Rakesh Reddy, Author at BotCore

Understanding Digital Customer Service And How To Improve It

Rakesh Reddy — Wed, 30 Dec 2020 09:48:00 +0000

Understanding Digital Customer Service and How to Improve it

The digital world has changed the buying process! Customers today are well-informed of products and the market. When they enter stores or talk to a sales representative, today’s customers already know what they want to buy and how much they want to pay for it. They have access to digital channels like blogs, vlogs, websites, social media, chatbots and digital marketplaces that provide them with a plethora of relevant information. In fact, once the sale is closed, customers take the time and use those same channels to either shame or promote the seller with a mere click of the button. Today’s customers don’t just want to enjoy the benefits of their purchases, they also want to enjoy the journey of making those purchases.

Therefore, to give the customers what they want, businesses have realized that they must provide exemplary digital customer services – paving the way for a complete customer service transformation.

Customer service leaders today are facing tremendous pressures:

Ensure customer journey in digital channels at lowered costs
Match up to competition’s service standards
Assure leadership that the service center is more than just a cost center

According to Karen Freberg, Associate Professor in Strategic Communication at the University of Louisville, digital customer service is a necessity in today’s business landscape as it presents a unique opportunity to build a two-way dialogue with customers and learn about their wants and needs.

Understanding Digital Customer Service

In today’s digital age, with rapid adoption of technology, the rules of customer services are changing. The customer is now in the driver seat.

Digital customer service – defined as meeting the needs of customers using digital channels such as emails, mobile apps, blogs, vlogs, SMS, online chats, and social media, has become more than just engaging with the customer and handling their complaints and returns; it is about enhancing the entire end-to-end customer experience, where every interaction is seamless, fast, and personalized.

In fact, if done well, digital customer service can also become a valuable revenue driver, with Forrester estimating that 69% of customers preferring to buy from brands that offer consistent customer service across multiple channels. Therefore, business leaders are increasingly understanding that “how” they deliver is as important as “what” they deliver.

Additionally, new competitors are flooding the market by taking advantage of the low barriers of entry provided by globalization, de-regulation, and technology developments. This further highlights the need for a robust digital customer service, with Deloitte stating that 67% of a company’s competitive edge comes from its customer service.

Improving Digital Customer Service

Digital customer service must not be seen as merely adding more digital options to the pre-existing customer service efforts. It must be approached as a multistage transformation, undertaken with rigorous planning, streamlined processes, and initiatives backed by the leadership. Here are some ways you can improve your digital customer service strategy:

1. Figure out the gaps

Digital channels produce terabytes of unstructured data, which when optimized can be a valuable source of information and insights. Therefore, it is necessary for businesses to deep dive into their existing customer service strategy and analyze various touch points and functionalities, and how they are offered to spot weaknesses and inconsistencies. This enables businesses to direct their investment into the right tools and processes.

Measuring the impact of the new initiatives across each digital channel individually and assessing the migration rate between them can help businesses improve their customer service results and identify the most effective digital channels. This ensures that the business can maintain control over various channels, understand the nature of the customer service requests, and its ability to resolve them. This can also help businesses identify the points where customers are abandoning self-service and calling the contact center.

Additionally, analyzing the prior customer service requests can help businesses identify priorities. For instance, businesses often find that a small number of problems account for the majority of customer requests and costs. One of the major reasons for this is a lack of direct digital solution. This means that designing the right solutions for those problems can help the business significantly cut costs and also enhance customer experience.

2. Develop targets and a service strategy

Once the business identifies the problem, it must set up well-defined targets, defined at the enterprise, group, and individual levels. This is initiated by developing a workflow for each involved personnel, as part of the larger framework to address the problem. For instance, a touchpoint map can show which customer request can be addressed at which digital touchpoint, which can help businesses pin-point which functionality to develop.

Businesses should consider the costs and savings-estimate when setting up the workflow. In fact, many businesses utilize service-to-sales functionality to some digital touchpoints in order to cross-sell services and cover the cost of the functionality development. However, it is crucial to push them selectively, and not too aggressively to prevent jeopardizing the customer service efforts and brand image.

3. Reach out to customers proactively

Proactive customer service involves anticipating the needs of customers and delivering the relevant information and solutions without being prompted. This can include notifying customers about new product errors and glitches, providing tailored advice, offering personalized product solutions recommendations etc.

For instance, consider the example of a shopping chatbot deployed by a retail or CPG company. When a customer interacts with the chatbot and shows interest in making a product purchase, the chatbot can analyze past shopping behaviour of the customer and recommend more products similar to the one he/she is trying to purchase.

In addition, the chatbot can suggest the usage of coupons or promotional offers while the customer tries to check out. It can also notify customers in advance if there is a delay in orders and provide an updated delivery ETA.

Proactive customer service not only improves customer satisfaction and confidence but also reduces costs and increases agent productivity. Human agents can spend less time answering routine questions and focus on other productive tasks. A report by Enkata shows that proactive customer service reduces call volumes by 30% and increases customer retention by 3-5%

4. Send updates on new products and services

Powerful digital customer service and engagement is crucial whenever an organization launches new products or services. You not only have to ensure customers are fully aware of the launch and understand the product benefits but also need to make sure they know how to use the product features and address any new concerns they might have.

A major insurance company based in Canada recently approached for our help on improving their digital customer service as they were planning to launch a new insurance plan. We helped the company deploy an AI virtual assistant on their corporate website within 8 weeks. Upon the launch of the new plan, the GDPR chatbot was able to educate customers about the plan, address their queries and help new members decide which scheme they should choose based on their demographic information. The bot deflected most of the questions from going to the company’s call center and reduced inbound call volume.

5. Address “How-to” scenarios

Another important aspect of digital customer service is helping customers understand the different ways they use a product or service. For instance, Knorr, a global CPG company and manufacturer of dehydrated soup and meal mixes, deployed a chatbot that provides different soup recipes, tips and tricks for preparation, and personalized ingredient recommendations.

This type of customer service initiatives help companies not only improve the overall customer experience and engagement but also drive sales and revenue.

6. Utilize AI-driven technologies

Businesses must look to adopt modern AI-powered technologies that can provide key advantages in improving digital customer service:

1. Chatbots and Virtual Assistants For 24/7 Customer Service

As seen above, a chatbot is arguably the most adopted digital customer service technology in recent times. With their highly interactive and human-like conversational interfaces, chatbots deliver personalized responses to customers based on their intent and preferences.

Their deployment can increase the company’s customer interactions capacity, and reduce human involvement to only when absolutely necessary or when the chatbots are unable to solve a specific problem, thereby saving costs. Moreover, their performance is easy to track. The data generated by chatbots can help businesses identify key customer trends and behaviors.

With their machine learning and Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities, chatbots can also learn from previous interactions to better understand customer vocabulary.

By acting as the first line of service agents, they enable human agents to focus on high value tasks. They can assist your customers 24 X 7, across multiple channels and languages.

Learn More:

2. Advanced Analytics To Extract The Value From Contact Centre Data

Contact centres produce humongous amounts of data. However much of this data is unstructured and present in different formats – free text fields, images, audio etc. and accessible only to the IT department. Therefore, businesses have been unable to tap into its value to guide their decision making.

However, today, with the development of NLP-driven advanced analytics, businesses can tap into this data, across multiple channels, and generate valuable insights to better understand customer behaviour and the general customer sentiment towards the product or the company.

Learn More: Advanced Analytics: 4 Simple Steps For Enterprise Adoption

Get Started

With McKinsey stating that 25% of customers will defect after just one bad digital experience, it’s time for customer service leaders to rethink their service strategy. Leading businesses make their digital customer service experiences useful, engaging, and consistent, at every touchpoint. They personalize it and keep it emotionally appealing across the entire customer life cycle. This enables them to drive brand loyalty and customer retention.

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 Understanding Digital Customer Service And How To Improve It appeared first on BotCore.

Top 6 Customer Experience Trends For 2021

Rakesh Reddy — Fri, 18 Dec 2020 10:12:00 +0000

Top 6 Customer Experience Trends For 2021

2020 has changed Customer Experience (CX) in an unprecedented way for both customers and brands. The previous “nice to have” experience improvements became “must to have” to ensure customers stay engaged. As the world changed dramatically overnight, customer service and experience leaders had to figure out how to shift to new operating models to serve customers.

Companies once used to differentiate themselves by their product, service or efficiency. Today, however, being distinct and competitive lies in creating a seamless customer experience across all platforms. Business leaders recognize the competitive edge gained by ensuring superior customer experience and the perseverance required to achieve such standards.

Reports show that post-COVID, for 59% of consumers, a brand’s customer experience is a key deciding factor while making a purchase. Only 38% felt the same pre-COVID.

In a nutshell, customer experience directly influences purchasing decisions and a brand’s revenue in 2021. With that in mind, here are some trends to consider, to deliver powerful customer experiences in 2021.

6 Major Customer Experience Trends For 2021

1. Showing empathy: Building Relationships over transactions

The pandemic has disrupted the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of people worldwide and compelled everyone towards social isolation. Customers are seeking empathy and care from brand interactions and evaluating businesses on a human scale. Salesforce research shows that 71% of consumers cite companies who show sensitivity to the current climate are more likely to earn their loyalty.

This means throughout the pandemic and 2021, organizations need to think beyond just solving customer issues but also consider providing emotional support. Contact center agents need to be provided with fresh guidelines on handling sensitive customer issues and showing empathy.

This also means that customer service leaders should focus more on metrics like CSAT and NPS instead of just AHT.

In addition, customer service chatbots need to be trained with sentiment analysis capabilities. This enables bots to understand customer sentiments and moods and deliver the appropriate response.

2. Providing personalized diagnosis and recommendations

In 2021 and beyond, brands will be focusing more on providing personalized customer diagnosis and recommendations to improve the overall customer experience. Consider Ponds’ (a Unilever brand) AI Skin Advisor chatbot. Considering the skin problems people face amid COVID-19 due to prolonged mask wearing and continued all-day exposure to screens, Ponds deployed a chatbot on Shopee, an e-commerce platform in Southeast Asia.

Based on an individual’s headshot photo, the bot identifies key skin concerns like wrinkles or acne etc and recommends the right skincare product. The bot received appreciation from over 98% of customers who interacted with it.

This type of personalized recommendations and engagement goes a long way in improving the overall customer experience.

3. Providing Quick Information

Throughout the pandemic, we have seen a huge influx in customer requests. But a majority of these requests and queries are basic and simple in nature and take a lot of time to answer. Customers who need minor information like “What’s the status of my flight” or “What are the new operating timings of the nearby retail store” or “Does my insurance policy cover COVID-19 costs” etc. are made to wait in long queues before getting their questions answered.

This not only frustrates customers and affects brand loyalty but also decreases the agent productivity. In 2020, we have seen many companies deploy FAQ chatbots to address this issue and this trend is likely to continue in 2021. Chatbots are available 24*7, handle numerous requests at a time, provide instant answers and can be deployed in multiple channels seamlessly.

4. Capturing Customer Feedback and Suggestions

Now more than ever, businesses are looking to increase agility in their operations, product development processes and business models. As a result, customer feedback becomes an invaluable guiding source to make quick adjustments, improve product quality and adapt to changing conditions. While there are many ways to capture customer feedback, companies are now leveraging customer service chatbots. Chatbots can go beyond the usual 1-5 rating and ask the customer to send the specificities of the feedback. With a chatbot, customers can also upload media like photos and videos to provide suggestions in detail.

Based on the feedback, chatbots can also be trained to take follow-up actions. For example, if a customer expresses dissatisfaction for delayed order delivery, the chatbot can apologize to the customer and offer a discount coupon or cashback.

5. Proactive updates on new products and offers

Keeping customers proactively informed and engaged is a crucial part of improving customer experience in 2021 and beyond. Brands should anticipate the needs of customers in advance and deliver the relevant information and solutions without being prompted. This can include notifying customers about new products, latest offers, status of their ticket/order, potential errors and glitches, providing tailored advice, and offering personalized solutions, recommendations etc.

A report by Enkata shows that proactive customer service reduces call volumes by 30% and increases customer retention by 3-5%.

For instance, consider the example of a shopping chatbot deployed by a retail or CPG company. When a customer interacts with the chatbot and shows interest in making a product purchase, the chatbot can send a notification about a potential sale or offer about a similar product.

6. Providing Product Usage Help

Another important customer experience trend in 2021, is helping customers understand the different ways they use a product or service. For instance, Knorr, a global CPG company and manufacturer of dehydrated soup and meal mixes, recently deployed a chatbot that provides different soup recipes, tips and tricks for preparation, and personalized ingredient recommendations.

Such customer experience initiatives help companies not only improve the customer engagement and satisfaction but also drive sales and revenue.

Need further insights?

If you’d like to learn more about the top customer experience trends to watch for in 2021, please feel free to get in touch with one of our customer experience experts for a personalized consultation. You might also be interested in exploring our chatbot builder platform (BotCore) and learn how it helps you build low-code customer service chatbots within a few weeks.

The post Top 6 Customer Experience Trends For 2021 appeared first on BotCore.

How Different CPG Companies Are Using Chatbots To Drive Customer Experience

Rakesh Reddy — Fri, 11 Sep 2020 09:14:52 +0000

How Different CPG Companies Are Using Chatbots To Drive Customer Experience

The importance of personalized customer experience in the CPG (Consumer Packaged Goods) industry cannot be overstated. However, this is easier said than done. The sheer scale of engaging personally with a humongous customer base, which may number to tens and hundreds of thousands, is not only next to impossible but also very expensive.

In the fast-moving world of CPG, it’s also critical to know the intent, preferences and behaviour of customers. It helps companies to make better recommendations, enhance product quality, provide superior support, personalize experiences – resulting in stronger customer loyalty, predictable market share and thus better financial results and an improved market position.

Several CPG companies today are adopting chatbots to address these challenges. Bots are becoming an essential part of CPG marketing and customer experience strategies. Some popular use cases include:

Product recommendations after understanding customer needs
Collecting customer feedback and reviews
Sending personalized tips and advice (Ex: recipes, hair/skin care tips etc.)
Pushing alerts and notifications about new products
Sending product information
Online shopping

Let’s look at a few cases where CPG companies have utilized chatbots to enhance their customer experience.

How Are CPG Companies Using Chatbots

1. Quaker Oats Company

In 2019, the Quaker Oats Company, one of the subsidiaries of PepsiCo., launched a Facebook chatbot named Otis, to improve customer engagement. It was built to automatically send recipes, and reminders for overnight oats, provide quick consultation for any concern, and assist in online shopping through the entire customer journey.

Quaker Oats has experienced considerable success in this initiative. The chatbot’s functionality and ability to assist customers one-on-one has enhanced the company’s marketing and customer Service efforts. As of mid 2019, the chatbot has had 6000+ customer interactions with a 13% YoY increase without any dedicated media or marketing support, drawing customers who don’t just want to purchase oats but also want to cook it differently. According to Elena Parlatore, Senior Director at Pepsico. who spearheaded this initiative, Otis has allowed them to successfully evolve their messaging, learn about the customer’s preferences, and test out automation.

2. Madison Reed

Hair color brand Madison Reed created the color-recognition chatbot – Mady, to help users just like a human colorist in a salon. It starts off by asking the user for a selfie of their face and hair, after which Mady will analyze the photo, ask the user some questions, and, depending on the user’s preferences, will recommend the right color and product accordingly. Mady has a highly informal tone, and even uses x’s and o’s and witty, funny, and flattering comments to better connect with the customer.

According to Madison Reed, it has a success rate of a whopping 85%. In fact, it has been so successful that it has boosted engagement by 400% and raised the click-through rate of the company website by 21%.

3. Acuvate Helps A Fortune 100 CPG Organization Improve Customer Experience With AI chatbot

We have recently helped one of our customers, a Fortune 100 CPG organization, deploy a Facebook Messenger chatbot for their hair care brand. The bot acts as a virtual hair and beauty consultant and provides recommendations on hair styling and the right products to use. Here’s how it works:

First, it requests customers to upload a selfie of themselves
It diagnoses the face and hair in the photo sent
Asks some quick questions about the nature of their hair and preferences
Uses Augmented Reality (AR) to create different hairstyles appropriate for the customer and recommends them
Finally it recommends the products which can help the customer achieve that look

4. PG Tips

For Red Nose Day 2017, PG Tips, a UK based Unilever tea brand, entered the chatbot realm by transforming its mascot – Monkey, into a chatbot. It answered user questions with a very degree of accuracy, provided information on PG Tips’ products, and shared light-hearted GIFS, and jokes during the conversation, generating 1 million laughs. This innovative use of chatbots enabled PG Tips to bring its brand persona to life, bringing a smile on people’s faces and encouraging them to donate to charity.

5. Perfect Fit

In 2018, Perfect Fit, a pet care subsidiary of Mars, launched a Facebook Messenger chatbot to provide customized pet care advice. The chatbot uses natural, conversational language to gather information from the users to create tailored nutrition and exercise programs and provide lifestyle enhancement tips for the benefit of the pets. Moreover, it has been designed to conduct routine follow-ups and measure the progress. In fact, users may ask direct questions to the chatbot regarding the health, habits or happiness of their pet, and it will either provide an answer or send a link to an external web page with more information.

6. Sephora

Sephora, a retail company that also manufactures beauty products, uses a chatbot to assist customers in shopping more effectively, booking appointments with a Sephora beauty specialist, handling questions, and locating brick-and-mortar stores quickly and on-the-go. Its goal is to drive sales and improve branding whilst providing a fun, social experience similar to that of shopping with a friend. It starts by asking questions to better understand the customer’s age and preferences and shares relevant content, tips, and tutorials, utilizing emojis, and providing relevant recommendations to enhance the buying experience.

The chatbot initiative has resulted in Sephora recording 600,000+ interactions, which have led to an 11% increase in bookings for the Sephora specialists and an average rise in purchasing worth $50 after reserving an in-store service.

Conclusion

CPG companies looking to improve their customer experience and marketing efforts are increasingly deploying chatbots on Facebook Messenger, websites, Virtual Assistants like Alexa and Google Assistant, etc. Chatbots deliver personalization at scale and engage customers with a conversational interface. The customer data captured from chatbots is also invaluable to build better products and improve product quality. If you’d like to learn more about this topic, please feel free to get in touch with one of our CPG chatbot experts for a personalized consultation.

You may also be interested in exploring our chatbot builder platform (BotCore) which is currently being leveraged by numerous large CPG companies across the globe.

FREE EBOOK

a guide to choosing an enterprise bot builder platform

The post How Different CPG Companies Are Using Chatbots To Drive Customer Experience appeared first on BotCore.

How Agent Assist Bots Help Improve Customer Service Productivity

Rakesh Reddy — Fri, 04 Sep 2020 08:02:00 +0000

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:

FREE EBOOK

a guide to choosing an enterprise bot builder platform

The post How Agent Assist Bots Help Improve Customer Service Productivity appeared first on BotCore.

A Comprehensive Guide To Understanding Chatbots

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

A Comprehensive Guide To Understanding Chatbots

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

Chapter 1: What Is A Chatbot

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

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

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

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

Chapter 2: The Past And The Present Of Chatbots

The History Of Bots: Where And How It All Began

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

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

The Present Scenario

With the advancements in AI, bots have become more intelligent are able to conduct meaningful and personalized conversations. Now, bots could adapt and learn based on the interactions they had with people. They could now process tons of data, rapidly retrieve information, process information, and give the right output/answer in no time. There are two primary entities of AI that power a chatbot – Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing.

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

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

Organizations today are using chatbots for a variety of use cases and the usage varies from industry to industry and function to function. And the benefits chatbots offer are plenty including enhancing customer experience, improving employee productivity, automating mundane tasks, reducing costs and simplifying business workflows.

Enterprises are now leveraging chatbot builder platforms to effectively build, deploy, manage and train AI chatbots.

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

Chapter 3: What Are Chatbots Capable Of Doing?

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

1. Fetching Information

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

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

Examples:

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

2. Send Personalized Alerts

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

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

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

3. Perform Tasks

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

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

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

Examples:

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

4. Answering Questions

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

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

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

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

Examples:

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

Chapter 4: Popular Chatbot Features You Should Be Aware Of

A) Knowledge Base

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

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

b) Broadcasting

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

c) Effective conversation system

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

An efficient bot would have features such as

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

d) Vocabulary

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

e) Sentiment Analysis

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

f) Administration

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

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

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

Chapter 5: Use Cases And Benefits

Functions

1. Human Resources

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

- Recruitment

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

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

Use Cases

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

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

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

Benefits

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

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

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

- Onboarding

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

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

- Learning and Development

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

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

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

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

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

- Retention and Engagement

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

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

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

- Off-boarding / Exit Management

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

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

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

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

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

Learn More: How Chatbots Are Revolutionizing The HR Department

2. IT Helpdesk

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

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

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

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

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

Use Cases

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

Benefits

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

Learn More:

3. Sales

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

Use Cases

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

Benefits

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

4. Marketing

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

Use Cases

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

Benefits

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

Learn More: 4 Ways Marketing Teams Can Use Chatbots

5. Intranet/Employee Assistant

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

Use Cases

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

Benefits

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

Learn More: Chatbots For SharePoint Intranet

6. Business Intelligence

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

Use Cases

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

Benefits

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

Learn More: Business Intelligence Bots

Industries

1. Banking & Financial Services

Some of the chatbot use cases for banking begin with personalized banking with an aim to improve customer satisfaction and engagement. Banks have enabled their customers to interact with chatbots to clarify banking queries. They can access and ask for account balance, bank statements, transfer funds, create a deposit, saving and investment advice, and so on.

Use Cases in Customer Service

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

Business Benefits

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

2. Consumer Goods & Retail

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

Use Cases in Customer Service

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

Business Benefits

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

3. Insurance

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

Use Cases in Customer Service

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

Business Benefits

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

Learn More: Chatbots For Insurance Industry

4. Legal

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

Use Cases In Customer Service

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

Business Benefits

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

Learn More: Legal Industry Bots

5. Education

Chatbots are changing the face of education right from personalizing education, helping people learn new languages, spaced interval learning, student feedback, professor assessment, essay scoring, acquaint students with school culture and for administrative formalities.

Use Cases in Customer Service

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

Business Benefits

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

Learn More: Chatbots for Educational Institutions

Chapter 6: Key Chatbot Implementation Considerations

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

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

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

Chapter 7: The Future Of Chatbots

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

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

1. Integrating Chatbots with RPA

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

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

2. Chatbot-to-Human Handover

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

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

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

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

Learn More: Human Handoff In Service Desk Bots

3. Voice Bots

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

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

Learn More:

4. DataOps With Chatbots

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

In Conclusion

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

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

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

About BotCore

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Different CPG Companies Are Using Chatbots To Drive Customer Experience

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

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

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

Understanding Voice Bots

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

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

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

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

Voice Bots In The New Normal

1. The Voice-First Workplace

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

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

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

2. Voice technology powering customer service and experience

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

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

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

3. Voice assistants will improve remote worker productivity

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

Learn More: Cortana in Microsoft 365

Conclusion

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

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

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

How is AI Transforming Enterprise Software Applications

Rakesh Reddy — Thu, 25 Jun 2020 10:10:00 +0000

How Is AI Transforming Enterprise Software Applications

A recent survey by Gartner predicts, “By 2021, 40% of new enterprise applications implemented by service providers will include AI technologies.”

The world of business is undergoing a massive change owing to the rapid emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) for enterprise applications. Indeed, artificial intelligence has the power to solve several organizational problems as it offers functionalities that humans cannot practically perform at the same rate and accuracy.

AI has quickly changed status from a “technology to experiment” to a “technology to deploy.” By 2025, most enterprises will be using AI-enabled apps to gain a competitive edge from streamline operations, more incredible product innovation, and improved customer satisfaction.

Drivers of this shift include an unprecedented growth of enterprise data, advances in machine learning (ML), natural language processing (NLP) capabilities and the need to accelerate digital transformation journey.

Below, we present you with the latest insights into how AI is transforming enterprise software apps.

A Glimpse at AI for Enterprise Applications

1. Embracing conversational AI to simplify data analytics consumption

While data analysis is critical, it is extremely time-consuming to sift through multiple business dashboards and reports and find relevant data. To overcome such limitations, AI-enabled virtual assistants are integrated with business intelligence apps.

AI-enabled virtual assistants, leverage the NLP technology to converse with users in natural language. By merely initiating a chat on the enterprise messaging app, and sending simple messages like “What is the sales of product A for 2017?”, employees and business leaders can procure in-depth insights in the most granular form of data, without switching between multiple tools and dashboards. Users need not manually filter data to analyze information and arrive at crucial decisions.

This, AI is transforming the consumption of business intelligence and analytics, especially for on-field employees (for example, sales agents) or CxOs, who need quick access to information without having to dig through heaps of data.

Learn More: Business Intelligence Chatbots

2. Securing Every Aspect of Enterprise IT through AI

With the rise of remote working across the globe and as IT decision-making becomes more democratic, enterprises cannot ignore the increased threat of cyber attacks.

To combat the threat and secure every aspect of the IT infrastructure, organizations are scrambling to deploy applications that integrate machine learning to detect possible threats and vulnerabilities in real-time.

These tools use ML techniques to spot anomalies in network traffic, emails and user activities. Hence, they can quickly identify a potential attack and take steps to mitigate it, even if the threat is unlike anything the organization has witnessed before.

3. Transforming IT through AIOps

AIOps, an emerging variation of DevOps, uses machine learning (ML) algorithms on IT operative data to derive insights that optimize and improve operations.

While DevOps automates and simplifies IT operations, AIOps goes a step further by extracting information that is useful in overseeing IT activities.

Sometimes, it can automatically take requisite action based on such insights, thus enabling IT personnel to supervise larger IT environments than otherwise possible.

4. Making Intranet Smarter with AI

AI can make your digital workplace more intelligent – right from content management and collaboration to information accessibility, employee communication, and social networking.

Modern intranets, equipped with AI technologies, serve the following purposes –

Cognitive enterprise search: Cognitive enterprise search is an AI-enabled smart search tool that connects all the internal and external enterprise systems, thus acting as a one-stop-search engine for enterprise-wide knowledge and information It understands natural language phrases and enables shows personalized search results based on the users’ roles, locations, interests and past search activities
Automated metadata management: Enterprises can use AI bots to automate metadata generation, data-tagging, classification, and organization and generate good-quality taxonomy recommendations. As a result, organizations can illuminate and maximize the value of unstructured data
Personalized employee experiences: AI empowers the intranet to break the clutter and deliver personalized content recommendations to the users, based on their interests, locations, and job profiles
Improved collaboration: AI analyzes the user’s persona to suggest the right subject-matter experts to connect with within the organization; thus fostering a collaborative workplace culture
AI-powered analytics: AI-powered analytics help in harnessing and analyzing intranet users’ data. This provides insights into how employees across departments are engaging with the intranet.

5. Combining AI with CRM

The benefits of integrating AI into your customer relationship management are manifold. Here are a few reasons to start contemplating an AI-driven CRM software –

Increased CRM adoption: AI-enabled chatbots boost the CRM adoption rates by

(i) Automating data entry

(ii) Simplifying the data updating process

(iii) Allowing users to access information faster

(iv) Sending personalized updates automatically.

Prediction of future customer behavior: Artificial intelligence can draw learnings from the customers’ past decisions and historical engagement to generate valuable sales. Moreover, AI can analyze customers’ sentiments, to predict their future behavior
Automated segmentation: AI segments customers automatically into groups with similar characteristics and ensures your messages reach the right audience at the right time
Price optimization: AI can analyze past client data to predict the ideal discount rate and pricing that is most likely to lock the sales deal

6. Optimizing Supply Chain Management Through AI

Several enterprises are investing in AI-powered supply chain management apps. Such applications help improve just-in-time deliveries, anticipate potential issues, reduce costs, and recover from supply disruptions.

By leveraging AI-powered analytics, businesses can generate valuable recommendations and forecasts to build a resilient supply chain. Some of these scenarios include – demand forecasting, stock visibility, detecting out-of-stock situations, and supplier risk analysis.

Speaking volumes about the utility of these apps, a study by Mckinsey has found, “among organizations that were using AI for supply chain management, 61% experienced cost decreases, and 63% saw revenue increases.”

Learn More: Creating A Digital Supply Chain For The New Normal

7. Simplifying Vendor Billing through AI

AI is capable of simplifying financial operations within the enterprise.

Moving a step ahead from traditional Optical Character Recognition (OCR) systems that extract data from templated documents, an AI-embedded invoice management software can look at any document and extract all the critical information.

For example, by just feeding the software with invoices from different vendors, AI can figure out who the invoice is from, the due date, the amount to be paid, etc., without any human intervention.

Get Started

AI is and will continue playing a significant role in transforming enterprise software applications. As seen above, one cannot deny the essential role of AI-enabled apps in driving improvements in quality, speed, and efficiency within organizations. While it can be overwhelming for organizations to transform their operations and systems overnight, beginning the AI journey with low-hanging fruits can be a good start.

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

Further Insights:

The post How is AI Transforming Enterprise Software Applications appeared first on BotCore.

How Are Chatbots Helping the Healthcare Industry Fight the COVID-19 Crisis

Rakesh Reddy — Fri, 12 Jun 2020 06:59:00 +0000

How Are Chatbots Helping The Healthcare Industry Fight The COVID-19 Crisis

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has especially affected the healthcare industry enormously. Doctors and healthcare staff are working tirelessly to treat the growing number of patients at the hospitals.

A disturbing trend posing a severe threat to the general health and well-being of the society is the spike in the volume of fake news and misinformation regarding COVID-19. The subsequent increase in queries from the anxious public has overwhelmed the staff at the urgent care centers.

Thus, the sector is looking at digital platforms to help ease the pressure. AI-enabled chatbots, in particular, are one technology that can infuse agility in healthcare operations and are fundamental to adopt as the healthcare industry makes its transition to recovery.

Chatbots can assist people with an initial screening of symptoms, thus limiting any avoidable visits to the doctors. Additionally, this prevents the spread of the virus by curbing the inflow of people into hospitals.

Chatbots can handle an unlimited number of conversations and requests simultaneously with lower operational costs. As hospitals function with infrastructure constraints, deploying chatbots can help them manage patients effectively with limited resources.

How can chatbots help the healthcare sector amidst the crisis?

1. Limiting doctor visits with pre-screening and self-treatment

In a study published in JAMIA, researchers from the Indiana University Kelley School of Business conducted an online experiment with participants who viewed a COVID-19 screening session between a hotline agent – either human or chatbot – and a user with COVID-19 symptoms.

The research concluded, “The primary factor driving user response is perception of the agent’s ability. When ability is the same, users view chatbots no differently or more positively than human agents.”

Every hospital and quarantine facility in the world is functioning off limited resources, including insufficient beds, ventilators, protective suits, masks, etc. To reduce the burden on the healthcare staff, the need of the hour is self-diagnosis and treatment using chatbots.

And how is this done? In case a person is experiencing flu-like symptoms such as a headache or mild fever, he may consult the chatbot for at-home pre-screening. The virtual assistant asks questions such as – age, initial symptoms, travel history, existing ailments, etc. – to map answers with the possible symptoms of COVID-19.

In case the symptoms don’t match with the warning signs of the disease, the chatbot advises the user on the next set of steps to be taken, which may be simple preventive measures. If the patient needs further observation, the chatbot can recommend a visit to the doctor.

Additionally by staying at home, chatbot users can prevent the spread of their disease. And also may protect themselves from catching another infection by visiting the hospital.

2. Scheduling Virtual And Physical Appointments

Chatbots can offer services such as locating nearby healthcare facilities, scheduling virtual and physical appointments, and encouraging users to participate in clinical trials.

As seen above, depending on the severity of the symptoms, a chatbot may recognize the need for a doctor’s appointment. In case of mild symptoms, the chatbot may connect the user virtually to an available medical professional.

However, if the symptoms necessitate a physical consultation, or if the patient requests for one, the chatbot can quickly draw up information from a database of hospitals and book the next available slot for the appointment.

3. Providing the right information

The need to deliver the right information and fight the spread of fake news has never been more critical. To reduce the panic around the pandemic, it is imperative that people have access to the most authentic information.

Chatbots can be designed to answer frequently asked queries around the pandemic and be constantly updated with the latest information from authentic healthcare sources. Moreover healthcare chatbots can provide users with diverse and personalized sources related to mental health, monitoring health and wellness, and self care.

So, the next time someone wants answers to “Can the coronavirus spread through air?”, “What are the common symptoms of COVID-19?”, “How to boost my immune system?”, they should look no further than a simple chatbot that is designed to disseminate the facts on all such queries.

This not only reduces panic among patients but also reduces the burden on healthcare staff and drives patient engagement.

Hospital systems can also deploy chatbots to provide general information about their operations and services e.g medical tests timings, working hours of doctors, availability of medical equipment etc.

A Quick Glance at the Existing COVID-19 Healthcare Chatbots

Providence St. Joseph Health is a Catholic healthcare system based in a Seattle suburb and serves patients in six western states in the U.S. The organization created a new version of its existing chatbot Grace, using Microsoft Healthbot and Azure services, to answer questions and guide the users to the next steps upon analysing whether they are at a risk of having a coronavirus infection.
Users can get information without calling physicians or showing up at the ER office. If the patients need further care, they are sent to Providence Express Care Virtual Visits or other clinically appropriate follow-up.
As per the stats in March 2020, more than 150,000 messages per day were exchanged between the bot and the patient. The bot engagement rate on the COVID-19 advisory page (i.e. percentage of people who land on the advisory page and click on the bot) was on average over 20%.
The Montefiore Health System located in New York, the biggest hotspot for coronavirus, experienced a large volume of calls coming into the doctors’ offices, a rapid surge in demand for services, and anxious patients flooding the ER.
To address this issue, Montefiore developed and deployed a COVID-19 symptoms screening tool and chat solution on its website to provide COVID-19 information and pre-screen services to the users. Additionally, the chatbot can direct users to important website pages such as the FAQ page and the patient portal application. During the first week of deployment itself, the organization witnessed hundreds of daily conversations with the chatbot.

We, at Acuvate Software, are proactively helping healthcare organizations tide over the challenges created by the pandemic, through our intuitive, no-code bot-builder platform called BotCore.

BotCore presents several advantages –

the intuitive, no-code interface allows quick development and implementation of chatbot technology;
it can seamlessly integrate with existing legacy systems and AI services;
it is versatile, as it can be deployed on both on-site and cloud environments;
Chatbots can be trained to simulate highly complex conversations.

To conclude…

The COVID-19 pandemic has presented a sea of challenges for the healthcare sector.

The pressure on the healthcare staff is mounting, as they scramble to meet the growing healthcare needs with insufficient resources. As telehealth and self care procedures become more common, for many healthcare systems, chatbots are becoming the core of their digital transformation journeys. Deploying chatbots during this crisis is key to drive patient engagement, streamline customer support operations, reduce panic, deliver services efficiently and reduce the overall burden on healthcare systems.

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

Further Insights:

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

Manage High Call Volume During COVID-19 Using AI & Call Deflection

Rakesh Reddy — Mon, 25 May 2020 05:45:00 +0000

Manage High Call Volume During COVID-19 Using Call Deflection & AI

The COVID-19 pandemic, and the unique challenges it has posed, has engulfed customers in a wave of fear and uncertainty and put organizations in a jiffy.

There has been a sharp spike in the volume of calls as anxious customers seek support on a variety of issues.

A majority of customers consider call support as a flexible channel of communication as it allows them to verbally explain and negotiate with the agents. Moreover, customers prefer calling for urgent matters, including cancelled flights and refunds, health insurance coverage, timings of convenience stories, appointments for COVID-19 tests, loan approvals, and much more.

Particularly, contact centers in industries like banking, airlines, retail, and healthcare have been experiencing a nightmare with the unprecedented surge in call volumes.

Organizations are facing a myriad of challenges, such as -

Contact centers are ill-equipped to deal with the huge increase in the volume of incoming customer calls and chats, which has burdened their systems, their agents, and their ability to respond and deflect calls from the queues.
The Washington State Department of Health’s coronavirus hotline experienced an average wait-time of 10 minutes with calls dropping 20 minutes after the customers were put on-hold;

Due to the inherent tendency to use call support in times of crises, customers are abandoning self-service channels and instead directly calling and requesting agent support.
A lot of questions and requests are repetitive and basic
Voice-based channels are not only expensive but also difficult to scale
There has been a shortage of staff as support agents fall sick and are unable to continue work.
Many US airlines have requested their customers who do not have flights within the next 72 hours to wait until closer to their trip before calling up the contact center;
Adding more agents is not only expensive; but also not feasible at a short notice.

Reducing Call Volume With Call Deflection and AI-Enabled Virtual Assistance

To deal with the above issues and reduce contact center call volume, organizations can use a call deflection approach driven by AI chatbots. Call deflection involves diverting incoming customer calls to alternate means of answering questions like self-service and digital channels e.g. chatbots.

AI Chatbots can handle an unlimited number of requests at the same time, provide instant support, and decrease costs for the organization as lesser employees are needed to handle customer queries. Moreover, they can answer routine customer questions 24×7, without the need for human support.

A combination of call-deflection and AI-enabled virtual assistance can improve the productivity of contact center agents, while simultaneously managing the surge in the volume of calls.

Irrespective of whether your IVR is based on legacy technology or deployed on the cloud, it is possible to shift the incoming call traffic to a text-based channel.

When the customer is ready to engage via text, the virtual assistant can converse with the client using natural language processing to handle simple requests, such as leading the customers to the required information. Or it can enable them to self-transact. Or it can be an extensive bot that offers complex capabilities, like drawing up the required background information to provide personalized solutions to customer queries.

The purpose of deflecting incoming calls is that a bot can handle customer requests that are basic and repetitive, and thereby it eliminates the need for agent involvement. The request will be transferred to an agent only when a customer specifically requests the transfer or the bot determines the conversation is too complex for it to handle.

Learn More:

The 2 Types of Call Deflection

Proactive and reactive call deflection are the two ways of diverting calls to text-based channels –

Proactive call deflection

Proactive call deflection is an approach in which measures are taken to prevent customers from calling to the contact centres in the first place and instead drive them to proactively use self-service digital channels. This involves:

Setting expectations and keeping customers informed about service hours, availability of certain services and the possible alternatives.
Driving awareness about self-service messaging channels and creating opportunities for customers to adopt them.

Proactive deflection, when supplemented with automation, allows customers to engage in a two-way interaction with a chatbot to resolve issues without waiting for agents. Thus, customers can operate in a self-serve mode for routine queries, and be directed to human agents only for more complex ones.

Reactive call deflection

A reactive approach to call deflection starts once customers call the contact center. On calling the contact center, the customers should be allowed to select the channel of their choice.

Customers may then opt to resolve their issue in a self-serve mode, with the help of AI-enabled chatbots enabled in messaging channels like SMS, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp etc.

An alternate way of doing this is using Conversation IVR systems which leverage Natural Language Processing to interact with customers via voice and resolve their queries.

Steps involved in Reactive Call Deflection Supported by AI chatbots

Deflection – Customers call the contact center. When faced with long queues, they opt to divert their queries to a virtual assistant channel. Once the call ends, customers get a link to open a virtual agent and continue their conversation.
Automation – The customer opens the chatbot on his/her device. The virtual assistant can answer FAQs or carry out simple tasks. If faced with a more complex query, the bot captures customer information and/or schedules call-backs before forwarding the request to a human agent or offline processing.
Integration – The virtual agent should integrate with any existing live chat platform to allow escalation to a human agent, when the VA can’t handle the request.

Benefits of Call Deflection supported by AI

A study by Gartner indicates that, “As much as 40% of today’s live volume could be resolved in self-service channels.” Here are some benefits of using call deflection supported by AI.

Improved agent productivity
A self-service fix costs 80-100 times less than a live interaction
Chatbots can provide instant assistance to customers even beyond the working hours
They can handle unlimited requests at the same time
A chatbot can work in close tandem with live agents to handle complex queries;
Call deflection and AI reduce the incoming call traffic, leading to shorter wait-times. This avoids customer frustration;
Improved CSAT and customer experience at lowered costs

Get Started

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused an unprecedented increase in the number of customer calls to contact centers. To ease the burden off support agents, organizations can implement a combination of call deflection (proactive or reactive) and AI-enabled chatbots.

Such automation enables customers to self-serve and provides them with a 24X7 interactive experience at significantly lower costs. It also allows the support staff to focus on the complex queries, leaving the chatbots to handle routine asks.

We, at Acuvate Software, are helping clients deliver superior customer experiences through our intuitive, no-code bot-builder platform called BotCore.

BotCore presents several benefits –

The intuitive, no-code interface allows the quick implementation of AI chatbots
It can seamlessly integrate with existing legacy systems and AI services
It also allows the connection of existing bots across different departments
It is deployable on both on-site and cloud environments
Chatbots can be designed to simulate highly complex conversations

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

The post Manage High Call Volume During COVID-19 Using AI & Call Deflection appeared first on BotCore.

Building A Resilient Customer Service During Uncertain Times

Rakesh Reddy — Wed, 20 May 2020 14:09:00 +0000

Building A Resilient Customer Service During Uncertain Times

The onset of the Covid-19 pandemic has posed some unprecedented challenges to both public and private organizations. Measures implemented to control the spread of the virus and the impact caused by them have created confusion, uncertainty, and fear amongst consumers.

The immediate need for clarity among customers on a variety of issues, from loan payments to booking flights, from cancellations to insurance claims and mortgage payments, has led to a huge spike in the number of calls received by the contact centers. A majority of customers prefer call support as their initial channel of communication since it allows for greater flexibility and provides a human touch.

Customers want an opportunity to explain, reason or negotiate with contact center agents. Also, they generally prefer to solve urgent issues by calling for support rather than use other channels.

Many organizations across industries are ill-equipped to deal with such a massive increase in call volumes, leading to longer wait-times as the support staff serves other customers.

Adding to the turmoil is the need to comply with social distancing norms that have forced the support staff to shift to a work-from-home setup. Moreover, there is a shortage of service staff as workers fall sick and are unable to report to work.

The pandemic has brought to the forefront the pressing need for businesses to be empathetic towards the needs of their customers while also implementing significant changes in their operational setups.

In times of crisis, a business’s ability to provide quick and compassionate service will enhance its brand value and go a long way in building a loyal customer base.

The obvious question, which then arises is, “How can an organization respond to these challenges?” Let’s find out.

The To-Do List: Addressing Key Challenges

Before delving into the potential solutions, it is imperative to understand the key areas of concern that require swift action by the organizations. These include –

Enhancing the quality of service by reducing customer wait-times
Leveraging automation to control the average wait-time
Adopting digital and self-service channels to address repetitive issues
Ensuring the availability of consistent and accurate information to customers
Ensuring scalability to meet the increased demand for customer support
Facilitating personalized customer experiences 24×7

Building A Resilient Customer Service

To navigate through the crisis, organizations must modernize their existing IT infrastructure. As a part of this modernization process, our customers and several large enterprises are adopting a myriad of advanced technologies. But the most popular of them are conversational AI and data analytics.

The combination of these technologies is enabling companies to effectively manage the growing demand for customer support, while reducing the burden on the support staff.

While analytics provide insights on the changing customer behaviour, emerging customer issues and common roadblocks in customer service operations, conversational AI can be used to deliver the first line of service and improve agent productivity.

1. Use Data Analytics To Enable A Forward-Thinking Approach

Utilizing data to the fullest has never been more important. In the midst of this volatility, contact centers must utilize data to

Predict customer demand
Predict workforce supply

This can be done in the following manner –

Predict Customer Demand: Forecasting models used prior to the pandemic are no longer viable to use. To predict the volume of calls in the new normal, data related a region’s economic activity and population health must be analyzed. Additionally, companies must also analyze the data pertaining to customer demographics, impact due to company actions, the volume of COVID-19 related calls in other virus-affected areas, PHI data, social media sentiment data, data derived from agents, etc. By analyzing this data with predictive and prescriptive analytics, companies can be better prepared to manage the influx of call volumes.
Predict Workforce Supply: A similar approach can be taken to predict any deviations in the planned workflow supply. Factors like workflow demographics, the spread of the virus in areas where members of the staff reside, etc. must be considered to predict the availability of contact center staff.

In addition to these two approaches, analytics can also be used to identify and deflect non-critical calls, requests and contacts to virtual agents or other self-service channels.

2. Use Conversational AI To Deliver Service At Scale

Conversational AI is an advanced technology that enables computers to process, understand and respond to text or voice inputs in natural language. Conversational AI platforms can be used to build conversational user interfaces, chatbots and virtual assistants which can be integrated with messaging platforms, social media platforms, SMS, and website chat.

Conversational AI technologies like chatbots and conversational IVR are designed to understand and provide answers to customer queries with minimal agent intervention. They can act as first line of support and improve the productivity of human support staff in the following ways –

Using data analysis, organizations can identify the primary reasons customers are reaching out to the support staff and can employ a dedicated chatbot on the website or mobile app to answer the repeat queries. This will allow the service agents to focus on the more critical and complex customer needs;
Conversational IVR systems which are enabled by Natural Language Processing (NLP) can handle the sudden surge in calls and reduce panic among the customers;
Chatbots can also monitor conversations and inform organizations about the frequently asked customer queries;
Bots can draw up the relevant knowledge and background information from CRM systems to assist contact center agents in servicing customers quickly. This will improve first call resolution rates
They can transfer calls or conversations to the right agents in case of more complex queries that require human attention

Learn More: Human Handoff In Service Desk Bots

To realize the potential of chatbots completely amid this crisis, organizations must be mindful of a few things –

Time is of the essence when implementing conversational AI solutions. It is prudent for the organizations to quickly set-up and adopt the technology to keep up with the rapidly evolving needs of the customers. Hence, there is a need for low-code bot-builder platforms like Acuvate’s BotCore or Microsoft’s Power Virtual Agents for quick deployment of virtual agents.
While designing chatbots, it is crucial to be sensitive to the customers’ emotions and feelings. For this it is necessary to use empathetic language and be proactive in answering the customers’ queries.Using sentiment analysis in chatbots can enable them to understand human emotions.
Offering personalized solutions is the key to gaining the customer’s faith. The chatbot must integrate with third-party databases to draw up relevant background knowledge. This helps in providing personalized solutions that are specific to the needs of the customer. This reassures the customer that he is understood and valued by the organization;
Consistency of information is the key to superior customer service. The information provided by chatbots must align with the information given by call center agents to avoid any confusion or misunderstanding.
The chatbot must stay up-to-date on the needs of the customers. Drawing up the old chatbot conversation data helps the organizations in understanding the frequently asked topics. They can then stay relevant by designing new chatbot conversations and workflows to address these issues.

Learn More:

There are several real-life scenarios where companies have adopted chatbots amid COVID-19 to keep up with the growing customer needs –

Bank of America introduced its chatbot ‘Erica’ inside its mobile banking app. From providing balance information, tracking spending trends to suggesting ways to save money to providing personalized recommendations, Erica has been helping customers address their banking problems. Erica added 1 million users a month from March through May 2020.

Since March, it has assisted 350,000 clients who had trouble meeting their credit card, auto loan and other payment obligations, thereby reducing the call volume to the bank’s contact centres.

Reliance General Insurance – A large insurance company based in India, Reliance General Insurance deployed an NLP based chatbot called RIVA, which is available on the company website, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. RIVA can generate a policy quotation, accept claim intimation, and provide a soft copy of the claim and policy in less than a minute.

The bot has handled more than 20,000 transactions handled monthly and 70% of chats handled have an average handling time of less than 2 minutes. The bot reduced the company’s operational cost by 60%.

FREE EBOOK

a guide to choosing an enterprise bot builder platform

We, at Acuvate Software, are helping clients to streamline their customer service operations and reduce costs through our chatbot-builder platform called BotCore.

BotCore presents several benefits – (i) it is an intuitive, no-code platform to easily build AI-powered bots, (ii) it is versatile and can seamlessly integrate with existing legacy systems and AI services, (iii) it allows the connection of existing bots across different departments to create a strong digital network, (iv) it is deployable on both on-site and cloud environments, (v) it facilitates the creation of chatbots that can simulate highly complex conversations.

Get Started

The pandemic has accelerated digital transformation initiatives in different functions of an organization and customer service is no different. To build a resilient customer service and infuse agility in day-to-day operations, organizations must continually evolve and adapt to the changing times. They must revamp their existing IT infrastructures to manage the pandemic-driven needs of the customers.

This response to the crisis is likely to transform the future of customer service forever. Adopting conversational AI and data analytics is a good starting point for organizations looking to transform their operations.

Since it is hard to predict the end of the crisis, organizations must plan both for short-term continuity as well as enabling long-term operational changes.

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

The post Building A Resilient Customer Service During Uncertain Times appeared first on BotCore.