Chatbots Archives - BotCore

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s explore more.

Introducing Conversational AI in Banking

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

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

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

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

1. 24x7 accessibility

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

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

2. A cohesive and intuitive experience.

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

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

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

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

3. Multilingual and omnichannel

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

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

Personalized banking at the fingertips

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

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

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

Sneaking in a quick example of a banking chatbot

How can Acuvate help?

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

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

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

Choosing your Conversational AI Platform

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

Choosing your Conversational AI Platform

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

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

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

Let’s explore more.

conversational AI platform - Capabilities

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

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

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

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

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

1. Ease of use with low-code platforms

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

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

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

2. Exceptional UX

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

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

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

3. Omnichannel presence and multilingual proficiency

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

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

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

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

4. Integrations with the client’s existing tech stack

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

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

5. Reporting, analytics, and security

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

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

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

How can Acuvate help?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Transforming The Retail Experience with Metaverse and Virtual assistants

Abhishek Shanbhag — Fri, 10 Jun 2022 13:30:00 +0000

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

Abhishek Shanbhag — Tue, 24 May 2022 09:15:00 +0000

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

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.

How can sales bots boost revenue?

Abhishek Shanbhag — Tue, 15 Mar 2022 06:59:00 +0000

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

Cinu Clement — Mon, 07 Mar 2022 10:53:00 +0000

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.

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?

Abhishek Shanbhag — Tue, 25 Jan 2022 07:08:00 +0000

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

Abhishek Shanbhag — Wed, 29 Dec 2021 06:25:00 +0000

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

7 Ways Marketing Bots Can Drive Lead Generation

Abhishek Shanbhag — Wed, 22 Dec 2021 06:40:00 +0000

7 Ways Marketing Bots Can Drive Lead Generation

Research by Outgrow shows that 3 in 5 millennials have used chatbots at least once in their lives. Additionally, Gartner states that by 2023, 30% of customer service organizations will deliver proactive customer services using AI-enabled process orchestration and continuous intelligence. Moreover, by 2025, customer service organizations will elevate operational efficiency by 25% by embedding AI in their multichannel customer engagement platforms.

The past year has transformed customer dynamics and redefined what customers consider “easy” and “seamless” customer experience (CX). With customers worldwide shifting to online brands, AI has emerged as the top spending priority for businesses to meet the need for instant and personalized customer interactions.

Indeed, chatbots have helped brands meet customers at their preferred touchpoints, build lasting relationships, and support what most organizations call the “new-age” customer experience.

Organizations can use conversational AI chatbots to build a foolproof CX strategy, including generating qualified leads for the brand. In fact, 36% of companies are already using AI chatbots to generate more leads.

Marketing bots, particularly those expressly designed for lead generation (lead bots), collect information from prospects and automatically qualify valuable leads from a myriad of incoming web traffic. This allows the sales team to focus on only those prospects that could potentially generate business for the company in the future.

Marketing bots can provide on-demand access to information, unrivaled 24X7 support, and user-friendly UX whenever a prospect lands on the brand’s website. By answering preliminary questions regarding the product and collecting prospect information, such bots can keep people longer on the landing page and help sift out leads qualified to move down the sales funnel.

This blog explores the seven ways marketing bots can drive lead generation for your company.

Let’s begin with a real-life example.

If a prospect goes onto HubSpot’s Facebook page, a Messenger chatbot automatically pops up to help the user get started. The moment the website visitor clicks on “Get Started,” an automated greeting message along with a list of probable actions, such as “Subscribe to our weekly newsletter.” or “Check out our new tools for free,” is displayed on the screen. This method of getting subscribers and leads is easier than asking leads to sign up manually. Moreover, the bot can map the Facebook Messenger leads to email, and kickstart an email campaign.

Just like HubSpot, all organizations can leverage marketing bots to get inbound leads in a streamlined and scalable manner.

So, here are the top 7 ways marketing bots are helping organizations drive lead generation –

1. Form a better understanding of the target audience

For any organization, understanding the target audience is the foundation for converting leads. When a prospect visits the website, the bot sends a welcome message like “Want to know about Product X? Just say HELLO to get started.”

A playful welcome message with a human-like touch marks the beginning of a potentially fruitful conversation with the prospect.

The bot moves on to ask a few qualifying questions to understand the prospect’s intent and recommend suitable products and services.

The bot can comprehend likes and dislikes through an initial conversation with the prospect, answer questions, and provide valuable information (instructions, tips, and helpful videos).

Moreover, AI chatbots can do away with the traditional, tedious, and often time-consuming practice of lead generation via form fill-ups. They can streamline information collection and create a frictionless and more exciting process of asking qualifying questions by providing multiple options.

Based on the response and automatic buyer persona creation, the bots can qualify leads and direct them to the right team of experts for further nurturing.

2. Segment customers for targeted nurturing

Segmentation involves profiling the audience based on factors like geography, company size, revenue, business needs, etc., to help deliver more meaningful engagement.

Organizations can design AI chatbots to segment the audience based on data collected, deliver relevant marketing messaging to nurture leads suitably, and increase the probability of conversion.

3. Automatic pre-qualification of leads at scale

Customer-facing chatbots can create exceptional conversational experiences for customers and automatically qualify potential leads at scale.

A conversational AI bot can qualify leads by asking a pre-defined set of industry-specific questions even when sales agents are busy or unavailable. Consequently, such bots can direct qualified leads to the sales team for more focused nurturing.

4. Integration of live chat widget with a marketing bot

Brand websites usually deploy a live chat widget to help streamline communication, provide real-time responses, and aid lead generation, even when the human agent is unavailable.

Such chat widgets may include onboarding (or welcome) chat widgets, support chat widgets, feedback chat widgets, or a general chat widget.

A live chat widget integrated with a lead bot can drive lead generation for brands. All the prospective lead has to do is provide details like name, contact details, and query, and the bot can collect this information so that an agent can address the concern as soon as business-as-usual resumes.

5. Schedule appointments round-the-clock with marketing bots

Often, B2B firms see a lot of incoming requests for scheduling demos and one-on-one consultations.

Conversational AI chatbots can guide qualified leads to book product demos and sales meetings. They can collect relevant information, propose slots for appointments, and send booking confirmations to the meeting participants.

With marketing bots, organizations needn’t worry about booking hassles or hiring employees to manage appointments.

6. Get qualified leads from across the world with multilingual customer-facing bots.

In today’s highly digitized business landscape, most organizations have a customer base that spans different geographies. Prospects are often more comfortable engaging with brands that speak their native tongue and understand cultural nuances.

Implementing a multilingual customer-facing bot helps companies span geographies and engage with incoming leads from various locations, improving engagement and conversion in the process.

Moreover, a multilingual bot gives customers an edge over competitors and increases the possibility of converting leads from across the globe.

7. Recapture interest with triggered messaging

Sometimes customers may not be sufficiently engaged, have difficulties navigating the brand’s website, or have questions about the product.

At other times, the customer may try to leave the website, and hence brands may wish to reel them back in.

Here, timing and personalization are crucial in re-engaging the customer. A marketing bot can send out trigger messages in the form of pop-up windows, such as “50% discount just for you” or “Sign up to learn about upcoming sales.”

When the user has already left the website, the bot may send an email that reads, “Pssst….we see you left something in your cart. Come back to avail a 20% discount.”

Benefits of Using Marketing Bots to Drive Lead Generation

24×7 customer service representative
Enhance B2B customer experience
Generate valuable leads at scale
Reduce the cost of generating leads
Increase ROI

How can Acuvate help?

At Acuvate, we help clients deploy AI-enabled marketing bots and drive lead generation with our enterprise bot-building platform called BotCore.

With minimalistic coding requirements and a graphical design interface, BotCore allows enterprises to build and implement customer-facing chatbots within weeks. As a Microsoft Gold Partner, we leverage the best of Microsoft’s AI, ML, and NLP technologies to build bots that deliver exceptional customer interactions.

Moreover, our bots are multilingual and can cater to a global audience with support for languages such as French, German, Italian, English, etc. Additionally, we support various platforms, including email, web, mobile app, and social media applications like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.

We also use Microsoft’s low-code bot-building solution, Power Virtual Agents (PVA), to help clients quickly build intelligent, conversational AI chatbots 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 7 Ways Marketing Bots Can Drive Lead Generation appeared first on BotCore.

Optimize your customer support in this holiday season using customer engagement bots

Abhishek Shanbhag — Fri, 03 Dec 2021 12:25:00 +0000

Optimize your customer support in this holiday season using customer engagement bots

The holiday season is around the corner. With the festive cheer comes higher sales, more revenue, and significant work for the customer support teams of e-commerce businesses.

Increased demand for products leads to an influx of customer support requests. Coupled with employee shortage due to leaves and absenteeism during holidays, handling customer support during the festive season can be extremely challenging for contact center agents, leading to a drop in productivity and lower customer satisfaction (CSAT) levels.

Moreover, with the fear of catching COVID-19 reducing traffic to brick-and-mortar stores, online shopping will soar again this year, creating higher demand for e-commerce businesses and their support personnel. In 2020, U.S. consumers broke records of holiday shopping during Cyber 5, with online sales rising 20.6% year-over-year.

Holiday shopping isn’t the easiest. Sometimes, a customer may have an item in mind but cannot navigate the brand’s website to find it. At other times, customers may not be able to think of suitable gifting options. Or, they may want to know about the delivery status of items already bought.

Additionally, the business world has witnessed a paradigm shift in customer expectations over the past year, the most prominent being an increased demand for more convenient, personalized, and meaningful customer engagement.

Conversational AI and automation have emerged as the most vital trends in CX. Businesses have adopted AI-powered chatbots to deliver desirable and seamless omnichannel customer experiences that lead to hyper-personalized customer journeys, brand loyalty, and a competitive edge over other players in the market.

This blog talks about how brands in the e-commerce business can optimize customer support in this holiday season using customer support bots and AI-driven virtual assistants.

Optimize your customer support in this holiday season using AI chatbots for customer service

E-commerce brands perpetually witness a spike in demand around the holiday season. And with the fear of catching COVID-19 still looming in the air, online shopping will continue to grow even as in-store shopping begins reopening its doors.

Amidst such high demand, how can online brands create a foolproof strategy for holiday customer support? How can customer service chatbots help in this regard?

Let’s explore.

1. Help shoppers find the right products.

As discussed above, holiday shopping can be time-consuming and often tedious as consumers look for the perfect gift options.

A conversational AI bot can gather information about the tastes and preferences of the customer or ask questions about the intended recipient the customer wishes to buy a gift for and suggest suitable products.

At times, customers may tell the support chatbot what they are looking for, and the bot can throw up relevant search results.

Additionally, customer experience bots may assist visitors in navigating the website and inform them about seasonal offers, discounts, and product combos.

Marks and Spencer launched a Christmas Concierge chatbot to connect with customers during the festive season via Facebook Messenger. The chatbot allowed the brand to tailor product recommendations to the customers’ specific interests and needs – home, food, or both.

If the customer selected food, the bot asked specific questions about the type of food, dietary needs, etc. The bot then walked website visitors through menu options and allowed them to browse through recipes, request tips, and purchase directly from the recipe page.

2. Answer frequently asked questions (FAQs)

Businesses face their fair share of chaos during the peak holiday season. As customers rush to buy their favorite products and gifts, brands witness a substantial rise in queries.

In such a scenario, leveraging chatbots can take the burden off your support staff. Brands can automate some of the routine, mundane queries (for example, minimum order value for free delivery) by using AI chatbots. By analyzing and reviewing trends, patterns, and metrics from previous festive seasons, they can make a list of the most frequently asked questions and train the customer support bot to answer them.

Conversational AI keeps response times low, streamlines and optimizes the support process, and helps brands provide a seamless experience to customers.

3. Offer prompt round-the-clock support.

At times, customers may want to track the delivery status of their orders at 2 pm on a Sunday. Or, they may be shopping for products at 3 am and have related product queries.

Customers are always in a rush during the holiday season and want their questions answered as quickly as possible. Often, they resort to last-minute shopping, and if left waiting, they may get annoyed and visit a competitor’s website.

Moreover, customer support agents may be unavailable during holidays, leading to staff shortages at the contact center.

Fortunately, customer experience chatbots are always awake, don’t need holidays, and handle multiple customer queries 24X7X365 days a year.

4. Escalate irate customers to the human agents

There may be times when the bot is unable to answer customer queries, leading to customer frustration. Moreover, as the customers often rush and expect quick service, their chances of getting annoyed are much higher when questions remain unresolved.

AI-driven customer support chatbots can leverage sentiment analysis to comprehend customer emotion and route queries to a human agent to ensure a speedy and effective query resolution.

5. Drive lead generation and reduce cart abandonment with live chat triggers

Sometimes, customers may visit the brand’s website and find it challenging to locate the products they need. Or, they may add items to their cart but leave the website before checking out.

Bots integrated with live chat widgets can help brands onboard new customers, provide real-time responses, and personalize customer support, even when the agent isn’t available.

Moreover, such bots can recapture the interest of customers who may be trying to leave the website by throwing pop-up messages like “Flat 20% on order above $100 just for you.”

If the customer has left the website without buying the items in the cart, the bot may automatically generate and send an email saying, “We see you left something in your cart. Come back and get a 10% off on your purchase.”

How can Acuvate help?

At Acuvate, we help clients deploy AI-powered customer experience chatbots to optimize customer support in the holiday season with our enterprise bot-building platform called BotCore.

With minimalistic coding requirements and pre-designed templates, BotCore allows organizations to implement customer-facing chatbots within weeks. As a Microsoft Gold Partner, we leverage the best of Microsoft’s AI, ML, and NLP technologies to build chatbots that deliver highly personalized and frictionless customer interactions.

Moreover, our bots are multilingual and can cater to a global audience with English, French, Italian, German, and many more languages. Additionally, BotCore supports various platforms, including web, mobile app, and social media apps like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.

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

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

The post Optimize your customer support in this holiday season using customer engagement bots appeared first on BotCore.