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6 Top CIO Priorities For 2021

Jagan Jami — Fri, 08 Jan 2021 09:03:00 +0000

6 Top CIO Priorities For 2021

In 2020, CIOs and other IT leaders have solved several unprecedented challenges and became key enablers in business continuity. CIOs are now in a dilemma regarding the orientation of their efforts and resources in 2021. While building resilience is still a priority, it’s time to plan for recovery post pandemic.

As millions of workers shifted to the remote setup, and customers moved online, businesses leveraged digital technologies to augment customer and employee experiences.

In a Harvey Nash/KPMG 2020 CIO survey, which polled 4,200 IT leaders, 61% of CIOs say they feel more influential than ever before, courtesy of their work to help hedge their businesses against the coronavirus.

However, rapid digital acceleration and adoption of cloud and other technologies have also brought many pressing issues to the forefront – the most significant one being the management of an increasingly complex IT infrastructure.

In a survey conducted among 1000 IT leaders, 63% reported technology management had become more difficult.

Yet, leaders globally have accepted the importance of technology as a business growth accelerator and will continue to work upon that in 2021 – even with tightened budget restrictions.

Let’s explore the top CIO priorities in 2021.

Top CIO Priorities For 2021

1. Low-code development

The onset of the coronavirus pandemic put immense pressure on the IT department to quickly develop new business apps to meet changing organizational needs. Faced with a massive resource crunch, many IT leaders implemented Low-code Application Platforms (LCAP) to enable business functions to develop and deploy custom apps quickly, and by themselves – with little to no reliance on IT. These platforms don’t require users to have prior coding experience.

Low-code platforms empower pro and citizen developers alike to build apps seamlessly, using canvas and model-based scenarios and automated testing. With LCAPs, CIOs can save costs in the long run, as –

Less coding means more apps can be developed in a shorter period of time
With low-code requirements, basic and quick apps, can be developed by less experienced employees, while professional developers can create complex solutions – but in much less time and cost.

As companies continue to focus on agility in operations and make their way to recovery in 2021, implementing low-code platforms like Microsoft PowerApps will be a top CIO priority in 2021.

Learn More: How Low-Code Application Platforms Are Driving Agility In the New Normal

2. Getting To The Next Phase of Chatbot Maturity

AI-enabled chatbots and virtual assistants gained widespread popularity in 2020.

To reduce wait-time and provide support at scale at lower costs, leaders implemented AI bots that leveraged natural language processing to hold human-like conversations with customers and employees and resolve queries quickly.

We have seen companies implement multiple employee-facing chatbots for a variety of use cases – There is a chatbot for HR support, another chatbot for IT issues, one more bot to let employees access information from LoB systems.

In 2021, we will see CIOs unifying all these individualized bots into a single aggregator bot or an intelligent employee assistant to provide a consistent user experience and reduce maintenance costs.

Similarly many customer-facing chatbots that were deployed during the pandemic focused solely on delivering support and quick information. In 2021, as recovery and bottomline becomes critical, leaders will focus on building brand loyalty, driving retention and generating revenue through chatbots. Chatbot use cases will be expanded to upselling, cross-selling, providing personalized recommendations and user experiences.

As such, capabilities like conversational analytics, sentiment analysis, and omnichannel engagement will become critical.

3. Enabling The Return to workplace

Another critical area that CIOs will prioritize is preparing their organization for a hybrid workplace setup in 2021. This will include investing in the right technology needed for a safe and smooth transition back to the workplace while also ensuring the availability of better collaboration tools, resources, and training essential to function remotely for an effective hybrid model.

Leaders must strike a delicate balance between resuming standard operations and managing the realities of the post-COVID era, including redesigning workplaces and redefining workflows to keep employees safe, productive, and aligned.

Autonomous digital workplace platforms and low-code return-to-workplace apps are a few solutions CIOs can consider.

Learn More: Getting Ready for the Hybrid Workplace: The New Normal of Work

4. AIOps

Owing to the pandemic, organizations around the world adopted digital transformations at an accelerated pace to be able to function in a remote setup and build agility and resilience in their operations.

However, as the number of apps, servers, and systems grew, it gave rise to an increasingly complex IT infrastructure, which can no longer be managed and protected by traditional performance monitoring systems and human agents. Even a single IT outage could cripple business operations and cost millions of rupees in revenue. As seen above, more than 60% of IT leaders felt technology management had become more difficult.

That’s where AIOps came into the picture. Artificial Intelligence for IT operations, also known as AIOps, leverages machine learning, big data, and analytics, analyzing heaps of IT data generated, diagnosing issues in real-time, improving application performance and uptime by predicting future outages, and reducing operations and maintenance expenditure.

Therefore, as businesses continue to operate in a highly dynamic and componentized IT landscape, the adoption and implementation of AIOps for IT operations management and cybersecurity will be a major CIO priority in 2021.

5. Reducing silos and streamlining the technology landscape

COVID-19 has accelerated digital transformation journeys and increased adoption of various AI and remote working technologies. While these initiatives did ensure business survival in 2020, they are now posing a new challenge – increased technological silos. In 2020, companies rushed into digital transformation – but with no solid strategy. We have seen the implementation of various siloed remote working apps, custom mobile apps, and several function-specific systems that have individualized use cases and served for one-off purposes.

Now is the time for CIOs to unify all these apps together with a Digital Experience Platform (DEX) and reduce silos. A DXP acts as a centralized digital platform which offers flexible app integrations and easy extensions for emerging business needs.

6. IT as an enabler of business growth

The drastic shift in consumer and employee habits has completely transformed the expectations from IT. For CIOs, the opportunities expand beyond routine – building digital capabilities and getting new tools and systems for the organization.

Instead, the expectation is to enhance core capabilities and align outcomes to key business goals. For example, say you are working to increase revenue by 10% through digital commerce. Everything you do, including your people, technologies, and processes, must then tie back to this goal in an outcome-driven environment.

Thus, reinforcing the role IT plays as a strategic enabler of business growth will be a top CIO priority in 2021.

Final Thoughts

As digital transformations have led the way for change in 2020, the role of CIOs has come to the forefront. They have not only ensured that businesses transition smoothly to a remote setup, but have also integrated operational continuity as a critical element in their overall IT strategy.

CIOs have been given buy-in from every level of the organization. In 2021, as the role of IT into a driver of business growth, there is an enormous opportunity for CIOs to transform and future-proof their businesses for a new normal.

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

The post 6 Top CIO Priorities For 2021 appeared first on BotCore.

How to Effectively Support Your Remote Workforce With HR Digital Assistants

Rakesh Reddy — Fri, 17 Apr 2020 13:16:00 +0000

How To Effectively Support Your Remote Workforce With HR Digital Assistants

The COVID-19 pandemic has turned the world upside down, leaving many businesses grappling to adjust to a new normal that is constantly changing. Specifically, extended lockdowns are forcing businesses to implement a long term work-from-home model. In fact, leading tech giants are heading this revolution with most of them allowing their employees to work from home for the rest of 2020 while others are implementing various solutions to ensure limited capacity in their offices. In the case of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, the CEO, informed his employees that they can continue working from home “forever”.

Are HR managers prepared for this shift?

As weeks turned into months, it is clear that the adoption of a work-from-home model hasn’t been as seamless as expected for most companies. This can be attributed to a variety of factors, spanning from the lack of collaboration tools to inefficient processes and poor training. HR and IT teams are overburdened with managing requests pouring in from employees working across geographies and time zones.

Given that the effects of the pandemic will continue to impact businesses for a long while to come, HR and other business leaders are realizing the need to invest time and resources into digital transformation and implement solutions that can increase productivity. It’s no surprise that HR digital assistants which were already on the CHRO radar prior to the pandemic, have now become a top priority.

Let’s discuss a few ways companies are leveraging virtual assistants to not only support their remote workforce but also improve HR team productivity during these uncertain times.

Leveraging HR Digital Assistants

Answering FAQ

In the wake of the current crisis, employees will have a variety of concerns regarding the new work-from-home policies, for which they typically turn to the HR department. Addressing these questions takes the HR team’s time away from completing more productive or complex tasks. A digital HR assistant, however, can ensure that your employees are given accurate and thorough answers in real-time. The employees would just have to input their questions in natural language and have their concerns addressed directly, rather than navigating multiple screens or interfaces.

Moreover, with a digital HR assistant, employees will no longer have to wait for a human assistant to get to their question/request and respond back to them and instead get instant responses 24/7. In the event that these questions are too complex for the virtual assistant to answer, the conversation can be transferred to an HR agent.

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, Acuvate is helping customers leverage Power Virtual Agents to deploy customized Crisis FAQ bots to support their remote workforce and answer questions related to work-from-home policies, travel advisories, emergency contact information etc.

Learn More: Acuvate’s Essential Apps Suite For Enterprises In The New Normal

Crisis Communications

The importance of communication during remote working can’t be overstated. Given their availability across different channels and devices, chatbots are a must-have in your crisis communication suite. HR leaders can leverage crisis communication chatbots to

Send public health information to employees from sources like WHO and CDC
Notify employees about company’s new policies, news and advisories
Send work-from-home tips

Recruiting and Onboarding

With social distancing protocols in place, a digital HR assistant can play a major role in ensuring seamless and effortless recruitment and onboarding processes by automating major parts of the process. For instance, businesses can leverage them to filter resumes, track applicants, and schedule online interviews across multiple messaging channels. They can also drive virtual onboarding by enabling remote access to relevant training policies, and materials. You can also automate onboarding processes like filling forms.

Track and support employee health

HR teams can leverage chatbots to track employee well-being by doing regular health status checks. They can also use bots to send safety, disease prevention, social distancing and remote working tips

In fact, Global Telecom, a Filipino telecommunications company, has implemented a chatbot named Digital Usher for Disasters and Emergencies (DUDE) to keep the management updated on its employee’s health and well-being. The chatbot does daily health status checks for its 8000+ employees.

“The insights that we have been receiving from DUDE really give us a good picture of where our employees are at,” said Nico Bambao, Director for Globe’s Employee Experience Team. “When we ask them if they are unwell, they don’t just reply with their symptoms, they tell us if they’re feeling overwhelmed, anxious, or even feeling lonely or depressed.” (Learn More)

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

Virtual Training Programs

Training playbooks, performance support materials, capability assessments and other learning and development activities can all be carried out within a virtual environment. A virtual assistant can perform these programs autonomously without much involvement from the HR team.

Get Started

The COVID-19 pandemic is changing how work gets done in an organization. It’s propelling businesses towards an increasingly remote workforce. Consequently, in order to ensure robust internal communications, employee engagement and simplified HR workflows, adopting HR digital assistants is becoming imperative for organizations.

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

A Return To Workplace Checklist For HR Leaders

The post How to Effectively Support Your Remote Workforce With HR Digital Assistants appeared first on BotCore.

How Chatbots Are Helping The Fight Against The COVID-19 Crisis

Jagan Jami — Mon, 16 Mar 2020 10:28:00 +0000

How Chatbots Are Helping The Fight Against The COVID-19 Crisis

As the impacts of the pandemic deepen and governments continue to enforce social quarantine to “flatten the curve”, it is innovative technologies like chatbots that are coming to the rescue. Their diverse range of applications, cost-effectiveness, and ease of implementation, is resulting in more and more organizations readily adopting them. From customer support, crisis management, internal communications to remote work support, organizations are using these conversational interfaces in different ways to fight this pandemic.

Let’s look into this in detail.

Functions Where Chatbots Are Making A Difference

1. Crisis Management

In regards to crisis management, chatbots can help in

Sending public health information to employees from sources like WHO and CDC
Performing employee health checks
Keeping employees informed about the company’s latest advisories, and news
Sending work from home tips for remote workers

2. Human Resources (HR)

The lockdown has put a huge burden on HR. The economic downturn has piled up their inboxes with emails from employees concerned about their work status, paycheck, and lack of procedural clarity. Moreover, managing the hiring and onboarding process has become incredibly difficult in the remote environment, resulting in offers being rescinded and talent choosing to join competitors. In such a scenario, chatbots can play a major role in streamlining the HR workflows.

Not only can chatbots answer FAQ, provide policy-related information to the workforce but also automate the hiring process and run virtual training programs and assessments. For instance, in industries which are aggressively hiring, chatbots can screen applications, conduct background checks on thousands of people, collect candidate data and help the HR team to focus more on productive tasks. Moreover, chatbots can make the training and onboarding processes interactive and interesting by ensuring active participation.

Learn More: HR Bots, Chatbots for Employees,

3. IT Services Management (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. Needless to say this is largely due to the sudden shift to remote working.

A huge volume of these requests are usually ‘basic’ or ‘simple’ questions that take a lot of time to answer. A chatbot is a powerful solution 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.

Learn More: IT Helpdesk Bot

How Different Industries Are Leveraging Chatbots Amid COVID-19

1. Government

Chatbots can enable governments to relay critical and accurate information to the public as and when they require it, providing much-needed clarity on some FAQs related to lockdowns, COVID-19 symptoms, testing locations, and the affected areas.

Interestingly, the British Government has launched a WhatsApp-powered chatbot, to prevent misinformation and spread reliable health information by sharing the latest news updates and health guidance, as per the chosen option, reducing the burden on the National Health Services (NHS). Additionally, WHO has also started to utilize chatbots in its app to prevent misinformation and spread reliable health information. The chatbot also conducts interactive quizzes in multiple languages.

2. Healthcare

In these testing times, with people facing a global recession, financial uncertainty, and increased health anxiety, their mental health is taking a beating. In such a scenario, AI-powered chatbots can not only help relay vital information but also help to cope with the increased stress 24×7. As the health industry continues to champion our fight against the pandemic, chatbots can also ease the burden on it by directly helping people through guided meditations, diet, and fitness programs.

Chatbots also help in communicating with digitally disconnected front line workers and sending the latest information right to their mobile messaging apps. Another popular use case amid this pandemic is remote patient screening.

Jefferson Health, a leading academic health system in the USA, has deployed a conversational chatbot to remotely screen patients and prioritize cases without the risk of exposure. The chatbot also digitized the patient intake process to streamline appointment scheduling for COVID-19 testing.

3. Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG)

With a drastic fall in physical store traffic, much of the demand for CPG has shifted online, with many executives publicly stating that they are zeroing in on digital commerce to target their customer base. With convenience and accessibility as the driving factors, they realize that implementing chatbots can be a vital step in this direction.

Not only can chatbots be used internally to manage restocks, track orders, and research promotions but also for online customer support to enhance the customer experience.

Britannia Industries, a leader in the CPG space, has launched a GPS-powered WhatsApp-based chatbot in light of the current social quarantine and rising demand. The chatbot is helping consumers locate grocery stores which have the organization’s products. In fact, the chatbot also sends notifications to the customers automatically whenever the store’s stock is refilled.

Learn More: CPG bots, Chatbots for CPG

4. Retail

With physical stores being open only for a few hours and supply chains hampered, retailers are changing their policies related to shippings, products among many others. A chatbot can be used to inform customers about these changing policies and keep them updated.

Learn More: Retail Bots, Chatbots for Retail industry,

5. Restaurants

With restaurants transitioning into takeouts only, their menus, service offerings, pricing, and timings have changed. Letting people know about these changes is important. Moreover, with them operating with limited staff, order taking and tracking can become a handful. Chatbots can be used to relay any changes and updates to customers, as well as collect orders from them.

Conclusion

Any doubts that businesses may have had about chatbots prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, have been put to rest. With the market dynamics changing in face of the social quarantine, chatbots are growing in popularity. Their use case is no longer limited to customer service, they are becoming an integral component of an organization’s operations, both internally and externally. A chatbot’s range of applications, scalability, and ease of implementation are some key drivers for its adoption amid this crisis.

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

The post How Chatbots Are Helping The Fight Against The COVID-19 Crisis appeared first on BotCore.

Chatbots: The Past, Present, And Future

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

Chatbots: The Past, Present, And Future

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

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

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

the history of bots: where and how it all began

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

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

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

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

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

the present state of chatbots: where we are today

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

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

chatbots in today’s enterprise

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

chatbots for customer service

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

chatbots for IT helpdesk

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

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

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

chatbots for business intelligence

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

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

Learn More: Business Intelligence Bots, Power BI Bots

chatbots for HR

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

Learn more: How Chatbots are Revolutionizing The HR Department

statistics on adoption of chatbots

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

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

the future of chatbots: where we are headed

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

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

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

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

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

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

FREE EBOOK

exploring the use cases of an enterprise chatbot

The post Chatbots: The Past, Present, And Future appeared first on BotCore.

Envisioning The Work-Life Of An Employee In A Chatbot-Driven Enterprise

Jagan Jami — Fri, 07 Sep 2018 10:09:00 +0000

Envisioning The Work-Life Of An Employee In A Chatbot-Driven Enterprise

Meet Nathan. He has recently joined ABC Corp. as a Marketing Manager. The new job means a new city and the tension associated with relocation. But one thing that Nathan is thankful for is that the hiring and on-boarding process was seamless and did not require him to visit their office again and again. But how was this achieved? Well, luckily for Nathan, ABC Corp. happens to be one of the forward-thinking organizations that uses chatbots for all their HR, ITSM, and Business Intelligence related tasks.

what is a chatbot?

A chatbot is a computer program or an artificial intelligence which conducts a conversation via auditory or textual methods. Chatbots are often designed to convincingly simulate how a human would behave as a conversational partner and are used for various practical enterprise use cases including customer service, IT helpdesk, HR or information acquisition (Business Intelligence).

ABC Corp uses BotCore’s AI chatbot which enables organizations to build and deploy customized AI chatbots. So, let us see how Nathan’s life at ABC Corp. has been impacted by chatbots.

chatbots – making nathan’s life easier

Nathan has joined as a Marketing Manager. A typical day in the life of someone in this role entails multiple team meetings, client interactions and brainstorming sessions that require them to access records and data insights on the go. Also, since marketing managers almost always have days that are jam-packed, having someone take care of handling internal processes such as applying for leave, giving appraisals, searching for reports and information and keeping them abreast of upcoming meetings etc. would be a boon. Someone like a personal assistant; BUT, not everyone can have an assistant tracking these details. It is just not a feasible option. However, everyone can seek help from a virtual assistant. In order to see how chatbots are helping Nathan handle daily life at ABC Corp., let us look at some scenarios.

Recruitment

When Nathan applied for the position at ABC Corp., he was immediately sent a text message by Allie, ABC’s recruitment bot.

Allie: Hello Nathan. I am Allie from ABC Corp. I am reaching out to you in response to your application for the position of Marketing Manager.

Allie: We see that your skill set matches that which is required for the role. Could I go ahead and set up an interview for you with our GM-Marketing?

Nathan: Thanks, Allie Sure!

Allie: Thank you Nathan. Would the 1st July 2019, 12 PM work for you?

Nathan: Umm…will I be required to come to your HQ location?

Allie: That will not be necessary. I see that you are based in a different city, hence we could have the interview via Skype. Is that okay?

Nathan: That would be perfect. Thank you!

Allie: You are welcome. Please add ABCCorp as a contact on Skype. I have sent you a calendar invite for the interview. Kindly acknowledge the same.

Nathan: Sure.

Allie: Thank you Nathan. Have a great day ahead. And good luck for the interview!

Nathan was extremely pleased with how efficient Allie was in reaching out to him quickly, understanding his location criteria and setting up an interview accordingly. 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. In fact, about 66% of candidates were comfortable with AI and chatbots taking care of interview scheduling and peripheral activity.

Essentially, a recruitment chatbot can collect information from candidates such as their resume and contact information, help set up an interview with a human stakeholder based on his/her calendar, collect screening details such as experience and skills and answer the candidate’s basic questions about the job.

Learn more: How Chatbots Can Simplify the Recruitment Process

HR Onboarding

Once Nathan cleared the interview and was offered the job, he was reached out by Allie once again.

Allie: Hello Nathan. This is Allie. Congratulations on the offer, Welcome to ABC Corp!

Nathan: Hi Allie. Thank you very much.

Allie: Before we start the onboarding formalities, do you have any questions I can help you with?

Nathan: As a matter of fact, yes. Could you please send me any company related information I should be well-versed in before getting started?

Allie: Absolutely! Below is a company overview video to get you started with!

Allie: You can also refer this intranet page for more information [Read Now]

Nathan: Great! Thanks Allie. Could you also send across the leave policy and the list of holidays for this year?

Allie: Sure. Here are the leave policy and the holiday calendar. [Check Now]

Now, please note that as part of the onboarding process, you are required to send across copies of the following documents to hr@abccorp.com:

Personal Identification Details – any authority attested identification card would do

Last 3 payslips from your previous employer

Bank account details

Nathan: Sure, I will send them across.

Allie: Okay. Also sending across the NDA. Please sign the same and send it across.

Nathan: Okay.

Allie: Great! Thank you Nathan..

Nathan: I’d like to raise an IT request for requesting a new laptop

Allie: Sure, your request is recorded. An IT agent will get in touch with you soon!

Nathan: That’s great, Thanks Allie!

Learn More: How Chatbots are Revolutionizing The HR Department

IT Helpdesk

Nathan has started his first day at ABC Corp. and has met his team. He has been given access to the company’s marketing dashboard but is unable to sign in. He remembers that ABC Corp. uses an IT helpdesk bot that can be accessed using the internal messaging tool. He decides to seek help.

Nathan: Hi.

IT Bot: Hello Nathan. Welcome to ABC Corp. How can I help you?

Nathan: Well, I am unable to sign in to the marketing dashboard.

IT Bot: Have you been granted access?

Nathan: Yes. I was sent an email earlier that I can now access the dashboard to see project-specific details. But my sign-in credentials do not work.

IT Bot: Sorry about that. Let me check.

Nathan: Sure.

IT Bot: Looks like there was a technical problem with credential generation. I have sent across a password reset link to your email ID. Kindly use it to sign in with the new password.

Nathan: Okay. Thank you.

IT Bot: My pleasure. Is there anything else I may assist you with?

Nathan: No.

IT Bot: Okay! Have a nice day Nathan.

Nathan uses the password reset link to quickly sign-in to the dashboard. He is happy that instead of having to waste time locating and asking the right people for the fix, he was able to reach out to the IT helpdesk bot in no time.

business intelligence

It has now been a couple of weeks since Nathan joined ABC Corp. Today he is scheduled to meet with the head of Alpha Foods, a long-standing customer of the company. One of the issues that Alpha Foods is facing is a steep decline in sales. Nathan has been asked by his manager to focus on the issue in order to come up with a fix. Before he walks into the meeting, Nathan wants to be abreast of the company’s revenue and sales data. He decides to use Mylo, ABC Corp.’s Business Intelligence bot.

Nathan: Hi Mylo.

Mylo: Hello Nathan. How can I help you today?

Nathan: I have a meeting with Alpha Foods. Can I see their annual revenue details for last year?

Mylo: Sure. Alpha Foods’ annual revenue for 2017-2018 is 90 Billion.

Nathan: Okay, can you break that down by region?

Mylo: USA – 32B, Asia Pacific region – 35.7B, Europe – 22.3B.

Nathan: Okay, can I see a graphical representation of their sales in the Asia Pacific region?

Mylo: Yes.

Nathan: Well, that doesn’t look good. What about their sales in Europe and USA?

Mylo: They seem to be doing pretty well there. Sales in Europe have seen an improvement of 6% on average annually. Sales in the USA are on the uprise too – at an average annual rate of 2%.

Nathan: Map sales numbers for Asia Pacific with their trade promotional campaigns from the last 5 years.

Mylo: There are no trade promotions from Alpha in Asia Pacific between the years 2013 – 2018.

Nathan: That explains it. This is enough insight for now. Can you mail these figures to me as well?

Mylo: Sure. The details have been sent to your email.

Nathan has understood that Alpha Foods is facing an issue specifically in the Asia Pacific region as they are facing a hard time attracting customers to their products. Nathan uses the data insights provided by Mylo to suggest a new trade promotional campaign to boost sales for Alpha in the Asia Pacific region.

Learn More: Why Business Intelligence Needs Chatbots to Boost User Adoption & ROI

Intranet/Employee Assistant

Nathan routinely reaches out to Mia, the company’s intranet & employee assistant bot to check on internal company updates and to set up meetings.

Nathan: Hi Mia. Please schedule a meeting with Alex from the Sales team for tomorrow at noon.

Mia: Confirming, meeting tomorrow with Alex Knoxville at 12 PM?

Nathan: Confirm.

Mia: Meeting scheduled. Calendar invite sent to Alex.

Nathan: Any other updates?

Mia: Yes. The leave policy for the year 2019 has been updated. Tap to see the latest policy.

Nathan: Well, send it to my email instead.

Mia: Updated leave policy sent to your email.

Mia has made simple, daily tasks a breeze for Nathan.

Learn More: The Role of Chatbots in the Intranet

explore how chatbots can help

While these are only a few popular work-life scenarios in which chatbots can help Nathan, the fact is that several other ways bots can simplify work for him or any normal employee. 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.

If you’re interested in learning more about chatbots and how they help your organization, feel free to get in touch with one of our chatbot consultants. Acuvate leverages its enterprise chatbot builder platform, BotCore to build, deploy, train and manage AI chatbots for large and medium sized enterprises.

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4 Amazing Things Enterprise Chatbots Can Do For Users

Abhishek Shanbhag — Tue, 12 Jun 2018 14:24:22 +0000

Amazing Things Enterprise Chatbots Can Do For Users

A report by Markets and Markets reveals that the chatbots market is set to be worth 3,172.0 Million USD by 2021. It isn’t too far fetched, at this point, to claim that bots just may be one of the most popular AI technologies today.

However, despite their popularity and increasing awareness around the incredible benefits that chatbots can bring to businesses, there hasn’t been nearly as much discussion around what chatbots can actually do for users. So while chatbots are touted as the next big thing across a variety of industries, businesses still do not know them for much beyond their ability to answer their customer’s most basic FAQs.

Before we delve into incredible new benefits that chatbots can bring to your users, let’s first take a step back to understand chatbots and their functionality.

A chatbot is essentially a computer program that enables conversation with an end user via auditory and textual methods. There are currently two types of chatbots- rule-based and AI-powered chatbots, and unsurprisingly, the former is rapidly becoming less and less relevant.

As we experience brand new advancements in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing, we are starting to see chatbots that are smarter than ever and provide intelligent, highly relevant answers. Typically, chatbots reside as a contact in messaging apps used by the organization, such as Slack, Skype, Skype for Business and so on.

Enterprise chatbots today are built by leveraging powerful enterprise chatbot building platforms that can both enable organizations to build and deploy chatbots. It would be interesting to note that before chatbot platforms were introduced into the market, building a bot was complicated, time-consuming, and required a specific set of sophisticated skills. As robust chatbot building platforms enter the market, it’s become easier than ever for businesses to get started with minimum deployment time and zero coding skills.

Enterprise chatbots are a trending technology and are in fact, easy to build. Therefore it is imperative that business leaders take the time to understand ways in which chatbots can impact their organizations and its operations.

Before making the decision to build bots, it is critical to evaluate specific challenges that the business may be facing and identify ways in which a chatbot can address and resolve them. Therefore, the chatbot development process begins by first strategizing and assigning specific tasks you want your bot to do.

In this blog, we’re going to explore five top tasks your chatbots can perform. Read on to see which one of these use cases would be most relevant to your business and its functions:

4 AMAZING THINGS ENTERPRISE CHATBOTS CAN DO FOR USERS

THEY CAN PUSH 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.

Users also have the option to decide the frequency, timing and type of alerts they’d prefer to receive – chatbots can deliver alerts in multimedia formats- and schedule accordingly.

Chatbot administrators can also schedule specific type of alerts that are meant to be delivered to a desired set of users.

Alerts can be both simple text-based notifications or ones which require users to perform an action.

Here are 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, included 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.

THEY CAN COMPLETE 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 of record or making form-based data entries that employees and customers need to perform commonly. Using a chatbot not only saves time but also eliminates repetitions, that may be caused by human error.

Chatbots also eliminate the need to switch across multiple applications, go through various mundane procedures or depend on personnel to get tasks done. By automating the process, you are saving time for both customers and employees. 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:

Employees can request an IT helpdesk chatbot to generate an IT ticket for any issues they may be encountering
Using an HR chatbot, employees can apply for leaves or generate payslips
Employees can request a Business Intelligence chatbot to update or make changes to a report.
Customers can place a product order
With Healthcare chatbots, patients can schedule appointments with doctors

FETCH INFORMATION

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

Users can specify parameters and filters they require for the information they need and chatbots can share required information with users in a way that’s easy for users to scan, understand and send along for further processing.

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.

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.

Examples:

Employee to a BI chatbot: What is the marketing ROI for 2016 and 2017?
Employee to a BI chatbot: Get me the sales report for Antwerp from Jan to April
Customer to a banking chatbot: Generate a report of my FICO score

THEY CAN ANSWER QUESTIONS

This is a functionality that most people who’ve ever heard of a chatbot are already familiar with.

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.

Using an enterprise chatbot platform, administrators can detect the most commonly asked questions by users to the bot. Thereby you can constantly update the FAQ database of the bot and consistently enhance user experience and adoption

Developers

For more complex questions, chatbots can search for answers from pre-defined websites or databases, which can be in a variety of formats – word, PDF and others.

Examples:

Employee to HR bot: How many leaves do I have left?
Employee to IT helpdesk bot: How do I reset my password
Customer to tech support: Can you tell me more about a product or service

CONCLUSION

Enterprise chatbot technology is evolving at an incredibly rapid rate and chatbots are quickly replacing traditional apps, whose functionalities are not adept at answering customers queries effectively.

Chatbots that drive enterprise productivity perform a variety of functions – much more than simply answering basic FAQs – they have the power to quickly become the backbone of enterprise search.

We recommend that business leaders work closely to define a robust enterprise bot strategy before embarking on the journey of building one. This strategy should address specific organizational challenges and how they plan to leverage chatbots to address these.

A workplace chatbot should be built to handle a variety of requests rather than having individual chatbots for each department or type of function. The idea is to have a go-to bot that employees and customers can rely on to find the information they require.

If you’re interested to learn more about chatbots or how you can integrate them into your business, get in touch with one of our experts who will help you explore the right use case of a chatbot for your organization.

FREE EBOOK

a guide to choosing an enterprise bot builder platform

The post 4 Amazing Things Enterprise Chatbots Can Do For Users appeared first on BotCore.

7 Chatbot Myths You Need To Stop Believing

Rakesh Reddy — Fri, 01 Jun 2018 17:10:00 +0000

7 Chatbot Myths You Need To Stop Believing

By 2020, at least 80% of businesses are expected to have some form of chatbot automation implemented
– Business Insider

In the last few years, there has been much hype around chatbots and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in digital transformation. These technologies with their conversational capabilities can transform the business workflow process and increase customer loyalty.

Several leading organizations have already adopted chatbots to improve their customer satisfaction and increase employee productivity.

Despite the uses and benefits that chatbots will be able to provide, many organizations are still hesitant in trusting chatbots entirely. The misconceptions and myths about chatbots are restricting them from implementing one and having a healthy ROI on it.

Here are a few popular myths or misconceptions about chatbots.

chatbot myths you need to stop believing

myth 1: chatbots will replace humans

Chatbots will replace humans and take away our jobs! This is the biggest fear probably rising across the organizations. A sense of insecurity sprouts out of such fears. So, organizations tend to not take advantage of the new technology.

However, chatbots play a complementary role and automate a few mundane jobs to provide more quality time for productive work. This can have an impact on overall productivity on both individual and organization level.

AI WILL ELIMINATE 1.8 MILLION JOBS, IT WILL ALSO CREATE 2.3 MILLION JOBS BY 2020!
– GARTNER STUDY

As a matter of fact, chatbots may never replace humans. They would rather help in reducing workload and free human employees. They’d help to do repeated, routine tasks like answering FAQs, receiving requests, generating leads, etc.

According to a PwC report, AI will reduce repetitive tasks such as paperwork (82%), scheduling (79%) and timesheets (78%).

Owing to this, employees will get more opportunities to focus on strategic, productive, innovative and creative tasks.

MYTH 2: CHATBOTS ARE EASY TO BUILD

This is both true and false. Chatbots are easy to build and deploy if you have a robust enterprise chatbot platform, personnel with the needed skills and expertise in the areas of AI, Conversational UX etc.

There are a wide range of challenges for developers to understand the purpose of chatbots, design chatbot conversations, frame rules and convert the information into a conversational flowchart, build development platforms or frameworks and integrate it with business apps and ensure the bots are aligned with the business priorities.

If you’re planning to build chatbots in-house for your organization, just remember that there is a lot of work involved to build them! Deployment of a successful chatbot requires a lot of planning and research in advance.

It would be interesting to note that before chatbot platforms were introduced into the market, building a bot was complicated, time-consuming, and required a specific set of sophisticated skills.

However, organizations having domain expertise and AI skills can deploy complex solutions within a short span of 6-8 weeks.

Learn More: Basic Resources Required to Build an Enterprise Chatbot

MYTH 3: CHATBOTS WILL REPLACE MOBILE APPS

Have tablets made smartphones old-fangled? No. Similarly, bots and mobile apps will also co-exist. For example, take ridesharing company Uber – customers can request a cab through an app as well as its Facebook messenger bot. So, it is not quite accurate to say that chatbots can replace apps.

Chatbots provide an easy way to text and request for information, whereas applications are about downloading and storing information. Moreover, chatbots offer textual conversational experience and apps stand for visual experiences. This clearly shows that chatbots will not replace apps with their distinct features. Rather, it appears like they complement each other.

Furthermore, organizations can leverage both bots and apps for their business growth. Besides, chatbots need messaging apps or channels such as Facebook, Slack, Skype for Business to deliver the conversational experience. Chatbots amplify the mobile app experience by giving it a new dimension of interaction.

MYTH 4: CHATBOTS ARE ONLY FOR BIG ORGANIZATIONS

Although artificial intelligence trend is spreading far and wide, many small and mid-sized organizations assume that AI technology is reserved only for large tech-savvy organisations. Assuming the boom of chatbots is only for large organizations is a major misconception.

Recent reports on chatbot market analysis show that AI technology is inspiring startups to incorporate chatbots to achieve definitive success and the mid-scale enterprise segment is expected to grow at the highest CAGR.

Chatbots and AI can be considered as an enhanced channel to streamline operations in small and mid-sized companies. They can go to the optimal extent of delivering responsiveness and efficiency within the organization.

Another misconception connected with this is that building chatbots could be expensive which is a false assertion. There are many powerful bot builder platforms available at an affordable cost. Using these platforms, you can cost-effectively deploy the desired chatbot persona which possesses the potential to cut down varied business costs.

MYTH 5: CHATBOTS ARE ONLY FOR CUSTOMER SERVICE SECTORS

Most of us consider that the primary function of chatbot is to chat with a customer. This is just fiction! The most common use case for chatbots is answering customer requests but they are not just limited to customer service tasks. There are a lot of different interesting use cases.

Below are a few examples of the most successful chatbot use cases in various sectors.

Enterprise-grade chatbots have the ability to deliver optimum results when mapped with an appropriate use case in any industry. Chatbots are poised to disrupt the way we interact within our organization and with our customers.

MYTH 6: ALL BOTS USE AI

Many are under the misconception that chatbots use AI and only work with it. The fact is that not all chatbots are AI based, most chatbots are rule-based and follow a simple, autonomous process, something along the lines of a decision tree.

Many organizations prefer these type of chatbots to understand the intent and context of the user. With the capabilities of NLP/ML, they can identify context from the requests typed by users and respond back with a relevant answer as bot trained on a large training set. In order to assist this purpose, chatbots need not be AI-based.

At present, there are three types of chatbots:

Script-driven: These rely on pre-defined scripts to answer queries.

Interference-driven: Answer based on NLU, deep learning and cognitive learning to respond like humans.

Data-driven: They recognize patterns based on previous learnings and respond from catalogued responses.

However, developing a perfect AI-based chatbot is not a simple task as it needs high-end developers and large sets of data on real human conversations.

MYTH 7: CHATBOTS DON’T UNDERSTAND THE CONTEXT

There is a popular myth that chatbots don’t understand a user’s intent and might not always provide the desired response to the user. This is somewhat true for traditional chatbots. However, with the advancements in AI technologies like Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning, chatbots are better able to process user intent and adapt to the jargon to give contextual, personalized and relevant responses with a wide range of vocabulary.

CONCLUSION

CHATBOTS ARE WORTH THE INVESTMENT

Organizations irrespective of their size and industry should consider getting ahead of the curve and embrace chatbot technologies now to leverage future opportunities. Chatbots should be a part of your digital transformation strategy, both to help you better serve customers/ employees today and to position you for the future.

Adopting chatbot technology can effectively streamline your business processes, enhance employee engagement, improve customer service, lower the operational costs and deliver a better employee experience.

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

Exposing your team to the potential of intelligent chatbots may just be the most effective way to exploit the potential of your business and your customers. The value of chatbots in an increasingly self-service-oriented landscape is that well-designed bots can go beyond just semantic search and actually execute simple transactions without much of human intervention.

Chatbot trends: What’s Big in Chatbots in 2018 and Beyond

Ready to deploy a chatbot tailored to your business? check out BotCore – An enterprise-ready conversational Bot builder platform which has inbuilt support for a number of conversation channels across text, voice and custom channels.

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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The post 7 Chatbot Myths You Need To Stop Believing appeared first on BotCore.

How Chatbots will help in HR onboarding

Rakesh Reddy — Fri, 11 May 2018 12:12:00 +0000

How Chatbots Will Help In HR Onboarding

Organizations are incorporating Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) as central components of their digital transformation strategy.

According to Gartner, more than 50% of CIOs will have artificial intelligence as one of their top five investment priorities by 2020.

AI-powered chatbots are set to transform different aspects of HR process, especially recruiting, hiring, and onboarding new employees. HR teams can progressively leverage these chatbots to streamline and personalize the HR onboarding process.

HR administrators are starting to pilot AI to achieve outstanding value to the organization by leveraging chatbots for recruiting, onboarding, employee development and training. Especially in high attrition industries such as retail, finance, healthcare. etc

A recent survey of 350 HR leaders conducted by ServiceNow finds 92% of HR leaders agree that the future of providing an enhanced level of employee service will include chatbots.

Learn More: How Chatbots Help HR Managers Improve Employee Experience And Reduce Cost Per Contact

7 WAYS HR CHATBOTS CAN HELP IN HR ONBOARDING

INITIAL SCREENING

In 2016, 56% of recruiters said they can’t make good hires because of lengthy hiring procedures
– MRI Network Survey 2016

Reduce the hiring cycle by automating your initial screening using the power of conversational user interface.

Chatbots can initiate the interview process by fielding screening questions and capturing the answers. This helps in automatically screening and shortlisting the right candidates by assessing their potential.

Automating screening has an additional benefit of eliminating human bias and identifying the candidates based on merit.

WALKING RECRUITS THROUGH INITIAL ONBOARDING REQUIREMENT

HR personnel need to collect basic information like KYC, tax forms and signed non-disclosure agreements or other legal documents from the new employees during onboarding. It would be a rather time-consuming activity for the HR personnel to collect information from every employee.

In such scenarios, HR chatbots can be best utilized to assist potential hires. During the onboarding process, chatbots can answer queries from new hires through the conversational interface. They can speed up the onboarding process by collecting employee information, completing forms, and assisting in online registration by removing the need for paperwork.

GUIDING NEW HIRES THROUGH COMPANY POLICIES

New hires require a lot of attention initially to get answers to some of the most repetitive or basic questions regarding the policies or standard operating procedures etc. of an organization.

New hires and HRs can save a lot of time by redirecting interactions involving basic queries to an HR chatbot. These could be anything from HR policies about a vacation to standard operating procedures for new employees.

HR chatbots can help businesses improve the employee experience and help reduce HR workload by answering employees questions about latest company policies instantly and accurately.

INTRODUCTION TO ORGANIZATIONS TEAM

In industries like retail etc. in which workforce is spread across multiple locations, onboarding can be a major challenge. Finding out about team updates, company achievements, scheduled projects and objectives is a basic need for a new entrant in a department.

New hires don’t know whom to contact for completing tasks or ask for information – in order to get the required information, they start contacting the HR team for even the most minor things.

AI chatbots can reduce dependency on HR and prioritize issues. Using chatbots, new employees can directly interact with the bot regarding their team’s whereabouts and updates within the organization. Additionally, chatbots help new joinees extract details about their assigned role, team hierarchy and their position in the organization landscape.

SHIFT MANAGEMENT

While employees are in the process of gaining insights and getting a hang of the systems, chatbots are programmed to set up monitoring of login logout timings of the new joinee.

Generally, employees maintain and manage their time sheets using specifically intended portals provided by the organization. Employees need to login into the portal and update them physically during login and logout times. This process would take time, impact productivity and may lead to human errors too.

AI-powered chatbots assist employees in check-in and check-out before and after the work-hour directly using the conversational interface. These details can then further get into your time management applications leaving no room for human error.

EMPLOYEE SURVEYS OR REFRESHER QUIZZES

HR can use chatbots to the fullest of potential by conducting surveys that are employee-specific. This helps them identify the patterns in employee experience in the onboarding process. This process helps HR in identifying their areas of improvement in the entire onboarding process.

Organizations can initiate refresher quizzes on any operational or HR practices to identify the pitfalls of each department leveraging chatbots. This helps in gaining extra mileage in the employee engagement space apart from process improvements.

EXPERIENCE IMPASSIVE YET HELPFUL INTERACTIONS

Some HR questions are awkward to ask a human. Employees might be fearful/ feel quite embarrassed to ask certain personal HR questions.

HR Chatbots are significantly more helpful than humans when it comes to asking highly sensitive personal inquiries.

Using HR bots employees could talk about a few personal concerns like:

If and when an employee needs to disclose a pregnancy, and what the maternal leave policies are.

What qualifies as sexual harassment and how to report it.

If employees are intending to leave the organization, they can ask about how much vacation time they have remaining and the compensation they get for remaining vacation time.

If the employee is not really satisfied with the answers provided by the chatbots, then he/she can interact about the issue directly with a human agent.

HR CHATBOTS ARE THE FUTURE

By 2021, 30% of high-volume recruiting activities (sourcing, screening, shortlisting and candidate interaction) will be done without human intervention, using innovative applications based on AI and data as a service (DaaS) – Gartner

If the onboarding process is carried out by chatbots, HR teams will have more time in managing critical and high priority issues resulting in an improved ESAT and lower cost per contact.

Organizations will have an edge over peer companies by ensuring enhanced employee engagement, improving employee retention and driving an increase in overall productivity.

On the other hand, employees feel more engaged and have a 24×7 accessible assistant who can come to their rescue at critical times and resolve issues.

Both organizations and employees will have a win-win situation by employing chatbots – by boosting employee productivity and maximizing efficiency.

Ready to deploy chatbots to assist you in your onboarding process and conducting employee surveys? If yes, check out our HR chatbot built on BotCore – An enterprise bot builder platform.

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.

A Return To Workplace Checklist For HR Leaders

The post How Chatbots will help in HR onboarding appeared first on BotCore.

How Chatbots Can Simplify the Recruitment Process

Rakesh Reddy — Thu, 19 Apr 2018 12:42:00 +0000

How Chatbots Can Simplify The Recruitment Process

According to CareerBuilder, over 67% of the applicants have a positive impression about organizations who keep them updated throughout the application process.

However, it is a herculean task for recruiters to provide regular updates to every one of the aspirants participating in the recruitment process.

In fact, they hardly have time to personally update the status of rejected applications while they’re busy sourcing candidates. Almost 75% of the applicants never hear back from recruiters.

This is an area in which chatbots can transform the applicant experience and take it to a new level.

According to Randstad Talent Trends survey, 84% of C-suite executives and human capital leaders assume AI will have an impact on the workplace in the next three to five years. And research firm IDC predicts the overall market for AI is expected to cross $46 billion by the end of 2020.

AI has the ability to take your HR experience to a higher level. According to Donald Southern, an HR expert at Resumes Planet, “AI can assist you in handling recruiting, productivity, and retention more effectively than regular HR techniques. Besides, it enables you to do the recruitment process faster than ever before.”

HOW ARE CHATBOTS SIMPLIFYING THE RECRUITMENT PROCESS?

Chatbots have been around for quite a while now, but in today’s digital world they are playing a vital role in many business processes. Organizations are quickly adopting this AI-powered technology, especially in the recruitment processes.

Chatbots are setting a new trend in the recruitment industry to manage time-consuming or repetitive administrative tasks with ease.

They provide a range of functions like

Resume Parsing
Making significant inquiries to filter the applicants for the screening process,
Providing updates about the status of an application
Answering FAQs to speed up hiring process for the busy recruiter.

Additionally, chatbots will come handy to collect data from candidates using a text conversation rather than asking them to fill out lengthy forms. A SmashFly report found that 74% of candidates who start filling the job applications will drop off before completing it. Organizations that use chatbots can save 74% of recruitment marketing efforts, time and budget!

Candidates can take the help of the HR virtual assistants available on their company websites or social handles to pump in their required information for the job application. Needless to say, all the conversations enabled on a website or social platforms undergo the standard security compliance and authentication methods while conversing with the chatbot.

By 2022, HR and recruiting chatbots have the potential to reduce business costs by more than $8 billion – Juniper Research

Here are few advantages of using recruitment chatbots:

They are available round the clock.
Quickly responds to any query raised.
Frees up HR personnel time.
Saves time and money with its smart and automated workflow.
Reduces cost per hire.
Handles multiple requests from different applicants simultaneously.
Keeps candidates engaged throughout the recruitment process and helps in improving the brand value.
Available across different messaging channels like Messenger, Slacks, SMS, etc.

4 SMART WAYS CHATBOTS ARE USED TODAY IN RECRUITMENT PROCESSES

ANSWER CANDIDATE FAQS

Juniper research forecasts that chatbots will answer 75-90% of queries and saves an average time of over 4 minutes and $0.50-$0.70 per interaction.

Recruitment chatbots are used to communicate with applicants to answer FAQs, interact with them to ask qualifying questions and speed up the screening process, and can also schedule an interview with a recruiter.

A major benefit of chatbot in recruiting is its ability to engage with an unlimited number of applicants simultaneously in real-time and answer their questions instantly, thereby greatly enhancing the candidate experience.

A recent survey by Allegis observed that 58% of candidates are comfortable interacting with AI for initial questioning in the application process.

COLLECT CANDIDATE EXPERIENCE FEEDBACK

Do you know how applicants feel about their recruiting experience with your organization?

In today’s tight labour market, organizations are identifying that candidate experience is turning into a major differentiator. Getting feedback and suggestions about candidates experience is key to differentiate from competition and build relationships.

AI enables intelligent chatbots to collect feedback and process it further. Chatbots capture feedback from applicants by asking simple questions about the job application and the screening process and also take suggestions to enhance it.

Sometimes, candidates tend to drop off in the middle of the application process. In these cases, chatbots can quickly get into action by enquiring why the candidate chose to not pursue the application further.

Key data that can be collected to add value to your recruitment process:

Notation Feedback: Design relevant questions that come with predefined answers. This helps in instant exchange of real-time feedback. Instead of forms, candidates will have a powerful interactive conversational interface to share their feedback.
Point of Improvement: Employers can pose questions like “where do you think we need to improve” and gain insights on the areas of improvement. The feedback collected from candidates is passed on to recruiters to initiate necessary actions and refine the process to best fit the human capital needs.

Using these insights, organizations can ensure provide an engaging experience to candidates and help HRs in eliminating human bias and capacity for error.

EMPLOYER BRANDING TOOL

According to LinkedIn report on employer brand statistics, 75% of job seekers consider an employer’s brand before even applying for a job.

Using a recruiting chatbot to communicate and engage with applicants can enable the organization to be recognized as innovative and responsive in recruiting when compared to peer companies.

Some organizations are taking their branding to the next level by giving a personality to their recruiting chatbot. They align the chatbot and its interactions with their organizational culture and values. Another benefit of recruitment chatbots is that they foster the employer brand by ensuring consistency in messaging and treating candidates during the recruiting process.

According to LinkedIn reports, organizations who differentiate themselves with a strong employer brand enjoy a 50% lower cost-per-hire and 1-2x faster time to hire.

HELP RECRUITERS SAVE A LOT OF TIME AND RESOURCES

According to SHRM Survey, the average Cost-per-Hire for companies is $4,129 and it takes an average time of 42 days to fill an open position.

A recruitment chatbot can dramatically lower both the cost of hire and time to hire by automating a large part of qualifying and scheduling interviews while simultaneously keeping candidates engaged.

Most resumes received for a high volume role may be unqualified and recruiters don’t have the time nor capacity to interact with candidates they plan to reject. Using a recruitment chatbot can help them interact with applicants and quickly screen out unqualified candidates. This helps both the applicant and HR save time and ensure engaging candidate experience. Moreover, recruiters can focus most of their time and effort on creating connections and building relationships with qualified and interested candidates.

With the present push towards AI and automation in the recruitment process, chatbots with advanced applications have the capacity to reduce recruiter workload.

In a complex scenario demanding engaging several candidates at once, chatbots are the most promising answer organizations have. They eliminate complexities and help businesses ensure there are no missed opportunities by providing an avenue to create efficient, engaging experiences for both recruiters and candidates. Chatbots also help organizations build the employer brand, which is vital to attracting the right talent.

Are you looking for a recruitment chatbot solution? Check out Acuvate’s enterprise bot builder platform BotCore, which enables organizations to create and train their own recruitment chatbot to handle employee queries and improve HR and operational efficiencies.

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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The post How Chatbots Can Simplify the Recruitment Process appeared first on BotCore.

9 Ways To Enhance Chatbot Security

Abhishek Shanbhag — Fri, 13 Apr 2018 18:10:00 +0000

9 Ways To Enhance Chatbot Security

Chatbots are the hottest new digital technology. Advancements in messaging platforms and conversational channels are quickly increasing chatbot development rates.

Gartner predicts that by 2019, 40% of enterprises will be actively using chatbots to facilitate business processes using natural-language interactions.

Many industries across the globe like healthcare, CPG, banking, financial, IT, customer service, retail etc., are adopting artificial intelligence (AI) powered chatbots to automate a range of tasks and simplify business processes.

By 2021, more than 50% of enterprises will spend more per annum on bots and chatbot creation than traditional mobile app development – Gartner

Chatbots offers a tremendous set of opportunities to organizations, thereby promptly breaking barriers of adoption. They help businesses innovate new ways of development, powering the advancement of next-generation digital interactions between businesses and their customers.

Despite all of the advances they promise, there is a lot of speculation surrounding efficiency in chatbot security.

Organizations are concerned about how secure chatbots are, where information is getting stored, how data will be protected, what channels will have access to it, and so on.

As enterprises contemplate adopting chatbot solutions, these are important questions to consider. How then can chatbots overcome cyber-security challenges?

Employees and customers often enter sensitive information during chatbot sessions. This information is prone to fall prey to cyber attackers. Security concerns are a snoozing alarm in the current digital age. The average cost of a data breach will exceed $150 million by 2020, as business infrastructure continues to become more connected than ever. With GDPR and compliance issues around the corner, cybersecurity is now the top priority of every organization.

Conversational data encryption, multi-factor authentication, behaviour analytics, artificial intelligence are some powerful techniques being used to safeguard chatbot usage.

SECURITY CONCERNS

There are two main security concerns that organizations should be aware of:

Threats: Threats are one-off events like Malware or DDoS attacks. Global cyber attacks targeting specific business groups result in a permanent system lock out and loss of access to intellectual property. Beyond this, attackers or hackers can even threaten to expose secure information.
Vulnerabilities: When a system is not maintained with superior standards, it can become open to attack, and therefore, ‘vulnerable’. Attacks can happen due to weak coding, poor protection, through the weakest connection in the chain or user errors.

However, chatbots can offer a solution to these weaknesses. Algorithms incorporated in chatbots are more complex and minimize the vulnerability of a system through highly secure protocols. Thus, chatbots not only offer an effective interface for conversations but also provide enhanced security.

While chatbots do enable acceleration in ROI growth; during the requirement gathering and deployment phases, security measures often go unnoticed. Here are a few techniques to ensure chatbot security:

9 WAYS TO ENHANCE CHATBOT SECURITY

END-TO-END ENCRYPTION

E2EE system provides secure communication by encrypting messages or the information that is transferring through the channel. Only the sender and the recipient can read the information; no third-party can view or intercept the transmitted data.

Even if attackers or hackers get access to servers where your data is stored, they cannot extract the data as they lack access to the decryption keys to understand the data.

Recently, social networking platforms have incorporated their messaging channels with this capability to protect themselves from cyber attacks.

If enterprises can incorporate this major security practice in chatbot platforms, it will be one of the most robust methods to ensure significant chatbot security.

TWO-FACTOR AUTHENTICATION

Two-factor authentication or two-way verification is another method to ensure security. This technique involves requiring users to verify their identity through two separate channels, to access a chatbot.

Verification codes are sent to the registered email or/and mobile number. Once the code is entered, the user is validated and granted access to a chatbot. This can be a precautionary step to verify that the account user is the person accessing the chatbot.

This may seem old-fashioned or traditional, but is most certainly tried and tested, making it a highly effective form of protection. Two-factor authentication is used by many industries, including financial and banking, where security is a high priority.

USER IDENTITY AUTHENTICATION

User ID authentication is the most well-known technique and a basic authentication method in many industries today. Users are provided with secure and unique login credentials, such as username and password. A user can verify his/her identity using these secure credentials.

These credentials are exchanged between the user and the chatbot for a secure authenticated token. Generated authenticated token verifies the user identity and grants permission to access the chatbot.

INTENT LEVEL AUTHORIZATION

Intent-based communication is influenced by combining two inputs – state and context. State refers to the chat history while the context is an outcome of the analysis done on the user inputs.

At times, contextual information involves revealing of critical information which needs to undergo a different level of authorization from the backend level.

For example, as of organization’s policy, no employee is supposed to reveal or disclose salary details on a public platform or a conversational interface. So, specific intents related to salary are blocked so that employees cannot access to that data.

Hence, if an employee requests for any data that is related to salary, based on user intent inputs chatbot will reply back as he/she is restricted to access the data.

Using this unique feature, organizations can provide access to critical data for the authorized users only.

CHANNEL AUTHORIZATION

Chatbots have a unique convenience of being available in multiple channels like Skype for Business, Microsoft Teams, Facebook, Slack, etc. Organizations are provisioned with a feature to restrict the use of chatbot in certain communication channels in view of ensuring better security and compliance.

Organizations can leverage the power of enterprise chatbot builder platforms to restrict the usage of chatbots in a specific channel which is convenient and serves the purpose.

INTENT LEVEL PRIVACY (GDPR COMPLIANCE)

According to the newly framed General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) laws organizations are forced to preserve the privacy of the personal details shared.

For example, during a conversational exchange if an employee shares his/her contact details which can be accessed by the admin is a clear case of a data breach. So to secure such critical data, chatbot platforms are coming up with an extra level privacy restriction. Critical data will not be revealed even from the backend. However, the intents are logged for audit purposes.

AUTHENTICATION TIMEOUTS

Time-based restriction on the usage of the authenticated user can ensure greater levels of security. Access to the authenticated tokens is limited for a certain amount of time. Once the token expires, access is revoked by the chatbot automatically. In some cases, users are asked to confirm if they are active, before closing sessions. A ‘ticking clock’ for right authentication input can prevent a hacker’s repeated attempts to try and guess their way into a secure account.

BIOMETRIC AUTHENTICATION

Biometric authentication process involves biological inputs to validate a user. Users can verify their identity using unique biometric authentication devices, such as an iris or fingerprint scanners to scan retina and fingerprints.

This technology has become quickly popular due to its effectiveness in ensuring security in the personal devices.

By 2019, use of passwords and tokens in medium-risk use cases will drop 55%, due to the introduction of recognition technologies – Gartner

SELF-DESTRUCTING MESSAGES

If you have a chatbot that is making digital transactions, it takes personal account information as inputs from the users and processes the transaction. However, users have to consider where chatbots store that information and for how long.

The best way to deal with this situation is to destroy or forever remove the information that is transmitted through chatbot conversation. After a certain amount of time, chatbots should automatically clear all the sensitive information or data that has been provided by the user.

CONCLUSION

While there are several benefits organizations can enjoy by embracing chatbots and all of their tremendous potential, it is important to first survey the chatbot and its security capacities. It is crucial that there is a robust, comprehensive and multi-layer security strategy in place in order to stay secure.

As AI becomes increasingly popular, chatbot developers should be aware of security and protection requirements, especially when building chatbots for the financial or banking industry.

Is your organization using chatbots? If not, get started today by building your own AI-powered chatbot with enterprise bot builder platform BotCore, which provides built-in security levels of authorization mechanisms for the 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.

FREE EBOOK

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The post 9 Ways To Enhance Chatbot Security appeared first on BotCore.