intelligent chatbots Archives - BotCore

How Chatbots Can Boost The Customer Retention Rate

Abhishek Shanbhag — Tue, 27 Oct 2020 10:19:00 +0000

How Chatbots Can Boost The Customer Retention Rate

As the world worked together to curb the COVID-19 pandemic, 2020 became the year when businesses were concerned with retaining customer loyalty, even if it meant taking a temporary hit to the bottom line. By putting customer-oriented policies in place, including flexible refunds, pricing, and change policies, and providing 24X7 service, organizations helped customers sail through the crisis.

As uncertainty loomed, contact centers became a significant touchpoint for anxious customers seeking answers, information, comfort, and support. AI-enabled customer service chatbots gained widespread adoption. Businesses leveraged chatbots to reduce wait-times and provide consistent support and quick information at scale and lower costs.

However, in 2021, as recovery and bottom line become extremely critical, businesses will now focus on leveraging chatbots to build customer loyalty, drive retention, and improve revenues.

Capabilities like omnichannel engagement, conversational IVR and sentiment analysis will become essential in delivering exceptional customer experiences and retaining brand loyalty.

In fact, a study by Harvard Business Review has concluded
increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%.

So, let’s explore how chatbots can boost customer retention rate in 2021.

Beyond Customer Service and Support: Developing a winning customer retention strategy with chatbots

While cost reduction and automation of inbound customer service requests are the main goals of deploying chatbots, a shift in focus to other use cases, including a decrease in customer churn and increased conversion rates, has gained traction.

1. Omnichannel customer engagement

Businesses today are leveraging multiple channels to reach out to their customers. In line with the increased usage of messaging apps and social media platforms, chatbots can now integrate with channels, like Facebook, WhatsApp, email, websites, mobile apps, voice assistants like Alexa, and Cortana etc., to assist customers in locating products and finding answers to their queries.

Omnichannel bots help businesses reach where their customers are. Using technologies such as machine learning, natural language processing (NLP), and natural language understanding (NLU), omnichannel bots understand and retain context and provide holistic, consistent, and meaningful support to customers across a host of channels.

Such wholesome customer experiences help reduce churn and boost retention.

2. Personalized engagement and recommendations

Chatbots collect data during their interactions with customers and analyze such information to craft buyer personas and identify customers who are on the verge of ending their relationship with your business.

Such data is critical in understanding needs, retaining customers, and increasing revenue.

For customers who are on the risk of leaving, chatbots can push special offers via different channels to re-engage them back with the brand
Chatbots can also be used to recommend other products to your existing customers, based on their interests and past purchasing behaviours, to increase retention and enhance revenue. For example, Consider Ponds’ (a Unilever brand) AI Skin Advisor chatbot, on Shopee, an e-commerce platform in Southeast Asia.

Based on the customer’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 and retention.

Chatbots can be trained to ask customers for referrals and reward most loyal customers with discounts and coupons

3. Making purchases easier

By using chatbots, businesses can provide the purchasing facility directly from the chat interface. Your bots can recommend products, lead customers to your online store, and make payments easier.

When there is simplicity in carrying out purchases, your existing customers will keep coming back to your business, and you may also convert potential leads.

Chatbots make the buying process more seamless and engaging by educating customers on product features, comparisons, how-to videos etc.

4. Going local with multilingual bots

Customers prefer to interact with chatbots in their native tongue. Moreover, they trust brands that offer support in their native language more than the ones that don’t.

By deploying a multilingual chatbot which can interact with users in their preferred language, you can accelerate your localization efforts by understanding regional nuances and cultural subtleties, make your customers feel valued and understood, and allow issues to be resolved in the shortest time interval. Therefore, multilingual bots play a significant role in acquiring and retaining customers.

5. Asking customers for feedback

Every time a customer completes an online interaction, the chatbot can ask for short feedback, like, “Are you happy with our services?” or “What are the areas we should work on?” with multiple options for each question.

If customers don’t feel satisfied, the bot can ask them the reason. Data collected from such feedback can help improve customer service and go a long way in increasing customer retention.

6. Respond to customer queries 24x7

One of the most basic ways for businesses to increase customer retention is to swiftly respond to customer queries. A chatbot can provide quick and accurate answers to customer queries in real-time, within seconds of being contacted.

According to a report by Hubspot, 90% of customers cite instant response as a critical factor when it comes to customer service.

With chatbots, your organization is assured of round-the-clock customer service, thus supporting customers at their convenience, even outside business hours.

Get Started

According to research, the probability of selling to an existing customer is 3x to 35x higher.

By providing the following benefits, chatbots help boost your customer retention rate –

Giving quick and relevant answers to customer queries
Enhancing customer reach through omnichannel engagement
Improving CSAT levels with highly interactive and personalized conversations
Boosting the ability to recapture lost customers with customized messages and tailored offers
Providing personalized diagnosis and recommendations
Delivering localized experiences with multilingual capabilities
Collecting customer feedback to ensure better support in the future

At Acuvate, we help clients build and deploy AI-enabled chatbots with our enterprise chatbot building platform, BotCore.

BotCore’s core capabilities include –

Minimum coding requirements, graphical nodes, visual templates, and pre-built connectors empower you to quickly build and deploy chatbots across different channels with a single configuration.
BotCore’s chatbots support multiple languages, like French, German, Italian, etc., so you can reach and engage a broader consumer base.
Through automatic handling of API requirements, BotCore’s chatbots can easily connect to various channels, such as Facebook, SMS, email, WhatsApp, etc.
BotCore’s machine learning (ML) capabilities allow chatbots to learn from past interactions and retain context to provide more interactive and meaningful engagements.

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

The post How Chatbots Can Boost The Customer Retention Rate appeared first on BotCore.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How IT Helpdesk Chatbots Can Help?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Benefits Of A IT helpdesk Bot

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

Learn More: How AI Bots Can Revolutionize Enterprise Helpdesk?

Key Capabilities To Look For In A IT helpdesk Bot

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

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

Learn More: Chatbots Human Handoff

Get Started With A IT Helpdesk Chatbot

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s look into this in detail.

Functions Where Chatbots Are Making A Difference

1. Crisis Management

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

In regards to crisis management, chatbots can help in

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

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

2. Human Resources (HR)

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

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

Learn More: HR Bots, Chatbots for Employees,

3. IT Services Management (ITSM)

In the past few weeks, we have seen IT help desks in several companies struggling to manage the sudden unprecedented surge in incidents, issues and requests. Needless to say this is largely due to the sudden shift to remote working.

A huge volume of these requests are usually ‘basic’ or ‘simple’ questions that take a lot of time to answer. A chatbot is a powerful solution to address repetitive and low-value requests. They’re available 24*7 and can handle multiple requests simultaneously. If the chatbot is unable to handle a particular query, it can always hand over the conversation to a human agent.

This will allow your IT staff to focus on productive and proactive tasks.

Learn More: IT Helpdesk Bot

How Different Industries Are Leveraging Chatbots Amid COVID-19

1. Government

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

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

2. Healthcare

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

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

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

3. Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG)

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

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

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

Learn More: CPG bots, Chatbots for CPG

4. Retail

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

Learn More: Retail Bots, Chatbots for Retail industry,

5. Restaurants

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

How To Make A Chatbot Intelligent?

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

How To Make A Chatbot Intelligent?

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

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

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

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

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

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

what makes a chatbot intelligent?

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

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

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

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

four essentials features that can make a chatbot intelligent

# Contextual Understanding

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

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

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

# Perpetual Learning

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

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

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

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

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

# Seamless Agent Handover

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

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

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

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

# Voice Technology

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

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

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

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

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

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

conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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