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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.

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10 Powerful Benefits Of Chatbots In Customer Service

Abhishek Shanbhag — Thu, 12 Jul 2018 11:34:00 +0000

10 Powerful Benefits Of Chatbots In Customer Service

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

24/7 CUSTOMER SERVICE

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

RESOLUTION SPEED

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

INSTANT RESPONSE

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

REDUCED OPERATIONAL COSTS AND IMPROVED MORALE

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

LANGUAGE SUPPORT

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

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

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

DATA GATHERING OPPORTUNITIES

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

REDUCED IVR FRUSTRATIONS

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

LESS CUSTOMER STRESS

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

BETTER SELF SERVICE

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

FINAL CONSIDERATIONS

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

BOTCORE – AN ENTERPRISE CHATBOT BUILDER PLATFORM

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

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

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The post 10 Powerful Benefits Of Chatbots In Customer Service appeared first on BotCore.

4 Top B2B Chatbot Use Cases You Must Know

Rakesh Reddy — Fri, 06 Jul 2018 10:18:00 +0000

4 Top B2B Chatbot Use Cases You Must Know

If you are wondering how to make your sales teams more efficient, leaner, highly predictable and motivated and reduce training costs, chatbots are the answer. This blog post will explore why.

Chatbots are making headlines in the B2B marketing world as the next big thing to assist businesses in their efforts towards enhancing customer service. Artificial Intelligence (AI) bots are expected to transform how people and businesses interact with brands and services.

Their ability to provide personalized and contextual responses via a chat interface on messaging apps like Facebook Messenger or Skype and through virtual assistants like Alexa, Cortana etc. without the constant need for involvement of human agents is touted to provide immense cost savings.

And in addition to the cost savings, the trend of people preferring to get information via chat compared to a traditional phone call is increasing.

The advancements in Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing (NLP) enabled the evolution of intelligent bots that could provide responses in a very natural language tone.

From lead qualification to data gathering, and finally to closing sales or problem-solving, chatbots can indeed create engaging and unique experiences with excellent results across the board, all while saving B2B companies time and money. Here is how:

4 B2B CHATBOT USE CASES YOU MUST KNOW

B2B CHATBOT USE CASE #1
LEAD QUALIFICATION

The road to get prospects to engage with a company on the website and turn them into serious customers is not a short one, but chatbots can be deployed at every stage to make it smoother in both B2B and B2C settings. A chatbot that can ask a website visitor the right questions and help them narrow down products or services that directly relate to their interests.

This eliminates the need to sift through content that is not relevant to the business or individual’s interests. Furthermore, bots can also analyze visitor patterns to help determine if they are likely a qualified lead, to begin with, saving the sales team precious time.

Chatbots facilitate a much faster sales cycle at every step of the way, but especially in the critical beginning stages. In turn, this reduces frustrations for your sales team and enables a much more seamless experience for prospects. Bots also make sales teams leaner and more productive by helping them chase better qualified leads, thereby reducing the sales training and direct sales costs significantly.

B2B Chatbot Example:

RapidMiner a B2B Technology company that provides analytics solutions deployed a website chatbot – MarlaBot, which asks relevant questions to visitors and determines their needs in a personalized manner.

The bot asks a series of qualifier questions starting with a simple “What brought you to RapidMiner today?”. This process cuts the wheat from the chaff and only the leads which are qualified will be connected to sales reps.

MarlaBot doesn’t completely eliminate the need for a sales staff, but it cuts down on their tedious workload and simultaneously collects data to improve future user interactions.

Other bots of these sort exist. Adopting them as sales assistants with a focus on helping human sales agents and customers alike, is key for their successful implementation.

B2B CHATBOT USE CASE #2
DATA MINING

Closely tied with lead qualification lies data gathering. Customers are not the only ones who must explore sources, process large amounts of information and then try to make informed choices. Sales teams also have to analyze data to figure out what the customers want or need, or to figure out the most qualified leads.

Especially when dealing with B2B marketing at a large scale, it is not possible for human agents to manually mine all of the relevant data, organize it, and also analyze it in order to improve services, target products to their desired audience, and tailor special approaches. Bots can automate the process of data management and can help human staff at mapping the data based on the changing organizational trends.

B2B CHATBOT USE CASE #3
CUSTOMER SERVICE

Chatbots can help an organization by improving the customer response rate around the clock. In other words, chatbots can give accurate, personalized and instant responses to common issues 24/7. Clients value this greatly, especially when checking for reliability and access information on products and services.

In addition, chatbots allow agents to focus on more complex customer service issues by handling a large volume of repetitive and basic queries without the need for interference.

Chatbots are customizable for different languages too, so it is not necessary to hire large numbers of staff who are fluent in many languages in order to assist clients from around the world. For these reasons, chatbots greatly reduce operational costs associated with the need to hire specialized staff or extra agents who need to be available at 24/7.

With the concept of data injection and machine learning, bots are learning faster based on the conversation they have with multiple users.

B2B CHATBOT USE CASE #4
EASY INFORMATION ACCESS FOR B2B SALES REPS AND MARKETERS

Sales representatives need access to key metrics to make informed decisions during the sales process. Having a virtual assistant to provide this information immediately, at any time and from anywhere saves time and enables a data-driven decision-making.

Acuvate’s AI Sales chatbot – SIA, can be added to a company’s internal messaging apps for sales teams to chat with and get data from CRM, LOB and BI systems.

SIA can be integrated with multiple databases and answers queries quickly and in natural language. Sales teams don’t have to manually obtain the required information from multiple systems and they can focus on more critical aspects of the sales process.

BOTCORE – AN ENTERPRISE CHATBOT BUILDER PLATFORM

In conclusion, B2B businesses are slowly realizing the potential of chatbots for customer service, sales, and marketing. Many B2B businesses have already deployed chatbots at least one of these business areas and exploring further use cases. At the very least, Chatbots can streamline the Lead Qualification process, greatly improve and speed up data gathering, enhance customer service, and simplify information access.

The use cases of B2B chatbots are endless and still emerging. If you’re planning to get started on your chatbot journey, you might be interested in our Build-A-Bot workshop in which we help enterprises capture the right bot use case and build a bot strategy. Alternatively, if you’re exploring different chatbot solutions, our enterprise chatbot builder platform – BotCore might interest you!

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 4 Top B2B Chatbot Use Cases You Must Know appeared first on BotCore.

Chatbots: AI’s Most Practical Use Case for The Digital Workplace

Abhishek Shanbhag — Fri, 23 Mar 2018 20:25:00 +0000

Chatbots: AI’s Most Practical Use Case For The Digital Workplace

WHAT DOES A DIGITAL WORKPLACE STAND FOR?

A survey by the SMG/CMSWire and Digital Workplace Group as an industry insight for the 2017 Digital Workplace Experience conference revealed that 95 percent of organizations agree that a digital workplace is important.

There are several definitions of a digital workplace, so it’s really important to understand what it really is. Gartner puts it eloquently, claiming that the Digital Workplace enables new, more effective ways of working; raises employee engagement and agility; and exploits consumer-oriented styles and technologies.

Needless to say, all of these important achievements for an organization and they want to get on the bandwagon as soon as possible. With all of the radical transformations in technology, the digital workplace is undergoing an upheaval of changes. How then does an organization prepare and adapt?

As the current of an issue as it is to digitize your workplace, it’s also important to note that this conversion should be addressed in its entirety, which means technology, process and people – all three contributing factors must be taken into account and accordingly brought together.

Even before we get into the specifics of how chatbots are key to a digital workplace, it should also be noted that a digital workplace is not a destination, but rather a journey. This means your organization must be prepared for constant innovation, improvement and transformation. With that being said, it is also imperative that the digital workplace strategy being employed must take into account that employees are of utmost importance in this journey – organizations must continually provide them with latest technologies and tools required.

Read More: 5 Digital Workplace Trends for 2018.

And that brings us to the discussion of a chatbot.

WHAT ARE CHATBOTS?

A chatbot is really just another software, which is often powered by machine learning and artificial intelligence and can carry human-like conversations. Conversations between the user and a bot happen via a chat interface using textual or auditory methods.

Bots are usually built using a chatbot platform or frameworks, and deployed on messaging apps like Skype, Skype for Business, Slack, Microsoft Teams etc. or virtual assistants like Alexa & Cortana to converse with end-users. Advancements in Artificial Intelligence and its components related to it like Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing (NLP) led to the building of highly intelligent bots with extremely relevant responses in a natural language tone.

The reason chatbots are gaining so much attention from businesses across the world is that they offer a myriad of practical applications for both employees and customers.

THE ROLE OF CHATBOTS IN THE DIGITAL WORKPLACE

Before we begin to discuss the role of chatbots in the digital workplace, it is essential to understand what chatbots can do for your workforce. Chatbots can:

Fetch information
Answer Questions
Push personalized notifications
Complete tasks

If you have watched the famous Marvel movie “Iron Man”, you must be be well acquainted with Tony Stark’s virtual assistant Jarvis and how Tony has him do a lot of groundwork for him like “Do a background check on that person”, “Launch the new missile”, “Connect me with Pepper”, “What is the latest news” etc.

An employee chatbot features similar functionality. Consider these scenarios:

George, a sales employee, wants to know the latest updates on the intranet. He can ask/send a quick natural language question such as, “What’s new?” to his/her intranet chatbot in Slack, Skype for Business etc. and obtain personalized updates.

George is facing issues with his VPN and wants to raise an IT helpdesk ticket, He can simply ask an IT helpdesk chatbot for instructions or raise a ticket to get in touch with a human agent. He doesn’t have to log in to ServiceNow or Jira to complete the action.

George wants to obtain specific information from the CRM or a BI system or a Reporting system. He can skip logging in, filtering dashboards and switching between windows – he simply has to ask the BI chatbot for the details he needs.

George is now wearing a field-sales personnel cap and needs to know if there have been rises or dips in sales. A field-sales chatbot can send personalized alerts so George is immediately notified when action needs to be taken.

George doesn’t know how to apply for a leave. He can simply ask the HR chatbot for instructions and apply by chatting with the bot in the language of his choice.

The greatest benefit that chatbots bring about is ensuring tasks get done in a single interface. There is no time wasted in switching between various apps or any ensuing confusion. George can get his daily tasks done efficiently because he has handed off most of the ‘manual’ work to the chatbot, getting it all done within his actively-used messaging app.

Chatbots provide a self-service option to employees and reduce their dependency on external IT or HR teams. This contributes towards delivering better employee experience and increased productivity, as well as easier knowledge access and sharing. Think of all time and costs saved! Chatbots are expected to cut business costs by $8 billion by 2022.

Chatbots provide enormous support to the emerging enterprise mobility. Remote employees can access chatbots to access information or get tasks done across multiple devices anytime and anywhere.

CHATBOTS PRESENT USE CASES ACROSS A RANGE OF DEPARTMENTS.

Take for example, the intranet system of an organization. What always begins with the highest expectations of collaboration and engagement, intranet installation often witnesses dismal adoption rates and eventually being relegated to the job of legacy reference systems or a repository of references. They are not remotely leveraged for their potential of generating interactive engagement across the organization.

This, of course, results in diminished ROI, and leaves employees working remotely void of the collaboration tool they require to stay plugged into the project and be productive in distributed teams. This inability to leverage the intranet’s potential functionality has left businesses rather concerned, as instances of distributed teams rise across the world.

The Gallup’s State of the American Workplace report reveals that “43 percent of Americans said they spent at least some time working remotely last year, up from 39 percent in 2012.”

IT’S THE RIGHT TIME TO CONSIDER CHATBOTS

As you begin your journey towards a digital workplace, we expect that chatbots will obviously figure into your path towards transformation. A bot strategy can help businesses identify the most profitable use case. Unlike other AI technologies, chatbots come with the least privacy and security issues and don’t require many cultural changes. They typically have high adoption rates due to ease of use, and deliver performance improvements rather quickly.

At Acuvate, we leverage our AI-Powered Chatbot Platform – BotCore to build custom bots for enterprises. Our readily available solutions also include:

If you are currently considering building a chatbot or are exploring what a chatbot can do to address your specific business challenges, sign up for a free bot strategy session with one of our AI experts!

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