Chatbot Implementation Archives - 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 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.

12 Experts Share The Biggest Chatbot Trends For 2020!

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

12 Experts Share The Biggest Chatbot Trends For 2020!

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

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

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

Here’s what they said…

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

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

– Larry Kim,
CEO, MobileMonkey.
LinkedIn | Twitter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

– Rakesh Reddy,
CEO, Acuvate Software.
LinkedIn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

– Ilker Koksal,
CEO, Botanalytics.
Twitter | LinkedIn

How Acuvate Helps Enterprises Deploy AI Chatbots

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

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

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

FREE EBOOK

a guide to choosing an enterprise bot builder platform

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

7 Tools To Build Chatbots Without Coding

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

7 Tools To Build Chatbots Without Coding

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

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

The 7 Popular Tools To Build No-Code Chatbots

1. Power Virtual Agents

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

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

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

2. BotCore

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

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

Learn More About BotCore’s features

3. Chatfuel

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

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

Some of the key features of Chatfuel include:

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

4. FlowXO

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

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

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

5. Botsify

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

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

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

6. BotKit

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

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

7. TARS

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

How To Convince Your Leadership To Deploy Enterprise Chatbots

Abhishek Shanbhag — Mon, 18 Mar 2019 10:47:08 +0000

How To Convince Your Leadership To Deploy Enterprise Chatbots

From customer support, business intelligence, service management, lead generation to information retrieval, chatbots have gained widespread adoption across functions. The reason why organizations are actively embracing bot technology is that chatbots not only have several high value business use cases but also are easy to deploy with minimum risks.

If you believe that your organization can greatly benefit from investing in chatbots but your top management is still on the fence about it, we are here to help. Here are some ways you can strengthen your business case and persuade your leadership/executive sponsors to deploy enterprise chatbots.

1. Demonstrate ROI with Hard Data

Data and facts help you sharpen your pitch and make decision-making simpler for your stakeholders. Show the ROI of chatbots by collating data and research both internally and externally for the chatbot use case you’re considering.

Let’s say you’re planning to deploy customer service chatbots, your internal data could be:

Our customer service agents spend more than XX hours on answering basic questions
Our CSAT score is below 6
Our customer service costs have increased by 30% compared to the last year
Our annual sales have gone down by 20% due to poor service experience

In the same way, you can collate similar data from external sources like analyst and research firms, vendors etc. For the example stated above, the external data could be along the lines of:

According to this Forbes report, 62% of US consumers like chatbots as a means to engage with companies. The adoption rates are even higher (more than 70%) in countries like the UK, Australia and France.
Gartner Says 25 percent of customer service operations will use virtual customer assistants by 2020
Chatbots can save up to 30% in customer support services – BI Intelligence
Spark New Zealand has reduced its customer service costs by 25 percent through the use of human online chat and chatbots

You can also ask vendors for a pre-defined ROI/business value calculator to make this process easier and showcase the exact ROI stakeholders can expect.

2. Show What The Media and Industry Experts Are Saying

Media plays a huge part in influencing our choices and buying decisions. You can share how the sentiments of media, market analysts and industry watchers about AI bots are in sync with the consumers trends. Here are some quotes and statistics you can include in your next PowerPoint Presentation with your bosses:

PwC affirmed, “Chatbots are disrupting various forms of customer engagement as they effectively meet customer needs for enhanced user experience through AI.”
Gartner anticipates that by 2022, modern workplaces would look a lot different than today and interacting with conversational platforms will soon be the norm. Analysts at the global research and advisory firm also believe that bots and virtual customer assistants will gain importance in the future.
Gartner predicts that by 2021, over 50% of enterprises will increase their yearly spends on bots and chatbot creation.
80% of businesses would deploy chatbots by 2020 after witnessing the benefits of conversational AI bots, according to Business Insider.
“Sixty-eight percent of service leaders indicate that bots and VCAs will be more important in the next two years. Service centers should seriously be considering how this technology could be integrated into current operations, in both customer-facing and rep-facing systems,” stated Lauren Villeneuve, senior principal, advisory at Gartner.

3. Present Case Studies

Build credibility for your suggestions and advice with case studies of companies that have successfully deployed chatbots. Look for examples within your industry and share relevant use cases with your leadership. Network with peers at events and find companies with comparable size and which share your operational model, IT infrastructure, and target market.

Present the information graphically alongside a narrative that depicts the ease of implementation and the newfound business outcomes after the implementation.

We have observed that the best way to convince top management about investing in a new technology is by sharing real life stories, experiences and laying out quantifiable business benefits.

If you need help in collating success stories relevant to your industry and company, please feel free to get in touch with us. We have helped organizations of all sizes and across industries in successfully deploying enterprise chatbot solutions. We’d love to share our success stories with you.

4. Demo The Technology

While words are effective, hands-on experience of a new technology is even more powerful. We suggest getting in touch with a reputable vendor to arrange a quick demo to explain how chatbots could help your business to your boss. Ensure that the vendor is able to address all the pain-points, short-term objectives, long-term goals and possible objections/concerns of your stakeholders.

The right vendor should not only be able to demonstrate how their bot solution could help in solving your business problems but also explain the quantifiable benefits.

5. Suggest A Pilot Project

Even if your leadership is intrigued by the statistics and demo, we understand that investing in a full fledged enterprise project could be an expensive proposition. Not everyone would be enthusiastic to deploy a new technology at a large scale. Counter this sentiment by suggesting the team to start with a pilot project.

A pilot program will help to break down the big goal of deploying enterprise chatbots into measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound steps. The decision-makers will be able to see how it works, what problems it can solve and how effectively it can solve before making a company-wide launch. Launching a finite project with low risk is a feasible strategy to test a prevalent but abstract idea and convince your leadership about the chatbot’s power.

6. Explain The Long-term Impact of Investing in A Promising AI Technology

Investing in AI is no longer just an option for organizations – it’s a business imperative. Unlike any other traditional technologies, AI-powered technologies have the ability to “think”, become intelligent with time and maximize ROI and business outcomes constantly.

And several senior executives are fast realizing this fact. According to Gartner, the percentage of enterprises employing AI grew 270 percent over the past four years.

Chatbots are one of the most prominent and widely adopted AI technologies among enterprises. Use this fact and explain how deploying a promising technology like chatbot aligns with the organization’s greater goal of adopting AI to accelerate digital transformation.

These are the six effective ways to convince your higher-ups about AI-powered bots. We understand that spearheading a company-wide change in an organization is challenging and complex. But it is also a very rewarding experience.

If you’re looking to deploy enterprise chatbots for your business or want to get your questions answered or need assistance in convincing your leadership, please do reach out to us. Our team of experts would be happy to offer a personalized consultation.

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The post How To Convince Your Leadership To Deploy Enterprise Chatbots appeared first on BotCore.

Understanding The Role Of Sentiment Analysis In Chatbots

Abhishek Shanbhag — Fri, 01 Mar 2019 10:00:00 +0000

Understanding The Role Of Sentiment Analysis In Chatbots

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s deep dive!

understanding sentiment analysis

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

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

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

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

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

It first identifies sentiment types and gauges if the emotions displayed in the conversation are positive, negative, neutral or objective. The technology detects emotions like anger, happiness, disgust, fear, sadness, curiosity, positivity and other range of emotions.
NLP and AI work in tandem to measures the intensity of the emotions and assign a numerical score to each of the core emotions.
After detection and classification, sentiment analysis presents the final output that enables chatbot to steer the conversation in the right direction. For example, for a text with a high positive score (joy + happiness), the digital assistant can use that as an opportunity for product recommendation or sales conversion. And in the case of a high negative score (sad + anger), the chatbot can escalate the complaint and transfer the call to a live support agent.

how can it be beneficial for your business?

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

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

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

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

Learn how customers feel about your brand

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

Seamless agent handover

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

Learn more: Human Hand-off in Service Desk Bots

Memorable customer experiences

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

Keep track of performance

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

Upselling and new user on-boarding

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

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

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

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5 Top Contact Center Automation Trends to Watch For: RPA, Chatbots, and More!

Abhishek Shanbhag — Fri, 26 Oct 2018 11:49:00 +0000

5 Top Contact Center Automation Trends To Watch For: RPA, Chatbots, And More!

the importance of automation in customer contact centers

Customer service as an industry has boomed over the past decade and a half and is valued at $350 billion. Knowing the impact of good customer service on the company’s revenue and positioning in the market, organizations are going to great lengths to establish the most efficient and effective customer contact centers. While traditionally, contact centers were a human-driven function, the advent of automated technology has made them much more adept at ensuring process efficiency and customer satisfaction (CSAT).

the coexistence of human skill and automation

While automation has the ability to make centers function more efficiently and deliver better customer experiences at lower costs, it cannot completely replace the need for the human workforce. While most contact center agents may look at automation as their competition, it is not the case. Organizations must look at harnessing automation technology to eliminate manual and mundane tasks and provide a more efficient and personalized experience to their customers. Essentially, organizations must look at fostering a coexistence model with automation enhancing existing human-driven processes – a blended AI approach.

AI & Automation technologies augment agent capabilities but won’t eliminate the need for

human agents entirely.

One way contact centers can get started with implementing automation technologies is taking a bite-sized approach. Capture those business processes and workflows which are

Right for automation and can be easily automated
Most time-consuming for agents
Risk-free

Perhaps an AI chatbot can collect the basic information of customers such as name, ID etc. before transferring the conversation to live agents and enabling them to focus only on solving the actual problem.

understanding customer expectations

While it is quite easy to get swept away with the technology wave, it is important to remember that as far as the customer is concerned, it is the overall experience that counts. From a customer perspective, all that really matters is that their queries and concerns are effectively and quickly addressed, whether by an automated entity or a live agent.

An effective contact center must be designed with an intelligent blend of humans, technology, and processes and keeping superior customer experience as the ultimate goal

In order to meet the growing needs and expectations of customers, a modern contact center must focus on the following key elements

Personalization of customer experience
Quick responses to customer queries
Enhancement of self-service tools to handle complex and more meaningful issues – not just the simple ones
Omnichannel communication: Availability on multiple communication channels like email, voice, text, chat, etc.
Technologically advanced processes and AI-driven workflows
Scalable infrastructure

the five automation trends to watch out for

When it comes to automation technology, ‘ever-evolving’ is probably the best way to describe it. And with regards to contact center automation, the top 5 trends that organizations must look out for, include:

1. Chatbots

According to Gartner, 25 percent of customer service and support operations will integrate bot technology across their engagement channels by 2020 up from less than two percent in 2017. For most companies with a focus on automating a part of their customer service process, it is only natural that chatbots have become a natural addition to their customer contact centers. Chatbots today are enabled by conversational AI, NLP, and machine learning, making them sophisticated enough to understand the ‘intent’ behind user queries and successfully simulate human-like conversation. Chatbots can, therefore, be used to handle simple and to an extent, complex tasks such as providing information, answering FAQ, sending instant acknowledgments, collecting user information, etc.

Chatbots act as the first line of support and provide self-service options to customers. Another benefit of using chatbots is that they can be used to handle customer care 24/7. Unlike humans, time as a parameter is not applicable to chatbots. Whether you have implemented a chatbot for 9 hours in a day or 24, it costs the same. Hence using chatbots to handle after-hour queries, is practical and cost-effective. CNBC has also reported that chatbots are expected to cut down business costs by as much as $8 billion by the year 2022.

Some key business benefits of deploying chatbots in contact centers include reduced customer service costs, improved CSAT, increased agent productivity, streamlined workflows, a decrease in the number of customer emails and calls, etc.

Chatbot Agent Handoff

Although chatbots are great at handling customer interactions by simulating human-like conversations, there may be scenarios where the conversation needs to be handed off to a human agent. The chatbot must be able to identify when it needs to hand off to a human and ensure that the transition is a seamless one for the user. Chatbots can fulfill basic, preliminary tasks such as aggregating user information, and recording customer concerns. Then the chatbot can transfer the conversation to a human agent who will only work on solving the issue based on the information collected by the chatbot.

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.

CRM Chatbots

Chatbots, when integrated with CRM systems, can also help agents quickly retrieve customer data without the hassle of navigating through windows and dashboards within the CRM system. They can have natural language conversations with the chatbot and get the pin-pointed information about the customer. This enables agents to provide quick responses to customer queries and solve problems swiftly. Chatbots also help drive the adoption of CRM systems.

2. Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

RPA helps deliver superior customer experience while also simplifying workflows handled by the human workforce. With RPA you can:

Reduce manual processes which are error-prone
Automate routine, high-volume and repetitive tasks

Rudimentary contact center tasks such as updating contact information, listening to routine voicemail messages, sending acknowledgment emails, etc. can easily be automated saving human agents a great amount of time. RPA reduces operational costs while upping efficiency and productivity.

RPA Bots

Front-office bots like chatbots can integrate with various enterprise systems like CRM, helpdesk etc. only if a modern API is available. An RPA bot can interface with multiple enterprise systems within the company that may have UIs but not APIs. RPA bots make data across several legacy systems easily accessible for the agents, cutting down on unproductive time and helping contact centers maximize overall productivity and CSAT.

3. Visual IVR

Interactive Voice Control (IVR), a telephonic menu system that helps route customer calls to the appropriate agent, has been around for quite some time. While the traditional methods used relate to speech-recognition or touch-tone technology, the latest upgrade taps into visual menus. In visual IVR, customers can quickly tap through touch-screen menus that will eventually take them to the desired answer or connect them with the right agent. Customers no more have to stay online listening to auto-recorded menu options being played out. Visual IVR saves time while providing customers with an efficient self-service experience.

4. Desktop Automation

Contact center agents tend to be under immense pressure to handle their time more efficiently. Hence, any automation effort that can simplify their daily tasks is welcome. One such automation trend to watch out for is desktop automation. Desktop Automation uses cognitive intelligence to efficiently navigate through the desktop environment. This helps agents cut down on time spent performing repetitive actions such as copy-paste of data and data input. This helps agents quickly respond to customer queries in real-time. Automated desktop processes are triggered by an event, such as a button click, hoover, etc. that is automated to result in corresponding action.

5. Big Data Analytics

Companies today want their customer interactions to be more personalized and astute. One way to achieve this is by getting to know the customer and their requirements well in advance, so as to deliver a personalized experience during each customer interaction. This is where Big Data Analytics has been a boon, helping companies glean insights into customer behavior, their expectations, and preferences. Additionally, predictive analytics help companies analyze market trends and customer psychology, helping them anticipate customer preferences.

So, where is the data for this analysis gained from? Often, company data stores are filled with customer data from multiple channels such as surveys, online forms, email subscriptions etc. In fact, Salesforce predicts that as many as 57 percent of modern-day customers are willing to share their personal data with companies so as to receive personalized offers and discounts. This helps companies populate their databases with humongous amounts of customer data which can be later used for powerful analysis.

If you’re interested in deploying Automation technologies for your contact centers or would like to learn more about this topic, please feel free to schedule a consultation with one of our AI and automation experts.

The post 5 Top Contact Center Automation Trends to Watch For: RPA, Chatbots, and More! appeared first on BotCore.

5 Tips To Ensure Your Chatbot Is GDPR Compliant

Abhishek Shanbhag — Wed, 19 Sep 2018 12:35:00 +0000

5 Tips To Ensure Your Chatbot Is GDPR Compliant

Chatbots are the latest emerging technologies used by organizations to improve customer service and reduce costs. Most companies today have deployed chatbots in various messaging apps, websites and portals to provide the first line of service and self-help to customers.

With the advent of GDPR, companies are required to follow the strict guidelines prescribed by it while dealing with sensitive customer data and these rules apply for the company’s chatbots as well. Unlike a traditional web form, chatbots don’t capture user information in a straightforward manner. However, users still share their data with a bot via conversations. Bottomline – ensuring your chatbot is GDPR compliant is mandatory if your customers are citizens of the European Union. This blog shares five actionable tips to ensure your chatbot is GDPR compliant.

but first, what is GDPR?

GDPR or General Data Protection Regulation came into existence in May 2018 and aims to give users and customers in the EU better control over their data. It makes organizations handling customer data more accountable, transparent and requires them to take clear consent from the customer regarding the usage of their data and privacy.

The kind of personal data protected by GDPR can be broadly categorized as:

Basic unique identification such as name, contact details, address, unique ID numbers, etc
Race or ethnicity
Health, genetic and biometric data (for unique identification)
Sexual orientation
Religious or political beliefs

There are three parties that are involved in GDPR compliance:

Data subject: whose data is processed by a data controller or processor
Data controller: who determines the purpose of collecting data
Data processor: who processes customer or personal data on behalf of the data controller

Irrespective of their industry or size, all organizations have to abide by the regulation. Failing to do so may attract fines to the extent of €20 million or 4% of annual global revenue (whichever is greater).

Now, let’s go back to how you can ensure your bot is GDPR compliant.

use user data only for the stated purposes

Users provide their personal data to chatbots for various purposes such as signing up for newsletters or email notifications, product launch updates, downloading gated content like eBook, whitepapers, etc.

Companies must inform users on why they’re asking for a specific piece of information and how they plan to use it. Also, you should make sure that the data collected is only being used for the stated purposes. For example, if you’ve told them that the chatbot will use their email IDs to send email newsletters about your company’s thought leadership content, you should use the data only for that purpose and nothing more. Leveraging user information for any purpose other than the stated one can attract a hefty penalty under GDPR.

obtain user consent

For sending personalized responses to user queries and delivering an enhanced user experience, your chatbot is required to collect and process a lot of personal data. However, in order to use this data, you need the consent of the user.

Right at the beginning of a conversation, the chatbot must provide a consent form to the user. Ensure that the language used in the form is jargon-free and easy to understand for users. People should easily understand why the data is collected and how it’ll be used.

give seamless information-accessibility to users

Transparency with respect to data collected is highly important. Users should have full control of and access to the data they provided to the chatbot.

The chatbot should give them this information anytime and through a simple response to their query. Besides, they should be able to download this data for their reference or delete any details.

Upon a user’s query, the chatbot should also be able to answer if his/her data is being used for purposes which are beyond you’ve communicated to them.

update your privacy policy

Users should be given an option to see your company’s privacy policy before the chatbot starts collecting data. GDPR advises companies to have a clearly stated privacy policy which should address the following concerns:

What data is the bot collecting and on whose behalf?
What will the data be used for and for how long?
Who will be using this data and why?
How can users withdraw their consent?

ensure secure data handling

Merely having consent isn’t all. Any data security threat or breach may prove to be a direct violation of GDPR and can be detrimental to your business.

That’s why once you have consent from the users or customers, you will need to make sure you have stringent data collection and processing measures in place so that it’s immune to unauthorized access. One great way to go about it is encryption. It will ensure that even if an unauthorized user accesses the data, he/she won’t be able to leverage it completely.

conclusion

The face of sales, marketing and customer service has transformed with the advent of GDPR and organizations will have to abide by the new rules. The points listed above are only a few key tips which will help you stay GDPR-compliant when your chatbot interacts with and collects data from your customers.

GDPR is a vast subject and if you’re planning to build a GDPR compliant chatbot, taking the help of a trusted consultant can make the process smooth.

Acuvate has helped large and medium-sized companies across industries like insurance, banking, financial services, etc. in building GDPR-compliant chatbots and follow a stringent procedure to ensure the chatbot is compliant at every step of its functioning.

For more information on this topic, feel free to reach out to our GDPR and AI experts for a free consultation.

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

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

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

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

what is a chatbot?

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

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

chatbots – making nathan’s life easier

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

Recruitment

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

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

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

Nathan: Thanks, Allie Sure!

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

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

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

Nathan: That would be perfect. Thank you!

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

Nathan: Sure.

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

Nathan was extremely pleased with how efficient Allie was in reaching out to him quickly, understanding his location criteria and setting up an interview accordingly. In a recent survey by Allegis it was noted that 58% of candidates were comfortable interacting with AI and recruitment chatbots in the early stages of the application process. In fact, about 66% of candidates were comfortable with AI and chatbots taking care of interview scheduling and peripheral activity.

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

Learn more: How Chatbots Can Simplify the Recruitment Process

HR Onboarding

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

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

Nathan: Hi Allie. Thank you very much.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Personal Identification Details – any authority attested identification card would do

Last 3 payslips from your previous employer

Bank account details

Nathan: Sure, I will send them across.

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

Nathan: Okay.

Allie: Great! Thank you Nathan..

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

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

Nathan: That’s great, Thanks Allie!

Learn More: How Chatbots are Revolutionizing The HR Department

IT Helpdesk

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

Nathan: Hi.

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

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

IT Bot: Have you been granted access?

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

IT Bot: Sorry about that. Let me check.

Nathan: Sure.

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

Nathan: Okay. Thank you.

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

Nathan: No.

IT Bot: Okay! Have a nice day Nathan.

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

business intelligence

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

Nathan: Hi Mylo.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mylo: Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Intranet/Employee Assistant

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

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

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

Nathan: Confirm.

Mia: Meeting scheduled. Calendar invite sent to Alex.

Nathan: Any other updates?

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

Nathan: Well, send it to my email instead.

Mia: Updated leave policy sent to your email.

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

Learn More: The Role of Chatbots in the Intranet

explore how chatbots can help

While these are only a few popular work-life scenarios in which chatbots can help Nathan, the fact is that several other ways bots can simplify work for him or any normal employee. The conversational interface of chatbots simplify everyday workflows for employees and eliminates the hassle of switching multiple apps. Chatbots act as a single point of contact to get tasks done and access information. The use cases of chatbots are diverse and emerging across functions and industries. Enterprise leaders should have a powerful bot strategy to make the most of this technology.

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

FREE EBOOK

exploring the use cases of an enterprise chatbot

The post Envisioning The Work-Life Of An Employee In A Chatbot-Driven Enterprise appeared first on BotCore.

10 Key Chatbot Implementation Considerations You Should Be Aware Of

Jagan Jami — Fri, 24 Aug 2018 10:40:00 +0000

10 Key Chatbot Implementation Considerations You Should Be Aware Of

According to a report featured by Business Insider, 80% of businesses want chatbots by 2020!

Chatbots today are being deployed across large, medium and small organizations to simplify business workflows and reduce customer service costs. Chatbots provide seamless self-service options to your customers and employees. They help your IT support, HR and customer service teams focus on productive activities and reduce time and effort involved in mundane tasks.

Any technology is only as good as how it’s implemented and leveraged across the organization

Implementation and deployment of enterprise chatbots are fraught with a few challenges as well. Without a robust bot strategy and being aware of some key governance, privacy and security considerations, organizations can’t make the most of their chatbot implementation. Many CIOs and IT executives who consult us at our Build-A-Bot strategy workshop, seek advice on some common chatbot deployment challenges in their organization.

Based on our learnings and after deploying chatbots for several Fortune 500 companies, we have enlisted those below to help you plan your chatbot implementation better and achieve maximum business value from your chatbots-

security and privacy

Any organization implementing chatbots should pay close attention to privacy and security. One should ensure that chatbots are compliant with GDPR or any other industry-specific or location-specific regulations and policies. Providing information to users based on their authorization levels is also crucial to ensure the privacy of information. User identity authentication, intent level authorization, channel authorization, end to end encryption, and intent level privacy, are some ways to enhance the security and privacy of your chatbot.

Learn more: 9 Ways To Enhance Chatbot Security

chatbots implementation can get expensive without proper expertise

Building home-grown chatbots without prior experience and understanding of the do’s and don’ts can make the implementation a mismanaged, disorganized, and costly venture. Especially customized chatbots may require a lot of lead time and technological understanding in implementation. Choosing “off-the-shelf” ready solutions from experienced chatbot service providers is one option.

setting the right expectations

Owing to the hype around Artificial Intelligence in the media, chatbots are largely considered as the one-stop solution that can solely streamline all business operations. However, this is not true. It’s imperative for a service provider to set the right expectations for their clients. Users must be made aware of the capabilities of a chatbot before they are deployed. This can be achieved by

Recognizing the champion user: There may be a large number of user groups or internal departments working together on or with the chatbot, however, it’s crucial to identify and thoroughly train one champion user from each department on the functioning of the bot.
Internal Marketing: Prior to deploying the chatbot, all users should be educated on the various use cases, capabilities and benefits of this new tool. If employees are not made aware of the bot functioning, there exists a high risk of low adoption and thereby low project ROIs or even failure of the project.
The right time to market: Large corporations may have thousands of employees in several departments dispersed across different countries and languages. Considering the needs and nuances of all the business divisions and cultures involved may take a lot of time. The extensive wait for the chatbot deployment might result in lowered enthusiasm.

infusing NLP and machine learning

In order for users to like and adopt chatbots, they should find them to be useful, relatable, and trustworthy. Users should be well aware of the capabilities of the chatbot. Though bots cannot entirely conduct human-level conversations, they should give a feel of meaningful interaction and people should be satisfied with the responses either through text or voice. Infusing NLP and Machine Learning into bots is a must for an enhanced and personalized user experience.

understanding how successful your chatbot is

The user experience with chatbots needs to be gauged. You may take feedback from your users and ask them about their chatbot experience and understand how the chatbot could be improved which helps you to find out if they are any developmental areas. You can also assign some business KPIs to your chatbot performance. Direct KPIs can be a reduction in customer service or HR or IT costs, a difference in the number of tickets raised, etc. A few indirect KPIs are employee engagement, customer experience, and so on.

future-proofing your chatbot

Chatbot technology is advancing at a very fast pace. 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. This abstraction layer also ensures you’re not locked down to any specific AI chatbot vendor or product.

improve chatbot capabilities with data

Data gathered by the chatbot can be leveraged for user insights, allowing you to understand the user needs and improve the capabilities of the chatbot continuously. Robust enterprise chatbot platforms usually are equipped with chatbot analytics to harness user data.

human hand-off

There’s always some cases when a chatbot simply cannot drive a query to its conclusion, so organisations need to ensure that there is always a human that can take over the conversation if necessary. Transferring the conversation to a human should be as seamless as possible without reducing user experience.

overcoming resistance

There could be a fear in many employees that AI and chatbots may pose a threat to their jobs. Employees should be made aware and ensured that a bot has the capability to relieve them of their repetitive work and make them more productive.

ensuring your chatbots fit in with your brand identity

Bots have to be tailor-made to match your brand identity and tone. This also helps in enhancing the user experience.

Chatbots are undoubtedly one of the most promising enterprise AI technologies. But maximizing the value from them requires extensive technical and functional expertise and a robust implementation methodology.

If implemented in an effective and data-driven manner with all challenges managed efficiently, chatbots can bring a huge transformation in your employee and customer service workflows.

If you’re planning to implement chatbots for your company, feel free to get in touch with us for a personalized consultation with one of our Artificial Intelligence and chatbot experts. Acuvate’s highly regarded expertise in AI and bots can help you overcome all teething issues and implementation challenges and help you achieve maximum returns from your chatbot investments.

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

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The post 10 Key Chatbot Implementation Considerations You Should Be Aware Of appeared first on BotCore.