Chatbots are seeping into our everyday lives with their seamlessness and convenience. Gartner predicts that 85% of customer interactions will be held without human intervention in 2020. Business leaders recognize the cost benefits of implementing chatbots. IBM suggests that businesses will collectively save $8 Billion by employing chat-based automation by 2022.

Many enterprises have implemented chatbots to interact with customers. Today, the use cases of chatbots extend beyond customer service as they are being leveraged in functions like HR, sales, marketing, finance, reporting, etc. The technology, that has already proven to drive customer engagement, is now being integrated into employee-facing applications to facilitate improved decision-making.

In order to deploy an employee-facing chatbot, it must be integrated with the relevant enterprise systems from which it can capture information. In this blog, we will discuss the benefits of integrating with some of the popular enterprise systems.

ERPs

An ERP is the backbone of an enterprise but they can be sometimes hard to navigate despite their immense usability. Chatbots can make everything more accessible and hence, help generate real business outcomes, faster.

Learn More: Every ERP System Needs An AI Chatbot. Here’s Why

HRMS

Chatbots can help strengthen internal communication including the one between HR and employees at your enterprise. Integrating chatbots with HRMS (Workday, ServiceNow, etc.) empowers HR staff to resolve employee queries faster and improve employee engagement. Moreover, this integration streamlines workflows across the entire HR workflow – right from recruitment, onboarding, training, engagement, performance management, to offboarding. Companies are also using HR chatbots to drastically reduce costs (cost-per-ticket, onboarding costs, cost-per-hire etc.), enable self-service, improve employer brand and so much more!

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

Business Intelligence systems

BI projects can help make the organization data-driven but sometimes  the adoption rate is low due to suboptimal user experience. Chatbots can boost BI adoption by providing actionable data, any time, anywhere. By integrating chatbots with BI systems (Power BI, Oracle, SAP, etc.) you can simplify data consumption and interaction. Just ask natural language questions like “what’s my market share for the year 2017?” and the bot will instantly respond with the answer.

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

ITSM systems

With ITSM systems, organizations can lower operational costs and improve their returns on IT investments. Often, IT service management teams lose time on unproductive tasks including basic query resolution and solving low-value tickets. With chatbots, most of the employee queries are quickly addressed and the teams can spend their time on more productive tasks The integration of chatbots with ITSM systems (ServiceNow, JIRA, BMC, etc.) enables improved incident, outage, and security management and real-time alerts for the issues that require attention.

Learn More: IT helpdesk chatbots

CRMs

CRMs help enhance communication, customer service, and efficiency across the organization.

However,  user experience can lead to poor adoption rates for CRMs despite the promised ROI. Marketing and sales representatives shouldn’t have to lose time on manual tasks. A chatbot can automate tasks like data entry by capturing keynotes from audio calls. Updating customer records will be made simpler with bots as users can chat with the CRM chatbot in natural language and provide voice or text commands. Integration of chatbots with CRMs can further easier access to data and personalized alerts.

Learn More: How Are Chatbots Boosting The CRM Adoption Rates

Integrating chatbots with Intranets

Intranets not only improve internal communication but also help employees find information faster. Why they don’t yield the expected ROI, it’s usually because of inadequate adoption. Integrating chatbots with intranets can improve productivity, keep employees informed, simplify processes, and offer personalized user experience. A chatbot can not only provide actionable information to the employees but also execute activities like leave requests, travel settlement requests, IT requests, etc. This leads to better engagement and collaboration.

Learn More: Chatbot for SharePoint Intranet

The Need for an Aggregator Bot

As enterprises increasingly adopt chatbots for different functions, employees might have to soon interact with multiple chatbots leading to suboptimal user experience. It’s important that organizations unify different bots into a single aggregator bot to provide a consistent employee experience. Such an aggregator bot would be able to handle all kinds of queries based on the employee access/permissions and then pass the query on to a specialized bot for further action. It will act as a single point of contact for employees to execute tasks across different functions.

Moreover, unifying chatbots reduces costs in building, deploying, training and maintaining chatbots. In training the aggregator bot, all linked bots are automatically trained as well. It’s also pretty flexible as you can link or remove different bots based on your requirements.

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. You might also be interested in exploring our chatbot builder platform (BotCore) which can be used to build, deploy, and train enterprise chatbots.