CX Archives - 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.

23 Experts Share How Chatbots Will Transform Customer Experience in 2022

Gina Shaw — Wed, 01 Dec 2021 11:03:04 +0000

23 Experts Share How Chatbots Will Transform Customer Experience in 2022

The COVID-19 pandemic has transformed customer behaviours in an unprecedented way.

In order to adapt to the sudden shift towards interacting with customers on digital channels, organizations across the globe have swiftly implemented chatbots to improve customer self-service, provide information, deliver continuous and cost-effective support and delight customers with personalized experiences.

With the adoption of customer experience chatbots soaring across industries, we reached out to global CX thought leaders and analysts to get their insights on:

“How chatbots will transform transform customer experience in 2022 and beyond”

Here are their responses:

“What will be interesting to see is the expansion of chatbots into the middle and top levels of the marketing funnel”

Particularly in a B2C environment, Chatbots will increasingly come to integrate into every stage of the marketing and sales funnel in 2022 and beyond.

There is no reason why you should not use a chatbot to execute a purchase or facilitate a transaction at the bottom of the funnel. Similarly, automating follow up customer care interactions is perfectly reasonable.

What will be interesting to see is the expansion of chatbots into the Middle and Top levels of the marketing funnel to assist customers with their questions relating to the consideration and decision-making part of the customer journey.

As natural language processing continues to develop, and interactions with customers become increasingly natural, these personalised interactions are going to become more and more prevalent.

Keith Williams

Chatbot Consultant, Founder, KMW3

David Truog

VP and Principal Analyst, Forrester Research

“Smart companies will upskill to the new discipline of conversation design”

Chatbots have a bad reputation, and it’s well deserved: most of them disappoint. Why? Forrester’s research finds that companies often treat conversational AI efforts primarily as IT projects, unfortunately, neglecting UX and human-centered design. Fortunately, a new discipline is emerging for creating chatbots that help users instead of frustrating them: conversation design.

In 2022, smart companies will upskill to the new discipline of conversation design, combining proven principles of human-centric design with deep understanding of how people talk and expect a conversation to flow. Those companies’ chatbots won’t disappoint — they’ll start to delight, instead.

“Chatbots are no more the future. They are the present.”

Brands have started reaping the benefits from their chatbots already. The power of chatbots will increase exponentially in the coming months and years, performing many more tasks, answering many more queries for the ease of the user. From spotting the right products to buying and using the product at ease, chatbots will start personalizing responses by understanding preferences, conditions, etc., and recommending the right products and best places to buy .

Rakesh Reddy

Chairman and CEO of Acuvate Software

Roman V. Yampolskiy

Associate Professor, University of Louisville

“AI will develop beyond chatbots providing a complete social interaction experience”

2022 is basically here, so I don’t anticipate any significant changes from the current situation. Long term, AI will develop beyond chatbots providing a complete social interaction experience, including audio, video and domain intelligence making it possible to fully automate human tech-support and sales jobs. AI will have a detailed profile of each customer and will use that information to customize and target each interaction providing better service, but also exerting unprecedented influence and sales pressure.

“....The technologies that enable (chatbots’ benefits) include sentiment analysis, emotion detection, data-driven question-answering, automatic language translation…”

Chatbots have several benefits that will drive digitally transformed customer experiences. Those benefits include scalability (simultaneously addressing the needs and questions of many customers); 360 view (able to access many different dimensions of customer data for hyper-personalization of the customer experience); security (able to receive, send, and use customer confidential data in a secure conversation, through secure cloud data access); and speed (promptly answering the customer call and delivering just-in-time customer service).

The technologies that enable this include cloud, AI, and multi-modal natural language processing: natural language understanding and generation, sentiment analysis, emotion detection, data-driven question-answering, and automatic language translation. Chatbots are a dream customer engagement and experience solution for organizations of all sizes.

Kirk Borne

Chief Science Officer, DataPrime Inc

Kate Leggett

VP and Principal Analyst for CRM and Customer Service, Forrester Research

“...Make sure they (chatbots) are connected to human-assisted channels to truly transform the customer experience...”

Chatbots have the power to reduce the volume of traditional email, chat or phone traffic; reduce costs and increase customer satisfaction by providing quick answers to questions that are tailored to the customer, or guiding customers through automated processes. Yet customers remain skeptical that chatbots can provide a similar level of engagement as a human agent. Look for ways to continuously improve the experience that chatbots deliver and make sure they are connected to human-assisted channels to truly transform the customer experience in 2022.

“2022 will likely usher in real advances in the convergence of voice and VR with text”

Chatbots need to become more “human”. Even really well designed, smart, AI-driven chatbots can be boring as hell, if they are only text based. And typing on mobile devices isn’t going to get any better any time soon. 2022 will likely usher in real advances in the convergence of voice and VR with text. When customers can have a natural conversation with an assistant with whom they can make ‘eye contact’, chat will really take off.

Barry Dalton

VP of Digital & Analytics Transformation, Genpact

Bernie Borges

Vice President Global Content Marketing, iQor

“While the maturity of the underlying technologies like NLU that makes chatbots function is high, the key goal is to deliver meaningful automation that solves customer problems”

If the predictions are accurate, retail spend on Chatbots is expected to exceed $140 billion by 2024. This investment in AI tech by retail is primarily focused on reducing customer friction, leading to memorable experiences. To deliver that amazing experience requires a level of expertise with Design thinking. While the maturity of the underlying technologies like NLU that makes chatbots function is high, the key goal is to deliver meaningful automation that solves customer problems.

Companies that are successfully delivering world class digital experiences listen to their customers and their customer service agents to find those business processes that could be easily handled by AI while allowing the workforce to have more meaningful engagements with the customers.

“We will witness a noticeable increase in the capacity of chatbots to communicate a ‘personality’...”

In 2022, we will witness a noticeable increase in the capacity of chatbots to communicate a “personality,” enabling the tone and style to match the culture and brand of an organization. The style of luxury hotel chatbots might sound and feel different than ones used by Harley dealerships or funeral homes. Thanks to A.I. and machine learning, chatbots will be able to assume more complex queries thus freeing agents to apply ingenuity and empathy in ways chatbots cannot.

Chip Bell

Senior Partner, The Chip Bell Group | Keynote Speaker

Shep Hyken

Customer Service / Experience expert and New York Times bestselling business author

“The (chatbot) technology has a better ability to understand questions asked in many different ways”

Chatbots continue to improve. The technology has a better ability to understand questions asked in many different ways, the ability to overcome the customer’s mistakes in grammar, spelling, and punctuation, and give an overall “human-like” experience. Digital has become a go-to first choice for many customers.

That said, for it to be truly successful, even with the great improvements, there will be times when the customer will need to move from a conversation with a chatbot to one with a human/live agent. At that point, there must be a seamless transition that causes, ideally, no friction for the customer. The company/brand that gets this right will win in a world where customer service is more important than ever.

“(Chatbot) reduces a customer’s resolution time and empowers internal agents to have time to serve in H2H engagement”

Customer behaviours and demand for anytime help has increased rapidly, accelerated further by the pandemic and a need to get things done often at odd times of the day. Many organisations are redressing their contact centre model and with increased inbound volumes need to automate in order to deliver a quality customer experience.

Front ended triage of customers using automated AI chatbots enables an organisation to direct a customer to the right information, guide them through help as required or where needed route them to a direct chat or live agent call efficiently. The chatbot done well reduces a customer’s resolution time and empowers internal agents to have time to serve in H2H engagement those that truly need this help

Ian Moyse

Chief Revenue Officer, OneUp Sales

Heverton Anunciacao

Founder and CRM CX Consultant at University of Customer

“Chatbots...should have more kindness and empathy in their scripts”

In my humble view, chatbots will transform customer experience in 2022 in the following ways:

Chatbots and CRM/CX initiatives of digital transformation should calibrate and put more kindness and empathy in their scripts. It is because I noticed many chatbots around the world became rigid in their dialogs with end users and customers. Remember, around the world, there are customers in different generations and levels of education.

Chatbots should prepare their contingency plan in case like we have in 2021 when Whatsapp was out of service and impacted 3 billion people around the world. Chatbots and their companies should ask themselves: what should I do if my backend applications like Faceboook Messenger, Whatsapp, Instagram, and so on.. are out of service? how to provide a good and continuing experience to my customer?

“It is critical that organisations do not see chatbots as a replacement for human to human interaction”

In 2022 and beyond, advancing digital technology will undoubtedly continue to play an increasingly important role in the lives of business and consumers. Chatbots are one primary example of this. If used in alignment with the customer journey, chatbots can help to automate simple tasks and activities to enable humans to perform more important, value-added tasks directly with customers. It is critical that organisations do not see chatbots as a replacement for human to human interaction, but as a way to improve the customer experience.

Ian Golding

Global Customer Experience Specialist, Customer Experience Consultancy Ltd

Stacy Sherman

Founder, DoingCXRight®‬

“The (chatbot) solution must provide a ‘low level of effort’..”

Chatbots have become a common solution to enhance customer online experiences and will continue to be a popular tactic in 2022. Chatbots are especially valuable for routine questions that can save customer care reps time and cost per call, while also useful to quickly solve simple customer questions, such as finding a nearby retail address, or hours of operation.

As questions get more complex, chatbots can become a source of customer dissatisfaction if not done right. The solution must provide a “low level of effort” and be easy to reach a human being (unlike when calling a company 800# and getting lost in an IVR system).

It’s no secret that people’s patience is dwindling, so the companies that use technology to enhance and solve their needs fast will win in a competitive marketplace. That means that companies must lean on CX-skilled leaders to ensure best practices are applied, such as communication continuity.

What I mean by this is when a customer asks a series of questions of the bot and is then forwarded to a live rep, the details of the conversation must be transferred simultaneously to avoid the customer having to repeat the same questions again.

In sum, chatbots and similar automated technologies will definitely be part of our future. The uncertain part is whether company leaders will focus on the Customer Experiences (CX) and their needs vs solve for internal requirements and processes–resulting in brand advocates turning into detractors over time.

“We’ll see the use of chatbots expand into areas where they can help the company create more value for their customers”

Until now, chatbots have primarily been deployed where companies can save money. Encouraging customers to shoulder routine tasks like Q&A, tech support, product registrations, and appointment scheduling allows employees to focus on higher-value work. This approach is attractive because it promises a permanent reduction in labor costs.

In 2022, I believe we’ll see the use of chatbots expand into areas where they can help the company create more value for their customers. Imagine you’re scheduling a dentist appointment using a chatbot. It might remind you when your kids are due for check-ups and try to find the most convenient time for all of you, including working around local school holidays.

The more value chatbots create for customers, the more valuable they are to a company’s brand.

Mike Wittenstein

Founder & Managing Partner, Storyminers

Jill Raff

CEO & Founder Jill Raff Group, LLC

“No one wants to feel they’re in a digital feedback loop with tech that cannot solve their problem”

Chatbots have become a part of our expected experiences as customers. As we move into 2022 and beyond, AI is progressing at lightning speed. It is crucial that organizations create internal Customer Experience (CX) teams working hand in hand with employee and customer experience experts for an external fresh-eyes perspective to ensure as much of a natural real ‘human conversation’ as possible.

In 2022, customers will demand more, faster, and with more convenience. No one wants to feel they’re in a digital feedback loop with tech that cannot solve their problem. Intelligently programmed chatbots can make ALL the difference in realizing these expectations.

“Thanks to AI, chatbots have, and will increasingly, expedite complex customer queries cost-effectively”

Chatbots offer three key components in customer value – access, information, and efficiency. Thanks to AI, chatbots have, and will increasingly, expedite complex customer queries cost-effectively. These savings ensure companies can hire talented service professionals when customers “opt human.” Chatbots have moved from a less desirable service option to a necessary and invaluable one.

Joseph Michelli

CEO, The Michelli Experience

Alex Jimenez

Chief Strategy Officer, Finalytics.ai

“2022 will see an incremental increase in proof-of-concept tests”

The pandemic has increased the demand for automated and self-service. Consumers expect 24×7 service in all kinds of industries. According to Business Insider “Nearly 40% of internet users worldwide prefer interacting with chatbots than virtual agents, and with major industries including retail and healthcare turning to digital technology, chatbots will likely increase in popularity moving forward.”

While for these reasons, I’m bullish on chatbots in the long-term, I don’t expect chatbots to hit their stride by 2022. The main reasons why I think it is too early are:

A customer’s intent often escapes current chatbots. Human language and variations are complex and even with models like OpenAI’s GPT3, basic requests are easily misinterpreted. Consumers trained by human-powered chat functions find that purely AI-powered chatbots lack the conversational intelligence they associate with digital chats.

Chatbots are trained on data that is biased and often impacts the experience of people of cultures that aren’t reflected in the training data. This is more of a challenge with voice bots, as accents continue to be a problem for the Alexas and Siris of the world. Personally, I experience this nearly every day with my Amazon Echo.

2022 will see an incremental increase in proof-of-concept tests, implementations, and demand but it will not yet be the tipping point.

“Predictive analysis won’t replace humans, but serve them better. Chatbots are at the helm of this! ”

We are in the age of hyper-customisation. Serving segments with the highest degree of diversity would remain distant without AI/ML . Predictive analysis won’t replace humans, but serve them better. Chatbots are at the helm of this! Since 2020 digital use has quadrupled . Hence, data collection on every behaviour to predict the future is scaling new heights. In such a competitive world, Customer Experience would be defined by efficient communication,thereby increasing loyalty!

Nabomita Mazumdar

Founder, Nabomita

Leslie O’Flahavan

Principal & Owner E-WRITE

“If deployed correctly, the convenience and accessibility of chatbots could transform customer experience”

The best chatbots will make great customer experiences better. The worst chatbots will damage customer experience in ways companies cannot recover from. Even simple rule-based chatbots can improve customer experience when they’re built to answer customers’ authentic questions or efficiently guide customers to self-service content.

But many chatbots transform customer experience into customer frustration when they ask for the customer’s patience because they’re “learning,” fail to give the customer an easy exit to a live person, or keep offering information the customer’s indicated they don’t want or need.

If deployed correctly, the convenience and accessibility of chatbots could transform customer experience in 2022 in the most positive ways. It’s more likely, however, that clunky, inadequate chatbots will make customer experience worse.

“use chatbots for simple, transactional interactions to free up agent time that can be focused on more meaningful, emotional experiences”

Chatbots used to help streamline transactional experiences can really make customer journeys easier, quicker and more convenient. But using chatbots to try and cut costs in emotional experiences will cause frustration, resentment and will damage the relationship between customer and company.

So my advice is to use chatbots for simple, transactional interactions to free up agent time that can be focused on more meaningful, emotional experiences.

James Dodkins

CS Ambassador, Pega Systems

deBBie akwara

Founder & Principal Consultant

“(Chatbots) can help improve (CX) with a focus on response time, personalization and staff utilization”

With a focus on customer service experiences in West Africa, I don’t predict that chatbots will transform CX because it is an enabler. However, it can help improve it with a focus on response time, personalization and staff utilization.

Chatbots do not have the power to transform CX because humans determine the outcome. From CX projects I executed in 2021, it’s clear that companies that have adopted it don’t understand how it works, haven’t optimized it or innovated with it. Chatbots can’t solve CX problems automatically. In my opinion, they are designed to provide technical support that impacts CX.

“Chatbots will increasingly become mainstream”

Chatbots will increasingly become mainstream and part of the customer’s expectation as an option to choose to interact with your brand. The fact that every customer won’t choose this option does not mean that you can ignore it!

Peter Lavers

Director, Customer Attuned

The post 23 Experts Share How Chatbots Will Transform Customer Experience in 2022 appeared first on BotCore.

All you need to know about conversational AI + what’s in it for your business

Abhishek Shanbhag — Mon, 22 Nov 2021 22:21:00 +0000

All you need to know about conversational AI + what’s in it for your business

Ever since the pandemic wreaked havoc on the entire business landscape, customer and employee experiences (CX and EX) have transformed drastically.

With the advent of various technologies, customers now expect personalized, immersive, and end-to-end brand engagement. Even employees are now considered customers of a digital world— expecting seamless collaboration and tailored engagement, even as interactions become more virtual, mobile, and distributed.

Over the past year, conversational AI has emerged as the new spectrum in both CX and EX. Businesses globally have adopted conversational AI to provide customers and employees exceptional experiences throughout their journeys with the organization.

As per Gartner, the conversational AI market is expected to reach an astounding AUD 22.6 billion by 2024.

This blog takes you through everything you need to know about conversational AI and what’s in it for your business.

What is Conversational AI?

Conversational AI is a set of powerful technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI), natural language processing (NLP), dynamic text to speech, intent and entity recognition, and machine learning (ML) that empower computers to understand, process, and respond to human utterances and text inputs naturally.

Conversational AI is used in chatbots, voice bots, and virtual assistants and helps conduct simple, natural, human-like conversations with customers and employees. It allows enterprises to design cost-efficient digital experiences, streamline internal operations, and deliver superior customer engagement.

Bots can operate 24X7 and provide instant solutions to millions of customer and employee requests simultaneously.

Users may experience the technology on various platforms, including social media (WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger), enterprise messaging apps (Microsoft Teams, Slack, Zoom), voice assistants (Alexa, Google Home), websites, and interactive voice response systems (IVR).

Emerging Capabilities of a Conversational AI platform

Let’s take a look at some of the emerging capabilities of conversational AI businesses should look out for —

Low-code chatbot development – Low-code chatbot building platforms like Microsoft’s Power Virtual Agents allow people with little or no coding knowledge (citizen developers) to build professional-grade bots within a few days. Such platforms host a visual interface, pre-configured templates, and drag-and-drop features, and reduce development costs by up to 90%.
Multilingual chatbots – Only 7.5% of the world’s population are native English speakers. Global organizations employ people from around the world and have a wide customer base that spreads over geographies. Multilingual chatbots help scale the business’s localization efforts and amplify reach amongst customers from different regions. By making them feel heard and supported, organizations that engage with their staff in their native language have higher chances of building loyalty and retaining employees.
Omnichannel experiences – As discussed above, users can experience conversational AI through bots embedded on different channels. Here, a significant capability of the technology is its ability to empower users to start a conversation on one channel and continue it in another— without losing context.
Proactive engagement – As the business landscape becomes more digitized, the users of conversational AI not only expect omnichannel engagement but also want organizations to understand their intentions and preferences and respond accordingly. Bots must anticipate customer and employee needs in advance, intervene at moments when they may need help, and push personalized, context-aware information at the right time.
Sentiment analysis – Another key capability of conversational AI is sentiment analysis— a bot’s ability to comprehend the type and intensity of a user’s sentiment, steer conversations, and escalate to agents for human support.
Context management – With conversational AI, interactions feel truly human-like. A chatbot can remember critical information from past dialogue and retain context from one response to the next, ensuring interactions don’t feel scripted.

Conversational AI for customer and employee experience

Conversational AI has a wide range of use cases for both employees and customers.

In the case of employees, function-specific bots for HR, IT, business intelligence, CRM, and enterprise intranets are making life easier for remote workers by fulfilling the following use cases—

Answer employee queries instantly— anytime and anywhere
For example, “How do I reset my password?”, “What is my leave balance for this year?”

Simplify and automate mundane, repetitive tasks
For example, raise IT tickets, book meeting rooms, schedule a video call

Fetch relevant information quickly
For example, retrieve project files, HR policy documents, and business KPIs

Push personalized alerts and notifications
For example, network outage, HR policy changes, upcoming events

Learn More: 4 Ways Chatbots Are Making Life Easier for Remote Workers

Moreover, chatbots transform customer experiences and ensure meaningful engagement at every stage of the sales funnel as follows—

Reach – Push alerts about new products, send personalized tips, collect data about customer preferences.
Acquisition – Suggest products to purchase, help customers navigate the brand’s online store, assist with checkout, guide on product use.
Retention – Analyze customer needs, inform customers about latest offers and sales, upsell/cross-sell products.
Loyalty/Advocacy – tailor loyalty programs, send personalized rewards and discount coupons, collect customer feedback.

Learn More: Customer Service and Beyond: Harnessing Chatbots to transform the customer experience

What can conversational AI do for your business?

By harnessing the power of conversational AI in everyday business, organizations can reap the following benefits

Benefits for customers	Benefits for employees/organization
Increase revenue through upselling and cross-selling opportunities Build a loyal customer base through personalized and meaningful engagement Reduce customer effort Improve net promoter scores	Improve employee productivity Reduce voluntary turnover rates Uncover data-driven insights to make intelligent business decisions Reduce cost per contact

To learn more about conversational AI and how businesses can transform the post-pandemic digital CX with conversational AI, please feel free to go through our e-book “Transform the post-pandemic digital CX with conversational AI.”

In this guide, we’ll talk in depth about what is conversational and how it has helped transform customer experience in a post-pandemic world.

Conversational AI: A sneak-peek into real-life use cases

Una - Unilever’s chatbot for HR

Unilever leverages its HR chatbot Una to answer employee queries on various HR topics, including performance appraisal, allowance, and perform certain routine tasks like checking meeting room availability, claiming for healthcare, etc. Una is capable of conversing with employees in 106 countries, using 32 languages.

Leena Nair, CHRO at Unilever, in an interview, said, “Una hub is like a google search leverage scale in transaction answering. UNA handles about 7 million transactions in a year.

By using this technology, we have taken time away from the HR person, in some cases, as high as 1 hour a day, that usually they would spend in resolving queries and given them the time to do things that drive business performance which is doing interventions for teams, getting people focused on the big things to do.

In our recent Univoice survey, 93% of our people felt that they were really well supported during COVID with the equipment and technology that allowed them to be productive.”

POND’s SAL

POND’s SAL is an exciting real-life example of how conversational AI has transformed the digital customer experience.

SAL leverages technologies such as artificial intelligence and augmented reality to provide an immersive online shopping experience. Customers can say “hi” to SAL on Ponds’ flagship Shopee store.

Users must first upload a selfie, and while the personalized skin analysis takes place, SAL sends beauty tips to keep them engaged.

Post determining the customer’s skin type, SAL offers personalized product recommendations from POND’s across four significant areas – pimples, wrinkles, spots, and uneven skin tone.

95% of users who completed the SAL experience on Shopee have stated a positive experience with the bot.

How can Acuvate help?

At Acuvate, we help clients deploy customer and employee-facing chatbots that deliver fast, meaningful, and personalized interactions with our enterprise bot-building platform called BotCore.

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

BotCore hosts the following list of advanced capabilities —

An intuitive, low-code, visual interface, allowing the quick implementation of AI chatbots
Flexible integrations with existing legacy systems and AI services
Our chatbots simulate both simple and highly complex conversations.
Our bots are deployable on most of the popular enterprise messaging and social media channels and support several languages, including English, German, French, Italian, etc.

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

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

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