Agent Handover Archives - BotCore Enterprise Chatbot Fri, 15 Mar 2024 10:02:51 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.6.1 https://botcore.ai/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/cropped-favicon-32x32-1-70x70.png Agent Handover Archives - BotCore 32 32 7 Advanced Chatbot Features To Consider in 2021 https://botcore.ai/blog/chatbot-features-2021/ Fri, 22 Jan 2021 05:23:00 +0000 https://botcore.ai/?p=7440 7 Advanced Chatbot Features To Consider in 2021 80% of businesses are expected to have some sort of chatbot automation by 2021. Business Insider The year 2020 has seen an unprecedented rise in the use of chatbots. Amidst the uncertainties caused by the pandemic and changing expectations about how brands should communicate with their customers, […]

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7 Advanced Chatbot Features To Consider in 2021

80% of businesses are expected to have some sort of chatbot automation by 2021.

Business Insider

The year 2020 has seen an unprecedented rise in the use of chatbots. Amidst the uncertainties caused by the pandemic and changing expectations about how brands should communicate with their customers, businesses have quickly adopted AI-powered bots to reduce the burden of their support staff and deliver easy, interactive, and more meaningful engagement to their customers.

No wonder chatbot technology has evolved to incorporate some powerful functionalities that will define the future of customer experience.

Research by Business Insider says, The global chatbot market is anticipated to reach $9.4 billion by 2024.

So, let’s have a look at the seven advanced chatbot features to consider in 2021.

Advanced Chatbot Features to consider in 2021

1. Augmented reality and chatbots

Augmented reality (AR) in chatbots opens a world of immersive, personalized, and engaging shopping experiences for customers.

Gartner defines augmented reality as the real-time use of information in the form of text, graphics, audio, and other enhancements integrated with real-world objects.

POND’S, a popular skincare brand,  launched a skin-diagnostic chatbot called SAL to assist consumers in dealing with common skincare problems across four areas – uneven skin tone, pimples, wrinkles, and spots. The bot leverages AI and AR to get an in-depth insight into the skin type and recommend suitable products. Customers need to simply upload a selfie, fill in a short survey, and the bot delivers a personalized skin diagnosis and product recommendations in less than a minute.

Such unique experiences generate buzz around the brand, boosting customer engagement and driving revenue in the process. Therefore, augmented reality will be a significant chatbot feature to consider in 2021, primarily for industries where buyers prefer a look-test or visual inspection of the product.  

2. Sentiment analysis and emotional intelligence

As the COVID-19 pandemic brought a wave of anxiety, confusion, and uncertainty, organizations recognized the increasing importance of responding to customers with empathy.

Sentiment analysis, therefore, becomes one of the most critical capabilities in a chatbot. Since tone and emotion significantly alter what a customer wants to convey, sentiment analysis allows bots to identify and understand the type and intensity of a customer’s sentiment, including anger, joy, fear, and frustration.

By deciphering words and sentence structures and extracting emotion, the bot can steer conversations, change the tone, or bring in a human agent for support. Hence, emotional intelligence will be a significant feature to look out for in bots in 2021.

3. Text-to-speech and speech-to-text

Another advanced feature that is fast-changing the world of bots is text-to-speech technology. This technology allows brands to develop a voice of their own by enabling bots to speak in a fluid, natural-sounding, human-like voice.

With text-to-speech bots, organizations can provide more engaging, accurate, and quick conversational IVR support.

So, the next time a customer wants to book a hotel room, he/she just needs to call up the contact center and say, “I want to book a hotel room,” instead of going through multiple IVR options. The bot will ask for other details in a human-like voice, book the hotel room or directly route the customer to the next available agent.

Additionally, bots may leverage speech-to-text technology to transcribe audio to text in different languages and variants accurately. In fact, research by Gartner suggests, “by 2023, 25% of customer interactions will be via voice.”

Many organizations have started leveraging Microsoft’s Azure Cognitive Services to convert text to life-like speech or convert spoken audio to text in more than 100 languages and variants.

4. Agent assistant capabilities

Despite chatbot technology growing at a rapid pace, in some situations, bots aren’t capable of handling customer needs entirely, and the conversation may require an agent handover. A customer may be angry or irritated, the issue may be complicated, or the conversation may involve high-value transactions with a customer at the risk of churning.

A few key chatbot capabilities that will ensure a smooth handover include –

  • Handing over chat transcripts, including details about context and sentiment analysis scores
  • Seamless integration with existing live agent software, including Salesforce, LiveChat, etc.
  • Translating queries for the human agents while routing the communication, in case of multilingual support
  • Agent observation, wherein agents merely monitor bot conversations instead of completely taking charge. In such cases, a bot privately takes agent authorization before recommending the solution to the customer.

5. Human-in-the-loop feedback system

Training, calibrating and explaining AI-enabled systems requires human-in-the-loop architecture.

– Gartner

Chatbots will come with a human-in-the-loop system to continually learn and become more intelligent. Small customer feedback, such as “click here if you are satisfied with the service,” can improve the machine learning algorithms and train the bot.

In addition to customer feedback, agent training plays a crucial role in enhancing bot performance. Contact center agents can classify outliers and exceptions, modify training data, and influence bot behavior.

6. Integration with RPA for end-to-end automation

Robotic Process Automation, or RPA, uses AI and machine learning to perform a variety of repeatable tasks, such as calculations, data entry, handling queries, etc.

RPA-chatbot integration is a powerful combination that can solve significant operational and workflow related issues for organizations. The automation capabilities of RPA combined with the cognitive abilities of chatbots can help enterprises automate processes end-to-end and reduce costs.

An RPA-enabled chatbot can integrate with multiple siloed and legacy back-end enterprise systems. RPA enables bots to retrieve information from such systems and handle more complex requests at scale.

Thereby, chatbots will not only handle queries and find information but also perform transactions on the user’s behalf, going from mere conversation to action.

7. Conversational maturity

Finally, the natural language processing capabilities that empower chatbots to understand the conversation context in multiple languages is an essential feature to consider.

Bots will be able to identify the intent of a query to provide a quick response and proactively seek information, ask clarifying questions, and confirm intent, even if the interaction isn’t linear.

Final Thoughts!

Chatbots have gained traction owing to their ability to provide real-time, on-demand resolutions that consumers are increasingly seeking out.

In light of their growing popularity, organizations must look out for specific features that enhance chatbot capabilities and enable them to deliver engaging, personalized, and more human-like conversations to users. 

Further Reading:

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]]> How Agent Assist Bots Help Improve Customer Service Productivity https://botcore.ai/blog/agent-assist-bots/ Fri, 04 Sep 2020 08:02:00 +0000 https://botcore.ai/?p=6419 How Agent Assist Bots Help Improve Customer Service Productivity Customer service agents not only have to resolve customer queries accurately but also need to do that in the least amount of time. Average Handling Time (AHT), therefore, is one of the most important metrics to determine if a contact centre’s service is productive or not. […]

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How Agent Assist Bots Help Improve Customer Service Productivity

Customer service agents not only have to resolve customer queries accurately but also need to do that in the least amount of time. Average Handling Time (AHT), therefore, is one of the most important metrics to determine if a contact centre’s service is productive or not. It impacts a customer’s satisfaction directly and is a key determinant of the overall customer experience. However, even the best customer service agents need help at times.

While handling complex queries, customer service agents have to put customers on hold to search for answers across multiple systems and documents, which usually is tedious and takes time. This increases AHT, frustrates the customer, and increases the likelihood of customer attrition – which in turn affects the company’s bottom line. This is where agent assist bots play a key role.

Agent Assist Bots Explained

Most customer service departments today use customer-facing chatbots. According to a report, 80% of the surveyed companies are or will be using customer-facing chatbots by 2020. These chatbots are usually equipped with AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP), and act as the first line of support agents. Complex conversations which need a human touch are transferred to a human agent.

But a chatbot’s applications in customer service doesn’t have to be limited to just customer-facing interactions.

Agent assist bots act as a companion to human customer service agents. They are programmed to work alongside live agents and provide customer information and smart suggestions to humans as per the query and the conversational flow. Moreover, they can also be programmed to handle the cumbersome, tedious, and time-consuming tasks of the agents like searching for information and automating CRM data entry. Agent assist bots are fast becoming a critical addition to deliver superior and more efficient customer service.

Improve Customer Service Productivity With Agent Assist Bots

1. Support during live calls or chats

Whenever human agents handle customer conversations via live chats or calls, agent assist bots analyze customers’ responses and identify their intents. This enables them to map the query to relevant topics and provide the needed information to agents to deliver faster resolutions.

At the same time, they can identify customers’ profiles and assess whether they are repeat callers or not by automatically analyzing the company’s customer database and relaying the information to the agent. Moreover, they ensure that the agents never hit a dead end during the conversation. When live agents do not know the answer for a specific query, chatbots provide immediate contextual suggestions.

2. Faster Access To Information

A majority of a human agent’s time is spent on manual search. Upon an agent’s request, agent assist bots can automatically connect to their knowledge bases, CRM and back-end systems to extract relevant articles and documents, and present it to the agent seamlessly.

3. Enhanced Live Agent Productivity

Whenever customer self-service interactions escalate to a human agent, an agent assist bot automatically provides the entire conversation history including sentiment scores and contextual information. They also suggest knowledge articles the agent can go through to fulfill the customer’s request. Additionally, agent assist bots can also help agents in tedious and time-consuming activities such as capturing customer information, post-conversation form filling and surveys, and thereby enhance the overall agent productivity.

4. Simplified and Automated CRM Data Entry

Manual data entry into CRM is a huge productivity roadblock for customer service agents. An agent assist bot mines audio calls/textual conversations whenever an agent speaks/chats with a customer. It captures key notes, details, insights from the customer and enters the data automatically into the CRM system.

Agents can also have quick chat with the agent assist bot and ask it to update/change the CRM records with the provided specifications.

Learn More: How Are Chatbots Boosting The CRM Adoption Rates

Get Started

Customer service agents and agent assist bots are complimentary in many ways. They have the same goals – improve customer experience and reduce the amount of time required to handle an interaction, but have different capabilities, which when synchronized can take customer service to the next level. While the agent can interact with the customers and make them feel at ease and comfortable, agent assist bots with their AI capabilities can extract and provide highly contextual and accurate information in real-time, enhancing the productivity of the company’s customer service.

If you’d like to learn more about agent assist bots, please feel free to get in touch with one of our contact center and chatbot experts for a personalized consultation. You may also be interested in exploring our enterprise chatbot builder platform (BotCore) which can help you build customer service and agent assist bots for your organization.

Further Insights:

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]]> A Comprehensive Guide To Understanding Chatbots https://botcore.ai/blog/chatbots/ Sat, 25 Jul 2020 10:53:51 +0000 https://botcore.ai/?p=6062 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 &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp Functions &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp Industries Key implementation considerations The future of chatbots Chapter 1: What […]

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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:

  1. Employee to a business intelligence chatbot: “What is the marketing ROI for 2016 and 2017?”
  2. 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:

  1. An intranet chatbot can send notifications to relevant employees when there is a new document added to the intranet knowledge base.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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:

  1. Employee to a helpdesk chatbot: “There is an issue with my laptop. Generate an IT helpdesk ticket”
  2. 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:

  1. Employee to IT helpdesk bot: “How do I reset my password?”
  2. 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.

]]> Understanding The Role Of Sentiment Analysis In Chatbots https://botcore.ai/blog/understanding-the-role-of-sentiment-analysis-in-chatbots/ Fri, 01 Mar 2019 10:00:00 +0000 https://botcore.ai/?p=4003 Understanding The Role Of Sentiment Analysis In Chatbots Chatbot technology has had an undeniable impact on digital transformation of organizations; customer experience management, in particular. When we talk about conversational AI solutions and other AI-based applications for augmenting customer  and employee experience, chatbots emerge as a front-runner. According to Gartner, 70% of white-collar workers will engage […]

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Understanding The Role Of Sentiment Analysis In Chatbots

Chatbot technology has had an undeniable impact on digital transformation of organizations; customer experience management, in particular. When we talk about conversational AI solutions and other AI-based applications for augmenting customer  and employee experience, chatbots emerge as a front-runner.

According to Gartner, 70% of white-collar workers will engage with conversational platforms on a regular basis in the next three years. The research firm’s 2019 CIO Survey revealed that chatbots are the main AI-based application used by the participating companies. Therefore, we can see increased investment in chatbot development and deployment.

“There has been a more than 160% increase in client interest around implementing chatbots and associated technologies in 2018 from previous years. This increase has been driven by customer service, knowledge management and user support,” shared Van Baker, VP Analyst at Gartner.

However, in the earlier stages, chatbots used to have limited capabilities and deliver standard responses. With the advancements in AI and machine learning, chatbots have become more powerful and incorporated new features that helped improve user experience. And one of these latest features that is taking user experience to the next level is sentiment analysis.

Sentiment analysis helps a chatbot to understand the emotions and state of mind of the users by analyzing their input text or voice. This analysis enables chatbots to better steer conversations and deliver the right responses. Sentiment analysis is also playing a key role in driving user adoption for enterprise chatbots.

Let’s deep dive!

understanding sentiment analysis

Sentiment analysis is a sub field of machine learning and natural language processing that deals with extracting thoughts, opinions, or sentiments from voice or textual data. It is currently widely used in marketing and customer service functions to analyse customer data from surveys, social media and reviews. This not only enables businesses to understand the impact of their products/services but also  to tweak their strategies as per the end consumers’ opinions.

In the context of chatbots, sentiment analysis helps in developing the bot’s emotional intelligence.

While machine learning helps to personalize the chatbot’s performance by harnessing historical customer data, NLP helps to evaluate and interpret the information sent by the customer in real-time.

These two features collectively help chatbots to deliver relevant responses and conduct meaningful conversations. Sentiment analysis takes this a step further by enabling bots to understand human moods and emotions.

Let’s break down how sentiment analysis in chatbots works:

  • It first identifies sentiment types and gauges if the emotions displayed in the conversation are positive, negative, neutral or objective. The technology detects emotions like anger, happiness, disgust, fear, sadness, curiosity, positivity and other range of emotions.

  • NLP and AI work in tandem to measures the intensity of the emotions and assign a numerical score to each of the core emotions.

  • After detection and classification, sentiment analysis presents the final output that enables chatbot to steer the conversation in the right direction. For example, for a text with a high positive score (joy + happiness), the digital assistant can use that as an opportunity for product recommendation or sales conversion. And in the case of a high negative score (sad + anger), the chatbot can escalate the complaint and transfer the call to a live support agent.

how can it be beneficial for your business?

Be it banking, insurance, hospitality, healthcare, travel or eCommerce, all customer-facing industries can benefit from sophisticated new-age chatbots that are integrated with sentiment analysis.

Take, American cosmetics brand CoverGirl, for instance. The company developed an influencer chatbot enabled by sentiment analysis, which helped them to improve mobile commerce performance. 91%  of the conversations via the chatbot earned positive sentiment, and on an average 17 messages were exchanged per conversation that reflects high engagement rate. In addition, 48% of those conversations led to coupon delivery and the coupons’ click through-rate was an impressive 51%.

The above example illustrates the effectiveness of sentiment analysis-powered chatbots in stimulating conversations, identifying customers’ intentions, providing relevant answers and delivering a meaningful customer experience.

Listed below are a few of the benefits of using a sentiment analysis enabled chatbot to augment customer experience.

  • Learn how customers feel about your brand

Emotions heavily influence a person’s decision making process. How a customer is feeling determines the length and the nature of the relationship with the brand. Make use of this technology to understand how customers are feeling about your brand and communicate effectively at any stage of the customer lifecycle.

  • Seamless agent handover

It is important to understand the impact of timely escalation of issues to human agents when it comes to customer service chatbots. In the absence of sentiment analysis, chatbots would not be able to sense the tone of the aggrieved customer. But a digital assistant with emotional intelligence will help businesses to deal with displeased customers in an efficient manner. If the customer sounds frustrated or angry, the bot can easily hand off the conversation to a human agent.

Learn more: Human Hand-off in Service Desk Bots

  • Memorable customer experiences

The basic intent of sentiment analysis is to personalize and modify a chatbot’s responses to match the customer’s mood. This will enable businesses to build engaging conversations with customers at a very early stage and create a delightful customer experience.

  • Keep track of performance

The biggest benefit of using sentiment analysis is that it provides unique and powerful consumer insights. The conversations of an emotionally intelligent chatbot can act as a treasure trove of accurate data, which can be used to measure effectiveness of products/service, design future strategies, segment the customer base and devise strong brand positioning.

  • Upselling and new user on-boarding

As exemplified by CoverGirl’s influencer bot, chatbots can assist companies in product discovery, recommendation and upselling their products & services to existing customers. It can also improve new customer acquisition metrics by retaining the interest of a new visitor by analyzing his/her sentiments.

As stated above, emotions influence decision-making. Sentiment analysis help chatbots to adapt to the users’ mood and respond accurately, effectively and in the right way. By deploying and investing in this technology, companies can not only improve customer experience but also allow human agents to focus on productive issues.

If you’d like to learn more about the role of sentiment analysis in chatbots, please feel free to get in touch with one of our AI chatbot consultants for a personalized consultation.

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]]> How To Make A Chatbot Intelligent? https://botcore.ai/blog/how-to-make-a-chatbot-intelligent/ Fri, 09 Nov 2018 09:42:00 +0000 https://botcore.ai/?p=104 How To Make A Chatbot Intelligent? Artificial intelligence (AI) has mostly been an obsession for research departments and development shops. Recently, however, the potential business ROI for the enterprise community in the form of amplified customer/employee digital experience extended intelligent capabilities, reduced support costs have become clearer. From addressing simple FAQ’s to making intelligent conversations, […]

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How To Make A Chatbot Intelligent?

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

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

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

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

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

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

what makes a chatbot intelligent?

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

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

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

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

four essentials features that can make a chatbot intelligent

# Contextual Understanding

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

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

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

# Perpetual Learning

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

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

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

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

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

# Seamless Agent Handover

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

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

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

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

# Voice Technology

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

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

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

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

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

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

conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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]]> 10 Powerful Benefits Of Chatbots In Customer Service https://botcore.ai/blog/10-powerful-benefits-of-chatbots-in-customer-service/ Thu, 12 Jul 2018 11:34:00 +0000 https://botcore.ai/?p=122 10 Powerful Benefits Of Chatbots In Customer Service Thanks to artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies, today’s chatbots have become invaluable tools for customer service operations. They are not only streamlining and optimizing customer experiences at every stage in the service process but are also proving to be helpful aids to customer service representatives. Here […]

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10 Powerful Benefits Of Chatbots In Customer Service

Thanks to artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies, today’s chatbots have become invaluable tools for customer service operations. They are not only streamlining and optimizing customer experiences at every stage in the service process but are also proving to be helpful aids to customer service representatives. Here are 10 powerful benefits of adopting chatbots for customer service:

24/7 CUSTOMER SERVICE

Maintaining a support team that can care for customers at all hours can be very costly, but customers’ needs may arise outside of business hours. Frustration can build when problems are not addressed immediately, so providing a way for customers to ask questions and get answers at any time can be a major relief and a way to increase satisfaction as well as customer retention. Because chatbots allow customers to get help at any time, businesses can leave a positive impact on their minds even if service staff are unavailable.

RESOLUTION SPEED

A direct result of 24/7 availability is the obvious benefit of increased resolution speed. Quick response and fix to a problem can be the difference between keeping a customer or having them abandon a service. A chatbot can tap into a database and provide answers to questions immediately, at any time. Even if a human agent needs to intervene and provide further support, chatbots cut the workload and allow agents to focus on the more critical steps in finding solutions to customers’ problems.

INSTANT RESPONSE

As previously mentioned, even if chatbots can’t solve a problem immediately, they can at least provide an instant response relevant to the customer’s query. Customers do not like to wait for help but staffing costs do not justify keeping a large enough live team at all hours to guarantee that they get help immediately. Chatbots can be the first point of contact, reduce customer frustration, and fill in for agents when needed. Even if a follow up is required, the customer can feel well cared for due to the quick initial response.

REDUCED OPERATIONAL COSTS AND IMPROVED MORALE

One of the most immediate benefits of chatbots is monetary. Chatbots reduce operational costs by reducing staffing needs. A full-time support team is costly, so leaving the after-hours support to a chatbot provides enormous savings. Also, chatbots can handle tedious and repetitive tasks so human agents don’t have to. Agent productivity increases as they don’t have to answer repetitive and basic questions of customers. This saves time and money but also has the added benefit of positively impacting employee morale. People are much happier when they don’t have to reset passwords 100 times a day, for example.

LANGUAGE SUPPORT

Chatbots handle thousands of customer queries at once in multiple languages. They can not only work with several languages, but they can even understand different intents. This makes them very versatile and useful, especially for global companies. Sometimes it’s hard to find speakers of some languages, so these bots are a good alternative. While they cannot fully replace fluent human agents in all circumstances, they reduce the need to employ multiple language speakers as staff at all times.

CONSISTENCY AND ACCURACY (EVEN IN THE MOST REPETITIVE, LOW-VALUE TASKS)

The workload can be strenuous and tough on agents’ performance, especially when having to work on the same tasks over and over. Furthermore, they may sometimes experience off days, when they may not work to their full capacity. Chatbots have the benefit of needing no breaks and performing at the same level regardless of how many times they have to repeat an action.

DATA GATHERING OPPORTUNITIES

For people, it is hard to remember every part of a conversation, and it is even harder to analyze all the details in order to improve services and better meet customer expectations. Some chatbots, however, have the ability to gather analytics and can be trained to do so on the spot. Chatbots also give consistent responses that can be used to test customer responses without bias. This allows businesses to improve their service strategies.

REDUCED IVR FRUSTRATIONS

Most customers loathe the dreaded use of interactive voice response (IVR) systems during phone calls. Having to listen to the menu and being unable to get a personalized response is frustrating. To some people, it is even downright insulting. IVR systems are also too structured, and oftentimes leave no room for special requests or unique scenarios. Customers have very few choices and sometimes end up being routed to the wrong help team. Chatbots can fully replace these outdated systems. Customers can still be routed to the right team without the intervention of a human agent, but they at least feel like they are being cared for and understood. Finally, using a chatbot also reduces the time and cost associated with transferring a customer between different departments, especially if some of these transfers are wrong.

LESS CUSTOMER STRESS

Reducing stress and frustration happens on many different levels, not only when substituting IVR systems. Some customers may experience anxiety when having to contact the help department and explain their issue, for example. Having the option to speak to a chatbot instead reduces these fears. The immediate response and overall reduced resolution speed also lessen the negative emotional response that some customers may have. Chatbots streamline the entire customer service process and help keep customers happy and satisfied.

BETTER SELF SERVICE

Finally, while chatbots can help route customers to the right hands, some customers would rather find the solution to their issues independently. With improved machine learning technology, chatbots can direct customers to answers that will help them solve their own issues or gather the needed information. This helps keep a high level of customer satisfaction while simultaneously decreasing support tickets.

FINAL CONSIDERATIONS

Chatbots are becoming essential for a well-rounded and solid customer service strategy.
As you can see, chatbots provide responses and help that can either strengthen or substitute the need for two-way human intervention. This cuts operational costs and also leads to much greater levels of customer satisfaction.

Read more: Chatbot Technology: Past, Present, and Future

BOTCORE – AN ENTERPRISE CHATBOT BUILDER PLATFORM

If you’re planning to customer service chatbots, you might be interested to check out our enterprise chatbot builder platform – BotCore which can be deployed both on cloud and on-premise environments. BotCore helps large and medium sized companies reduce customer service costs, improve agent productivity and enhance customer experience.

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

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