Abhishek Shanbhag, Author at BotCore Enterprise Chatbot Fri, 15 Mar 2024 09:21:11 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.6.1 https://botcore.ai/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/cropped-favicon-32x32-1-70x70.png Abhishek Shanbhag, Author at BotCore 32 32 Power Virtual Agents & Power Automate – Truly Powerful! https://botcore.ai/blog/power-virtual-agents-power-automate/ Wed, 23 Nov 2022 13:09:00 +0000 https://botcore.ai/?p=5917 Power Virtual Agents & Power Automate – Truly Powerful! Introduction Power Virtual Agents (PVA) and Power Automate (PA), formerly called Flows, are Microsoft’s latest AI innovations and a part of their Power Platform. Enterprises can use these tools separately to solve unique challenges but can also integrate and leverage them together to accomplish a common […]

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Power Virtual Agents & Power Automate – Truly Powerful!

Introduction

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

Understanding Power Virtual Agents

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

Using PVA, powerful chatbots can be built using a guided, no-code graphical interface that can be deployed for sales, HR, finance, customer service and virtually on all channels where customers need to be engaged. Bot Framework and Azure Bot Service and Cognitive Services provide the technological foundation for Power Virtual Agents.

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

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

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

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

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

Understanding Power Automate

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

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

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

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

Integrating Power Virtual Agents With Power Automate

Trigger bots to take action!

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

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

But with the launch of Power Automate this is solved.

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

Learn More: Add actions to a bot using Power Automate

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

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

Some key benefits include:

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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Improve Employee training and Engagement with Knowledge Bots https://botcore.ai/blog/employee-training-and-engagement-with-knowledge-bots/ Fri, 16 Sep 2022 07:23:00 +0000 https://botcore.ai/?p=10735 Improve Employee Training and Engagement With Knowledge Bots Rapidly increasing digitization and the emergence of hybrid working practices have resulted in a permanent shift in the kind of experiences employees expect at the workplace. Just as modern-day customers want faster, more meaningful and personalized brand engagement, employees have come to value and like rich, contextual […]

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Improve Employee Training and Engagement With Knowledge Bots

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s explore more.

Knowledge bots in employee Training and engagement

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

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

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

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

A) HR Knowledge Bot

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

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

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

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

HR Assistant

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

Onboarding Assistant

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

Training and career development

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

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

Collaboration and engagement

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

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

B) IT Knowledge Bot

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

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

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

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

C) BI Knowledge Bot

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

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

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

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

How can Acuvate help?

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

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

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

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

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

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Conversational Commerce in various Social Channels https://botcore.ai/blog/conversational-commerce-in-social-channels/ Wed, 06 Jul 2022 12:17:59 +0000 https://botcore.ai/?p=10409 Conversational Commerce in various Social Channels We live in an era where artificial intelligence (AI) has taken over every aspect of our being. And customer experience (CX) is not alien to it. As the world embraces new-age customer experiences (CX) with open hands, warranting the delivery of hyper-personalized customer engagement to a more informed, connected, […]

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Conversational Commerce in various Social Channels

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

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

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

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

Let’s explore more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s find out.

Curating a personalized sales journey through conversational commerce

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

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

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

Conversation Bot
Conversation
Conversations A Bot

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

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

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

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

1. POND’s SAL chatbot for Facebook Messenger

Chatbot For Facebook Messenger

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

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

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

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

2. pRANA’s chatbot for Facebook Messenger

Prana’s Chatbot For Facebook Messenger

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

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

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

Chatbot On Whatsapp

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

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

4. Clear’s Cera chatbot for Facebook Messenger

Clear’s Cera Chatbot For Facebook Messenger

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

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

5. Roma by Rochi’s chatbot for Instagram

Chatbot For Instagram

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

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

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

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

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

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Choosing your Conversational AI Platform https://botcore.ai/blog/choosing-conversational-ai-platform/ Thu, 30 Jun 2022 14:18:01 +0000 https://botcore.ai/?p=10355 Choosing your Conversational AI Platform With the growing popularity of conversational AI as a facilitator delivering instant, personalized, and meaningful engagement to customers and employees, the market is flooded with constantly evolving tools and solutions that make this a reality. In fact, conversational AI is expected to mature into a $1.3 billion market by 2025, […]

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Choosing your Conversational AI Platform

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

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

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

Let’s explore more.

conversational AI platform - Capabilities

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

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

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

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

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

1. Ease of use with low-code platforms

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

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

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

2. Exceptional UX

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

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

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

3. Omnichannel presence and multilingual proficiency

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

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

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

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

4. Integrations with the client’s existing tech stack

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

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

5. Reporting, analytics, and security

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

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

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

How can Acuvate help?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

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

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Top Voice Bot Use Cases In Different Industries

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

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

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

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

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

Unique Voice Bot Use Cases for Various Industries

Unique Voice Bot Use Cases For Various Industries

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

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

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

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

Healthcare

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

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

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

Banking

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

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

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

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

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

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

Insurance

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

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

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

Retail and Conversational Commerce

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

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

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

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

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

Manufacturing

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

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

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

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

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

How can Acuvate help?

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

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

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

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

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

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Total Experience in the Age of Conversational AI Platforms

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s explore further.

Understanding Total Experience from an Organizational Perspective

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conversational AI Platforms for Total Experience (TX)

Conversational Ai Platforms For Total Experience

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

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

Customer Experience

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

Employee Experience

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

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

User Experience

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

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

Multi-experience

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

How Can Acuvate Help?

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

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

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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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s explore in detail.

1. Send personalized product recommendations after understanding customer needs

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

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

2. Push notifications about new products

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

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

3. Assist in online shopping

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

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

4. Give personalized tips and advice

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

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

Mark bot
Mark bot

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

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

Unox bot
Unox bot

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

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

wholes food

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

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

Ponds Chatbot

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

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

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

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

5. Provide customer support

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

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

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

6. Boost customer loyalty and advocacy through offers and feedback

Pepsodent bot

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meet HelloFresh’s Freddy

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

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

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

How can Acuvate help?

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

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

BotCore boasts of the following capabilities —

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

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

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

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