BotCore

Power Virtual Agents & Power Automate – Truly Powerful!

Abhishek Shanbhag — Wed, 23 Nov 2022 13:09:00 +0000

Power Virtual Agents & Power Automate – Truly Powerful!

Introduction

Power Virtual Agents (PVA) and Power Automate (PA), formerly called Flows, are Microsoft’s latest AI innovations and a part of their Power Platform. Enterprises can use these tools separately to solve unique challenges but can also integrate and leverage them together to accomplish a common goal. In this article, we explore the different capabilities of these technologies and how they can be more powerful when integrated with each other!

Understanding Power Virtual Agents

PVA is a low-code chatbot building tool with which you can build and deploy chatbots in the shortest time possible. This democratises the technology to non-technical users and reduces the dependency on IT expertise.

Using 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. Bot Framework and Azure Bot Service and Cognitive Services provide the technological foundation for Power Virtual Agents.

A power business user can go from zero to a working bot in a matter of minutes! IT experts with extensive knowledge in the development of chatbots can also code on PVA for additional customization.

You don’t have to retrain AI models – just provide the bot with a few examples of the conversation topic, use the graphic editor to build conversations and your bot will be ready to perform tasks and take requests! PVA also provides a test pane with which you can play around with changes in real-time.

PVA provides the end-to-end experience of bot development, from the creation of the dialog to deploying it on online platforms like Slack, Teams, Facebook Messenger and MS Teams among many others.

PVA can also be integrated with several other apps including but not limited to, Office 365, Dynamics 365, Salesforce, ServiceNow, OneDrive to gather information from these systems. PVA also provides AI-driven dashboards with which you can track and improve your chatbot’s performance.

Learn More: Why Are We Excited About Power Virtual Agents?

Understanding Power Automate

Power Automate is a low code AI-based solution that allows users to build time-saving workflows for various systems and processes with seamless integration using hundreds of prebuilt connectors. UI flows, the new feature in PA provides Robotic Process Automation (RPA) capabilities that can automate repetitive tasks in Windows and web applications.

Power Automate can currently connect to more than 275 apps and services. With Power Automate, you can automate diverse rules-based tasks like handling data entry, performing calculations, handling queries and back-office operations in HR, Finance and accounting. Power Automate offers the low/no code experience of creating automations with point-and-click operations. PA can not only automate tasks across APIs, SAS platforms, databases but also do UI-based recording on Windows desktop and have that run in your automation workflow.

Power Automate’s UI Flows feature or Power Automate RPA helps you integrate business apps with each other and create automated workflows with an intuitive, no-code interface. The tool provides both attended RPA and unattended RPA and enables you to focus on more high-value work by automating boring, repetitive tasks like front-office activities.

To better understand Power Automate, let’s take the example of an insurance claims processing company where clients fill out digital and paper forms and send emails to communicate. The claim usually gets processed on the cloud but employees also have to maintain paper records and legacy apps. This entire process could be automated by Power Automate: AI can process the digitized data in scanned paper forms and RPA can process legacy systems.

Integrating Power Virtual Agents With Power Automate

Trigger bots to take action!

Chatbots can have conversations with your employees and answer their queries. This is great. But what’s truly powerful is enabling chatbots to act on users’ behalf. Integrating chatbots with back-end and legacy systems is now made easier with Power Virtual Agents – you can do it either out-of-the-box or using custom connectors available on Power Automate.

Integration with legacy enterprise systems which lack modern APIs was a huge challenge for many organizations that are excited to deploy chatbots.

But with the launch of Power Automate this is solved.

The RPA capabilities of Power Automate enable it to create a flow between your Power Virtual Agent and your backend systems. You can design flows where based on a user’s request, the chatbot can trigger an action in the needed backend application.

Learn More: Add actions to a bot using Power Automate

This combination of PVA and PA can solve several common problems enterprises are facing today.

It helps organizations to meet the rising customer and employee expectations at lower costs by combining the automation capabilities of RPA and the self-service features of a chatbot. This also results in increased agent productivity as agents don’t have to spend time on mundane and routine activities like gathering customer data, copying information, completing paperwork, etc.

Some key benefits include:

Improved employee and customer experience
Reduce business costs
Reduced time to complete tasks
Increased employee productivity
Increased competitive advantage

Power Virtual Agents and Power Automate synergistically produce an end-to-end automation that can automatically perform complex operations through natural language commands .

Conclusion

Through PVA and PA, Microsoft has democratised the technology to produce virtual agents and intelligent workflows to professional developers and citizen developers alike. A Power Virtual Agent provides a platform to build enterprise chatbots with minimal coding. Power Automate is a multifaceted RPA platform to automate enterprise-wide repetitive, rules-based tasks. These applications have a simple to use user drag and drop and point-click interface.

PA and PVA complement each others’ functionality. By integrating PVA and PA, you can enable end-to-end automation of processes, streamline workflows, improve agent productivity, improve ROI from your legacy systems and more!

As a Microsoft Gold Partner, Acuvate helps enterprises in the effective implementation and adoption of the Power Platform.

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

The post Power Virtual Agents & Power Automate – Truly Powerful! appeared first on BotCore.

Improve Employee training and Engagement with Knowledge Bots

Abhishek Shanbhag — Fri, 16 Sep 2022 07:23:00 +0000

Improve Employee Training and Engagement With Knowledge Bots

Rapidly increasing digitization and the emergence of hybrid working practices have resulted in a permanent shift in the kind of experiences employees expect at the workplace. Just as modern-day customers want faster, more meaningful and personalized brand engagement, employees have come to value and like rich, contextual interactions based on their behavior and changing expectations at work.

The new-age employee experience (EX) warrants technology as a vital enabler to augment and enhance critical touch points right from “hire to retire.” In short, designing modern EX entails mixing digital components with the human touch.

That’s where conversational AI has come to play a significant role. AI-based conversational applications, such as chatbots and virtual assistants, also known as knowledge bots in this context, have rapidly gained traction as a key facilitator of the “employee-first” approach that most organizations have adopted to create a more committed, engaged, and motivated workforce.

Employee knowledge bots offer a guided chat interface and the ability to ask ad-hoc questions to automate simple and complex employee tasks, answer FAQs, and retrieve relevant information for employees.

Powered by AI, natural language processing (NLP), and natural language understanding (NLU) technologies, such employee engagement chatbots enable employees to increase efficiency, save time, and focus on more productive work that demands higher attention. It is anticipated that by the end of this year, 70% of white-collar workers will have daily interactions with conversational AI platforms.

Easy-to-navigate and well-designed chatbot services have the ability to deliver high-quality human-like interactions, improve employee training and engagement at all levels, and help design effective employee experience strategies.

Let’s explore more.

Knowledge bots in employee Training and engagement

Streamlined and more personalized employee engagement enriches EX, makes jobs easier, and allows organizations to better address employee needs.

Whether it’s recruitment, engagement, training, collaboration, or support, conversational chatbots play a critical role in re-thinking and re-designing employee experience to focus on improving employee engagement and increasing self-service at a broad level through four critical functionalities:

Pushing personalized alerts and notifications to employees based on role, location, interests, etc.
Answering queries within a matter of minutes/seconds, anytime and anywhere.
Automating day-to-day tasks that add little value to the organization, yet take up a hefty chunk of the employees’ valuable time.
Retrieving the right information for employees from the digital workplace.

Looking at the role of employee knowledge bots in personalizing engagement and enriching employee experience through a functional/departmental lens:

A) HR Knowledge Bot

Organizations with a very large workforce struggle with managing the thousands of HR-related queries and tickets generated everyday, along with maintaining human-level interactions with each member of the workforce. Moreover, they must try to reduce cost per contact while ensuring employee engagement and HR efficiency is at its peak. With a majority of the workforce operating from remote locations, it is time to bring all HR-related functions, including onboarding processes, learning and development, etc., at employees’ fingertips.

That’s where we can use Microsoft’s Power Virtual Agents (PVA) to quickly develop an HR bot for you.

As a Microsoft Gold Partner, Acuvate uses Power Virtual Agents to accelerate the delivery of HR bot solutions that help customers solve HR-related business challenges faster. For example, with more than 1500 employees worldwide, Neptune Energy, an independent oil and gas exploration and production company, wanted a one-stop-solution for all HR-related queries such as terms and conditions, rewards and benefits, HR policies, and offshore employee guidance. Within two weeks, built with PVA and Power Automate, Acuvate launched the HR Handbook Bot for Neptune’s Employee Experience Digital Platform.

Delving deeper into the use cases, we see that an HR bot serves the following purposes:

HR Assistant

Answer employee queries related to insurance policies, leaves, HR rules, benefits, etc.
Schedule meetings, apply for leaves, input daily hours, etc.

Onboarding Assistant

Schedule new hire interviews, send paperwork, and capture new hire details.
Complete onboarding forms via chat and create standard employment letters.
Resolve new hire queries.

Training and career development

Send personalized AI recommendations on suitable internal open positions based on current profiles.
Recommend training programs based on individual interests, needs, and passions.

Acuvate helped a Dutch British Consumer Goods company build an all-encompassing digital assistant to address routine queries for various departments, including IT, HR, logistics, and finance, for 160k+ workforce. The bot resulted in 47% time savings in getting answers to regular HR/IT queries, 30% increase in CSAT, and 40% reduction in cases.

Collaboration and engagement

Fetch relevant information and allow employees to access the right tools quickly for greater efficiency and productivity.
AI-based feedback collection, surveys, polls, and analysis to gauge and understand employees’ behavior, stress levels, emotion, and overall engagement with the organization.

Acuvate helped a major oil and gas conglomerate spin up a knowledge capture assistant quickly, to maintain the tacit knowledge base of the organization. Geoscientists possess a wealth of knowledge that they gather, interpret, and convert to meaningful insights. To preserve this knowledge even if one employee needs, geoscientists must manually capture and store the data, which can be highly tedious, error-prone, and may make discoverability of knowledge difficult. This process was made quicker and accurate with a knowledge capture assistant that could capture text, notes, and links with real-time voice input, convert geological terms into text, tag transcripts with relevant keywords, and make knowledge search and management a breeze.

B) IT Knowledge Bot

Growing digitalization has significantly increased the dependence on digital solutions and apps for everyday work. Consequently, the staff is constantly looking for help on various IT-related queries. While this has put tremendous pressure on IT helpdesks, failure to receive timely assistance hampers employee productivity and efficiency.

IT bots developed and deployed quickly using Power Virtual Agents can address routine queries and IT issues, and help with the following:

Get common IT queries resolved (for example, “How do I reset my password?”)
Support IT onboarding by allocating new laptops
Report a potential security breach, obtain outage reports, get stolen devices wiped or disabled, etc.
Send asset request and asset change request notifications.

Acuvate helped a client build an intelligent IT helpdesk chatbot to enable self-service support, answer IT-related FAQs, and help employees authenticate and resolve their queries using a guided conversation experience. The bot also integrated with the company’s ITSM tool to auto-create incidents upon the user’s request.

C) BI Knowledge Bot

To maintain competitiveness, make critical business decision, and stay up to speed with how the business is faring, business leaders need instant access to critical KPIs, metrics, and business insights. BI bots help executives access data-driven insights and make business-decisions in a quick, cost-effective manner.

Get business metrics and KPIs at the fingertips.
Receive quick answers to fairly specific queries, for example, “What were Product Y sales in Q1-2021?
Receive alerts on movements (rise/dip) in critical KPIs.
Get quick access to visual reports and dashboards.

Acuvate built a Data chatbot for a government agency responsible for supplying water to one of the largest municipalities in the USA. The chatbot was able to provide insights related to contracts, payments, vendors based on the natural language questions. Not just that, the unique feature of this data bot is that it can surface relevant visuals from Power BI on the chatbot itself so that users need not login to Power BI separately to view the visuals and drill down charts to find more info. All this can be done on the chatbot itself.

Due to the 24/7 access to real-time data with zero dependency on devices and portals, the client was able to achieve 90% reduction in invoice processing times and reduce cycle times for orders drastically.

How can Acuvate help?

At Acuvate, we help clients strengthen their employee experience strategy by building and deploying employee knowledge bots with our enterprise bot-building platform called BotCore.

As a Microsoft Gold Partner, our chatbot services leverage the best of Microsoft’s AI, machine learning, and NLP frameworks, including Azure Cognitive Services, the Microsoft Bot Framework, and LUIS.

Furthermore, keeping in mind our customers’ strong interest in building & deploying chatbots quickly, we leverage Power Virtual Agents (PVA) and Microsoft’s Azure services extensively to roll-out chatbot solutions with lesser time-to-market and help customers solve business challenges faster.

Along with their multilingual functionality, our employee engagement chatbots support popular enterprise messaging channels (Teams, Slack, ProofHub, etc.), thus helping clients to engage a globally dispersed workforce.

To explore more about knowledge bots, schedule a personalized consultation with our BotCore experts.

The post Improve Employee training and Engagement with Knowledge Bots appeared first on BotCore.

Top 5 Ways Intelligent Virtual Assistants Augment Customer Contact Centers in Europe

Roopesh Poojala — Mon, 12 Sep 2022 06:39:25 +0000

Top 5 Ways Intelligent Virtual Assistants Augment Customer Contact Centers in Europe

In today’s fast-paced, digital-first world, customer needs and expectations continue to rise, raising the demand for customer contact centers all over the globe.

In Europe, particularly, the change in customer demographics and the growing popularity of e-commerce has led to increasing pressure on contact centers for customer support. Here, companies, small, medium, and large, believe in focusing on their core operations; hence, Europe is one of the biggest markets that is outsourcing contact center operations.

The call center outsourcing market share in Europe is expected to increase by USD 3.73 billion from 2021 to 2026, and the market’s growth momentum will accelerate at a CAGR of 3.53%. The retail, IT, and telecom sectors will be the most significant drivers of contact center outsourcing in Europe from 2022-2024.

High agent volume and the need for diversity, scalability, and multilingual capabilities are the most significant reasons why most European enterprises are turning to automation and AI to scale their contact center operations.

That’s where intelligent virtual assistants, including chat and voice bots, come into the picture. Virtual assistants, also known as virtual agents, use intelligent conversational interfaces powered by AI, machine learning, and natural language processing technologies to understand and respond to customer inquiries in a human-like manner.

Let’s know the five ways virtual assistants are well-placed to support European contact centers.

Five Ways Customer Support Chatbots Augment Contact Centers in Europe

1. Deliver exceptional customer support across geographies and time zones.

European companies prefer to focus on their core revenue-generating activities and prefer to outsource their contact center operations. However, they mostly outsource to nearby regions and time zones to account for language and cultural similarities.

This strategy suffers from a major drawback. Rapidly changing customer demographics have necessitated quick, 24X7 customer support. Thus, organizations may want to set up contact centers in distant countries to cover customer support beyond their usual business hours, demanding additional resources in terms of staffing and equipment.

AI-powered customer support chatbots transcend locational boundaries, especially in a continent like Europe that has multiple time zones, and provide instant answers to all customer queries at all times.

2. Make omnichannel chatbots the new gold standard in customer support in Europe.

Customers in different parts of Europe prefer different ways and channels of contacting contact center support. For example, the Netherlands has the highest number of non-telephone channel users, with email and web chat being the most popular.

On the flip side, people in Norway, Denmark, and Sweden prefer social media and web chat over email. The bottom line is that people prefer to communicate with brands on the channel of their choice and may even want to switch channels in the middle of an ongoing support case.

That’s where omnichannel chatbots play a crucial role. Virtual assistants can offer omnichannel experiences so customers can experience consistent and personalized brand engagement on their preferred channels. Moreover, customers can seamlessly transition from one channel to another without losing the context of the original conversation.

3. Address inquiries and grievances in customers’ native tongue in the land of many languages.

In a continent like Europe, where people speak multiple languages, it is challenging to personalize customer support for the entire customer base. After all, customers prefer being engaged in their native language. Moreover, it makes them feel comfortable, valued and heard.

Hiring contact center agents who speak multiple languages or training existing ones to speak in different tongues is costly in terms of time and money. That’s where virtual assistants play a crucial role.

AI virtual assistants support contact centers by detecting the user’s language and switching the conversation flow to the native tongue. What’s more, the customer support chatbot can remember the customer’s language preferences and then reach out to them in the same language in case of a proactive outbound engagement.

4. Providing scalable self-service options and data-enriched proactive engagement.

In recent times, Europe has seen steady growth in using self-service solutions like websites, social networking channels (Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Telegram, whatsapp etc.), and IVR. These are easily accessible and take a considerable load off contact centers. To work productively and provide seamless, more meaningful customer engagement, organizations in Europe are embedding customer support bots on these channels.

70% of contact center agents say there are fewer calls when chatbots are available. Customer support bots and virtual assistants can shorten waiting times and collect relevant customer data before the call is passed on to the human agent. In cases where the requests are simple and repetitive, virtual assistants can solve them faster than the contact center agent.

Voice bot platforms have paved the way for conversational IVR in contact centers. Voice bots embedded within traditional IVR systems leverage natural language processing and speech recognition technologies to respond to users’ verbal commands using voice or text, enabling faster, more accessible, and more interactive user support.

Moreover, predictive data analytics maps out the entire customer journey to personalize interactions, reduce mean time to resolve (MTTR), and increase overall customer satisfaction (CSAT).

5. Cost is always a significant factor!

Using virtual assistants — chat and voice bots, leads to major cost reductions for all enterprises.

For starters, outsourced customer service agents cost as much as €22,200 per agent annually in countries like Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. Even for employees hired in Central and Eastern Europe, where contact center jobs are amongst the better-paid ones, the cost of hiring a contact center agent can come out to be around €6,436 per year.

In short, hiring more contact center agents will always prove heavier on the organization’s pockets. On the other hand, intelligent virtual assistants can solve thousands of problems at a few pennies per transaction, making them highly viable, almost a mandate for countries in Europe where labor costs are very high.

How can Acuvate help?

Acuvate helps clients build and deploy virtual assistants – customer support & engagement chatbots and voice bots with its enterprise bot-building platform, BotCore.

As a Microsoft Gold Partner, we have the opportunity of leveraging the best of Microsoft’s AI, machine learning, and natural language processing (NLP) frameworks, including the Microsoft Bot Framework, Azure Cognitive Services, and LUIS.

Besides supporting languages like German, French, English, Latin, and many more (multilingual functionality), our bots work on popular enterprise channels (Teams, Slack, ProofHub, etc.) and social channels (Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Telegram, whatsapp etc.), thus helping organizations engage a geographically-dispersed workforce and customer base.

To know more about our bots and virtual assistants, please schedule a personalized consultation with our experts.

The post Top 5 Ways Intelligent Virtual Assistants Augment Customer Contact Centers in Europe appeared first on BotCore.

How Can Traditional Banks Challenge the Fintech Space With Conversational AI?

Pradeep Tigulla — Mon, 05 Sep 2022 11:45:26 +0000

How Can Traditional Banks Challenge the Fintech Space With Conversational AI?

In today’s highly digitized business landscape, customers have come to expect seamless engagement across the broad spectrum of banking and financial services. More than two years into the pandemic, thanks to powerful advancements in artificial intelligence, automation, machine learning, blockchain, and other technologies, a new wave of digitally-enabled financial firms have taken the entire banking industry by storm.

Fintech firms, also known as the digital challenger banks (Venmo, CashApp, PayPal), have quickly exploited traditional banks’ inability to scale up their digital transformation initiatives. Long branch queues, highly complex application forms, cumbersome login procedures, stringent guidelines, and inconsistent banking portal designs for different use cases have deterred customers from engaging with traditional banks.

Instead, banking customers have now made a steady move toward fintech firms providing an easy, cohesive, and well-designed suite of online and mobile banking services. From opening a bank account to making immediate peer-to-peer transfers to shopping online, executing international transfers, or making contactless payments, the ability to effortlessly perform common banking tasks from the convenience of one’s home and at the fingertips has made third-party fintech services a go-to choice for the younger, new generation of customers.

Research shows that 88% of incumbent financial institutions believe that part of their business will be lost to standalone fintech companies in the next five years.

However, all is not lost for traditional banks. To ensure frictionless banking experiences, reduce customer dropout, and build unified digital banking practices that can help traditional banks challenge fintech firms, it’s time to adopt conversational AI in banking, more popularly known as conversational banking.

Let’s explore more.

Introducing Conversational AI in Banking

Conversational AI in banking can help traditional banks challenge fintech firms. AI-enabled chatbots in banking can recognize, understand, and resolve simple and complex requests while avoiding back and forth for the customers.

An intuitive conversational interface, unmatched speed and convenience, and the ability to offer a wide range of banking services on various digital channels, including social messaging apps, SMS, IVR, and the web, make conversational banking one of the strongest tools to challenge up and coming fintech firms.

Legacy banking systems are not capable of supporting the changing market expectations of today’s banking customers. With chatbots in banking, traditional banks can offer services akin to fintech firms while allowing banking agents to focus on other critical tasks that require higher attention.

Some of the features that chatbots in banking offer include the following —

1. 24x7 accessibility

Customer dynamics have changed drastically during the pandemic. Coming across a customer who needs banking services or answers to basic banking queries at an odd 2 am at night is not surprising in today’s times.

Even when bank branches and call centers have closed shop for the day, banking chatbots can help customers get answers to their queries and help them with any support they need 24×7.

2. A cohesive and intuitive experience.

Conversational AI in banking can help customers access a range of banking services via text or voice. Specifically, banking chatbots can overcome the hassles of traditional IVR systems and guide customers through everyday banking services such as money transfers, loan applications, blocking lost cards, closing and opening accounts, etc.

Also known as conversational IVR, banking chatbots integrated within traditional IVR systems can improve first-call resolution by quickly providing personalized answers and solutions to customer queries.

Customers are freed from the hassle of filling up long, complicated forms. Instead, chatbots can handle their queries, automate transactions, and comprehend what the customer really wants using natural language processing (NLP) and natural language understanding (NLU) technologies.

What’s more, contact center agents can leverage chatbots to draw up relevant background information on the customer, thus ensuring speedy query resolution.

3. Multilingual and omnichannel

Banking chatbots can be made available over a plethora of channels in the customers’ preferred languages. Technologies such as AI, NLP, and context management make it possible for chatbots to provide consistent experiences across all channels while ensuring customers can easily switch channels without having to start over.

Consistent conversational banking experiences leave a positive impression of your bank and its services. Moreover, allowing customers the option to chat in their preferred language makes them comfortable with your bank’s services, keeps them engaged, and is more likely to help banks retain them.

Personalized banking at the fingertips

Conversational banking chatbots can provide scalable, cost-effective, and personalized banking services at the customers’ fingertips. Customer support bots in banking can integrate with backend systems and also form comprehensive customer personas to act as “personal financial advisors.”

Not only can banks then offer personalized financial insights and product recommendations, but they can also design products and services tailored to their customer’s needs.

Additionally, banks can drive revenue and sales by offering customers products they are eligible for but aren’t fully aware of.

Sneaking in a quick example of a banking chatbot

How can Acuvate help?

At Acuvate, we help clients build intelligent chatbots using our accelerator BotCore, Microsoft’s Power Virtual Agents.

Interested to know more about Conversational AI or chatbots. Connect with us today.

The post How Can Traditional Banks Challenge the Fintech Space With Conversational AI? appeared first on BotCore.

Creating Intelligent Chatbots Using Power Virtual Agents & Dataverse

Satheesh Kothakapu — Thu, 18 Aug 2022 08:54:52 +0000

Creating Intelligent Chatbots Using Power Virtual Agents & Dataverse

Over the past two years, the shift in how businesses operate worldwide has been palpable. Dynamics have transformed, ushering in an era of rapidly changing customer and employee expectations.

One of the most significant trends witnessed over the past two years has been the unprecedented and unparalleled rise in the use of conversational AI — chatbots and virtual agents — toagents—to provide quick, meaningful, and more personalized service to customers while enhancing employee efficiency levels by minimizing repetitive and redundant tasks.

A well-developed chatbot has the potential to shape a company’s brand image, playing an integral role in attracting and retaining the right market for your product and keeping employees active, engaged, and motivated throughout their journey with your organization.

Agile, resilient, and future-proof — these are three words that best describe today’s business environment. It is not enough to implement chatbots; deploying them at the right time to hasten business operations and build a competitive edge in the market is paramount.

That’s where Microsoft’s Power Virtual Agents (PVA), a low-code SaaS platform that helps build and deploy bots quickly with minimum coding experience required, comes into the scene.

This blog will explore creating intelligent chatbots using Power Virtual Agents and the Dataverse.

An integral part of Microsoft’s suite of services, Power Virtual Agents helps organizations develop and implement virtual agents and chatbots leveraging the low-code approach. This means both pro and citizen developers alike can build chatbots in a short period with little or no coding knowledge needed.

Moreover, being hosted on the Microsoft Azure Cloud environment offers the added advantage of pre-existing infrastructure. Hence, organizations needn’t invest more resources in maintaining the chatbots and can enjoy seamless integration with other services.

In short, Power Virtual Agents capitalizes on its graphical interface and minimalistic coding requirements to make bot building a breeze for all.

PVA takes entire responsibility for the functional aspect of the chatbot, so all the user has to do is provide the logic and set the virtual agent up.

Below, we describe in brief the process of creating your first chatbot using Power Virtual Agents and the Dataverse environment —

Install Power Virtual Agents in Teams by selecting and adding it from the left navigation bar.
After installing, launch the app and choose the “Start Now” button.
Choose which team would own and manage your chatbot and then “Continue.”
Choose a name and language for your virtual assistant.
Select “Create” to complete the process of creation.
Define the topic nodes. Topics define chatbot conversations and how they take place. Types of topics include “trigger” phrases (phrases and keywords that indicate the user has asked a question) and “conversation nodes” (define how the bot responds to the user’s request).

How to create a topic?

Select + New topic. Name and Save the Topic.
Enter trigger phrases for the topic, “for example, “Who can I contact for a loan query?”
In the Message node, enter information for the trigger nodes. For example, “The contact details for a loan query are Steve Robbins, sr@xyz.com.” You can add multiple conversation nodes.
Select Redirect to another topic > End of conversation to define the end of the conversation.

Click here to know more.

7. Add inputs, variables, and conditions.

Instead of defining all trigger phrase information in the message node, you can add inputs, variables, and conditions to vary the chatbot’s response based on the user’s input.

Inputs define the user’s response when the chatbot asks a question. While variables store the inputs to be used later, conditions set forth the branching logic.

To add a node between the trigger phrases and end conversation node, select the Add node plus sign and then select the “ask a question” option.
Select “Multiple choice options” and define the options for the user to select from.
Select the variable name that will be triggered when the user configures the branching logic.
To define the next appropriate response for each of the multiple choice options, create a new condition node and add a new message node for each probable response that the user may give.

8. Pull in data from Dataverse for Teams

Dataverse for Microsoft Teams is a low-code service that offers relational data storage, editable data tables, rich data types, robust governance, and one-click deployment to Teams.

You can create a Dataverse for teams table in the same team as the chatbot using Microsoft PowerApps.
In PowerApps for Teams, select Build -> See all -> New -> Table.
Create a new table, add new rows, and columns.
Add a “call an action.”
Use Power Automate flows to pull in data from the Dataverse for Teams table, Lists, or any other data source.

To know more, click here

9. Publish the Chatbot

In the Power Virtual Agents app, open the chatbot for editing.
Choose the Publish bot menu item or button.
Choose the Publish option. Select Publish to confirm in the Publish latest content confirmation window.

10. Publish the Chatbot

Once the chatbot is complete, it must be published so that users can interact with it. You can send a link to team members or add the chatbot to the Built by your colleagues section in Teams or if the chatbot is for the organization, you’ll send it to your Teams admin for approval.

If the chatbot is only for your team members, you must instruct them on how to use and share the bot by choosing one of the following:

Copy link – Provide users with a link to the chatbot.
Add to the team – Add the bot to a specific team. With this option enabled, anyone in your team will be able to find the bot in the Teams app store in the Built by your colleagues section.
Show in Teams app store – Make your bot visible in the Teams app store, with the option of showing only to teammates and shared users or to everyone in your organization.

Click here to learn about how to publish the chatbot for the entire organization.

Subscription And Licensing:

Microsoft 365 offers two editions of PVA:

PVA for Teams: A free app that only permits the creation of internal bots.
Power Virtual Agents: Requires additional subscription & supports the development of both web-based external client bots and internal Microsoft Teams bots.

How can Acuvate help?

As a Microsoft Gold Partner and provider of next-generation AI and consulting services, Acuvate leverages Microsoft’s robust suite of services, including PowerApps, Power Virtual Agents, and Power Automate, to create custom apps, AI bots, and workflows that enhance employee efficiency and support the delivery of exceptional customer experiences.

We have assisted clients from different industries and geographies in creating intelligent chatbots using PVA and Microsoft Dataverse.

To learn more about our chatbots, please schedule a personalized consultation with one of our experts.

The post Creating Intelligent Chatbots Using Power Virtual Agents & Dataverse appeared first on BotCore.

Deliver Total Experience With Microsoft Power Virtual Agents

Satheesh Kothakapu — Thu, 11 Aug 2022 12:18:02 +0000

Deliver Total Experience with Microsoft Power Virtual Agents

With multiple technologies working together to decipher the language, context, and intent to respond in an almost human manner, Conversational AI has seen staggering growth in the last few years. 70% of the world’s white-collar population has adopted it as a way of life. Today, organizations worldwide are using chatbots, among other technologies, to meet employee and customer experience needs and deliver what Gartner calls Total Experience (TX).

Microsoft Power Virtual Agents is one such intelligent no-code solution that allows businesses of all sizes to create chatbots to engage with customers and employees. This bot-builder is part of the Microsoft Power Platform that gives it access to powerful technologies, making it a compelling tool for your business.

What is Power Virtual Agent?

At its core, Microsoft Power Virtual Agents provides the building blocks for customizable AI chatbots. It allows businesses to stay connected to customers, employees, and other intended users 24×7, answer queries in real-time and improve self-service capabilities through company websites or employee platforms. Eventually, chatbots designed on Power Virtual Agents reduce the workload on CX, HR, and IT helpdesk teams.

Easy to customize for the unique needs of each business, Power Virtual Agents do not depend on high-end resources like data scientists and developers. This allows any business user, even in smaller firms, to build bots that deliver the same interactivity and experience as large brands. In addition, Power Virtual Agents is available as a standalone application on the web or as an app within Microsoft Teams, giving businesses the flexibility on where they choose to deploy it.

Power Virtual Agents vs. other bot builders – what's the difference?

With conversational AI becoming the new norm for TX, many fly-by-the-night bot builders are available. But none with the nuances and ease of use of Power Virtual Agents.

Some features that differentiate Power Virtual Agents include –

1. Ease of use and cost-effectiveness

Power Virtual Agents allows the bot to be built quickly without any high-end resources or skills. With its no-code, intuitive UI, PVA is perfect for users with little or no technical capabilities and advanced developers. In addition, the pre-built drag-and-drop features supported by Microsoft Power Automate make this no-code process easy to deploy.

2. Deep customization

Business can integrate their relevant processes with Power Virtual Agents with pre-built connectors. This allows them to quickly customize and deploy bots on your website, social media, and Microsoft Teams, among other platforms, to engage with the end-user in various contexts.

3. Simple escalation hierarchy

Power Virtual Agents addresses low-level requests, freeing up customer service resources. But it also enables the bot to flag a concern that needs live, human intervention. Ultimately, this means a quick resolution of customer or employee queries despite lean dependence on person-hours.

4. Performance monitoring

The inbuilt data-driven insights and AI-enabled analytics allow for real-time monitoring of the chatbot’s performance. This ensures continuous learning and improvement in a company’s conversational AI experience.

5. Real-time adaptation

The Microsoft Azure machine learning capabilities inherent to PVA allow the chatbots to adapt to real-time situations and deliver accurate responses. This ensures that your bot is almost human-like in its response, making the experience more personalized for the customer.

6. Round-the clock-customer support

No more waiting for opening hours! Chatbot’ agents’ can now be available for end-users in a time-zone agnostic manner. So, whether your employee wants information on healthcare insurance at 2 am during an emergency or your customer asks WISMO at midnight, you can rest assured that they will get the answers they need.

The evolution of Power Virtual Agents

As recently as May 2022, Microsoft announced many transformative new features that make Power Virtual Agents more potent than ever. According to Microsoft, the new and improved platform unifies the sophistication of Microsoft Azure Bot Framework Composer’s pro-code capabilities with the simplicity of the existing low-code platform. Simply put, Power Virtual Platform now allows professional developers and subject matter experts to work collaboratively to build a bot on the unified Microsoft Bot Building Studio. An additional feature will enable it to go from a simple bot-builder to a complete suite of interactive voice response (IVR) builder. This is made possible by incorporating an end-to-end backend support framework for telephony. It now also includes the agility of Power BI, which helps with data visualization, self-service analytics, and data protection.

This evolution is built around four main themes:

1. Unified bot building to leverage the true potential of the Microsoft stack

With the new single unified bot building studio, Power Virtual Agents now incorporates-

The advanced functionality of Bot Framework Composer with the bot-building experience of Power Virtual Agents.
Deep integration of Bot Framework Composer and Microsoft Cognitive Services, allowing professional developers and domain experts to collaborate easily in building powerful conversational bots and IVRs.

2. Advanced authoring for richer experiences

With this new feature, Power Virtual Agents now delivers –

Richer conversations with integrated multi-media response support through images and video sharing, adaptive cards, and quick response capabilities
Data storage, reuse, and transformation for professional developers. Made possible by the use of the Power FX editor to connect to the custom API via the Microsoft Power Platform connectors, elicit a response, resolve it into its parts and ultimately transform the information for use within the conversation
Reaction to events with contextual responses. For example, for a product delivery query, any system information on delivery updates will trigger the bot to respond with “Your product will reach you soon.” or “Your product is in transit in X location.”
Logic using variables, loops, and advanced conversational flows to make the interaction as close to mimicking a human interaction as possible

3. Seamless Fusion Teams collaboration

According to Gartner, 84% of companies have set up Fusion Teams, i.e., multi-disciplinary teams of technology and other experts. Power Virtual Agents now allows the collaboration of these Fusion Teams in the bot-building process, with features like multi-authoring and commenting that is similar to the MS Office experience. So, for example, your bot-building process can now have technology and psychology experts working together to deliver the most humane conversation AI experiences to your customers and employees.

4. IVR and Telephony for multichannel conversational AI support

Power Virtual Agents has progressed from a simple bot builder to an end-to-end IVR builder. Now, all businesses need is a phone number and a bot published on the back of it. And the next thing you know, your customers are engaging with your bot on the phone! This not only reduces customer service workload but also addresses delays in response times for the customer. More importantly, it makes conversational AI more inclusive, bringing elderly users into its fold who are more comfortable with phone conversations than with web- or platform-based chatbots.

How businesses are deploying Power Virtual Agents with Acuvate

With conversational AI becoming a must-have for organizations, Acuvate and Microsoft have delivered humane, sentient, and genuinely effective chatbots across the TX spectrum with Power Virtual Agents.

Some of the use-cases include –

1. Employee assistant chatbots

Using the latest features of PVA, Acuvate built Employee Assistant Chatbots to answer employees’ FAQs. This bot deployment was highly effective and helpful during the last two years of remote work and COVID concerns.

The chatbot can –

Issue COVID-related information, including insights from official sources, preventive measures and tips, COVID-19 health checks for employees, etc.
Deliver company-specific information, including advisories, news from the organization, and emergency contact details.
Act as an HR helpdesk, answering employees’ HR-related queries with minimal human intervention.

Yet another example of HR chatbots for employee experience include a turnkey project that Acuvate delivered for Neptune Energy, a large energy company that wanted to streamline its HR information seeding. With the sentient HR Handbook Bot built in a record two weeks using Power Virtual Agents, Neptune’s employees now have instant information and answers on terms and conditions, rewards and benefits, policies and procedures, and offshore employee guidance. Click here to read more about the success of Neptune’s HR Handbook Bot.

2. Customer support chatbots

No matter the size of your organization, ease of customer query resolution is always top of mind. Power Virtual Agents enables customer support automation with no-code capabilities. So, your customer support is up and running quickly and customized to deal with queries specific to the nature of your business. Simple questions like – ‘what are your working hours,’ ‘how soon can I expect my order to be delivered’ or ‘I need help to understand the refund process for the item I wish to return’ – can be easily programmed to be quickly dealt with by your chatbot. The system will flag queries beyond its scope and escalate seamlessly to a human agent wherever necessary.

3. IT helpdesk

IT-related issues can be aggravating, especially for employees working remotely. For example, imagine you are on a project deadline, and your system shuts down for unforeseeable reasons. When you call your IT Helpdesk, you are guided through all the possibilities of addressing the situation with automated IVR. If the matter is resolved, the ticket can be satisfactorily closed. If not, it can be escalated to a live helpdesk agent. This is how seamless and cost-effective Power Virtual Agents can make your IT and query resolution process.

Begin your chatbot journey with the next-gen Microsoft Power Virtual Agents

67% of consumers worldwide have interacted with a chatbot in the last 12 months, with an estimated 57-fold increase by 2025.

It is not too late to begin your conversational AI journey. Acuvate is ready to walk you through this process and help you achieve the maximum effectiveness from your Power Virtual Agents investment.

Talk to our experts today.

The post Deliver Total Experience With Microsoft Power Virtual Agents appeared first on BotCore.

Top use cases of Chatbots in the Banking and Finance Industry

Pradeep Tigulla — Thu, 04 Aug 2022 08:11:20 +0000

Top Use Cases of Chatbots in the Banking and Finance Industry

Chatbots have come a long way since the first time they were used by a banking application in 2015. With advancements in AI, NLP, and new communication channels like Google Home, Alexa, and social media platforms, they are now widely being used by almost all popular banks and financial institutions.

These ChatBots perform various repetitive tasks easily and accurately. Further, they can be personalized for each of the customers.

The conversational bots can be text-based or voice-based. They can be accessed from a mobile app, a banking website, social media messaging platforms, or voice-based personal digital assistants.

Generally, ChatBots used by banks are more popular in the finance and banking industry. However, chatbots are used for more complicated and personalized tasks beyond conventional uses.

Though as bank customers using digital services we all experience ChatBots, they are also used by employees working in financial institutions to retrieve information easily. When we go to a bank to learn more about a policy the employee retrieves information not from big bundles of paper on their desks, but rather from the organization’s memory using a ChatBot.

In 2017, Acuvate published a blog on top use cases of chatbots in the banking and finance industry. A lot has changed in these five years. They can guess the information we seek, suggest policies and initiatives, and are more convenient to use.

Here are 5 ways banks and financial institutions are using chatbots

1. Addressing Customer’s concerns

Unlike banking personnel, digital tools like websites are available for customers 24×7. To make it further easy for users, chatbots integrated into websites and mobile apps can answer the most common questions faster and with fewer clicks.

For example, reporting a hacking attempt, locking your account to stop a hacking attempt, or finding out more information about an unidentified debit would previously require the customer to log in to the website, search for the option, and take action. These are the most common tasks that a banking chatbot in the banking website or social media app can answer in just a few seconds. Since the app is on your mobile phone, verifying your credentials is easy. Here’s an example

The ambit of the operations a chatbot can perform has greatly widened these days with advancements in security systems and technologies. ChatBot interactions are now more personalized and natural.

2. Retaining old customers and expanding customer base

Customer engagement is beyond human interactions between customers and employees at the office. With more customers using digital tools like websites, apps embedded in mobile phones, and other personal digital assistants like Google Home or Alexa, each of these tools have ChatBots to answer customers and cater to their needs in time.

These tools simplify various processes and save time and effort. ChatBots are integral to all digital tools to engage with a large number of customers and provide personalized services. They define the quality of service and ease of operations a financial institution provides its customers.

For example, ChatBots identify new customers and present them with options of information they are more likely to seek. For older customers, ChatBots identify them, address them by their name, and with knowledge of their account details, they present a different set of actions for each of them. With advanced ChatBots, customers can’t say if they’re talking to a human or a digital assistant.

When embedded in IoT digital assistants like Alexa or Google Home, the latest advancements in NLP ( Natural Language Processing) technologies help the audio-based Chatbots provide a pleasant conversational experience to customers along with information they asked for and may be interested in.

3. Generating useful Marketing Leads

Modern ChatBots backed with Artificial Intelligence can build interest in a financial institution’s products and services. Chatbots are the perfect tools to implement digitalized marketing techniques to find new customers and sustain old ones. They are effective in keeping customers active by providing the convenience of being there for them always.

The ChatBots collect information from customers and provide them with information on various initiatives that are likely to interest them. This helps in identifying potential customers and in growing the customer base.

4. Recommendations and upselling

As the services of banking and financial institutions grew wider, it is important to let the right customers know about the right policies and initiatives. Intelligent digital systems like chatbots can more accurately identify interested customers. Chatbots make it easier to maintain customer profiles, identify who wants to buy other products, and get feedback on existing products and services.

Moreover, these Chatbots learn and adapt to situations. Hence they learn more about customers and get better and more accurate over time.

5. Personal Financial Assistant

Chatbots help users track their spending and receive a timely reminder of impending payments. Payments can be automated to avoid late fees. They do help customers refrain from overspending and provide regular reports of their expenses.

The information collected by chatbots can be used to profile customers based on their financial needs, status, and expenses. They especially make loan approvals and investment decisions easier and more manageable.

How to build the most reliable chatbots?

Chatbots reduce costs, no doubt, but that’s not the main advantage. They provide a better customer experience and make essential processes simpler. Every bank and the financial institution needs a chatbot.

However, these simple solutions are not so easy to build. As with any other financial system, since they involve sensitive information and must be error-free, they should be built with care and by trustable experts. Moreover, unlike physical assets, digital infrastructure like chatbots need to be updated continuously to address changing needs of customers and to stay relevant and competitive in the market.

BotCore - the powerful enterprise bot builder platform from Acuvate

Over the past few years, we have helped several enterprises build & launch bots to meet the needs of their employees, customers, and vendors. After observing several enterprise scenarios large landscape of user intents, and common pain points across various departments, we spent more than 15 person-years of research, design & development on building a highly flexible and powerful enterprise bot builder platform – “BotCore”.

BotCore is the perfect accelerator that enables banks and financial institutions to train, build, and launch customized conversational bots powered by artificial intelligence. Using “Cognitive Abstraction” it can leverage an AI service available today and are scalable for future services.

BotCore today powers chatbots at several Fortune 100 & large enterprises. To learn more about how Botcare can help your business in providing superior customer engagement, please mail us at

The post Top use cases of Chatbots in the Banking and Finance Industry appeared first on BotCore.

The DOs and DON’Ts of Conversational AI

Satheesh Kothakapu — Wed, 13 Jul 2022 06:27:43 +0000

The DOs and DON’Ts of Conversational AI

Conversational AI is an emerging market that is taking over the business world by storm. Indeed, interest in chatbots, voice bots, and other AI-driven virtual assistants is growing by leaps and bounds, so much so that the conversational AI market is expected to reach $18.02 billion by 2027, growing at a CAGR of 21.02%.

While chatbots and other digital assistants have immense potential to improve customer satisfaction (CSAT) levels, enhance employee engagement, empower organizations with exceptional experiences, and improve brand image, not every conversational AI project may prove to be successful.

That’s where an effective conversational AI design comes into the picture. Effective conversational AI design builds the user’s trust and boosts their confidence in the virtual assistant. It keeps them engaged and brings them back again and again.

When a user enters a chatbot, they may be apprehensive about the quality of interactions at first and whether the chatbot can resolve their issue. While chatbots automate conversations and offload human tasks, the discussions should still feel human and akin to having a one-on-one chat with the brand.

So, what are the dos and don’ts of conversational AI? What best practices can you keep in mind while designing and implementing a chatbot?

Let’s explore.

DOs and DON’Ts of Conversational AI

Here are some key chatbot considerations and DOs and DON’Ts that organizations must be mindful of –

1. Ask yourself — what purpose is my bot designed to serve?

While a chatbot can do many things for your organization, answering queries, executing simple tasks, or even pulling relevant information, it’s essential to ensure it achieves its actual purpose. Narrowing down the chatbot’s purpose can help the organization ensure that the scripts, content, and functions required to make the chatbot successful aren’t ambiguous. Answer questions like-

Am I designing my chatbot to promote self-service? If yes, do I know the common contact reasons and transactional issues that burden my contact center?
Do I have sufficient data to design an AI chatbot to solve queries and hold an end-to-end conversation?
Are there restrictions on what the chatbot can/cannot do?
What if the bot is unable to fulfill its role? Is there a backup plan for that?

It’s imperative to set the right expectations when it comes to what your chatbot is supposed to do. Moreover, in large organizations with several departments, considering the needs of all business divisions may be tough and lead to delays in time-to-market. Rather, deploying separate conversational AI solutions for disparate use cases will be the wiser option.

2. Choose the right platform and expertise.

Jumping into the world of conversational AI without the right expertise in your hands can be daunting and make the entire process extremely disorganized and uneconomical.

Instead of burdening your IT team with the responsibility of learning, designing, and optimizing conversational AI technology and embedding automated workflows, try choosing a conversational AI tool from a host of vendors available in the market.

Depending on your needs and intended use cases, you can either go for a custom solution, a specific service/functional offering, or else a platform-based approach.

A platform-based conversational AI offering leverages game-changing no-code or low-code solutions (LCAPs) that help non-technical users build, improve, and adjust apps based on needs with little or no coding.

3. Security and privacy are must-haves

Data privacy and cybersecurity are significant conversational AI implementation considerations. Since chatbots can handle sensitive customer information at times, incorporating robust security protocols is a “must-do.”

After all, a cyberattack on the PII of customers has an enormous financial impact and can significantly hamper the brand image of your organization.

Keep up with the latest security regulations in the conversational AI space, including any industry or location-specific requirements.
Before implementing the chatbot, run comprehensive penetration and API security tests.
Space out dispensing information based on the users’ authorization levels. Implement user, intent level, and channel authorization and privacy, and ensure end-to-end encryption.

4. Simplify. Simplify. Simplify

Keep it simple for the user. Design the chatbot to minimize the list of asks for the user.

Avoid unnecessary questions or overly wordy sentences.
Use directions like “Tap, yes to continue” or “Please select one option from below” to tell the user exactly what is required.
Design auto pop-ups that tell what the chatbot can do and gently nudge the customer to discuss his queries.
Earn user confidence by matching your bots to your brand’s tone and identity.

5. Human handoff is always key.

Forcing customers to interact with a chatbot in the name of modernizing IT, scaling operations, or reducing costs isn’t the best option. While providing an intelligent, natural language interface that simplifies problems, understands context, and allows users to speak to the bot on their own terms is the best option, it’s also necessary to build an escalation pathway that supports an effortless transition to a human agent.

So, when an issue arises beyond the bot’s scope, or if the customer seems irate (sensed through sentiment analysis) and willing to speak to a human agent only, the bot must be able to escalate the call to ensure quick resolutions seamlessly.

6. Never stop working on making your conversational AI solution better.

As conversational AI technology progresses and your organization needs mature responses to deal with different intent types, make sure your chatbot is equipped to harness user data and deliver more meaningful and personalized engagement.

If required, keep on adding new responses and natural language and machine learning capabilities to progressively make your bot better and more human-like.

7. Don’t forget to integrate your bot with existing systems and digital channels.

Integrations with backend and legacy systems, such as ERP, CRM, or databases, are essential if you want to provide seamless support to your customers or employees.

Conversational AI platforms when integrated with other systems can help in checking the status of orders to answering queries, address problems from diagnosing a problem to resolving issues quickly. Also, with the data from the systems the Conversational AI platform can provide valuable insights. So based on your use case, identify what integrations are a must for your case.

8. Don’t forget to check — How successful is my bot?

Goal completion rates, bounce rates, and customer satisfaction scores are great examples of significant metrics and KPIs that determine the success/failure of conversational AI implementation.

As a result of monitoring, organizations can continually develop better and more seamless experiences for users and build a winning conversational AI strategy.

Want to implement the best-in-class conversational AI technology? Talk to our experts.

At Acuvate, we help clients develop and deploy powerful chatbots, voice bots, and digital assistants, keeping in mind the DOs, DON’Ts, and must-haves of conversational AI.

Our enterprise bot-building platform, BotCore, uses top-notch AI and natural language processing technologies to build intelligent bots and support exceptional customer and employee experiences.

To know more, please feel free to schedule a personalized consultation with our experts.

The post The DOs and DON’Ts of Conversational AI appeared first on BotCore.

Conversational Commerce in various Social Channels

Abhishek Shanbhag — Wed, 06 Jul 2022 12:17:59 +0000

Conversational Commerce in various Social Channels

We live in an era where artificial intelligence (AI) has taken over every aspect of our being. And customer experience (CX) is not alien to it.

As the world embraces new-age customer experiences (CX) with open hands, warranting the delivery of hyper-personalized customer engagement to a more informed, connected, and empowered customer, organizations are left to deal with several questions and dilemmas.

After all, endless customer conversations are happening online on various social channels — Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Twitter — it’s challenging to cover every digital touchpoint and use the enormous amount of customer data it generates to fathom “what customers want.”

That’s where conversational commerce comes to the rescue. Powered by AI, conversational commerce solutions like chatbots, voice bots, and other digital assistants have enabled companies to render human-like customer interactions at scale. Conversational commerce apps on various social channels leverage the unending amount of customer data to analyze customer behavior, predict their needs to deliver proactive engagement, and provide more personalized support.

Let’s explore more.

Conversational commerce in various social channels - What can it do for your business?

“Human interaction matters now — 82% of U.S. and 74% of non-U.S. consumers want more of it in the future. Regardless, the technology supporting human interaction must be seamless and unobtrusive across channels,” stated PWC’s latest report, Experience is everything: Here’s how to get it right.

Conversational commerce solutions in the form of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp chatbots are making this a reality.

Conversational chat commerce, powered by advanced technologies like machine learning, artificial intelligence, and natural language processing, is the latest paradigm in the customer experience world that draws in huge investments from the C-suite leaders. Chat and voice bots available on various social channels are now being used to solve a host of simple and complex customer queries 24X7, understand customer emotions, store information about purchase history, discover patterns in their behavior, and act accordingly to achieve maximum customer satisfaction.

Modern customers live online. They may be awake at two at night, browsing for new products or even reaching out to customer support. And they may do so from their desired social channel, be it Messenger, WhatsApp, or Instagram. Moreover, they may want to switch channels amidst an ongoing support case, i.e., change from WhatsApp to Facebook. Here conversational commerce solutions take charge. Not only do they provide instant, round-the-clock customer support, but e-commerce bots can retain the original context of the conversation to allow seamless switching without the customer being asked to start over.

So, what are the use cases of conversational commerce? How can chat and voice bots present on various social channels delight customers and build value at each stage of the sales funnel?

Let’s find out.

Curating a personalized sales journey through conversational commerce

Below, we present to you the use cases of conversational commerce on various social channels that can help organizations tailor sales journeys and win the life-long loyalty of their customers.

Amplify reach to new customer segments by pushing alerts about new products, collecting customer preferences and behavior data, answering initial queries, and delivering personalized recommendations and tips.
Acquire customers by curating creative marketing campaigns on the most popular social channels, assisting customers with website navigation, payment, checkout, and product use, and tailoring product suggestions according to purchase history and past behavior.
Is this shirt available in a different color? When will I receive my package? Customers can get their queries addressed simply by approaching the brand’s chatbot on the social channel of their liking. In this way, not only customer support becomes more accessible, but brands also get hold of valuable information that can help personalize CX.
As and when the customer’s desired product becomes available, e-commerce bots can push notifications and alerts through various social channels and provide a CTA to “Buy Now.” It can also suggest alternative and supplementary products as the case may demand.
Collect customer feedback through Instagram and Facebook surveys on a test batch of a new product.
Curate loyalty programs and send personalized discount and reward coupons to encourage customers to share product ratings and feedback and develop long-lasting relationships.

Take a look at the type of conversations a bot can have with your customers.

A sneak peek into a few conversational commerce solutions on various social channels

At Acuvate, we help clients build and deploy bots on various social channels that consistently deliver exceptional CX with minimum friction or hassle with our enterprise bot-building platform called BotCore.

BotCore is a Microsoft Preferred Co-Sell-ready solution that leverages Microsoft’s best AI, machine learning (ML), and natural language processing (NLP) technologies.
Our conversational commerce solutions are deployable on popular social channels (WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, etc.) and support multiple languages, including German, French, Italian, English, etc.

Here are a few examples of how brands are using conversational commerce in various social channels to engage, inform, and support their customers.

1. POND’s SAL chatbot for Facebook Messenger

An FB Messenger bot, also available on webchat in different countries, POND’s SAL can be accessed through Unilever’s flagship store on Shopee. Using technologies like AI and augmented reality (AR), SAL interacts three-dimensionally with customers to deliver personalized and more immersive shopping experiences.

When a user uploads a selfie, SAL works on identifying critical skincare concerns across four significant areas, namely, pimples, wrinkles, spots, and uneven skin tone.

The bot also sends relevant skincare articles and beauty tips to keep the users engaged.

Having completed the skin analysis, SAL then recommends suitable products from POND’s according to the customer’s skin condition.

2. pRANA’s chatbot for Facebook Messenger

Sustainable clothing company prAna’s chatbot for Facebook Messenger uses a casual, friendly tone to help customers shop online or get the information they need.

The bot helps shoppers navigate through the online store by asking them to choose between options like “Shop Women’s, “Shop Men’s, or “Shop Best Sellers.” Moreover, the bot’s intuitive conversational AI interface gives the option to type a message or easily navigate to the previous menu.

3. BMW’s “Follow Now” chatbot on WhatsApp

To combat the massive inflow of service requests when summers and winters are approaching, BMW launched its “Follow Now” chatbot on WhatsApp to help customers book an appointment from the convenience of their home from an app they use every day.

The bot offers real-time updates on the service status of their car and intimates them when their cars are ready for pickup. Moreover, service assistants can intervene and answer certain queries if the bot isn’t able to answer those.

4. Clear’s Cera chatbot for Facebook Messenger

Clear is Unilever’s leading anti-dandruff shampoo brand. The company’s chatbot Cera, available for the Indonesian market on Facebook Messenger, acts as your go-to hair care assistant offering personalized hair diagnosis, advice, and product recommendations for dandruff, dry hair, oily hair, etc.

The bot proactively sends relevant articles to the users after analyzing their behavior, preferences, and needs and delivers answers to a range of frequently asked questions related to hair care.

5. Roma by Rochi’s chatbot for Instagram

Roma by Rochi is a popular fashion brand in Argentina that revolves around encouraging women to embrace their sense of style.

Though quite popular on Instagram from likes, comments, and story mentions, recently, the brand launched a digital assistant on the social media platform to assist with a “tag and like” giveaway.

Post the deployment of the bot; the brand experienced an astounding 82% increase in reach in one week and a whopping 741% rise in engagement.

The brand also has a Facebook Messenger bot, which they use to answer queries, upsell products, and notify customers when sales begin.

We, at Acuvate, can help clients across industries build engaging conversational commerce experiences in various social channels using our enterprise bot-building platform called BotCore. To know more, please feel free to schedule a personalized consultation with our AI experts.

The post Conversational Commerce in various Social Channels appeared first on BotCore.

Choosing your Conversational AI Platform

Abhishek Shanbhag — Thu, 30 Jun 2022 14:18:01 +0000

Choosing your Conversational AI Platform

With the growing popularity of conversational AI as a facilitator delivering instant, personalized, and meaningful engagement to customers and employees, the market is flooded with constantly evolving tools and solutions that make this a reality. In fact, conversational AI is expected to mature into a $1.3 billion market by 2025, with no signs of slowing down.

With much ado around AI and so many organizations embarking on their first conversational AI journey, choosing the right vendor for your needs can feel nothing less than looking for a needle in a haystack.

So, how do you select your vendor when making a foray into the world of conversational AI?

Let’s explore more.

conversational AI platform - Capabilities

Improving customer satisfaction scores and empowering employees with exceptional experiences are the ultimate motives of conversational AI. Hence, choosing capabilities that help achieve these goals is the foremost criteria to be considered when selecting your conversational AI platform.

Even though user interest in chatbots, voice bots, and other digital assistants has grown by leaps and bounds, not everyone knows how to identify and select the optimal type of conversational AI solution amongst the plethora of options in the market.

Based on immediate needs and preferred use cases, organizations may choose from a wide range of conversational AI implementation approaches in the chatbot market: custom solutions, platform offerings, and targeted service/functional offerings.

Custom Solution: Most suitable when deep technical customizations are needed to address unique business problems, a custom approach uses a complex framework of software development kits (SDKs) to build conversational AI platforms and bot solutions.
Specific service/functional offering: Often used to target a specific business problem or the needs of a particular service or function, such as sales enablement or IT service desk optimization, a specific service/functional offering is usually built on top of an existing enterprise application.
Platform-based approach: With a low-code, administrator-type GUI implementation and maintenance approach, platform-based conversational AI offers ease of use and a host of chatbot-building capabilities. The best part? A platform-based approach is uniquely versatile because it provides intuitive, low-code, template-based options to build and edit chatbot applications while offering complex, custom solutions built leveraging APIs and SDKs.

Irrespective of the approach you select, here is our 101 on some of the critical capabilities that define a next-generation artificial-intelligence-based conversational platform. However, please remember that not all conversational AI projects require all the functionalities, and leaders must always consider the requirements and capabilities needed to address those.

1. Ease of use with low-code platforms

Building and deploying a conversational AI platform is only 50% of the job done. As business needs evolve, it is essential to maintain and upgrade your conversational AI platform accordingly.

Business users inside your company must have a handhold over managing and improving existing virtual agents. In line with this need, more and more vendors are offering low-code platforms that allow employees without technical skills or coding knowledge to upgrade their chatbots quickly or even build new ones.

These platforms also offer predefined templates & reusable content such as domain-specific small talk and intents that expedite the bot-building process for both pro and citizen developers alike and accelerate the time-to-market.

2. Exceptional UX

A chatbot’s UX describes its accessibility, usability, and the pleasure derived from interacting with it. While a conversational AI platform must understand and execute a user’s request with a bare number of questions asked, interactions must always feel natural and human-like.

Your chosen conversational AI platform must possess best-in-class machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) technologies, along with intent and identity-defining technologies, maintenance tools, testing and version management, channel-based personalization, dialog management, and sentiment analysis.

Moreover, not every customer may be willing to speak to a bot in matters that are highly sensitive. So, if an issue goes beyond the bot’s scope, or if the customer seems dissatisfied or irritated and willing to talk to a human agent only, the conversational AI platform must offer the option to quickly take an escalation pathway and transition the case to a human agent.

3. Omnichannel presence and multilingual proficiency

You would want to be where your customers are. Therefore, ensure your vendor supports the channels where your customer is, and their platform is capable of quickly adapting to emerging channels when need be.

A platform that builds a single chatbot optimized for multiple channels, including email, IVR, web, and messaging applications, and can optimize bots to engage with voice, text, and multimodal channels would be best suited to any organization’s needs.

Moreover, a vital capability of any conversational AI platform would be the possibility of building bots that can remember critical details from past conversations, comprehend both simple and complex conversations layered with twists, turns, and entity changes, and enable users to switch channels without losing context.

Additionally, conversational AI platforms that support multiple languages (i.e., possess multilingual capabilities) like German, French, Italian, English, etc., would allow you to expand to global markets, serve customers from different geographies, and ensure employees in all parts of the world are satisfied and highly engaged with the organization.

4. Integrations with the client’s existing tech stack

No matter what approach you choose, your conversational AI platform must support integrations with your backend and legacy systems, including ERP, CRM, billing tools, live-chat and routing applications, and helpdesks.

Not only will such integrations provide the necessary data that is the heart and soul of conversational AI, but they will also help export and import entities, pull out relevant information for the user, and build conversational flows that automate a host of simple and complex processes and workflows (robotic process automation).

5. Reporting, analytics, and security

Last but certainly not least, your chosen conversational AI platform must support GUI-type dashboards, visualizations, and programmatic capabilities that generate custom reports on the chatbot’s functioning.

To build better and more seamless experiences for both customers and employees, organizations must monitor, study, and leverage data analytics and key KPIs and metrics, including goal completion rates, customer satisfaction scores, and bounce rates.

Additionally, platform administration and privacy functions offer robust security features in terms of the ability to manage user accounts and platform access. Such functionalities enable organizations to meet compliance requirements, protect PII, and prevent data intrusion.

How can Acuvate help?

Looking for a conversational AI platform? We are here to tell you what’s best suited for your needs.

At Acuvate, we follow a platform-based approach to help clients build and deploy chat and voice bots to provide exceptional customer and employee experiences with our enterprise bot-building platform, BotCore.

As a Microsoft Gold Partner, we leverage the best of Microsoft’s AI technologies that arm bots with powerful, futuristic functionalities like Knowledge Graphs, context management, dialog builders, machine learning, and an advanced NLP engine.

What’s more, you can offer customers and employees the convenience of interacting in the language of their choice with 90+ languages.

A low-code platform, BotCore can be deployed both on-cloud and on-premise and offers integrations with 100+ enterprise systems, including Office365, PowerBI, Oracle, SAP, and many more.

To know more about BotCore, please feel free to schedule a personalized consultation with our experts.

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