provide product related information, and alerts on a new product launch, and suggestions on discounts or coupons or any other sales offers

3. Insurance

Chatbots in the insurance industry are being used to enhance the customer experience. Top insurance companies including Liberty Mutual Insurance, Lincoln Financial Group and Allstate Business Insurance are using chatbots to handle routine customer questions, address minor insurance related challenges, provide quotes, automate the claim process, and reduce call center costs.

Use Cases in Customer Service

Help in filing a claim
Answer Scheme and plan related questions
Provide recommendations to prevent loss
Provide guidance for choosing the right plan
Send Insurance documents of the customer
Send personalized quotes to users

Business Benefits

GDPR compliant conversations
Simplify complex jargon for customers
Help customers understand the policies or any domain-specific terminology better
Streamline claim filing process
Simplify regular tasks like payments and updating user info
Better marketing through personalized plan recommendations and alerts on new plans
Increase customer agent productivity by answering FAQ

Learn More: Chatbots For Insurance Industry

4. Legal

Legal jargon is a complex language of its own and piles up every day, across multiple document structures. Analyzing these documents and accessing the relevant ones is a time-consuming process for humans. Chatbots reduce the time to analyze with use of artificial intelligence and exponential power to process natural language. With machine learning, chatbots have been trained to be legal advisors for mundane and redundant customer queries.

Use Cases In Customer Service

Helping attorneys with finding information quickly
Understand legal services and offerings of law firm
Queries for better understanding unknown legal jargon
Basic legal queries while staying anonymous
Book appointments with attorneys at the desired time

Business Benefits

Offer a certain amount of free legal advice
Drive leads and appointments
GDPR complaint conversations
Self-service and 24/7 availability
Learn complex legal jargon swiftly and effortlessly

Learn More: Legal Industry Bots

5. 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 students with school culture and for administrative formalities.

Use Cases in Customer Service

Handling queries related to the university and courses during registration, assessment related questions, tuition fees, time tables, scholarships, grades etc.
Get university policy documents, enrollment certificates, academic information, disability and other personal information
Provide course and administration related information
Access course documents
Handle university registration
Send feedback about professors, courses etc.
Update contact information
Register for courses
Fill applications
Apply for permissions

Business Benefits

Provide a personalized 24/7 self-service student experience
The bot act as a single point of contact for all needs of the student – right from registration to farewell
Reduce administrative costs
Improve the productivity of teachers and administration staff

Learn More: Chatbots for Educational Institutions

Chapter 6: Key Chatbot Implementation Considerations

When implementing chatbots in your organization, here are a few factors to consider to plan your implementation better and achieve maximum business value from your chatbots:

Define your goals – Clearly define the purpose of your chatbot and what actions you would want it to handle. Usually, chatbots are used to provide customer service, improve the brand’s online presence, or used to collect BI or process user queries on the intranet.
Start small: Start small but quickly. Establish many small milestones. This will help you stay ahead of competition and by having many small milestones you will understand the pulse of the users. Thenceforth, you can start making changes and updates to the chatbot. An enterprise chatbot platform will be helpful for this process.
Understand your audience – You must profile the users for whom the chatbot is intended in order to understand their needs, behavior, and expectations. Classifying your audience gives you insight that is essential to keep your chatbot strategy focused. Setup live ops to continuously incorporate behaviour pattern and to make adjustments
Outline the user actions – In order to establish a streamlined design, you must outline the key intents, or user actions, that the chatbots will complete as they move through the conversation funnel.
Pay attention to Security and Privacy – Ensure that chatbots are compliant with GDPR or any other industry-specific or location-specific regulations and policies. Provide information to users based on their authorization levels and adopt authentication measures such as user identity authentication, intent level authorization, channel authorization, end to end encryption, and intent level privacy, to enhance the security and privacy of your chatbot.
Chatbot implementation can become expensive, without proper expertise – Building chatbots without prior experience can make the implementation a mismanaged, disorganized, and costly venture. Choosing from a reputed “off-the-shelf” solution, is a better option.
Set the right expectations – Users must be made aware of the capabilities of a chatbot before they are deployed.
Infuse NLP and Machine Learning – Infusing NLP and Machine Learning into bots makes them relatable to the user, thus enhancing adoption, and providing an enhanced and personalized user experience.
Future-proof your chatbot – Ensure your chatbot can leverage any AI service available today and will scale for future services. This can be achieved by choosing bot platforms with cognitive abstraction that ensures you’re not locked down to any specific AI chatbot vendor or product.
Ensure that there is a human hand-off, when required – There should be a human that can take over the conversation in cases where the chatbot cannot drive a query to its conclusion. The hand-off should be as seamless as possible without reducing user experience.
Help employees overcome their resistance to chatbots – Employees may fear that AI and chatbots pose a threat to their jobs. Hence, you should make them aware that a bot has the capability to relieve them of their repetitive work and make them more productive.
Align the chatbot with your brand identity – A tailor-made bot that matches your brand identity and tone is imperative in enhancing the user experience.

Learn More: 10 Key Chatbot Implementation Considerations You Should Be Aware Of

Chapter 7: The Future Of Chatbots

According to Orbis Research, the Global Chatbot Market is to grow at a CAGR of 34.75% during the period 2019-2024.

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

1. Integrating Chatbots with RPA

As chatbots are increasingly being used to perform a greater range of tasks, they will need back office bots that can quickly find information and complete transactions on behalf of users. Integrating front-office chatbots with legacy systems is achieved with the help of Robotic Process Automation (RPA).

Learn More: RPA Bots: Understanding The Chatbot And RPA Integration

2. Chatbot-to-Human Handover

There can be times when a chatbot needs to hand off the conversation to a human being to handle issues that are complex. The bot should recognize the situations when it needs to hand off and provide the user with a clear, smooth transition.

One of the simplest and an effective method of initiating a handoff from is provide a user-driven menu. The bot can be programmed to provide the user with a menu of predefined options after every message.

When the chatbot senses that the user is trying to reach for a human assistance, it can simply provide the user with an option of chatting with a human agent. The user can then select the option if the chatbot seems incapable of solving the problem.

Another scenario in which handoff becomes imperative is in the case of escalations. The chatbot should effectively inform the user that the interaction is being transferred so as to address their concerns better. It also should always provide users an option to talk to a live agent.

Learn More: Human Handoff In Service Desk Bots

3. Voice Bots

A ComScore study forecasts that by 2020, 50% of all searches will be voice-based.

Although in the current scenario text-based chatbots are ruling the roost, the application of voice technology is gaining momentum. Since most people prefer talking as opposed to typing, it is no wonder that organizations are increasingly implementing voice bots for both customers and employees. At the moment, voice bots are a good fit when it comes to handling simple, linear tasks and queries. However, at the rate at which voice technology is evolving, with applications in smart devices such as speakers, TVs, watches etc., voice bots may very well be what the future looks like for AI chatbots.

Learn More:

4. DataOps With Chatbots

A large amount of data is captured from chatbots. Data analytics employs new approaches like DataOps to leverage data that is captured through chatbots. This data can be analyzed and integrated with the other sources of internal and external data for better marketing and customer service.

In Conclusion

Organizations are significantly utilizing Chatbots to automate their internal business processes, productivity, boost revenue and enhance the customer experience.

Juniper Research forecasts that chatbot conversations will be responsible for cost savings of over $8 billion per annum by 2022.

The conversational interface of chatbots simplify everyday workflows for employees and eliminates the hassle of switching multiple apps. Chatbots act as a single point of contact to get tasks done and access information. The use cases of chatbots are diverse and emerging across functions and industries. Enterprise leaders should have a powerful bot strategy to make the most of this technology.

About BotCore

BotCore is an enterprise-grade bot builder platform using which enterprises can create, build, train, deploy and manage chatbots for their organization. BotCore is fully deployable on both on-premise and cloud environments.

BotCore is an accelerator that enables you to launch customized, AI-powered conversational bots in your organization. With the help of “Cognitive Abstraction”, it can leverage any AI service available today and will scale for future services.

BotCore today powers chatbots at several large enterprises and Fortune 100 companies.

If you are planning to adopt a chatbot in your organization, Acuvate’s bot workshops like the Build-A-Bot program helps you get a subject matter expert opinion to plan your bot journey.

The workshop helps identify specific use cases within your enterprise and evaluate different technologies. Acuvate provides a 1 day bot strategy workshop within your company premises for both business and IT leaders.

The post A Comprehensive Guide To Understanding Chatbots appeared first on BotCore.

Leverage Microsoft Power Virtual Agents To Accelerate Your Crisis Response

Rakesh Reddy — Thu, 30 Apr 2020 11:43:00 +0000

Leverage Microsoft Power Virtual Agents To Accelerate Your Crisis Response

As the world continues its struggle amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, the onus on staying connected with employees in an increasingly remote work environment is the utmost concern for businesses. They realize that ensuring the health and well-being of their employees is critical to improving the stability and productivity of all business functions, especially in times of crisis and isolation. The need to efficiently communicate, collaborate and stay productive has never been more important.

AI technologies like chatbots are playing a critical role in building a collaborative work environment during the world’s biggest remote working experiment. In addition, to the numerous ways chatbots drive business value e.g service desk management, HR automation, sales support etc., they can be life savers in times of crises.

Microsoft customers looking to accelerate their crisis response strategy should look no further and start implementing Power Virtual Agents – Microsoft’s low-code chatbot builder platform. However, before diving into the potential of Microsoft Power Virtual Agents in times of crises, let’s understand the solution itself.

What is Microsoft Power Virtual Agents?

Microsoft Power Virtual Agents simply put is a platform that enables anyone to build chatbots easily without coding or development experience. In fact, according to Techcrunch, “Microsoft Power Virtual Agents make building chatbots almost as easy as writing Word documents”.

Power Virtual Agents’ low-code interface enables anyone – from a regular business user to an experienced developer – to build and implement chatbots, and minimizes the dependence on IT and technical teams. The Power Virtual Agents platform was developed as part of the Dynamics family of products and was primarily built for customer support use-case. However, the chatbots built using it can be deployed for your internal customers or employees as well.

How can Microsoft Power Virtual Agents Accelerate Crisis Response?

1. Crisis Communication

In times of crisis and uncertainty, employees have several doubts about a variety of topics. Businesses receive a humongous amount of messages at an unprecedented rate through multiple channels. Chatbots built with Power Virtual Agents can answer crisis-related FAQ and deliver critical information across multiple channels – social media, email, IVR, web or mobile chat etc. Repetitive questions related to remote work, public health information, companies policies etc. can be answered instantly 24/7.

Chatbots are essential not only because they answer FAQs of employees, but also for their ability to conduct human-like conversations – something very desirable when people are isolated and going through difficult times.

As a Microsoft Gold Partner, we’re helping customers deploy the Crisis FAQ chatbot built using Power Virtual Agents.

2. Streamline Internal Processes

As the crisis evolves, your organization might need to modify internal workflows or corporate policies. You might need a new leave management system or modified reporting process or a new cancellation tool. Once you deploy a chatbot using Power Virtual Agents, you can constantly update its skills to facilitate the new workflows. This way you don’t need to have new multiple apps or siloed processes.

3. Improve Productivity

It’s important to ensure your workforce is highly productive when they’re working remotely. In the past few weeks, we have seen IT help desks and HR teams in several companies struggling to manage the sudden unprecedented surge in issues and requests. Employees are being kept on hold for hours before their issue is resolved. Just imagine the loss of productivity. Chatbots act as the first line of support agents to address repetitive and low-value requests. They’re available 24*7 and can handle multiple requests simultaneously. If the chatbot is unable to handle a particular query, it can always hand over the conversation to a human agent.

This will allow your IT staff to focus on productive and proactive tasks. In the same way, your employees don’t have to wait for hours to get their issues resolved.

Learn More:

4. Proactive Communication

Proactively communicate and update your employees about the changes in your company before they seek information – A chatbot lets you schedule alerts and push notifications with which you can keep employees informed about the state of the business. Thereby, you can build employee trust and let them focus on doing their work without worrying about the situation continuously.

Learn More: How Chatbots Are Helping The Fight Against The COVID-19 Crisis

5. Easier Access To Information

Quick access to information is imperative when employees work remotely. Chatbots built with Power Virtual Agents can be integrated with SharePoint intranets, business intelligence and LOB systems. From there, employees can access the information stored in these systems via natural language conversations with the chatbot. They don’t have to open or switch multiple apps to find information – a chatbot acts as their single point of contact.

Learn More:

Get Started

A chatbot’s range of applications, scalability, and ease of implementation are some key drivers for its adoption amid this crisis. With Microsoft Power Virtual Agents, organizations can build and deploy custom chatbots within days. The bots’ capabilities can be constantly updated with the changes in internal process and to solve emerging challenges posed by the pandemic.

We’re helping several organizations leverage Power Virtual Agents to deploy chatbots for crisis management, HR and help desk operations, and remote work support.

If you’d like to learn more about this topic, please feel free to get in touch with one of our chatbot experts for a personalized consultation. We’d also be happy to share our success stories and how we can help you implement Power Virtual Agents effectively.

You might also be interested in our COVID-19 Essential Apps Suite:

The post Leverage Microsoft Power Virtual Agents To Accelerate Your Crisis Response appeared first on BotCore.

Amid COVID-19, How Are Chatbots Solving IT Help Desk Challenges

Jagan Jami — Mon, 30 Mar 2020 11:03:00 +0000

Amid COVID-19, How Are Chatbots Solving IT Help Desk Challenges

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a serious wake up call for companies which put digital transformation and AI adoption in the back-burner. It made us all realize that adopting emerging digital and AI technologies is not so much an option but a necessity.

One significant area where digital transformation has become critical is ITSM. In the past few weeks, we have seen IT help desks in several companies struggling to manage the sudden unprecedented surge in incidents, issues and requests. Some of our key observations include:

Incidents are continuing to grow as a large number of employees are trying to access different types of applications simultaneously and remotely
In order to maintain smooth operations, organizations are rushing to rollout critical business apps without proper testing. Once the issues are detected in the production environment, more incidents come up
Incidents and requests range from simple ones like setting up VPNs, authentication issues to complex ones like accelerating the deployment of new digital initiatives to ensure business continuity
When troubleshooting end users’ issues with SaaS apps, it’s becoming difficult for service desks to determine whether the issue is related to the network connection, users’ equipment or the app itself

Ensuring that an IT helpdesk is running hassle free at all times has been an ongoing challenge for many enterprises even before this pandemic. Many of these organizations already face a shortage of help desk staff. And with the new unique challenges, the situation is becoming further overwhelming. Employees are being kept on hold for hours before their issue is resolved. Just imagine the loss of productivity.

How IT Helpdesk Chatbots Can Help?

A huge volume of requests are usually ‘basic’ or ‘simple’ questions that take a lot of time to answer. When most of your workforce is working remotely, the overhead on the helpdesk team to resolve such queries is huge.

One of the easiest ways to overcome these challenges is to deploy an IT Helpdesk Chatbot and enable self-service to employees.

A chatbot is not only a powerful solution to address repetitive and low-value requests but also super easy to deploy.

A chatbot will be available 24*7 on any device and can handle requests across the organization simultaneously. This will allow your IT staff to move away from a reactive environment where they are constantly putting out fires and focus on productive and proactive tasks.

Chatbots conduct multi-turn conversations (something most help desk requests involve) and guide users to resolve the issue through a series of steps.

In addition to solving simple requests and low-value tickets, chatbots are becoming increasingly intelligent to address several complex queries as well. The AI, NLP and ML integrated in a chatbot helps it learn from previous conversations, understand user intent better and deliver smarter responses.

When the chatbot can’t handle a particular query, it’ll handover the conversation to a human agent.

With low-code chatbot builder platforms like Microsoft Virtual Agents and BotCore, you can build and deploy a simple FAQ bot within hours and with limited resources! These chatbots also come with prebuilt connectors and easily integrate with your existing help desk platforms like ServiceNow, JIRA, Freshdesk etc.

Join Our Webinar:

24/7 IT Virtual Agents – Supporting your remote workforce anytime & everywhere

Benefits Of A IT helpdesk Bot

Easy and quick rollout
Seamless integration
Super fast responses
Reduced cost per ticket and IT support costs
Improved productivity of help desk agents
Eliminate calls and emails: The bot acts as a single point of contact for help desk requests
24X7 availability in both mobile and desktop devices
Real-time alerts
Enterprise level security
Employee self-service

Learn More: How AI Bots Can Revolutionize Enterprise Helpdesk?

Key Capabilities To Look For In A IT helpdesk Bot

Incident Management
Incident notifications
Incident creation
Submit change requests
New change request notifications
Task notifications and notes
Outage Management
Sends outage alerts
Displays real time outages
Sends outage reports
Security Management
Reset passwords for devices and network and generate tokens
Disable, wipe or suspend device
Real-Time Alerts
Access request notifications
Asset request notifications
Outage alerts
Authentication alerts
Human Hand off

The chatbot should be intelligent enough to recognize situations where it can’t help the user and should hand over the conversation to an agent. As soon as the bot learns that a human intervention is required, it should present users with an option to “chat with an agent”. Once the user clicks the option, an agent takes over the conversation.

Learn More: Chatbots Human Handoff

Get Started With A IT Helpdesk Chatbot

We are forced into the largest work-from-home experiment and many employees have little to no experience in adopting the new environment. Right from setting up their home offices, VPNs, to adopting video conferencing and collaboration apps, employees are facing a myriad of challenges and flooding the helpdesk with repetitive requests. An ITSM chatbot streamlines the helpdesk workflow, enables self-service and acts as a level-1 support agent.

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

The post Amid COVID-19, How Are Chatbots Solving IT Help Desk Challenges appeared first on BotCore.

12 Experts Share The Biggest Chatbot Trends For 2020!

Poonam Chug — Fri, 14 Feb 2020 17:16:00 +0000

12 Experts Share The Biggest Chatbot Trends For 2020!

In the past decade, we have seen the emergence of several AI technologies. And one of the most significant one among them are chatbots. In the last few years, we have not only seen the emergence of AI chatbots but also their exponential growth and rapid adoption among enterprises.

While enterprises are already using chatbots for different use cases, we believe this is just the beginning of a long journey of this sophisticated technology. As someone who helped several medium and large organizations deploy enterprise chatbots, we’ve asked 11 experts the following question.

According to you, what is the biggest chatbot trend to watch for in 2020?

Here’s what they said…

#1 “…Facebook will integrate the messaging infrastructure of Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp greatly extending the reach of chatbots…”

Chatbots haven’t yet taken off with businesses today with only approximately 1% of companies actively using them. But In 2020, Facebook will integrate the messaging infrastructure of Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp, greatly extending the reach of chatbots to over 3 billion daily active users on a single platform. We believe this will make chatbots a must-have for businesses wanting to connect with users on those popular platforms.

– Larry Kim,
CEO, MobileMonkey.
LinkedIn | Twitter

#2 “…Chatbots should become generically more efficient at identifying the intent of a user…”

“The largest technical trend I see in 2020 is that Chatbots should become generically more efficient at identifying the intent of a user. As the work done on BERT at Google starts to be incorporated into offerings, the context of words (like prepositions) within an utterance will be given weight to enable more accurate understanding.

However, Chatbots are at the Peak of Inflated Expectations in the Gartner Hype Cycle for Artificial Intelligence in 2019, but the potential return is not inconsiderable. Consequently, within business we should see an increase in Chatbot Education allowing expectation to more closely match Reality and an increase in the meaningful adoption of chatbots.”

– Keith Williams,
Chatbot Consultant, Founder, KMW3.com,
Ex-HR Services Director – Technology, Unilever.
LinkedIn

#3 “…Conversational assistants will remain an extension of the brand and a sidekick for customer care…”

“Consumers are increasingly demanding real-time engagement, including self-service tools that allow for instant Q&A and problem resolution. As technology continues to improve and evolve, conversational assistants will remain an extension of the brand and a sidekick for customer care, providing not only contextual, personalized on-demand support, but critical insights on the customer journey back to the organization. Such tools are no longer nice-to-have, but critical elements for differentiation and success in the digital economy.”

– Theodora Lau,
Founder, Unconventional Ventures, Speaker, Writer, and Startup Advisor.
LinkedIn | Twitter

#4 “…we are going to see a huge surge in chatbots deployed to understand, retain & serve customers better…”

With about little over 2 years of enterprises trying out and experimenting with chatbots for internal employee-facing use cases, many are now confident about the technology and the usefulness. And now, many businesses are switching to the next level to use chatbots to engage their customers, which was the primary goal in the first place.

From bots on webpages, portals, WhatsApp and even Facebook messenger, we are going to see a huge surge in chatbots deployed to understand, retain & serve customers better. This will reduce the time to feedback leading to quicker innovation of products by businesses.

Last but not the least, chatbots will provide the half-life extension to social platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn. These platforms will change from knowledge and communication mediums to self-service platforms – One of the rare things B2C will be adopting from B2B. Overall 2020 will be the year of chatbot rising to help humans.

– Rakesh Reddy,
CEO, Acuvate Software.
LinkedIn

#5 “…Expect structure to come from the enterprise…”

Expect structure to come from the enterprise – more specifically, expect to see key advances in 2020 coming through more extensive AI integration for bot services of all kinds. The enterprise arena is an obvious spawning ground for innovation, as businesses of every kind are crying out for intelligent and highly scalable bot solutions to connect customers with product in a timely and efficient manner.

Given the mission critical nature of any technology investment for commercial purposes, it is extremely likely that the enterprise will offer the most effective ‘test-bed’ for a rapid evolution of more adaptive and verbose solutions, thus finally delivering on the promise of a ‘near-human’ chatbot interface.

– Andy Clayton-Smith,
Executive Editor, The Record, Tudor Rose.
LinkedIn | Twitter

#6 “…It (voice technology) has reached a tipping point where you can hardly differentiate between a human and machine…”

Gartner predicts that “chatbots will power 85 percent of all customer service interactions by the year 2020 and by then the average person will have more conversations with chatbots than with their spouse.” Voice technology has developed so much that it has reached a tipping point where you can hardly differentiate between a human and machine, Google Duplex is one brilliant example. An AI-powered chatbot will supercharge businesses improving customer care by connecting them to a whole array of personalized services in real-time.

– Alvin Foo,
MD, Reprise Digital.
LinkedIn | Twitter

#7 “…using chatbots to support the productivity of work teams..”

One of the trends is using chatbots to support the productivity of work teams. They start off as simple signposts to point people in the direction of useful learning resources, insights and practical skills. We will then start to see them move up the value chain, and offer simple coaching. Over the longer-term with data analysis, we might start to see improved engagement, better decision-making, and improved psychological safety.

– Andrew Spence,
HR Transformation Director,
Glass Bead Consulting.
Twitter | LinkedIn

#8 “…we would be able to start seeing early versions of a chatbot as your sidekick at work…”

“At the business level, I believe we would be able to start seeing early versions of a chatbot as your sidekick at work. Not as advanced as JARVIS in Ironman but at the minimal, chatbot that is able to make better suggestions based on your personal preferences, parameters as well as the vast amount of data it collects of you every single minute. For instance, if my day is packed with back-to-back meetings, it could suggest blocking one hour of reflection time to process those meetings. This is on top of more accurate voice processing which enables users to communicate with the chatbot faster than typing.”

– Adrian Tan,
HR Tech Solutions Architect at PeopleStrong.
LinkedIn | Twitter

#9 “..As the quality and accuracy of chatbots improve, the number of use cases will increase…”

The two biggest chatbot trends to watch will be the increase in the number of use cases, along with improvement in usability. Frankly, when it comes to chatbots, the user experience isn’t living up to the hype, but this will change over time. Chatbots are continually learning and need to get data fed in order to understand the words and phrases used for each vertical and each particular business or organization. As chatbots keep learning, they will improve their accuracy and the ability to respond to customer inquiries.

As the quality and accuracy of chatbots improve, the number of use cases will increase. While currently used for very basic inquiries and interactions, they’ll increasingly be used to better assist customers and agents and drive more complex interactions and transactions.

– Blair Pleasant,
Co-founder, UCStrategies.
Twitter | LinkedIn

#10 “…Sentiment analysis will be increasingly applied in the development of chatbots…”

Sentiment analysis will be increasingly applied in the development of chatbots — because at the moment, let’s face it — most bots still act rather like bots.

The race to properly react to human sentiment is on! (And we’ve already seen how it can go badly wrong, in the case of Microsoft’s Tay.)

As conversational AI bots continue to improve in 2020 onwards, it should become almost impossible for a customer to realize they are speaking with a machine.

Amazon Comprehend is one example of chatbot software paving the way.

– Sam Hurley,
Managing Director, OPTIM-EYEZ.
LinkedIn | Twitter

#11 “…We are starting to see them (chatbots) being used to automating certain aspects of commerce…”

Chatbots have been through their initial experimental phase, and we are starting to see them being used to automating certain aspects of commerce. The bad news is that they are starting to be used to spam us as the other channels of interruption marketing (advertising, cold calling, unsolicited emails) dry up. If Chatbots are to be taken seriously, people need to try and start using them, not to spam, but to create real-valued business processes. What do I mean? One of the spin-offs of the new technology of the iPhone, was social media. Social Media has changed how we work and changed society. Let’s hope Chatbot energy is channeled in the same way?

– Tim Hughes,
CEO and Co-Founder, DLA Ignite.
Twitter | LinkedIn

#12 “…Voice bots will not be limited to just asking weather or playing music…”

Voice chatbots will be more powerful for 2020 as we predict it with data backed by Botanalytics. The penetration of Google Home and Amazon Alexa is increasing dramatically and usage of voice bots will not be limited to just asking weather or playing music. Banks, Insurance and Travel companies will be more in the game by providing voice chatbots with specific skill sets. Maybe not providing lots of capabilities, but focusing on some skill sets. That will be the key to get success in 2020.

– Ilker Koksal,
CEO, Botanalytics.
Twitter | LinkedIn

How Acuvate Helps Enterprises Deploy AI Chatbots

We leverage our enterprise chatbot builder platform – BotCore to help various Fortune 500 companies, SMBs, and start ups to build, deploy, manage and train AI chatbots. Our chatbots are used to improve customer service, productivity, efficiency and coordination at workplaces.

MeshBOT: World’s premier chatbot for SharePoint intranet that can solve your intranet adoption challenges.
IT Helpdesk Bot: IT Helpdesk Bot uses machine learning to learn answers to repetitive support requests and improves the speed and work productivity of your helpdesk.
SIA Bot: An intelligent sales assistant which helps your sales team in making informed decisions and improves top line revenue.
Business Intelligence Bot: A chatbot which simplifies your data consumption and interaction.

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.

FREE EBOOK

a guide to choosing an enterprise bot builder platform

The post 12 Experts Share The Biggest Chatbot Trends For 2020! appeared first on BotCore.

Why are we excited about Power Virtual Agents?

Abhishek Shanbhag — Mon, 11 Nov 2019 18:30:00 +0000

Why Are We Excited About Power Virtual Agents?

At this year’s Ignite , Microsoft made several announcements related to conversational AI and chatbots. One of the key announcements that caught our attention is the launch of Power Virtual Agents as a part of Microsoft’s citizen development vision of Power Platform.

Power Platform as you know had until now a few powerful tools like Power BI, Power Apps & Flow (now called Power Automate). With the addition of Power Virtual Agents, Microsoft is essentially connecting all their previous investments in these respective technologies. At the same time, addressing the key questions that many customers and partners had been inquisitive about: Where is Microsoft’s bot builder platform?

conversational AI & microsoft

With the launch of the Microsoft Bot Framework in early 2016, Microsoft paved the way for customers and vendors alike to start experimenting and developing chatbots. Simply put, Bot framework is an SDK and coupled with the Azure Bot Service and Cognitive Services like LUIS and QnA Maker using which developers can build some pretty cool chatbots. However, bot building is yet regarded as technical & complex. To bridge this gap and democratize bot building, solutions like BotCore were developed that put the business analyst or the power user in the driver seat.

With Power Virtual Agents rollout, we are comprehending that all these investments that Microsoft has done since 2016 are all coming together. Not to any wonder, Bot Framework and other cognitive services which are used to enable chatbots forms the foundation of Power Virtual Agents. The building experience is however very simple. This platform doesn’t necessitate an understanding of concepts like intents, utterances, entities etc. which every bot developer and trainer swear by. A power business user can go from zero to a working bot in a matter of minutes!

experiments with power virtual agents

One thing that is true with any chatbot rollout is to fail faster and keep trying. Chatbots can be used to automate a lot of different areas. However, if you choose a use case that happens to complicate the end-user experience or make it difficult for a user to get the job done – your chatbot adoption is at stake!

Once you identify a process or area that can be handled by a chatbot, using Power Virtual Agents, you can quickly create, test and deploy the agent to your users. Call it a PoC or MVP or Pilot or anything else that assures your users that there will be more improvements going forward. This helps you to test the waters before embarking on a larger enterprise-wide journey that would take more time and effort.

areas of employee support within the enterprise

Power Virtual Agents platform was developed as part of the Dynamics family of products and was primarily built for customer support use-case. However, the chatbots built using it can be deployed for your internal customers or employees as well. The whole notion behind chatbots is to offer quick front office or L1 support, effectively eliminating or reducing low-value requests that come into your contact centre or helpdesk.

Few of the areas, where we see Power Virtual Agents being used within the enterprise are:

IT Support
- FAQ
- Self-help and troubleshooting
- Triaging a problem before creating an incident or request in ITSM tools
HR Support
- FAQ
- Automating simpler processes like time-off
- Displaying & validating employee information like contact details etc. from HRIS
Compliance
- FAQ
- Guided dialog conversations to help identify the right action to be taken given a situation
Finance
- FAQ
- Requesting for payroll or benefit related information

integrating power virtual agents with enterprise apps

If you have seen or used Microsoft Flow (Power Automate) before, you are in business! That’s because Power Virtual Agents can seamlessly connect with Power Automate flows to integrate with a wide variety of enterprise applications.

Few examples of integrations that you can use today are:

SharePoint, OneDrive, Outlook, etc
Dynamics 365
Salesforce
ServiceNow
Freshdesk
Zendesk
Workday HCM
Box
DocuSign
Jira

And many many more…

making power virtual agents accessible to your employees

At the time of this writing, Power Virtual Agents can be deployed on a variety of different messaging applications.

What’s exciting us the most is the ability to launch an agent on Microsoft Teams on the click of a button!

Once you build your agent, you can enable it on Teams and get your pilot group to start using and testing the bot. With any chatbot, the crucial step is to collect lots of feedback from your pilot or early users before you go to a larger audience.

securing your power virtual agents

This part is a bit technical as it does involve some knowledge of Active Directory. However, once you have the configuration in place, you can protect your sensitive data and transactions by ensuring that an employee is properly signed in before the dialogue is executed.

conclusion

With Power Virtual Agents, any enterprise with Office 365 can start building chatbots to automate a wide variety of use cases. Something that was once considered as the complex is now democratized – true to Microsoft’s mission of empowering every person and every organization to achieve more.

With this level of proliferation of chatbots within an enterprise, we see that the transition from apps to conversational bots is all set to increase in pace. Many enterprises are using Acuvate’s BotCore for a similar end.

BotCore is a chatbot middleware and aggregation platform that helps customers to build virtual agents and, as well, connect existing bots within a single enterprise persona. Together, Power Virtual Agents and BotCore can aid in an AI-driven Digital Transformation within the enterprise. At Acuvate we are looking forward to automating and solving complex enterprise problems with our customers using Power Virtual Agents!

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.

The post Why are we excited about Power Virtual Agents? appeared first on BotCore.

7 Tools To Build Chatbots Without Coding

Abhishek Shanbhag — Fri, 19 Apr 2019 15:39:43 +0000

7 Tools To Build Chatbots Without Coding

Conventionally, it required extensive knowledge, skill and substantial coding, support, maintenance, and manual work to build chatbots from the ground up. Large amounts of time and money expended into building chatbots ultimately did not seem viable or profitable. Time and resource intensive practices of developing chatbots has been a major impediment for smaller companies to effectively implement the technology along with a fierce competition for the scarce engineering talent pool to develop chatbots.

The problem of finding niche expertise and the cumbersome process in building chatbots is being resolved by the uprise of no/low code chatbot platforms that allow businesses to enjoy the customer service benefits of chatbots without draining resources. There are several frameworks or software development kits (SDKs) readily available necessary to build intelligent bots that drastically reduce the amount of code required to build chatbots thus democratising the chatbot technology.

The 7 Popular Tools To Build No-Code Chatbots

1. Power Virtual Agents

Power Virtual Agents is a SaaS offering by Microsoft to build chatbots that can be integrated with several Microsoft and third-party applications. PVA greatly reduces the need to have the infrastructure to maintain and deploy chatbots as Microsoft’s Azure Cloud Services does all the heavy lifting of providing a conducive environment to host the application.

Chatbots to handle customer service questions and inquiries internal and external to the organisation can be developed using Power Virtual Agents. Bot Framework and Azure Bot Service and Cognitive Services provide the technological foundation for Power Virtual Agents that are essentially SDKs that allow users to build chatbots with minimal coding thus making the technology available to citizen developers.

With the help of PVA, powerful chatbots can be built using a guided, no-code graphical interface that can be deployed for sales, HR, finance, customer service and virtually on all channels where customers need to be engaged.

2. BotCore

BotCore is an accelerator that enables organizations to train, build & launch customized conversational bots powered by artificial intelligence. Using “Cognitive Abstraction” it can leverage any AI service available today and will scale for future services. BotCore is a no-code enterprise-grade bot platform. It is fully deployable on both on-premise and cloud (Microsoft Azure) environments. Some important features of BotCore are:

Knowledge Graph: Build bot conversations with an integrated Knowledge Graph consisting of multi-functional nodes
Conversation System: BotCore uses Message Definition Language (MDL) to define bot responses
Agent Hand-off: Let the bot handle most user queries, while providing a seamless escalation to a human agent
The best of Microsoft technologies: BotCore can aggregate LUIS bots, QnA Maker bots, Power Virtual Agents and other third-party bots.

Learn More About BotCore’s features

3. Chatfuel

With over 46,000 chatbots created using ChatFuel, it is one of the leading chatbot platforms for Facebook Messenger that comes packed with integrations to several third party services. Sales activities, personalized marketing and automated support can be executed with Chatfuel’s chatbots which can be built without any coding.

Chatfuel supports multiple languages and comes with Facebook Live Chat Website Plugin to embed Messenger bot for the website. Chatfuel is a desirable tool to build chatbots from scratch as it has an in-built guide to navigate through the process of developing a bot systematically. In addition, bot’s responses can be customized by adding content through hyperlinks. The chatbots on Chatfuel despite their versatility have limited A.I. and Natural Language Processing capabilities.

Some of the key features of Chatfuel include:

Predefined bot templates and provision to create automated and personalized messages
Bots enabled to send email notifications and attachments
Payment gateway can be integrated chatbots
Analytics Dashboard with several chatbot and business metrics

4. FlowXO

FlowXO is a popular platform to build chatbots for seamless communication and effective customer engagement across a wide range of channels. Chatbots by FlowXo have been incorporated on well-known platforms like Slack and can connect with over 100 different cloud-based apps. FlowXO provides a wide range of capabilities for chatbots, from simple chatbots to cognitive chatbots with artificial intelligence.

Chatbot widgets for websites can be built using FlowXo and can be integrated with suitable third-party platforms.

FlowXo provides the comfort of building chatbot using visual flow editor and conversing with users directly inside the chatbot platform. FlowXo also supports multilingual chatbots with Facebook and Slack integration, enabled to send emails and attachments.

5. Botsify

Botsify with its easy-to-use drag and drop interface allows users to build template designs for chatbot and create AI chatbots for websites and Facebook messenger without any coding. Botsify is used by some of the popular brands including Apple and Shazam to design their chatbots. Botsify is integrated with several services, including WordPress, Shopify, Slack, Alexa, Google Sheets, RSS Feed, JSON API and ZenDesk.

Botsify provides a comprehensive approach of design, development, launch and growth to building chatbots. Major chatbot content like messages, and menus are first designed which are followed by designing messages that trigger and enable chatbot to human handover.

Botsify users can automate live chat sales, track sales leads through social media and collate user information. Botsify also allows users to create conversational forms, integrate with WordPress and has form fields that are easy to customize.

6. BotKit

BotKit is a great chatbot builder that has a semantic interface for holding conversations which empowers chatbots with capabilities that mirror human conversational abilities. BotKit allows users to manage real-time messages, monitor activity, provide detailed statistics and can also be integrated with the API to improve functionality.

Botkit includes a visual conversation builder, open source libraries and rigorously tested, robust code. BotKit while providing all the desirable features doesn’t involve any coding.

7. TARS

TARS is a chatbot builder with a drag-and-drop interface to create chatbots for Facebook Messenger and conversational interfaces for websites. TARS comprises several chatbot templates that are easy to edit and customize and provides ease of use with its zero coding interface. Chatbots by TARS are loaded with advanced chatflow logic and conversation analytics and are useful for businesses to generate leads and increase ROI in marketing efforts.

Following are some of the other interesting features of chatbots by TARS:

Provision to export data to Excel/CSV
File and Image Upload
Integration with Zapier
Custom Chatbot Design and Branding
Webhook/API Integration

Conclusion

Building Chatbots bot isn’t a complex task any more. Several players in the market are democratising the process of building chatbots by providing platforms that require no code to build chatbots. Several platforms provide some of the cutting edge features, augmenting the abilities of chatbots all done without a single line of code. If you’d like to learn more about this topic, please feel free to get in touch with one of our enterprise chatbot consultants for a personalized consultation.

The post 7 Tools To Build Chatbots Without Coding appeared first on BotCore.

6 Factors To Consider When Selecting Your First AI Pilot Project

Rakesh Reddy — Tue, 09 Apr 2019 11:15:00 +0000

6 Factors To Consider When Selecting Your First AI Pilot Project

According to Gartner’s CIO Agenda Survey, 46 percent of CIOs have plans to adopt AI in their corporate realm.

Over the past few years, AI has impacted various functions and industries and its adoption only seems to be growing. In fact, McKinsey predicts that AI will lead to a GDP growth of $13 trillion by the year 2030.

Although the adoption of AI is on the uptick, it can also be noted that it has not gained momentum the way it could have. One of the reasons is the time it takes enterprises to evaluate the risks involved in adopting an AI-related technology. Also, organizations will need to weigh between the risk of replacing legacy systems and the business value AI technologies generate.

Since all organizations are starting from scratch, an AI pilot project can be an actionable starting point for an AI journey. It helps in validating use cases, evaluating the risks and measuring the ROI quickly. Here are five factors to consider when selecting your first AI pilot project.

6 Factors To Consider When Selecting Your First AI Pilot Project

1. Have a well-defined challenge and define outcomes

Most early AI projects fail due to the lack of clear business objectives and outcomes. Enterprise leaders should keep the end result in mind while picking a project or use case. These outcomes could be improving the CSAT score, reducing contact center volume, reducing service desk costs, etc.

The business problem does not have to be big or strategic. However, a clarity with respect to the business problem to experiment with, learn, and to get the desired outcome, is much needed.

Clearly defining the desired outcome and identifying success metrics simplifies stakeholder buy-in and support for the project.

2. Pick a simple project that can be completed with a short turnaround time

Since this will be the first venture with AI, a pilot project must be one that can be executed in a short duration of time, ideally about 6-12 months. The core objective of a pilot project is not to solve any major issues, rather it is meant to serve as a reference point for later implementations.

For instance, choosing a project with a higher success rate such as an AI chatbot implementation in the company’s contact centers is a good place to start. Since chatbots can be deployed quickly in a matter of a few weeks, they pose a minimum risk as well as helping companies see their impact in a short amount of time.

The stakes are usually high during the pilot project. Ensure that the initial ambitions are sensible because if the initial AI project doesn’t work, the future AI initiatives may be suspended indefinitely by the organization.

3. Don’t Expect Perfection and Aim Low, to Begin With

It’s recommended not to aim for hard outcomes and direct financial gains when starting your pilot project journey. Start with a small scope and aim for soft outcomes such as process improvements, improving customer satisfaction or increasing efficiency, rather than aiming for something big.

Expect AI pilot projects to primarily produce lessons that can help drive future or consequent projects. Do not expect the pilot project to be perfect or a tremendous success right away. Set the targets as low as possible to have a referenceable outcome.

4. Build a compact team and appoint a capable leader

As with all projects, the number of resources required varies according to the project requirement. Although the same is true for an AI pilot project, it is good practice to build a compact team that can effectively work cross-functionally.

Having a small team helps everyone communicate more effectively and stay on the same page with regards to the goals and outcome of the pilot project.

In order to steer the team effectively, a capable leader is required who can liaise between both AI and the domain/industry experts.

5. Use good, static data

In order to effectively implement an AI project, a large amount of good quality, dependable data is required. Data is the cornerstone of any AI undertaking as the intelligent system ‘learns’ by studying vast amounts of data over a period of time.

Additionally, using data that is more static in nature, and does not keep changing rapidly, helps the algorithms produce consistent results. We must remember that AI on its own is not capable of discerning between good quality and bad quality data.

An AI system that is fed bad data, will produce inconsistent and often incorrect insights. Hence it is important to use a large dataset of accurate content in order to be successful when implementing the AI pilot project.

6. Accelerate your pilot project with credible partners

Although AI pilot projects are ideally simple and easily manageable, they still require a great amount of expertise and the right resources to implement correctly.

If your organization lacks an experienced AI team, it is best to work with a capable external partner to effectively execute the AI pilot project in the company.

Conclusion

Selecting and starting your AI pilot project may be a little intimidating but by delaying the decision, you may fall behind your competitors who move faster.

This list of factors to consider should help you get a good idea about choosing your first AI project. If you need in-depth insights, please feel free to get in touch with one of our AI experts for a personalized consultation.

You might also be interested in:

The post 6 Factors To Consider When Selecting Your First AI Pilot Project appeared first on BotCore.

Enterprise Chatbot Builder Platform Archives - BotCore

Using AR and chatbots to increase customer engagement

Using AR and chatbots to increase customer engagement

What is Augmented Reality (AR)?

#1 POND’S

#2 Sephora

#3 Madison Reed

#4 IKEA

The benefits of integrating augmented reality and chatbots

1. Unique selling point

2. Increase engagement with personalized experiences

3. Higher revenue

Final Thoughts

Further Reading:

Why The Future Of Chatbots is Low-Code

Why The Future Of Chatbots is Low-Code

Benefits of building chatbots on a low-code platform

1. Infuses agility

2. Reduces development costs

3. Allows flexible integration

4. Encourages innovation across functions and levels

Seven low-code development tools for chatbots

1. Power Virtual Agents

2. Chatfuel

3. FlowXO

4. Botsify

5. BotKit

6. TARS

7. BotCore

Further Reading:

Transforming Omnichannel Customer Service With Chatbots

Transforming omnichannel customer service with chatbots

Omnichannel Chatbots: Build Once, Deploy Anywhere

Benefits of omnichannel chatbots

1. Improved customer satisfaction

2. Fast response

3. Increased revenue

4. Data collection

Go Omnichannel Today!

A Comprehensive Guide To Understanding Chatbots

A Comprehensive Guide To Understanding Chatbots

Chapter 1: What Is A Chatbot

Chapter 2: The Past And The Present Of Chatbots

The History Of Bots: Where And How It All Began

The Present Scenario

Chapter 3: What Are Chatbots Capable Of Doing?

1. Fetching Information

2. Send Personalized Alerts

3. Perform Tasks

4. Answering Questions

Chapter 4: Popular Chatbot Features You Should Be Aware Of

A) Knowledge Base

b) Broadcasting

c) Effective conversation system

d) Vocabulary

e) Sentiment Analysis

f) Administration

Chapter 5: Use Cases And Benefits

Functions

1. Human Resources

- Recruitment

Use Cases

Benefits

- Onboarding

- Learning and Development

- Retention and Engagement

- Off-boarding / Exit Management

2. IT Helpdesk

Use Cases

Benefits

Learn More:

3. Sales

Use Cases

Benefits

4. Marketing

Use Cases

Benefits

5. Intranet/Employee Assistant

Use Cases

Benefits