Artificial Intelligence (AI) Archives - BotCore https://botcore.ai/blog/category/artificial-intelligence/ Enterprise Chatbot Fri, 15 Mar 2024 09:21:11 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.6.1 https://botcore.ai/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/cropped-favicon-32x32-1-70x70.png Artificial Intelligence (AI) Archives - BotCore https://botcore.ai/blog/category/artificial-intelligence/ 32 32 Power Virtual Agents & Power Automate – Truly Powerful! https://botcore.ai/blog/power-virtual-agents-power-automate/ Wed, 23 Nov 2022 13:09:00 +0000 https://botcore.ai/?p=5917 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 […]

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

]]>

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.

]]>
Choosing your Conversational AI Platform https://botcore.ai/blog/choosing-conversational-ai-platform/ Thu, 30 Jun 2022 14:18:01 +0000 https://botcore.ai/?p=10355 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, […]

The post Choosing your Conversational AI Platform appeared first on BotCore.

]]>

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. 

The post Choosing your Conversational AI Platform appeared first on BotCore.

]]>
Transforming The Retail Experience with Metaverse and Virtual assistants https://botcore.ai/blog/retail-experience-with-metaverse-and-virtual-assistants/ Fri, 10 Jun 2022 13:30:00 +0000 https://botcore.ai/?p=10315 Transforming The Retail Experience with Metaverse and Virtual assistants Metaverse is the next big thing for retail! Everyone is talking about it. And why not? The global pandemic has brought us closer to the digital world like never before, throwing us into the exciting new world of augmented and virtual reality. While metaverse is the […]

The post Transforming The Retail Experience with Metaverse and Virtual assistants appeared first on BotCore.

]]>

Transforming The Retail Experience with Metaverse and Virtual assistants

Metaverse is the next big thing for retail! Everyone is talking about it. And why not? The global pandemic has brought us closer to the digital world like never before, throwing us into the exciting new world of augmented and virtual reality.

While metaverse is the new buzzword globally, few understand it and its unlimited opportunity to help brands create unique experiences for their customers. So, what is metaverse?

According to Gartner, “Metaverse is a collective virtual open space, created by the convergence of virtually enhanced physical and digital reality. It is physically persistent and provides enhanced immersive experiences.” 

While still in its nascent stages, the concept of metaverse has caught the eye of tech giants, including the likes of Facebook and Microsoft. It’s the next big technology platform, with technology leaders, social networks, online game makers, and most importantly, big fashion brands vying to capture a piece of what experts predict to be an $800 billion market opportunity. 

By 2026, 25% of people will spend at least one hour a day in the Metaverse for shopping, education, social media, work, and entertainment. 

Here’s looking at how popular retail brands are leveraging the metaverse to drive more engaging and immersive experiences for their customers.

Dyson came with its virtual store to allow users to try out its products on a variety of hair types.  After logging into Dyson’s virtual store, customers can use its VR demo to style their hair in the metaverse or look deeply inside the products to understand their technology.

Popular sportswear brand Nike built Nikeland, its own metaverse studio, to turn sport and play into a lifestyle. Nikeland’s surroundings match the buildings and fields inside Nike’s real-life headquarters. 

What’s more, you can dress up your Nikeland digital avatar in classic Nike apparel and staple footwear like the Air Force 1, Nike Blazer, ACG, Nike Tech Pack, and Air Force 1.

Visitors can play games such as dodgeball, the floor is lava, and tag inside the virtual world. Creators can also develop their own mini-games using interactive sports materials.

Since Metaverse is the sum of all virtual worlds, including augmented reality, the internet, and other technologies, it undoubtedly encompasses tons of data generated by artificial intelligence (AI) that needs to be collected, analyzed, and leveraged for accelerated innovation.

In this blog, we’ll talk about online retail, one of the most upcoming and potentially game-changing use cases of AI-enabled virtual assistants in the metaverse of tomorrow.

Personalized Shopping Experiences with Virtual Assistants in Metaverse

The ability to shop in the metaverse is the next big retail trend. And leading retail brands are jumping on this bandwagon. With the integration of conversational AI technologies such as virtual assistants and voice bots, brands are now looking to offer interactive, real-time, and more immersive digital shopping experiences.

Imagine living in New York and trying on that pretty red dress from a Paris-based clothing brand virtually through a 3D fitting room or taking a thrilling test drive to buy your next car in virtual reality. Or try out the latest accessories, the coolest new sunglasses, or the trending makeup products. While it’s your virtual avatar doing that for you, you wouldn’t mind it considering your newfound ability to access global retail brands while sitting in the comfort of your living room.

That’s where the metaverse has the potential to take the world of retail. The integration of AI-powered virtual assistants and conversational AI bots allows brands to track customer activity, purchase behavior, and demographic profiles, learn from prior patterns, and leverage this data to provide more personalized product recommendations and encourage purchase.

Here’s how metaverse is making all this possible.

1. Shop beyond space and time with your virtual AI avatar

To tap into the unlimited potential of the metaverse, many brands are investing millions to make this vision a reality. Or should we say “virtual reality?” Pun intended. The virtual shopping experience involves 3D digital avatars that would help users interact with other 3D digital objects and digital humans in the virtual world. These digital humans are virtual sales assistants, who assist users (or, to put it in better words, their virtual avatars) with online shopping, guide them through the brand’s online store, provide advice, and hand-hold them throughout the sales process.

Customers (i.e., their virtual avatars) can try out products, check out discounts and offers, and pick out items for purchase.

Naturally, these digital humans are voice bots designed to ease the process of searching and buying products and ensure virtual shopping feels natural and frictionless, screaming out convenience for users. 

These virtual assistants have conversational AI capability that helps them understand an intent, carry on human-like conversations with users, and provide truly immersive and engaging human-like experiences in the virtual world.

What’s more, you can customize your virtual/ 3D digital avatars to render them human-like features and make them look like you, be it hair, makeup, or clothing. In fact, some brands solely design clothes to be worn only by avatars in the metaverse.

2. Generate personalized product recommendations in virtual reality

AI-powered virtual assistants can analyze, understand, and learn the users’ preferences and shopping habits and generate unique product recommendations and buying tips based on such data.

Let’s take a quick example. Outfit generator apps will be the next breakthrough in the metaverse, providing unparalleled shopping experiences in the virtual world. Advanced AI technologies will help create virtual wardrobes, wherein users can put their existing clothes and get personalized outfit recommendations, exposing them to completely new and unique shopping experiences.

How Can Acuvate Help?

We are a global player in next-gen digital services and consulting, Acuvate leverages next-gen technologies to build chatbots, voice bots, custom apps, and workflows that increase business efficiencies and support collaboration, information orchestration, and intelligent analysis.

If your company is new to the metaverse, it would be wise to understand the vast opportunities the technology is prospected to offer. We, at Acuvate, can help you take baby steps into the metaverse and help you explore retail experiences and environments from different industries in the virtual world.  

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

The post Transforming The Retail Experience with Metaverse and Virtual assistants appeared first on BotCore.

]]>
Top Voice Bot Use Cases In Different Industries https://botcore.ai/blog/top-voice-bot-use-cases-in-different-industries/ Tue, 24 May 2022 09:15:00 +0000 https://botcore.ai/?p=10272 Top Voice Bot Use Cases In Different Industries A few years back, voice search and voice-based assistants were more a novelty than common parlance. With the advent of more powerful AI, natural language processing (NLP), and speech recognition technologies, AI-based voice search and voice support have come to the forefront in various industrial use cases. […]

The post Top Voice Bot Use Cases In Different Industries appeared first on BotCore.

]]>

Top Voice Bot Use Cases In Different Industries

A few years back, voice search and voice-based assistants were more a novelty than common parlance. With the advent of more powerful AI, natural language processing (NLP), and speech recognition technologies, AI-based voice search and voice support have come to the forefront in various industrial use cases. Statista research shows a whopping 154% jump in the voice AI market share is expected from 2020 to 2026.

Voice bots and other voice-based assistants have taken conversational AI and traditional IVR to the next level. Powered by advanced AI and NLP technologies, voice bots allow consumers to communicate with the bot in natural speech and have them respond in their own natural voice. They analyze the linguistics and intent behind the user’s request and respond accordingly, be it answering queries, delivering on a request, or pulling essential information for the user.

Convenience is the name of the game when it comes to voice bots. Indeed, customers’ have a natural tendency to prefer voice over chat support, especially in times of a crisis, simply because speaking is faster and more hassle-free than typing. 2022’s voice statistics reveal almost 50% of all searches in 2022 are done speaking.

Moreover, by personalizing voice bots according to a brand’s identity, organizations can elevate employee experience, scale-up employee support, reduce costs, and potentially set the company apart from competitors.

Voice bots play different roles in different industries, be it healthcare, banking, insurance, or eCommerce. Let’s take a closer look.

Unique Voice Bot Use Cases for Various Industries

Unique Voice Bot Use Cases For Various Industries

U.S Bank launched an AI-enabled Smart Voice Assistant embedded in its Android and iOS app to allow users to carry out banking requests using conversational language.

Acting as a digital bank teller, the AI voice bot starts listening when a customer taps on the microphone button in the app. It then enables customers to pull up bills and spending history, carry out transfers, and manage credit cards.

Most recently, the bank has debuted a Spanish-speaking version of this voice assistant. Users can use this feature simply by changing the U.S. Bank mobile app language preference to Spanish.

So let’s explore some of the other popular use cases of voice bots in different industries.

Healthcare

Consumers’ interactions with healthcare services have dramatically shifted amidst the rise in demand during the COVID-19 pandemic. Research by voicebot.ai found that just 7.5% of U.S. adults had used a voice assistant for a healthcare need v.s. 21% in 2021.

Voice bots augment the way healthcare is administered today. By handling both various routine tasks, voice bots have paved the way for more efficient telehealth services, some of which include the following

  • Scheduling doctor appointments
  • Pre and post-surgery check-up calls
  • Preliminary health analysis and initial health assessment
  • Symptom triage and diagnosis
  • Accurate and reliable healthcare information
  • First aid and emergency tips
  • Healthy nutrition advice
  • Reminders for appointments and prescription refills
  • Accessible reports and test results

Banking

AI-enabled voice bots have revolutionized the banking sector as well, answering queries quickly and helping customers seamlessly execute routine banking functions, thus taking the burden off the customer support staff.

Voice bots carry out secure, encrypted conversations in natural language, ensuring customers receive the most accurate information and get transactions completed without compromising on security, speed, privacy, or quality.

Voice bots fulfill the following functions within the banking and financial services industry

  • Manage credit cards
  • Pull up past billing and spending history
  • Provide tailored financial tips depending on customer profile
  • Perform critical transactions, such as transfers, blocking a lost card, etc.
  • Assess the risk appetite of customers
  • Recommend suitable financial products for clients
  • Make reminder and follow-up calls for debt collection and loan repayments and gather information about the probable date and mode of payment.

As part of its digital-first organic growth strategy, Kotak Mahindra Bank in India launched Keya, an AI-powered voice bot in the banking sector that augments the phone-banking helpline and traditional IVR.

Customers needn’t go through the complex menu and myriad options offered on the IVR. Instead, they just need to give a single command. Built on advanced AI and speech recognition technologies, Keya understands and verifies the caller’s intent, thus ensuring accurate routing, speedy resolution, and improved customer satisfaction.

Insurance

A few months back, Edelweiss General Insurance (EGI) launched an AI voice bot to enable hassle-free, real-time registration of motor claims 24X7. Available in three languages, the voice bot answers any questions registered by garage representatives and routes complex queries to EGI agents, besides being a claims assistant.

EGI’s voice assistant makes insurance easy, superior, and seamless.

  • Guiding users step-by-step through processes like filing insurance claims, making payments, etc.
  • Automate routine information collection for customers by integrating with the CRM, customer databases, etc.
  • Sending timely reminders for policy renewal and payment of premiums.
  • Update customers on processed payments and activated policies.
  • Collect customer feedback

Retail and Conversational Commerce

Communicating via voice is the most natural and flexible way of human interactions. And eCommerce brands have surely picked this up quickly. Voice bots can analyze purchase history, understand customer preferences and past behavior, and proactively recommend suitable products.

Users can even ask the bot to suggest complementary products, explain product specifications, and help with order management. Assisting with return/exchange, tracking order status, and sending delivery updates and reorder reminders are some of the most common use cases of voice bots in e-commerce.

What’s more, users can offer product feedback or request product support, and the voice bots can seamlessly automate time-consuming queries, ensuring shoppers get quick, personalized, and round-the-cloud service. 

Flipkart, an Indian eCommerce brand acquired by Walmart, has launched a voice assistant on its mobile app that allows customers to order groceries in the language of their choice, English or Hindi. Owing to its ability to comprehend different languages, colloquial terms, and mixed-language commands, Flipkart has made buying groceries as easy as shopping from a local store.

Walmart has developed a voice assistant for employees at more than 5,000 Walmarts in the US. The “Ask Sam” voice assistant answers employees’ queries about locations and prices, sends alerts about emergencies and policy changes, and helps managers broadcast the latest company updates.

Manufacturing

Voice bots for manufacturing play a significant role in streamlining operations at the factory level or on the field, resulting in improved efficiency, reduced man-hours, and enhanced employee experience.

Voice bots connect to the backend manufacturing systems for direct input and quick retrieval of data. Moreover, they can help synchronize operations by easing the communication between different departments and functions.

Additionally, some companies have taken AI-powered voice automation to the next stage by providing a hands-free connection to the plant equipment, making it an IoT-enabled manufacturing plant.

BSH, a leading European home appliances manufacturer, implemented a voice control solution that allowed workers to operate heavy machinery hands-free by speaking into a headset connected to an embedded voice recognition system. The technology supports various languages and accents.

Voice automation helped the company increase production line efficiency, improve ergonomics, and reduce yearly manufacturing costs.

How can Acuvate help?

As the world moves towards voice technologies, it is evident that voice bots are the future of customer service and employee experience in various industries and are set to deliver exceptional engagement and impressive ROI.

Acuvate helps clients in several industries develop voice bots for several use cases with our enterprise-bot building platform called BotCore. Additionally, as a Microsoft Gold Partner, we leverage Microsoft’s low-code platform, Power Virtual Agents, Azure AI services, and powerful machine learning (ML) and NLP technologies to build bots that provide human-like support and positively impact user experience.

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

You can also learn more about the advantages and essential capabilities of a voice bot here..

The post Top Voice Bot Use Cases In Different Industries appeared first on BotCore.

]]>
Total Experience in the Age of Conversational AI Platforms https://botcore.ai/blog/total-experience-in-conversational-ai-platforms/ Wed, 18 May 2022 12:41:00 +0000 https://botcore.ai/?p=10254 Total Experience in the Age of Conversational AI Platforms This new decade that began with the COVID-19 pandemic ushered in an era of business experiences that are mobile, remote, and digital-centric. The keywords here being “experiences” and “digital.” Yes, we are in the midst of a business environment that feeds on experiences that empower, driven […]

The post Total Experience in the Age of Conversational AI Platforms appeared first on BotCore.

]]>

Total Experience in the Age of Conversational AI Platforms

This new decade that began with the COVID-19 pandemic ushered in an era of business experiences that are mobile, remote, and digital-centric. The keywords here being “experiences” and “digital.”

Yes, we are in the midst of a business environment that feeds on experiences that empower, driven by social, cultural, and economic changes. And yes, “digital” is the fodder fuelling these experiences. So, putting it in simpler words, the quality of the digital experiences businesses deliver to their customers is foundational to their success in today’s landscape.

After all, products and services are commodities that can be easily imitated and lose their differentiating value in the long run. But it’s the emotions and feelings that customers take away that matter the most and create memorable brands at the end of the day.

But, it’s not just about the customers anymore. To create exceptional experiences, it is vital to focus on providing meaningful employee experiences. After all, fulfilling even a minor customer request requires coordination amongst different departments at the workplace. A great employee experience makes it easier for employees to do their jobs and serve customers better. Moreover, it is only an engaged, motivated, and enthusiastic workforce that would work towards reaching outstanding CSAT scores.

Hence, intelligent, future-oriented organizations understand that they cannot separate customer (CX) and employee experience (EX) strategies into silos anymore. As important as it is for CX and EX to function outside the formerly created vacuum, it is equally vital to strengthen “experience” strategies with thoughtful user experiences (UX) and flexible multi-experiences (MX).

As put forth by leading analyst firm Gartner, “MX, UX, CX, and EX (or, simply “total experience”) are inextricably intertwined in the digital experience economy.”

In its latest report, “Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2022,” Gartner defines total experience (TX) as “a business strategy that integrates employee experience, customer experience, user experience, and multi-experience across multiple touchpoints to accelerate growth.”

Through holistic management of the expectations of various stakeholders, including customers, employees, suppliers, and vendors, TX boosts confidence, satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy.

So, how can an organization optimize experiences for its customers, employees, and other stakeholders?

The simple answer lies in enhancing the everyday interactions that make up a considerable chunk of a typical day at work. And mature conversational AI technologies and platforms can play a significant role in this.

Let’s explore further.

Understanding Total Experience from an Organizational Perspective

By 2024, Gartner estimates that organizations providing TX will outperform competitors by 25% in satisfaction metrics for both CX and EX. Additionally, by 2026, 60% of large enterprises are expected to employ a total experience strategy to transform their business models and achieve “world-class customer and employee advocacy levels,” in which both groups are motivated to promote the corporate brand.

So, what is total experience from an organizational perspective? TX consists of the following four components 

  • Customer Experience (CX) – Customers’ interactions and feelings about a brand
  • Employee Experience (EX) – Employees’ interactions, perceptions, and engagement with the company
  • User Experience (UX) – How a user feels after interacting with your product or service. Measured in terms of KPIs like error rate, abandonment rate, success rate, etc.
  • Multi-Experience (MX) – Delivering seamless and consistent experiences on multiple touchpoints, devices, and modalities.

Jason Wong, a distinguished VP analyst at Gartner, rightly stated, “While excellence in one area is valuable, the organization as a whole can be further strengthened if these four disciplines are intertwined as a Total experience (TX) strategy so that they mutually reinforce one another.”

As discussed above, everyday business interactions amongst the different stakeholders, including customers, employees, support agents, suppliers, and vendors, drive overall experience management in any organization.

These stakeholders demand new-world experiences that are A) personalized, B) consistent, C) resolution-driven, and D) enable faster decision-making. Often, these interactions are routine and repetitive, leaving massive room to automate and optimize them using the latest technologies. Additionally, even though managing individual stakeholder experiences may be effortless, problems arise at the points where they intersect.

With an explosion of interactions taking place across different channels, how can organizations deliver new-world experiences for everyone at scale and ensure seamless TX? Moreover, most prevailing digital technologies in the workplace fail to understand the context and respond conversationally to customer and employee queries, consequently increasing human dependencies and operational costs.

The solution lies in deploying AI-first conversational technologies that work in tandem with chatbots, voice bots, and other virtual assistants to offer contextual, meaningful, and personalized engagement to customers and employees, and a rich user experience with real-time alerts, nudges, and contextual information.

Conversational AI Platforms for Total Experience (TX)

Conversational Ai Platforms For Total Experience

An integrated conversational AI platform brings CX and UX together by helping users build automated workflows and deliver intelligent conversations that delight customers and engage employees.

Conversational AI platforms ensure a robust total experience (TX) by integrating powerful UX and MX and building intelligent virtual assistants and chatbots that provide user-friendly, consistent, multilingual experiences across numerous social, messaging, web, and voice channels.

Customer Experience

Chatbots and voice bots deliver exceptional, quick, personalized, and resolution-driven customer support. These bots leverage powerful AI, machine learning (ML), and natural language processing (NLP) capabilities to understand customer sentiment, learn from past customer behavior, and recommend the right products based on their interests, activities, and profiles.

Employee Experience

A conversational AI platform can make employees’ lives easier by building chatbot personas for every need. Be it HR, IT helpdesk, business intelligence (BI), or the intranet, employee-facing bots answer simple and complex queries, perform day-to-day tasks, and fetch relevant information.

Additionally, agent assist bots simplify the access to the CRM system and knowledge base for agents, providing contextual information and suggestions about the customers in the middle of interactions.

User Experience

A chatbot’s UX comprises its usability, accessibility, and the pleasure of interacting with it. Enhancing these three aspects constitutes an exceptional user experience. Simply put, the faster the bot is able to understand and execute the user’s request, the better will be the UX.

With the latest advancements in machine learning (ML), natural language processing (NLP), and natural language understanding (NLU) technologies, a conversational AI platform can ensure users have a seamless, natural, human-like conversations with customers and employees, understand their needs better and quicker, and offer maximum support by asking the bare minimum number of questions.

Multi-experience

Conversational AI platforms allow users to experience personalized engagement across multiple channels (social, web, voice, etc.), through multiple devices (mobile, desktop, smart speakers, etc.), and across multiple languages (multilingual functionality).

How Can Acuvate Help?

Acuvate is a Microsoft Gold Partner that helps clients build intelligent chat and voice bots using its enterprise bot-building platform called BotCore. Powered by Microsoft Azure and AI technologies and armed with advanced, future-ready functionalities like Knowledge Graphs, context management, dialog builders, machine learning, and a superior NLP engine, BotCore is used by 150+ customers across industries for a range of customer and employee use cases.

What’s more, you can offer customers the convenience of conversational IVR support with text-to-speech bots and the option to interact in the language of their choice with 90+ languages.

It is a low-code platform that can be deployed both on-cloud and on-premise and provides integrations with 100+ enterprise systems, including Office365, PowerBI, Oracle, SAP, and much more.

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

The post Total Experience in the Age of Conversational AI Platforms appeared first on BotCore.

]]>
Conversational Commerce – The Next Big Thing in Customer Experience https://botcore.ai/blog/conversational-commerce-use-cases-benefits/ Tue, 29 Mar 2022 09:58:00 +0000 https://botcore.ai/?p=10210 Conversational Commerce – The Next Big Thing in Customer Experience Modern-day online brand experience is all about having meaningful conversations to help customers cut through the clutter. Reports suggest that 86% of shoppers expect a quick, personalized experience when interacting with any business online. Therefore, across the globe, organizations have been swiftly changing gears and […]

The post Conversational Commerce – The Next Big Thing in Customer Experience appeared first on BotCore.

]]>

Conversational Commerce – The Next Big Thing in Customer Experience

Modern-day online brand experience is all about having meaningful conversations to help customers cut through the clutter. Reports suggest that 86% of shoppers expect a quick, personalized experience when interacting with any business online. Therefore, across the globe, organizations have been swiftly changing gears and deploying conversational AI to increase engagement on their online platforms. Conversational commerce, thus, has taken the spotlight and has emerged as a driving force for businesses. A new-age technique, conversational commerce, refers using of AI-powered conversational tools, enabling them to initiate and sustain online dialogue with their customers. This dialogue essentially aims to assist customers throughout their purchase journey, leading to higher sales volumes. Some of the conversation tools actively deployed by organizations worldwide are live chat, chatbots, voice bots, voice assistants, or digital messaging. Their use facilitates seamless two-way communication between the brand and the customer.

Interestingly, conversational commerce has made its way into multiple customer-facing industries, including e-commerce, food delivery, travel, healthcare, and banking, among others. For example, a growing number of restaurants now use voice command functionality to receive orders. Also, food delivery apps such as Zomato and Swiggy offer in-app chat services to help customers place orders, check delivery status and resolve complaints. In healthcare, voice bots are being deployed to efficiently manage patient records, schedule appointments, and much more.

Clearly, conversational commerce can make a great deal of difference to an online store or business. A recent report suggests that businesses making the correct use of conversational commerce are witnessing an increased annual revenue by 7-25%.

How Brands Are Leveraging Conversational Commerce – The Key Use Cases

Brands have been using conversational commerce in unique ways throughout the user journey. Here are some of the essential use cases.

Product Discovery

Any brand or e-commerce website typically has plenty of items listed. Often, this confuses the customer, making it difficult for them to make a choice.  However, with conversational commerce in place, customers are served with accurate information on products, making it easy to arrive at a decision. Well, it goes like this – the customer explains the product requirements to a chatbot or a virtual assistant, who then instantly gathers and furnishes the required information based on the customer’s individual preferences. This increases the likelihood of a purchase being made.

Product Recommendations

Consumers often seek recommendations from a business, which is clear from a study that reveals 91% of consumers are more likely to shop with brands that offer product recommendations. As a chatbot efficiently processes the customer requirements, it provides them with personalized recommendations, which helps consumers in leading their way forward in their purchase journey. For businesses, it is also a great way to up-sell or cross-sell products. According to a report, 49% of consumers are willing to buy additional products if their online shopping experience is personalized.

Omnichannel Experiences and Cross-Channel Re-engagement

An online store typically has a presence on multiple online platforms. The strength of conversational commerce is that a consumer can initiate an interaction with the brand on any one platform and continue the same on some other channel. Yes, the chatbot picks up the conversation precisely from where it is left, thus assuring constant and seamless support in an omnichannel environment.

Seamless Transactions

Conversational commerce allows businesses to focus on the transaction and make it more effective. Push notifications, updates on sales, and order status can be sent via messaging apps. This frees the customer service agents, who could now easily take up other urgent, high-value tasks/ issues.

Customer Support

Globally, 86% of online shoppers seek proactive customer support, either before or after-sales. Since chatbots function round the clock, consumers can connect with a brand whenever needed and receive timely, seamless support.

Customer Retention and Loyalty

Unparalleled customer assistance and support can pave the way for incredible, long-lasting customer relationships. As a chatbot engages with the customer and even offers extended offers and discounts, it delivers customer delight. A happy and satisfied customer would eventually start trusting a brand and stick to it for long. According to HubSpot, 90% of customers are willing to make repeat purchases from the businesses they love.

Conversational Commerce – The Top Three Benefits

The rapid growth of conversational commerce means that brands and customers are equally benefitting from its capabilities. Here we highlight some of these benefits.

Excellent Real-Time Customer Support

With conversational AI becoming a part of our daily lives, customers have come to expect a similar experience from the brands they interact with online. A customer could require support from a business during multiple stages of their purchase journey. From choosing a product to making the final payment, and anything in between, the benefits for real-time support cannot be overstated. With a conversational AI-enabled virtual assistant, customers are assured of seamless, real-time support and assistance.

High Conversion Rates and ROI

As virtual assistants actively engage with customers, the customer is never lost in your online store. Conversations with chatbots help them move closer to their final purchase. Information on discounts and offers provided through a live chat platform also plays a vital role in influencing their purchase decisions. More importantly, conversational commerce can help you achieve higher average order value on your store with techniques like product recommendations, upselling, and cross-selling. Conversions and ticket values get a boost, creating a win-win proposition for your brand store.

Lower Cart Abandonment

Cart abandonment is reasonably common in the world of e-commerce. A staggering average of 70% of customers engage in cart abandonment, which means almost 7 out of 10 customers do not complete their purchases; they tend to drop off after filling carts with desired items. Though the reasons for this behavior could be plenty, one thing is certainly clear – assistance can make a lot of difference, as in the case of physical retail stores. Conversational commerce helps customers complete their purchases by providing incentives and triggers at the right moments. AI-powered chatbots initiate human-like conversations to understand preferences, answer product queries, inform stock availability, check-out, payment, shipping details, and more. If a customer’s cart is lying unattended, a virtual assistant sends a reminder message or shares a promo coupon, which prompts them to finish their purchase. Reports suggest that using a virtual assistant reduces cart abandonment rates by 20-30%.

Looking Ahead

Conversational commerce is poised to become a force to reckon with in any and every customer-facing industry sector. The global conversational commerce market is set to grow from USD 6.8 billion in 2021 to a staggering USD 18.4 billion by 2026 – 3X growth in half a decade! Let that sink in.

Today’s customer is even willing to pay extra for a great experience. So, brands and businesses looking to deliver great experiences cannot afford to miss out on the phenomenon that is conversational commerce.

Let’s keep the conversations going! Talk to our chatbot experts to know more about Conversational AI and how it can help your business.

The post Conversational Commerce – The Next Big Thing in Customer Experience appeared first on BotCore.

]]>
How can sales bots boost revenue? https://botcore.ai/blog/sales-chatbot-boosts-revenue/ Tue, 15 Mar 2022 06:59:00 +0000 https://botcore.ai/?p=10185 How can sales chatbots boost revenue? The COVID-19 pandemic has established a new normal in the way customers interact with brands. With the dramatic increase in online shopping and rapid digitization, customer expectations have pivoted drastically. Customers now want brands to engage with them across multiple devices and channels while upholding the need for a […]

The post How can sales bots boost revenue? appeared first on BotCore.

]]>

How can sales chatbots boost revenue?

The COVID-19 pandemic has established a new normal in the way customers interact with brands. With the dramatic increase in online shopping and rapid digitization, customer expectations have pivoted drastically. Customers now want brands to engage with them across multiple devices and channels while upholding the need for a personalized, contextual experience at every touchpoint.

In line with changing customer expectations, brands have adopted AI-powered chatbots to deliver the personalization customers wish for, drive loyalty and retention, and boost revenue.

Research by Inside Intercom found that sales are the most common use of chatbots, with 41% of respondents saying they use their chatbots for sales activities. 67% of respondents in the retail industry claimed they were satisfied with their chatbot investments. Chatbots increased sales by an average of 67%, with 26% of all sales starting through a chatbot interaction.

Indeed, chatbots boost revenue by automating every stage of the sales funnel, generating overall business value, streamlining activities across sales and production, and helping sales personnel deliver seamless customer engagement throughout their journey with the brand.

Moreover, bots help the sales team simplify operations and increase productivity. Sales chatbots ingest data from various LoB systems, interact with the sales team using a conversational interface, and quickly provide the most relevant information for faster decision-making. Moreover, they can push alerts regarding business-critical KPIs such as revenue, stocks, etc., to help the sales team streamline sales-related activities and boost revenue.

Research by Mckinsey showed that 75% of people using digital channels for the first time will continue to use them when things return to “normal.” Consequently, organizations worldwide have started adopting sales bots to boost revenue.

Let’s explore further.

Common use cases of sales chatbots

There are many ways chatbots help sales teams improve customer-centricity and increase revenue.

Sales chatbots can act as the first line of communication between businesses and their customers and offer personalized, engaging content in multiple languages, turning customers into delighted brand advocates and allowing the sales team to focus on pertinent issues requiring immediate action.

Let’s have a look.

1. Generate qualified leads by understanding the customer better

Chatbots embedded on your brand’s website can engage with visitors, ask a predefined set of questions, understand the prospect’s intent, and collect demographic information such as name, email, phone number, etc., to qualify leads for further nurturing.

Furthermore, they can trace website visitors’ browsing patterns and search history to understand their profile and needs and decide if they could be potential customers.

2. Engage customers with personalized product recommendations

Based on the information collected and the browsing history, sales bots can push suitable products, guide users to the specific product pages, blogs, and videos, and offer detailed information about the purchase process.

Proactive engagement with potential customers saves time finding the required information and leads to a positive customer experience that can convert to a sale.

Global analyst firm Gartner predicts that by 2025, proactive customer engagement interactions will outnumber reactive customer engagement interactions. 

3. Improve loyalty with frictionless customer support

A sales bot never sleeps. Users can interact with these bots 24X7, raise service requests, and find answers to mundane, repetitive queries in a few minutes.

A single sales bot can answer an unlimited number of queries simultaneously, in multiple languages and time zones, while still maintaining a personalized touch. This allows customer support agents to focus on high-priority customers or tasks that add business value.

Prompt and excellent service enhance brand perception and improve sales and customer retention.

4. Retain customers through upselling and cross-selling activities

Sales bots can retain customers by sending meaningful recommendations and relevant messaging to them.

As a customer interacts more and more with the sales bot, data collected by the bot can help marketers get a deeper insight into customer preferences and needs and refine engagement.

Predicting customer needs saves costs as organizations spend less time and resources developing products that customers won’t like. The bot can then proactively inform customers about upcoming sales and latest offers and upsell/cross-sell products to increase revenue.

5. Tailor loyalty programs to boost sales

Sales bots can build customer loyalty by curating tailored loyalty programs comprising freebies, offers, and discount coupons sent through email and social media apps.

Additionally, the sales team can use bots to collect customer feedback, understand pain points, and resolve them through suitable engagement.

Building customer loyalty enhances customer satisfaction (CSAT) and improves the Net Promoter Score (NPS) – both of which help boost revenue.

Let’s take a real-life example.

Otis, Quaker Oats’ Facebook Messenger bot, sets reminders for overnight oats, helps customers with online shopping, offers delicious recipes, and supports any queries they raise

Users may type in a food emoji or choose from some of the seasonal recipes available, and the bot can gauge customer preferences to recommend suitable products and ingredients.

Post implementing Otis, Quaker Oats’ customer engagement has increased 13% year-on-year without any marketing support.

6. Sales bot - your internal sales team’s friendly digital assistant!

Sales bots help sales personnel access all sales data on a unified platform and track business-critical KPIs such as revenue, market share, best and worst-performing quarters, etc.

Moreover, sales bots can notify sales team members if they are off-track meeting targets or fail to meet their KPIs. In short, such bots can improve employee productivity and boost revenue. The sales team is responsible for ensuring top-line growth; consequently, they must track several key performance metrics, including OTIF (On-time in full), Opportunity win rate, average deal size, must stock list (MSL), etc.

At times, they must access information from multiple back-end systems and interact with LoB systems simultaneously.

Sales bots can process large amounts of data in real-time. They can generate reports every quarter on best and worst-performing products, best quarter, individual members’ performance, stock across various locations, etc.

All the sales team has to do is ask natural language questions like “What were sales of Product X in Q2-20,” and the bot will fetch information from the backend, even from multiple systems, if needed. The sales bot will then leverage its conversational interface to analyze and generate key information and respond in natural language for quicker decision-making. Sales bots can also push alerts to sales personnel while on the field, based on location and the customer they are interacting with.

Moreover, the sales bot works 24×7. This means the sales bot can ask questions and get answers when and where they want.

How we helped a leading FMCG brand improve operations and increase revenue with a sales bot

At Acuvate, we developed a sales bot named “Lucy” for a leading FMCG brand. As the largest supplier of branded still soft drinks, the number two supplier of branded carbonated soft drinks in Great Britain, and the industry leader in Ireland and France with operations in Brazil too, the company found it challenging to obtain a consolidated view of data across production, inventory, and sales, often relying on manual reporting to combine sales and production data.

With our enterprise bot-building platform called BotCore and advanced technologies like Microsoft Azure and .net framework, we built Lucy to help our client overcome the above challenges.

Lucy helped the sales team obtain immediate, easy, and anywhere access to data. By connecting to various LoB, reporting, and CRM systems, the bot enabled the sales team to query sales and ops-related metrics on a unified platform, such as net revenue, trading contribution, stocks, etc. Lucy eliminated the need to view offline reports or log in to siloed systems to get essential information.

The company experienced a slew of benefits, including the following –

  • Improved revenue due to better decision-making
  • Reduced shortages and improved productivity
  • Single-window view of production, sales, and shortages data
  • Instant answers to questions frequently asked by the new staff.

How can Acuvate help?

We at Acuvate help clients build intelligent sales bots with our enterprise bot-building platform called BotCore.

Minimalistic coding requirements and a visual design interface allow clients to deploy customer-facing chatbots within weeks. We leverage the best of AI, ML, and NLP technologies to build bots.

Our bots are multilingual and support various almost all popular enterprise messaging apps and social media platforms.

Additionally, we leverage Microsoft’s low-code bot-building solution, Power Virtual Agents (PVA), to help clients build bots as needed with little or no coding knowledge.

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

The post How can sales bots boost revenue? appeared first on BotCore.

]]>
Generate 5X ROI on chatbots with a personalized engine https://botcore.ai/blog/chatbots-roi-personalized-engine/ Mon, 07 Mar 2022 10:53:00 +0000 https://botcore.ai/?p=10158 Generate 5X ROI on chatbots with a personalized engine Way back in 1998, Jeff Bezos once remarked, “If we have 4.5 million customers, we shouldn’t have one store. We should have 4.5 million stores.” More than two decades later, one can say for sure that truer words haven’t been spoken. In today’s digital era, personalized […]

The post Generate 5X ROI on chatbots with a personalized engine appeared first on BotCore.

]]>

Generate 5X ROI on chatbots with a personalized engine

Way back in 1998, Jeff Bezos once remarked, “If we have 4.5 million customers, we shouldn’t have one store. We should have 4.5 million stores.”

More than two decades later, one can say for sure that truer words haven’t been spoken. In today’s digital era, personalized experiences form the heart and soul of meaningful customer engagement. Customers prefer brands that can predict their needs and understand what they want to buy.

As a new age customer, you must have experienced the rapid transformations that have been happening around you. Well, this blog will talk just about that. So, let’s deep dive into the following aspects —

  • Changing customer expectations in the post-pandemic world
  • Introducing AI in your customer experience strategy
  • The perils of not personalizing customer engagement
  • Use cases of AI chatbots in personalizing the customer journey
  • Generate 5X ROI on chatbots with a personalized engine
  • POND’S successful journey to personalizing CX
  • How can we help

Introduction

91% of consumers say they are more likely to shop with brands that provide offers and relevant recommendations. Additionally, 74% of people hate being shown irrelevant content. Generic, non-personalized messaging can upset customers and lead to churn.

Customer needs have gotten more dynamic and harder to fathom by the day. Yet, customers worldwide continue to demand personalized and seamless engagement. In a survey of 350 executives conducted by consulting firm Gartner, about two-thirds (63%) of digital marketing leaders said they continue to struggle with personalization. The survey also found that even as 84% of respondents believe AI and machine learning enhance the ability to deliver real-time, personalized experiences, only 17% of the executives are using it.

For one, an unprecedented amount of customer conversations are taking place online — tweets, memes, likes, dislikes –  and customers expect brands to listen to all these conversations. Secondly, they expect brands to leverage all this information, modify their CX strategy accordingly, and deliver proactive, meaningful, and personalized customer engagement.

The Perils of not Personalizing!

Personalization has become the “holy grail” of marketing. Businesses are striving to garner the benefits of personalized customer experiences (CX), including improved retention and increased ROI.

Organizations that fail to adopt personalization as a vital CX strategy face issues on various fronts, some of which are listed below —

  • Negative customer experiences and increased churn
  • Low customer retention
  • Lost business value 
  • Lack of customer insights
  • Inaccurate customer data
  • Loss of competitive advantage

Research by Gartner says brands risk losing 38 percent of customers because of poor marketing personalization efforts.

Artificial Intelligence in the CX World

To empower customers with tailored brand experiences, CX leaders are making vast investments in artificial intelligence-powered virtual agents, like chatbots, voice bots, and conversational IVR.

AI-powered chatbots, in particular, play a significant role in forming connected brand experiences across the entire customer journey. By analyzing customer conversations to gain real-time insights into their preferences, sentiment, and intent, bots can help brands create unparalleled personalization at every stage of the sales funnel, delighting customers and delivering significant ROI from AI.

Let’s deep delve further into how chatbots are helping brands personalize the customer experience and generate 5X ROI.

How are AI chatbots driving personalized CX?

AI-driven chatbots leverage advanced analytics, machine learning, natural language understanding, and cloud technology to collect, store, and analyze vast amounts of customer data, discover patterns in customer interactions, and predict customer needs to deliver proactive and personalized engagement.

In the post-pandemic world, customer experience practitioners are making vast investments in AI to meet their customers at all possible digital touchpoints (omnichannel engagement) and satisfy their desire for instant, flexible, and more personalized interactions.

Moreover, such bots drive higher value customer interactions by proactively recommending intelligent actions to help contact center agents resolve customer issues quickly. 

So, how do AI chatbots help brands tailor customer journeys, build lasting loyalty, and produce exceptional ROI?

Use-cases of AI chatbots in personalizing the customer journey

1. Reach:

  • Reach out to new customers by pushing alerts about products, collecting insights on customer preferences, and sending personalized tips and advice.
  • Study customer preferences, create cohort profiles, and better match them to recommend accurate products.

2. Acquire:

  • Acquire customers by curating personalized marketing campaigns, assisting in online shopping, guiding customers on product use, and sending tailored product suggestions.
  • If the customer’s preferred product is unavailable, AI chatbots can apologize for the inconvenience, suggest alternative products, and provide a “buy now” option to enable a smooth transition.
  • Suggest frequently bought together products to invoke new thoughts and help customers make better buying decisions.

3. Retain:

  • Create buyer personas (customer profiles) to understand their priorities and area of focus and send personalized reminders to “buy again.”
  • Study valuable customer data to predict customer needs, proactively upsell, and develop products based on customer needs.

4. Support:

  • Progressively profile customers based on their interests and click-rates and proactively recommend articles and FAQs based on their primary concerns.
  • Answer product-related queries, track orders, help with product use, and offer technical support.
  • Leverage sentiment analysis capabilities to comprehend customer emotion and respond to customer needs accordingly.

5. Loyalty:

  • Ask for product ratings and feedback to recommend better products in the future.
  • Build tailored loyalty programs (freebies, discounts, reward coupons, etc.) to develop lasting customer relationships.

Enjoy 5X returns on chatbots with a personalized engine

Research has shown marketers who exceeded their revenue goals were using personalization techniques 83% of the time. Moreover, businesses that employ data-driven personalization deliver five to eight times the ROI on marketing spend.

Deloitte’s study “Connecting with meaning: Hyper-personalizing the customer experience using data, analytics, and AI” reveals well-executed hyper-personalization can deliver 8X the return on investment on marketing spend and lift sales by 10% or more.

Additionally, personalization can reduce acquisition costs by as much as 50% and increase the efficiency of marketing spend by 10% to 30%.

A recent survey of 200 marketing leaders by Forbes Insights and Arm Treasure Data reveals that where personalization is being applied in a robust way, enterprises see positive results. Two in five executives surveyed, 40%, report that their customer personalization efforts have had a direct impact on maximizing sales, basket size, and profits in direct-to-consumer channels, such as e-commerce, while another 37% point to increased sales and customer lifetime value through product or content recommendations. More than one-third of respondents have seen increases in their transaction frequency due to personalization strategies.

Let’s take a quick example of SAL, POND’s personalized skincare expert.

Ponds Chatbot

Women often find themselves googling for skincare products and hacks for fighting uninvited spots and pimples before an important event. Yet, most are still searching for the “right” skin care product for their skin type. POND’S recognized this gap in the market and developed its chatbot SAL to meet this consumer need.

SAL is the “go-to” place for all women spending hours on the internet searching for skincare products.

Rohit Bhasin, Global Brand Vice President, POND’s Unilever, has stated, “POND’s has always been known for providing consumers with expert skincare and making beauty more accessible. We recognize how confusing and overwhelming it can be for anyone to pick the right skincare products when there are so many choices.”

Customers can access POND’s SAL through Unilever’s flagship store on Shopee. SAL leverages powerful technologies like AI and augmented reality (AR) to act as a personalized skincare assistant for users.

With SAL, POND’s has newfound ability to interact three-dimensionally with all its customers and provide immersive shopping experiences to them.

When in need of skincare, all you have to do is open SAL’s chat interface and upload a selfie. Based on your headshot, SAL will identify significant skincare concerns in four critical areas: pimples, wrinkles, spots, and uneven skin tone, and suggest the best product for your needs.

Additionally, SAL will keep sending additional beauty tips to keep you engaged while it analyzes your skin.

SAL’s success can be established because 98% of users have cited positive ratings with the bot. Moreover, 95% of users have enjoyed the personalized shopping experience on SAL.

How can Acuvate help?

According to Gartner, “By 2023, more than 60% of all customer service engagements will be delivered via digital and web-service channels, up from 23% in 2019.”

At Acuvate, we help clients build AI chatbots to assist them in hyper-personalizing customer journeys and generating maximum ROI from investment in AI using our enterprise bot-building platform called BotCore.

  • A low-code, graphical interface that allows companies to build and deploy AI-enabled chatbots quickly
  • Bot administrators can create/update bot responses using the drag and drop feature and rich media elements like Buttons, Carousel, Images, Videos, etc.
  • Supports seamless integration with existing CRM software
  • Our bots can engage in both simple and highly complex conversations.
  • BotCore leverages Microsoft’s most renowned AI, machine learning (ML), and natural language understanding (NLU) technologies.
  • Our bots are deployable on popular enterprise messaging channels (Slack, Teams, etc.) and support multiple languages, including English, German, French, Italian, etc.

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

The post Generate 5X ROI on chatbots with a personalized engine appeared first on BotCore.

]]>
How can conversational AI help win the digital shelf? https://botcore.ai/blog/how-can-conversational-ai-help-win-the-digital-shelf/ Tue, 25 Jan 2022 07:08:00 +0000 https://botcore.ai/?p=10051 How can conversational AI help win the digital shelf? Amidst the ongoing move from brick-and-mortar to online shopping, the number of digital buyers has jumped drastically. In 2020, during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, over two billion people purchased goods or services online, and during the same year, e-retail sales surpassed 4.2 trillion U.S. […]

The post How can conversational AI help win the digital shelf? appeared first on BotCore.

]]>

How can conversational AI help win the digital shelf?

Amidst the ongoing move from brick-and-mortar to online shopping, the number of digital buyers has jumped drastically. In 2020, during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, over two billion people purchased goods or services online, and during the same year, e-retail sales surpassed 4.2 trillion U.S. dollars worldwide.

The digital shelf has emerged as one of the most widely discussed terms in today’s age. Recall the last time you bought a product online. You may discover the product or service on Facebook, see your favorite influencer use it on Instagram, or simply scroll through the brand’s website to research and buy it.

The digital shelf is “anywhere and everywhere” customers can discover, research, and shop for something online. Think of it as the shelf in the local brick-and-mortar store, only with more product options and a broader set of touchpoints to choose from — be it retailer websites, social media, mobile apps, or third-party marketplaces. Customers can even interact with the digital shelf when they buy products in-store.

Conversational AI is the new paradigm in the customer experience (CX) world, allowing organizations a flexible, reliable, and speedy way to interact with customers digitally all day.

Let’s explore what conversational AI is and how it can help brands win the digital shelf in 2022 and beyond.

Conquering the Digital Shelf with Conversational AI

Before we delve deeper into winning the digital shelf with conversational AI, let’s first understand what conversational AI is.

Conversational AI is a set of powerful technologies & new-age technologies, including machine learning, natural language processing (NLP), and natural language understanding (NLU) — used in conjunction with chatbots to help brands interact with customers throughout the sales journey.

How is conversational AI supporting the digital shelf? Well, the answer is simple.

1. Providing options for self-service - Finding products and answers online.

Amidst an overwhelming demand for support, customers turned to self-service options like AI chatbots, during the COVID-19 pandemic.

More than a year and several “waves” of the virus later, customers are now accustomed to using chatbots to search for products online, make purchases via digital channels, and get their queries answered within seconds.

The CCW Digital Market Study released in August 2021 has noted,
“Customers are particularly willing to self-serve for informational issues. Just under 49% of consumers prefer to use self-service for inquiries like account balance checks and delivery date confirmations. Other popular self-service drivers include transactions (38%), desire for fast resolution (30%), and situations in which connecting with an agent would be inconvenient (26%).”

Chatbots can be embedded on various digital channels, including social media platforms like Facebook Messenger, common messaging apps (for example, WhatsApp), company websites, and mobile apps. They are easy to adopt, available 24X7, and help the brand service customers at scale.

To create awareness about their products & services, organizations deploy conversational AI bots on various channels that comprise the digital shelf.

Such bots can answer queries, push alerts about new products, analyze customer preferences, and send personalized tips. 

For example, many brands deploy conversational AI bots that initiate a conversation with the visitors as soon as they scroll past a particular point on the website, indicating potential interest in the product.

2. Tell customers what they should buy with personalized and proactive digital support

While customer needs have become more dynamic and challenging to fathom, customers still tend to prefer brands that can understand their requirements, predict what they may need, and tailor support accordingly. Brands that leverage generic and repetitive messaging lose out on customers.

Conversational AI bots can capture and evaluate customer interactions while they happen, generate real-time insights into customer preferences, perspectives, and intentions, and help brands personalize the entire digital sales journey — helping organizations win the digital shelf.

Brands can then take a proactive approach, provide customers assistance, and pitch new products, even before the customers ask.

While reaching the right customer segment is crucial, bots must also assist them in making informed decisions about what to purchase to help create a winning digital shelf.

Conversational AI Bots study customer information, recommend suitable products, guide on product use, assist in navigating the brand’s online store, and help with shopping, payment, and checkout.

To retain customers and build a long-lasting digital shelf strategy, brands must continue to engage them with relevant and meaningful messaging.

As a customer interacts more with conversational AI bots, the brand can collect the required data to help marketers understand customer needs, measure engagement, and develop proactive marketing campaigns.

Consequently, such bots can proactively inform customers about the latest offers and upcoming sales and help upsell/cross-sell products using the digital shelf.

Moreover, loyal customers advocate the brand’s products, spread positive word-of-mouth, and help build a winning digital shelf.

To cement customer loyalty and strengthen the digital shelf, organizations must leverage chatbots to tailor loyalty programs, send customized discount coupons and freebies through email and chat, and allow customers to manage reward balances and redeem gift points online.

3. Help customers experience the same level of digital service, no matter what channel they choose!

In the post-pandemic world, customers have attached newfound meaning to what exceptional brand engagement means. They not only want brands to meet and recognize them at every digital touchpoint but expect consistent and personalized experiences on each channel and want brand conversations to seamlessly flow across digital touchpoints, encompassing the entirety of the digital shelf.

That’s where omnichannel chatbots come into the picture. They allow brands to be present on popular customer channels (website, email, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, IVR, etc.), adapt to the unique features of each channel, and coordinate communications across all digital touchpoints. For example, a customer may become aware of a product through email, gather additional information through WhatsApp, and ultimately purchase the product through the brand’s website or in-store.

Omnichannel bots are built once and deployed across multiple channels. In an era where customers are increasingly levitating towards brands that can predict their needs and make suitable recommendations, omnichannel chatbots understand customer context, store information in a centralized database, comprehend customer needs, and retain the context of the original conversation — delivering personalized conversational experiences and allowing customers to switch channels without starting from scratch.

4. Carry out more meaningful customer conversations online with context management

Human conversations are seldom straightforward. They are often layered with interruptions and clarifications and move to a different topic without seeing the previous interaction to its logical conclusion.

Conversational AI Bots carry out the most natural and human-like interactions, create memorable user experiences, and conquer the digital shelf. Context and dialogue management allow bots to pause a particular customer task, switch intent, complete a different activity, and efficiently steer the conversation back to the original customer request without losing context.

The Customer Contact Week Digital report titled Customer Experience Trends, Challenges, and Innovation, states, “In addition to making it easy for customers to move between channels, leading brands will ensure their data follows suit. With a 360-degree view into each customer, the company and its employees can spot inefficiencies within the journey, tailor experiences to a given customer’s intent, personalize communication based on their profile and sentiment, and avoid the much-maligned habit of asking customers to repeat information.”

5. Amplify digital reach with multilingual chatbots.

Online brands can reach a global audience by deploying bots that speak different languages.

Often, large brands have customers located in different parts of the world who speak different languages. While interacting with brands, customers prefer having conversations with bots that speak their native tongue.

Creating a separate chatbot for each language isn’t feasible. That is where a multilingual chatbot comes into the picture. Chatbots are capable of supporting and conducting conversations in customers’ native tongue scale localization efforts, amplifying digital reach, and making customers feel valued and understood.

How can Acuvate help?

We at Acuvate can help clients build a winning digital shelf with conversational AI by leveraging our enterprise bot-building platform called BotCore.

  • An intuitive, low-code, graphical interface that allows quick implementation of conversational AI chatbots
  • Integrates seamlessly with existing LoB and enterprise systems and AI services
  • Our chatbots can also simulate highly complex user conversations.
  • We are a Microsoft Gold Partner and use the best of Microsoft’s artificial intelligence, machine learning (ML), natural language processing (NLP), and natural language understanding (NLU) technologies.
  • Our chatbots are deployable on almost all popular social media channels and support different languages, including English, German, French, Italian, etc.

We also help clients build and deploy AI-chatbots quickly with Microsoft’s low-code bot-building application Power Virtual Agents.

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

The post How can conversational AI help win the digital shelf? appeared first on BotCore.

]]>
6 ways chatbots can help improve customer engagement in CPG & Retail industry https://botcore.ai/blog/chatbots-customer-engagement-cpg-retail/ Wed, 29 Dec 2021 06:25:00 +0000 https://botcore.ai/?p=9332 6 ways chatbots can help improve customer engagement in CPG & Retail industry Juniper’s recent study, “Conversational Commerce: Market Outlook, Emerging Opportunities, and Forecasts 2021-2025,” has highlighted that the total spend over conversational commerce channels will reach $290 billion by 2025. Conversational commerce leverages chatbots, messaging, and digital voice assistants to automate retail transactions and […]

The post 6 ways chatbots can help improve customer engagement in CPG & Retail industry appeared first on BotCore.

]]>

6 ways chatbots can help improve customer engagement in CPG & Retail industry

Juniper’s recent study, “Conversational Commerce: Market Outlook, Emerging Opportunities, and Forecasts 2021-2025,” has highlighted that the total spend over conversational commerce channels will reach $290 billion by 2025.

Conversational commerce leverages chatbots, messaging, and digital voice assistants to automate retail transactions and payments. Chatbots shall process $145 billion of the spend by 2025.

With customers adopting digital channels post-pandemic, customer experience has gained traction and become as significant as the products and services the brand provides. Customers, particularly in the fast-moving world of retail and CPG, not only expect speedy resolutions but also want brands to understand their preferences, interactions, and end-to-end history and remember them at every touchpoint.

In short, retail brands must take a proactive stance to comprehend the potential value of each customer interaction and how it can be leveraged to deliver personalized engagement.

Many organizations in the CPG and retail industry have started adopting AI-enabled chatbots to address these challenges. Chatbots offer a fast and easy way to interact with customers and help retailers streamline processes and earn more revenue.

Let’s explore in detail.

1. Send personalized product recommendations after understanding customer needs

Chatbots can study customer profiles to provide personalized product recommendations and engage smartly with customers by leveraging intelligent machine learning technology.

Moreover, retail brands may design bots to ask a few questions about the customer’s needs and preferences and then display a tailored collection of specific products that they may like. Customers can click through to the brand’s online store and make a purchase.

2. Push notifications about new products

Retail brands must concentrate their marketing efforts on the channels where customers are present and most likely to engage with the company.

They can deploy AI chatbots on popular messaging platforms like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger to push alerts and notifications about new products and services, increase sales,  and ensure customers are constantly engaged with the brand and its offerings.

3. Assist in online shopping

Chatbots can lead customers to the retailer’s online website, help them navigate the portal, suggest complementary/alternate products, and assist with payment and checkout.

Moreover, retail bots can also bring back customers who added products to their cart but left without buying anything. Abandoned cart reminders from a chatbot are beneficial in converting sales. Research shows they have 80% open rates compared to email’s 25% and ten times higher click-through rates.

4. Give personalized tips and advice

Brands can use chatbots to send personalized tips, diagnosis, and advice and help customers select the right products.

Moreover, they can provide additional product information and suggestions on how to use the product.

Mark bot
Mark bot

Unox has been linked to Dutch cuisine for over 80 years. The brand is popular for its smoked sausages, frankfurters, and canned soup.

Through its website chatbot, “Mark,” the brand answers customer queries, addresses their complaints, and provides recipes for delicious Dutch dishes, with options for vegetarian recipes too.

Unox bot
Unox bot

Another brand in the food space that has deployed a chatbot to deliver personalized engagement to website visitors is Conimex.

Conimex brings delicious Asian flavors to the Netherlands. With more than 100 products, including soy sauce, sambal, side dishes, soups, and marinades. The brand’s website bot Connie helps customers answer questions, give suggestions and feedback, and look for recipe inspiration.

wholes food

Whole Foods’s Facebook Messenger chatbot helps customers find recipes based on meal type, ingredients, and dietary restrictions— foods for dinner, gluten-free and vegan recipes, etc. Customers can use emojis or a combination of text and emojis to find new meals.

Moreover, they may also check if their nearest Whole Foods retail store has the required ingredients for a particular recipe.

Ponds Chatbot

POND’s SAL is an interesting example of how chatbots have transformed post-pandemic customer engagement in the retail industry. Customers can access SAL through Unilever’s flagship store on Shopee under “chat.”

After that, a user must upload a selfie, and based on the headshot, the bot identifies key skin concerns in four significant areas— wrinkles, pimples, spots, and uneven skin tone. While the skin analysis takes place, the bot keeps sending beauty tips to keep the user engaged.

Post the skin analysis, SAL recommends suitable products from POND’s according to the user’s skin type.

98% of users cited positive ratings with SAL. 95% of users who have completed the SAL experience on Shopee have enjoyed the personalized shopping experience.

5. Provide customer support

AI chatbots can assist users with their queries, handle grievances, and provide product support.

Chatting with a bot is not only fast and convenient— users can request support at any time of the day and through any platform the brand is on. The chatbot will be available instantly to provide personalized support.

Moreover, retailers can customize their bots to support multiple languages— driving engagement and localizing experiences for global customers. 

6. Boost customer loyalty and advocacy through offers and feedback

Pepsodent bot

Digidentist, Pepsodent’s personalized oral care advisor, helps you with common oral health problems, including tooth pain, sensitivity, tooth decay, etc. The bot is a free online tool to help with oral health concerns quickly and provide personalized healthcare advice endorsed by the IDA.

Moreover, Digidentist collects personal information from website visitors, such as phone numbers and email addresses, to send information about Pepsodent and other Unilever brands’ products, services, and offers.

Chatbots can build customer loyalty by sending freebies, offers, and discount coupons to customers through email and social media.

Moreover, data collected by the bot helps retailers predict customer needs, understand the features they like and the ones they don’t prefer, and design products and marketing campaigns accordingly.

Additionally, retailers can use bots to collect customer feedback, understand their pain points, and help solve these through suitable engagement.

Building loyalty increases customer satisfaction (CSAT) levels and improves the Net Promoter Score (NPS).

Meet HelloFresh’s Freddy

HelloFresh sells pre-curated meal kits in the US. The company delivers step-by-step recipes complete with nutritional information and fresh, pre-measured ingredients to help customers whip up delicious meals in no time.

HelloFresh has deployed a customer-facing chatbot called Freddy. Freddy’s primary purpose is to shorten wait times for customers by responding to customer queries. Besides providing customer support, the bot offers recipe suggestions to customers looking for a particular dish, reminds users to pick their weekly meals on time, and provides Spotify playlist recommendations so that customers have something to listen to while cooking their meals.

The bot also comes with built-in “food-themed” quizzes to engage and entertain users. Freddy has been so successful that HelloFresh has recorded a 47% increase in incoming messages and witnessed a staggering reduction in response times by 76%.

How can Acuvate help?

At Acuvate, we help our retail and CPG clients deploy customer-facing chatbots to deliver fast, interactive, and personalized customer engagement with our enterprise bot-building platform called BotCore.

As a Microsoft Gold Partner, we leverage the best of Microsoft’s AI, machine learning (ML), and natural language processing (NLP) technologies.

BotCore boasts of the following capabilities —

  • An intuitive, low-code, visual interface allows the quick implementation of AI chatbots in the fast-paced retail world.
  • Seamless integration with existing legacy systems and AI services
  • Our chatbots simulate highly complex customer conversations.
  • Our bots are deployable on almost all popular enterprise messaging and social media channels and support multiple languages, including English, German, French, Italian, etc.

Moreover, we help clients build and deploy AI chatbots using Microsoft’s low-code bot-building solution called Power Virtual Agents.

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

The post 6 ways chatbots can help improve customer engagement in CPG & Retail industry appeared first on BotCore.

]]>