AI Bots Archives - BotCore

The Future of Chatbots: Top statistics to look for in 2021 and beyond

Abhishek Shanbhag — Tue, 18 May 2021 12:47:00 +0000

The Future of Chatbots: Top statistics to look for in 2021 and beyond

According to a study by Allied Market Research, the global intelligent virtual assistant market was pegged at $3.44 billion in 2019 and is expected to hit $44.25 billion by 2027, registering a CAGR of 37.7% from 2020 to 2027.

Owing to the rapid digitization of business, the rise in the penetration of smart devices, the high demand for automation in customer services coupled with the evolving employee expectations, chatbots and voice-enabled assistants are being used in a wide range of industries and use cases.

From searching for information, finding hotels and restaurants, listening to music, and shopping for products to solving customer queries, carrying out routine HR and IT tasks, and getting personalized alerts and recommendations, intelligent virtual assistants (IVA) have taken the entire business landscape by storm.

Today’s market is filled with AI-enabled chatbots and voice assistants, including Microsoft Cortana, Google Home, Apple Siri, and Amazon Alexa, embedded on every platform and device, such as websites, social media apps, smartphones, portable speakers, smartwatches, and tablets. Indeed, it’s time for organizations to jump on board with this transformation to survive and thrive in the market.

So, if you plan to implement chatbots/virtual assistants for your customers and employees, read on to learn about the latest industry trends and use cases, and top statistics to look out for in 2021.

Customer and employee challenges

33% are most frustrated by having to repeat themselves to multiple support reps. (HubSpot Research)
60% of customers feel that long holds and wait times are the most frustrating parts of a service experience. (Zendesk)
30% of customers will leave a brand and never come back because of a bad experience. (IDC)
The average business worker uses 4 different applications for daily work.
Employees spend over 3 hours a day on easily automatable tasks. (Business Standard)
70 to 80 percent of business intelligence initiatives end up failing due to bad user experience. (Gartner)
In a survey, 99% of the respondents said it is valuable for employees to easily find HR information, such as maternity leave or other company policies. (ServiceNow HR Tech Conference and Expo)

Chatbot Adoption Statistics:

3 in 5 millennials have used chatbots at least once in their lives. (Outgrow)
There are more than 300,000 active bots on Messenger. (Review42)
About 7 billion conversations take place on Facebook Messenger every day. Messages are opened more often than emails, with a 30-40 percent CTR. (G2 Learn Hub)
Teams that use chatbots to automate conversations are 27% more likely to meet rising customer expectations than those that don’t. (Tech Republic)

Customer Service Chatbot Statistics:

By 2023, 30% of customer service organizations will deliver proactive customer services by using AI-enabled process orchestration and continuous intelligence. (Gartner)
By 2025, proactive customer engagement interactions will outnumber reactive customer engagement interactions. (Gartner)
By 2023, more than 60% of all customer service engagements will be delivered via digital and web-serve channels, up from 23% in 2019. (Gartner)
By 2025, customer service organizations will elevate operational efficiency by 25% by embedding AI in their multichannel customer engagement platforms. (Gartner)
Chatbot conversations will deliver $8 billion in cost savings by 2022. (Juniper Research)
By 2023, 25% of the customer interactions will be via voice. (Gartner)

Employee Chatbot Statistics:

In 2021, artificial intelligence will recover 6.2 billion hours of worker productivity globally. (Gartner)
By 2022, 70% of white-collar workers will interact with conversational platforms on a daily basis. (Gartner)
Support leaders whose teams use chatbots are 60% more likely to report an improvement in resolution times and 30% more likely to report an increase in customer satisfaction than those who do not. (Tech Republic)
Organizations are increasingly using RPA chatbots to automate diverse, repeatable tasks and back-office operations in HR, IT, etc. RPA software spending will total $2.4 billion in 2022. (Gartner)
92% of HR teams agree that chatbots will be important in directing employees toward finding the information they need in the future. (ServiceNow HR Tech Conference and Expo)
90% of businesses report faster complaint resolution with chatbots. (MIT)

Chatbot Market Statistics: Outlook in 2021 and beyond

The global chatbot market in BFSI is projected to reach $2,186 million by 2024, growing at a CAGR of 29.7% from 2018 to 2024. (Allied Market Research)
The operational cost savings from using chatbots in banking will reach $7.3 billion globally by 2023, up from an estimated $209 million in 2019, representing a whopping 862 million hours of time saved for banks. (Juniper Research)
The retail sector will gain the most from chatbot technology. By 2023, 70% of chatbots accessed will be retail-based. (Juniper Research)
The smart speaker market segment will grow at a CAGR of 40.3% until 2027. (Allied Market Research)
Voice shopping is estimated to hit $40+ billion across the U.S. and U.K. by 2022. (Tech Crunch)
By 2021, early adopters of the technology who have redesigned their websites to support voice search capability will increase revenue by 30%.
By 2024, consumer retail spend via chatbots worldwide will reach $142 billion – up from just $2.8 billion in 2019. (Insider Intelligence)
The Healthcare chatbots market is poised to value over $340 million by 2027 end with a CAGR of over 20.5% during the forecast period 2020 to 2027. (Future Wise)
AI may automate more than 100,000 supportive roles in the legal sector within the next two decades. (Deloitte)
85% of travelers book travel activities via mobile. (Hotel Tech)
87% of users would interact with a travel chatbot if it could save them both time and money. (Hospitality Technology)

How can Acuvate help?

At Acuvate, we help clients deploy AI-enabled chatbots and virtual assistants with our enterprise bot-building platform called BotCore.

With minimalistic coding requirements and a visual design interface, enterprises can build and deploy chatbots for a wide range of use cases, including HR, IT, intranet, business intelligence, customer service, and contact center support, within a few weeks. Our bots leverage the best of Microsoft’s AI, machine learning, and natural language processing technology to understand what the user wants, learn from past conversations, retain context, and provide proper support.

Moreover, BotCore allows organizations to create an intelligent virtual assistant network by connecting multiple bots within your enterprise, supporting third-party app integration, and enabling built-in support for Power Virtual Agents, LUIS, and QnA Maker.

Enterprises can also cater to a global customer and employee audience with support for multiple languages like French, German, English, etc.

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

The post The Future of Chatbots: Top statistics to look for in 2021 and beyond appeared first on BotCore.

How Dynamics 365 Virtual Agents Can Supercharge Your Customer Service

Rakesh Reddy — Mon, 13 Apr 2020 09:40:49 +0000

How Dynamics 365 Virtual Agents Can Supercharge Your Customer Service

Delivering positive customer experiences has become critical for organizations to drive engagement, purchases, loyalty and retention. To this end, many enterprise leaders have deployed AI customer service technologies like chatbots for various use cases.

Several Microsoft customers are already using Bot Framework to build customer chatbots. These bots though effective require high coding and more resources. To overcome this, many customers are using Azure-driven low-code chatbot builder platforms like BotCore developed by Acuvate, a Microsoft Gold Partner.

With the launch of Dynamics 365 Virtual Agents, Microsoft is aiming to supercharge the capabilities of customer service bots and pave the way for a low-code and seamless bot building experience. In this article, we’ll give an overview of this new technology and what it means for Microsoft customers.

What Are Dynamics 365 Virtual Agents?

As the name indicates, Dynamics 365 Virtual Agents is a combined package of Microsoft’s two key technologies – Dynamics 365 (Customer Relationship Management Software) and Power Virtual Agents (low-code chatbot builder platform).

If you’re a Microsoft user, you must be familiar with Dynamics 365. With its no-code guided graphical interface, Power Virtual Agents enables business teams to build powerful chatbots quickly and with no developer help.

It is also a part of Microsoft’s prestigious Power Platform – a low-code business application platform which brings PowerApps, PowerBI, Power Automate and Virtual Agents under one umbrella.

As chatbot technology becomes critical in customer service operations, it’s integration with a CRM is a no brainer. Customer service teams can use Dynamics 365 Virtual Agents to easily identify and automate common support issues – without having to write code.

The Need For Dynamics 365 Virtual Agents

Let’s quickly explore the current state of customer service chatbots built with bot frameworks and the limitations associated with them.

The success of customer service chatbot largely depends on the quality and quantity of the bot’s knowledge – topics it understands and can deliver the right solutions. Customer service experts who actually interact with customers and know their problems are often disconnected from the bot development process due to the high coding most framework-based chatbots today require. This leads to poor bot conversations and customer experience. Empowering customer service teams to create virtual agents by themselves is imperative to success.
New requests and queries emerge due to changing market and business conditions. Ex: launch of a new product, roll out of a new product update, etc. This means the chatbot’s content should also be updated. Customer service teams should be provided with the ability to easily update the bot and add new topics without any hassle and long update cycles.
Customers can get frustrated if the bot doesn’t understand their intents. A chatbot should be equipped with AI and NLP capabilities that adapt to customer content.
Customer service chatbots should extend their capabilities well beyond responding to users – they should be able to perform tasks on behalf of customers. Hence, it’s key to integrate them with backend systems.

Learn More: RPA Bots: Understanding The Chatbot And RPA Integration

How Dynamics 365 Virtual Agents Can Help?

The solution provides a proactive workflow for resolving customer issues and a modern approach to customer service. Let’s deep dive into its key features.

1. Discover Issues to automate

With the Dynamics 365 Customer Service Insights dashboard, you can identify issues which are repetitive, trending and time-consuming for your agents. The AI in the software also provides recommendations on the right issues to automate.

2. Automate support issues with the virtual agent

Once the common support topics and issues to be automated are identified, customer service teams can easily build a virtual agent that’ll automatically address these issues. With a simple no-code graphical interface and ready-to-use templates, agents can build rich conversations within minutes. If there is no need to build a new virtual agent, human agents can also update the knowledge of an existing chatbot with the same ease.

3. Complete actions on behalf of users

Virtual agents can not only troubleshoot users’ problems by chatting with them but also perform actions on their behalf. By integrating Power Automate with Dynamics 365 Virtual Agents, your customer service team can enable a trigger which lets bots to access data or perform tasks in your back-end systems.

4. Human Hand off

When a virtual agent can’t solve an issue or the conversation becomes too complex to handle, it provides customers an option to “Talk to a human agent”. Once the customer agrees, the virtual agent hands off the conversation to a human agent.

Learn More: Human Handoff In Service Desk Bots

5. Monitor Performance with Analytics

Dynamics 365 Virtual Agents comes with an AI-powered analytics dashboard in which you can track topics that are handled, which topics need human handoff and overall performance of the virtual agent. The dashboard continuously provides suggestions on improving service experience and frees up the bandwidth of your agents.

Business Benefits Of Dynamics 365 Virtual Agents

The software drives a win-win-win situation for customers, human agents, and management. Customers will get better service experience, agents can focus on productive tasks and management can reduce operating costs. Here are some more benefits:

Increased Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) score
24*7 Self-service
Reduced customer service costs
Improved agent productivity
Personalized service experiences
Increased ROI from back end systems

Pricing

The pricing for the Dynamics 365 Virtual Agents package – which includes Power Virtual Agents + Dynamics 365 Customer Service Insights starts from $1,100 per tenant/month. This includes

2,000 Power Virtual Agents Sessions and 100,000 Dynamics 365 Customer Service Insights cases.

Get Started

Microsoft is coming up with new features for Dynamics 365 Virtual Agents including AI-driven dialogs, multi-lingual support, support for telephony and more! Microsoft customers planning to modernize their customer service should look into implementing this exciting new technology which brings the best of Microsoft innovations – Dynamics 365, Power Virtual Agents and Power Automate together. The future of delivering stellar customer experiences depends on the robustness of your service workflow and Dynamics 365 Virtual Agents helps you build a powerful one.

If you’d like to learn more about this topic or planning to implement the solution, please feel free to get in touch with one of our Microsoft and chatbot consultants for a personalized consultation.

The post How Dynamics 365 Virtual Agents Can Supercharge Your Customer Service appeared first on BotCore.

How Chatbots Are Helping The Fight Against The COVID-19 Crisis

Jagan Jami — Mon, 16 Mar 2020 10:28:00 +0000

How Chatbots Are Helping The Fight Against The COVID-19 Crisis

As the impacts of the pandemic deepen and governments continue to enforce social quarantine to “flatten the curve”, it is innovative technologies like chatbots that are coming to the rescue. Their diverse range of applications, cost-effectiveness, and ease of implementation, is resulting in more and more organizations readily adopting them. From customer support, crisis management, internal communications to remote work support, organizations are using these conversational interfaces in different ways to fight this pandemic.

Let’s look into this in detail.

Functions Where Chatbots Are Making A Difference

1. Crisis Management

Chatbots are essential not only because they answer FAQs of employees, but also for their ability to conduct human-like conversations – something very desirable when people are isolated and going through difficult times.

In regards to crisis management, chatbots can help in

Sending public health information to employees from sources like WHO and CDC
Performing employee health checks
Keeping employees informed about the company’s latest advisories, and news
Sending work from home tips for remote workers

In fact, Global Telecom, a Filipino telecommunications company, has implemented a chatbot named Digital Usher for Disasters and Emergencies (DUDE) to keep the management updated on its employee’s health and well-being. The chatbot does daily health status checks for its 8000+ employees.

2. Human Resources (HR)

The lockdown has put a huge burden on HR. The economic downturn has piled up their inboxes with emails from employees concerned about their work status, paycheck, and lack of procedural clarity. Moreover, managing the hiring and onboarding process has become incredibly difficult in the remote environment, resulting in offers being rescinded and talent choosing to join competitors. In such a scenario, chatbots can play a major role in streamlining the HR workflows.

Not only can chatbots answer FAQ, provide policy-related information to the workforce but also automate the hiring process and run virtual training programs and assessments. For instance, in industries which are aggressively hiring, chatbots can screen applications, conduct background checks on thousands of people, collect candidate data and help the HR team to focus more on productive tasks. Moreover, chatbots can make the training and onboarding processes interactive and interesting by ensuring active participation.

Learn More: HR Bots, Chatbots for Employees,

3. IT Services Management (ITSM)

In the past few weeks, we have seen IT help desks in several companies struggling to manage the sudden unprecedented surge in incidents, issues and requests. Needless to say this is largely due to the sudden shift to remote working.

A huge volume of these requests are usually ‘basic’ or ‘simple’ questions that take a lot of time to answer. A chatbot is a powerful solution to address repetitive and low-value requests. They’re available 24*7 and can handle multiple requests simultaneously. If the chatbot is unable to handle a particular query, it can always hand over the conversation to a human agent.

This will allow your IT staff to focus on productive and proactive tasks.

Learn More: IT Helpdesk Bot

How Different Industries Are Leveraging Chatbots Amid COVID-19

1. Government

Chatbots can enable governments to relay critical and accurate information to the public as and when they require it, providing much-needed clarity on some FAQs related to lockdowns, COVID-19 symptoms, testing locations, and the affected areas.

Interestingly, the British Government has launched a WhatsApp-powered chatbot, to prevent misinformation and spread reliable health information by sharing the latest news updates and health guidance, as per the chosen option, reducing the burden on the National Health Services (NHS). Additionally, WHO has also started to utilize chatbots in its app to prevent misinformation and spread reliable health information. The chatbot also conducts interactive quizzes in multiple languages.

2. Healthcare

In these testing times, with people facing a global recession, financial uncertainty, and increased health anxiety, their mental health is taking a beating. In such a scenario, AI-powered chatbots can not only help relay vital information but also help to cope with the increased stress 24×7. As the health industry continues to champion our fight against the pandemic, chatbots can also ease the burden on it by directly helping people through guided meditations, diet, and fitness programs.

Chatbots also help in communicating with digitally disconnected front line workers and sending the latest information right to their mobile messaging apps. Another popular use case amid this pandemic is remote patient screening.

Jefferson Health, a leading academic health system in the USA, has deployed a conversational chatbot to remotely screen patients and prioritize cases without the risk of exposure. The chatbot also digitized the patient intake process to streamline appointment scheduling for COVID-19 testing.

3. Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG)

With a drastic fall in physical store traffic, much of the demand for CPG has shifted online, with many executives publicly stating that they are zeroing in on digital commerce to target their customer base. With convenience and accessibility as the driving factors, they realize that implementing chatbots can be a vital step in this direction.

Not only can chatbots be used internally to manage restocks, track orders, and research promotions but also for online customer support to enhance the customer experience.

Britannia Industries, a leader in the CPG space, has launched a GPS-powered WhatsApp-based chatbot in light of the current social quarantine and rising demand. The chatbot is helping consumers locate grocery stores which have the organization’s products. In fact, the chatbot also sends notifications to the customers automatically whenever the store’s stock is refilled.

Learn More: CPG bots, Chatbots for CPG

4. Retail

With physical stores being open only for a few hours and supply chains hampered, retailers are changing their policies related to shippings, products among many others. A chatbot can be used to inform customers about these changing policies and keep them updated.

Learn More: Retail Bots, Chatbots for Retail industry,

5. Restaurants

With restaurants transitioning into takeouts only, their menus, service offerings, pricing, and timings have changed. Letting people know about these changes is important. Moreover, with them operating with limited staff, order taking and tracking can become a handful. Chatbots can be used to relay any changes and updates to customers, as well as collect orders from them.

Conclusion

Any doubts that businesses may have had about chatbots prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, have been put to rest. With the market dynamics changing in face of the social quarantine, chatbots are growing in popularity. Their use case is no longer limited to customer service, they are becoming an integral component of an organization’s operations, both internally and externally. A chatbot’s range of applications, scalability, and ease of implementation are some key drivers for its adoption amid this crisis.

If you’d like to learn more about this topic, please feel free to get in touch with one of our chatbot consultants for a personalized consultation.

The post How Chatbots Are Helping The Fight Against The COVID-19 Crisis appeared first on BotCore.

Conversational IVR: The what, why and how

Abhishek Shanbhag — Mon, 29 Apr 2019 15:40:00 +0000

Conversational IVR: The What, Why And How

Today’s modern customers want more – They expect faster resolution to issues, personalized experiences and effective self-service. Even though traditional IVR systems are deployed with an intention to provide self-service via phone, reduce call volume and increase agent productivity, these outcomes are rarely realized. Customers usually choose phone-based interactions for escalations, disputes and complex issues.

Traditional IVR systems with touch-tone and dialog-based commands, complex routing and convoluted navigation menus often fail to resolve the needs of customers and end up frustrating them more.

Consequently, the calls are routed to live agents, which increases the operational costs and decreases productivity.

According to an IBM report, companies across the world spend more than $1.3 trillion to serve 265 billion customer calls each year. One can only imagine the savings companies will make, if they can reduce the customer call time handled by human agents.

Companies, therefore, need efficient ways of resolving the problems of traditional IVRs and at the same time address customers’ issues effectively. And the solution? Conversational IVR.

Powered by AI, conversational IVRs provide a unique voice-based and hands-free solution where customers can interact using natural language as opposed to choosing the options from a long static menu offered by traditional IVRs. Conversational IVR systems can also anticipate the caller’s needs and can determine the context of a conversation with the help of Natural Language Understanding (NLU).

The What – Understanding Conversational IVR

Powered by automated speech recognition (ASR) and NLU engines, conversational IVR can comprehend both the meaning and the rationale of the question. Getting the intent of the customer right can in itself reduce handling times by eliminating detours and ineffective routes to resolution.

With conversational IVR users can now talk to the system to address their queries without having to press buttons and select options. This IVR system understands the semantics of the request, determines the user intent and guides the user through the correct sequence. This improves the quality of self-service and eliminates complex navigation through the menu.

In a traditional interaction, the agent authenticates the customer and evaluates the history to provide a tailor made solution. This entire process can be automated using an intelligent IVR system to provide a personalized experience to customers.

The Why – Benefits of Conversational IVR

Reduce operational costs

It’s imperative that enterprises optimise contact centre costs without compromising on customer experience. Conversational and intelligent IVR systems have been integral for achieving cost-efficiency in many ways.

One of them is by improving call resolution and deflection rates, thus lowering contact center costs. Conversational IVR also fosters better agent utilisation, thus reducing labour costs.

Reduce contact center call volume

Since traditional IVRs comprise of list-based menus, they are not very effective in addressing customers’ requirements. Often, after taking the caller through a long list of options, they may not address the issue faced by the caller at all. In such a scenario, calls are directed to live agents for resolution.

With conversational IVRs however, customers can directly speak about their issue in natural language and the system suggests the best possible solution for it. This shortens the entire process of customers having to make several attempts for resolution, thus reducing the contact center call volume.

Agent Productivity

With ineffective resolution of issues through traditional IVRs, customers are compelled to contact human agents. With more calls stacking up, agents will be incapacitated to handle the large volume of calls leading to call abandonment, long waiting and handling times, in turn affecting their productivity.

With conversational IVR, customers can be engaged effectively through the IVR system without having to connect to the agent, unless in rare scenarios. This leaves the agents with more time to attend to critical matters that need human intervention and resolve issues conclusively leading to improved agent productivity.

Learn More: Human Hand-off in Service Desk Bots

Improve Customer Experiences And Improve CSAT

Since conversational IVRs foster better call resolution and quick turnaround time, the customer experience naturally goes up. This leads to greater customer loyalty and improved brand perception, increasing the overall CSAT.

Customer-centric Self-Service

The motto of self-service IVR platforms is to resolve issues quickly and reduce IVR abandonment.

Conversational IVRs address this challenge effectively by seamlessly authenticating customers, quickly understanding complex requests, and predicting customer requirements to conduct business transactions and resolve customer issues efficiently.

Adapts To Customer Behavior And Needs With The Help Of AI

Backed by AI and machine learning, conversational IVR systems can build their own database and intelligence based on customer interactions. This helps them improve their overall capability in solving customers’ issues.

This data is then used in successive interactions to efficiently adapt to the customer’s behaviour and needs.

Higher Resolution Rates for Better CX

With the ability to discern complex requests, conversational IVRs can route calls to agents who are best suited to resolve specific issues than just routing calls to the first available agent. This leads to higher rates of resolving customer issues while improving customer experience.

The How – Key considerations When shifting to Conversational IVR

Clearly, there are several benefits to adopting conversational IVR systems. However, the shift in technology comes with its own challenges. Following are some of the key aspects that companies should consider when transitioning to conversational IVR:

Understand your customers: To provide the best experience, companies should have an understanding of their customers journey, different touchpoints, their goals and challenges. They must also acknowledge that different customers will respond differently to the new self-service option. Incorporating a feedback program is essential to understand customers’ experiences and expectations.
Capture use cases: Shortlist the use cases/customer journeys which would be the most beneficial for conversational IVR. Each use case needs a different conversation flow. So, you must also consider any new use cases that can come up due to new product launches or initiatives.
Tracking Performance: The shift to conversational AI platforms must be measured in order to evaluate its success and track progress. An important KPI to be considered is the Customer Effort Score (CES) – a metric that indicates the effort customers have to exert for their issue to be resolved. Effort is a key influencing factor of customer loyalty and organizations should aim to keep it as low as possible.

Conclusion

With customers demanding more agile, quicker and faster ways of getting their issues resolved, intelligent IVR systems are becoming key to enhance and modernize customer service. In the coming years, we can see many organizations deploy conversational IVR systems to cut costs, improve agent productivity and enhance customer experience.

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

The post Conversational IVR: The what, why and how appeared first on BotCore.

How To Convince Your Leadership To Deploy Enterprise Chatbots

Abhishek Shanbhag — Mon, 18 Mar 2019 10:47:08 +0000

How To Convince Your Leadership To Deploy Enterprise Chatbots

From customer support, business intelligence, service management, lead generation to information retrieval, chatbots have gained widespread adoption across functions. The reason why organizations are actively embracing bot technology is that chatbots not only have several high value business use cases but also are easy to deploy with minimum risks.

If you believe that your organization can greatly benefit from investing in chatbots but your top management is still on the fence about it, we are here to help. Here are some ways you can strengthen your business case and persuade your leadership/executive sponsors to deploy enterprise chatbots.

1. Demonstrate ROI with Hard Data

Data and facts help you sharpen your pitch and make decision-making simpler for your stakeholders. Show the ROI of chatbots by collating data and research both internally and externally for the chatbot use case you’re considering.

Let’s say you’re planning to deploy customer service chatbots, your internal data could be:

Our customer service agents spend more than XX hours on answering basic questions
Our CSAT score is below 6
Our customer service costs have increased by 30% compared to the last year
Our annual sales have gone down by 20% due to poor service experience

In the same way, you can collate similar data from external sources like analyst and research firms, vendors etc. For the example stated above, the external data could be along the lines of:

According to this Forbes report, 62% of US consumers like chatbots as a means to engage with companies. The adoption rates are even higher (more than 70%) in countries like the UK, Australia and France.
Gartner Says 25 percent of customer service operations will use virtual customer assistants by 2020
Chatbots can save up to 30% in customer support services – BI Intelligence
Spark New Zealand has reduced its customer service costs by 25 percent through the use of human online chat and chatbots

You can also ask vendors for a pre-defined ROI/business value calculator to make this process easier and showcase the exact ROI stakeholders can expect.

2. Show What The Media and Industry Experts Are Saying

Media plays a huge part in influencing our choices and buying decisions. You can share how the sentiments of media, market analysts and industry watchers about AI bots are in sync with the consumers trends. Here are some quotes and statistics you can include in your next PowerPoint Presentation with your bosses:

PwC affirmed, “Chatbots are disrupting various forms of customer engagement as they effectively meet customer needs for enhanced user experience through AI.”
Gartner anticipates that by 2022, modern workplaces would look a lot different than today and interacting with conversational platforms will soon be the norm. Analysts at the global research and advisory firm also believe that bots and virtual customer assistants will gain importance in the future.
Gartner predicts that by 2021, over 50% of enterprises will increase their yearly spends on bots and chatbot creation.
80% of businesses would deploy chatbots by 2020 after witnessing the benefits of conversational AI bots, according to Business Insider.
“Sixty-eight percent of service leaders indicate that bots and VCAs will be more important in the next two years. Service centers should seriously be considering how this technology could be integrated into current operations, in both customer-facing and rep-facing systems,” stated Lauren Villeneuve, senior principal, advisory at Gartner.

3. Present Case Studies

Build credibility for your suggestions and advice with case studies of companies that have successfully deployed chatbots. Look for examples within your industry and share relevant use cases with your leadership. Network with peers at events and find companies with comparable size and which share your operational model, IT infrastructure, and target market.

Present the information graphically alongside a narrative that depicts the ease of implementation and the newfound business outcomes after the implementation.

We have observed that the best way to convince top management about investing in a new technology is by sharing real life stories, experiences and laying out quantifiable business benefits.

If you need help in collating success stories relevant to your industry and company, please feel free to get in touch with us. We have helped organizations of all sizes and across industries in successfully deploying enterprise chatbot solutions. We’d love to share our success stories with you.

4. Demo The Technology

While words are effective, hands-on experience of a new technology is even more powerful. We suggest getting in touch with a reputable vendor to arrange a quick demo to explain how chatbots could help your business to your boss. Ensure that the vendor is able to address all the pain-points, short-term objectives, long-term goals and possible objections/concerns of your stakeholders.

The right vendor should not only be able to demonstrate how their bot solution could help in solving your business problems but also explain the quantifiable benefits.

5. Suggest A Pilot Project

Even if your leadership is intrigued by the statistics and demo, we understand that investing in a full fledged enterprise project could be an expensive proposition. Not everyone would be enthusiastic to deploy a new technology at a large scale. Counter this sentiment by suggesting the team to start with a pilot project.

A pilot program will help to break down the big goal of deploying enterprise chatbots into measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound steps. The decision-makers will be able to see how it works, what problems it can solve and how effectively it can solve before making a company-wide launch. Launching a finite project with low risk is a feasible strategy to test a prevalent but abstract idea and convince your leadership about the chatbot’s power.

6. Explain The Long-term Impact of Investing in A Promising AI Technology

Investing in AI is no longer just an option for organizations – it’s a business imperative. Unlike any other traditional technologies, AI-powered technologies have the ability to “think”, become intelligent with time and maximize ROI and business outcomes constantly.

And several senior executives are fast realizing this fact. According to Gartner, the percentage of enterprises employing AI grew 270 percent over the past four years.

Chatbots are one of the most prominent and widely adopted AI technologies among enterprises. Use this fact and explain how deploying a promising technology like chatbot aligns with the organization’s greater goal of adopting AI to accelerate digital transformation.

These are the six effective ways to convince your higher-ups about AI-powered bots. We understand that spearheading a company-wide change in an organization is challenging and complex. But it is also a very rewarding experience.

If you’re looking to deploy enterprise chatbots for your business or want to get your questions answered or need assistance in convincing your leadership, please do reach out to us. Our team of experts would be happy to offer a personalized consultation.

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The post How To Convince Your Leadership To Deploy Enterprise Chatbots appeared first on BotCore.

7 quick tips for designing a chatbot personality

Abhishek Shanbhag — Wed, 20 Feb 2019 12:52:00 +0000

7 Quick Tips For Designing A Chatbot Personality

One of the key factors for creating better conversational user experiences (CUX) and driving chatbot user adoption is the chatbot personality. Having the right personality enables the chatbot to conduct human-like, rich, personalized and relatable conversations with users and establishes an emotional connection with the user.

If the chatbot is built for a customer-facing function, its personality should ideally mirror that of your company’s and should be tailored keeping the end-user in mind. This is crucial as your bots are a representation of what your brand stands for and the experiences you want to deliver to your customers.

Humans are usually hard to please but can be frustrated easily. Hence, your chatbot’s personality should be consistent at every stage of the conversation – right from customer greeting, query handling, providing information to conversation sign-off.

7 quick tips for designing a chatbot personality

understand the persona of your target user

When designing your chatbot personality, keep in mind the demographic, age group and other key personality traits of the end-user the chatbot interacts with. For instance, if the majority of your end-users/customers are between 25 – 40 years, giving the chatbot an adolescent-like persona isn’t the best fit. Understanding the personality of the audience, their oft-used colloquial/slang language, verbatim, habits, mannerisms, interests, etc. can help in tailoring the personality of the chatbot to the customer base.

purpose of the chatbot

It is very important to design the personality of the chatbot according to its purpose. If the chatbot is built to conduct serious conversations like handling customer complaints or helping customers with time-sensitive actions, the chatbot should be efficient and straightforward with questions and responses. Trying to be clever with witty responses is the last thing the chatbot should be doing in such a situation.

brand tone of voice

Brands often use a specific Tone-of-Voice in order to successfully communicate their personality to the consumer. Maintaining a consistent tone of voice across all platforms of communication such as social media, marketing brochures, websites, etc., helps establish how the consumer perceives the brand.

Similarly, when developing a personality for the chatbot, it is important to factor in the tone-of-voice since users tend to perceive the brand through the chatbot. Maintaining consistency between the brand tone of voice and the chatbot’s use of it will inculcate user trust.

design chatbot personality at a country level

One of the typical strategies used when rolling out chatbots in multiple countries and languages is building the chatbot personality at a global level. This is not only incorrect but also risky for a chatbot roll out.

Cultures differ with regions. Some conversations that are polite in one country aren’t deemed the same way in another country. The word “crazy” might sound funny in the UK but it’s offensive in the US. So, it’s very important for Conversational Architects to build a chatbot personality at a country level than at a global level.

This means having a single Conversational Architect for a multilingual chatbot wouldn’t be enough – even if he/she has an exceptional cross-cultural understanding. Having a cross-cultural team of Conversational Designers is a better bet. This will help to bring in the flair of language in conversations which might be very locale-specific at times.

Learn More: Multilingual Chatbots: Benefits And Key Implementation Considerations

the greeting/opening a conversation

The greeting or the first message (first interaction) the bot sends to the customer is a crucial element of conveying the bot’s personality. Ideally, the bot should not only introduce itself but also convey the different services it offers. Instead of greeting with open-ended questions like “How can I help you”, the bot should send specific messages like “I can help you with raising an HR ticket, answering common HR questions, or connecting with an HR agent”

There are several ways of opening a conversation – “Hello”, “Hi”, “Yo”, “Greetings” etc. and all these reflect different personalities.

handling unexpected and unknown questions

Even when a human asks the bot a random question or something that has nothing to do with your offerings, the chatbot must still be able to offer a reply, no matter how rudimentary the question is. This characteristic, in turn, helps the human form an emotional connection with the chatbot. The chatbot should also have multiple none-intent responses. Sending a standard “Sorry, I didn’t get that” response every time a user asks an unknown question leads to bad CUX.

humour

Just as in everyday social interactions, humor tends to have a positive effect on how humans perceive conversations. It helps engage the user, especially in interactions or processes that may be long and arduous. A chatbot that is capable of humorous parlance helps the human user get more involved in the communication and perceive the chatbot as an emotionally intelligent entity. With the help of machine learning and NLP, enterprise chatbots can be trained to recognise humorous expressions, assess the user’s mood and respond appropriately.

conclusion

Designing a personality for your chatbot seems like a lot of work, but a chatbot with a great personality ultimately enhances the user experience for your customers who interacts with it. This, in turn, promotes greater user adoption, customer experience, and sales.

If you’re interested to learn more about this topic, please feel free to get in touch with one of our chatbot consultants.

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Top 5 Myths About AI You should stop believing

Abhishek Shanbhag — Mon, 11 Feb 2019 19:46:00 +0000

Top 5 Myths About AI You Should Stop Believing

As much as AI and its abilities are being spoken about and speculated today, there are quite a few myths that are doing the rounds as well. While some believe that it to be a deus ex machina, a tool that can resolve seemingly unsolvable problems, there are others who see it as just hype that will eventually die down. The reality about AI however, lies somewhere in between.

With the growing need for technology to make processes more efficient and provide companies with a competitive advantage, it is crucial to understand how AI can create value in your business and what its limitations are.

Alexander Linden, a Vice President Analyst at Gartner says “Business leaders are often confused about what AI can do for their enterprise. This is understandable, as there are many definitions and variants of AI that are present in the general discourse”. Misconceptions and a lack of understanding about AI is an impediment for IT leaders who are trying to incorporate AI in their organizations.

In this article, we bust the 5 myths that are often associated with AI and make a case for why you should stop believing them NOW.

The top 5 AI MYTHS

1. There Is No Need For AI Strategy

As the abilities of AI are evolving, organizations should consider tapping into its capabilities and understand the potential impact this technology may have in addressing the organization’s business needs.

Deliberately refraining from using AI is akin to forgoing the next phase of automation and could put your organization at a competitive disadvantage.

Even if you choose to abstain from adopting an AI strategy for your company, this decision should be made on pragmatic grounds supported by research and robust data. The need for AI in your organization should also be regularly evaluated and modified to fit the organization’s evolving needs.

2. AI Is All About Automation

While it is true that AI can automate several manual tasks, its range of capabilities are not always synonymous with automation itself. Automation is a subset of AI.

According to an extensive survey by Deloitte Research of AI applications in various industries, AI applications fall into three categories: product, process, and insight.

Product applications use AI to provide a better experience for the end user, either by enabling “intelligent” behavior or by automating tasks that a human user often performs.
AI is used in Process applications to enhance, scale up, or automate business processes.
Insight applications on the other hand use AI, machine learning and computer vision to analyze data and glean insights in order to drive better business decisions.

In only some of the cases is AI really used to automate human work. More often, AI is used to perform tasks that are unattainable by human cognitive abilities. While automation refers to the completion of a task without human interference, AI is used to power machines, making them capable of thinking or at least making intelligent decisions based on a series of predefined models and algorithms.

3. AI, Machine Learning And Deep Learning Are The Same

AI, Machine Learning and Deep learning are often interchangeably used or misunderstood to be the same, despite being fundamentally different.

Artificial Intelligence is the human-like intelligence exhibited by machines that encompasses various human cognitive abilities.
Machine Learning is a set of algorithms that allows a program to generate results accurately without the results being fed into the program explicitly. ML is in fact one of the tasks that AI performs by continually learning from the data fed into it and can be referred to as a sub-discipline of Artificial Intelligence.
Deep Learning, however, refers to the algorithms used to solve problems based on neural networks designed to mimic the neurons in the human brain. DL is one of the specialisations of ML and in turn, one of the aspects of AI.

4. AI Will Replace Humans

A common AI myth is that it can outsmart and replace humans at some point. This misconception is also one of the major barriers to AI adoption.

While it is true that AI makes machines extremely intelligent, we need to understand that machines cannot acquire such a potential all by themselves. The capabilities of a machine is limited to the data that is fed to it by a human being and the actions that they have programmed the machine to carry out.

It is important to identify the obvious benefits AI and ML add when it comes to automatically identifying patterns from an expansive amount of data with little to no human intervention. However, the algorithms and models that make this feat possible, have to be built by humans. So essentially, AI only can get as smart as a human mind can make it.

Another crucial feature that sets human intelligence well above AI is that humans are capable of recognizing when there is a problem or redundancy with a certain approach they are taking. AI models on the other hand, tend to pursue the best possible answer out of nearly infinite possibilities, even if it leads to them never exiting the process.

5. AI Is A Cost-intensive Undertaking

AI is looked at with apprehensive often, based on the assumption that it is going to be a costly investment for the company. However, high cost is not the case for AI in general. There are many AI tools that are available for businesses that do not demand an exorbitant investment to implement AI solutions. Some important AI solutions which are cost effective and also yield a huge ROI and several business benefits include chatbots, RPA, modern intranets with AI capabilities and advanced analytics.

On the other hand however, AI development does require expertise in programming languages and development practices. While hiring data scientists for this job may rack up costs, organisations can consider training the existing resources to effectively implement the algorithms themselves.

conclusion

It is necessary that companies take concerted initiatives to develop comprehensive strategies that accommodate AI and prepare themselves for futuristic environments that are compatible with AI powered technologies. It is imperative for companies to act on these initiatives before any new market disruptors jeopardise the competitive edge the organization may hold in the industry.

This demands the leadership of organisations to have a pragmatic and precise understanding about AI’s capabilities and its trajectory into the future. Having a strong academic foundation and practical experience in AI among the leadership allows organisations to avoid misinterpretations and misleading myths about AI.

Adopting AI just for just a few functional areas will be ineffective in making a great impact on the organization as a whole. Hence, companies must try to incorporate an effective blend of embedded, edge and centralized intelligence systems across all functions and teams.

Adopting AI and related technologies in building an intelligent business environment will strengthen the alliance of humans and intelligent machines and produce a powerful workforce for the future. Companies must acknowledge that humans and machines will continue to be the indispensable building blocks of the new workforce and plan to utilise their combined strengths effectively.

Acuvate believes that organizations need AI to accelerate their digital transformation journey. Our range of solutions and services around conversational AI, digital workplace, business intelligence and RPA are built with a strong AI foundation. If you’d like to learn more about AI and its capabilities, please feel free to get in touch with one of our AI experts for a personalized consultation.

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How chatbots help you reduce customer service costs

Abhishek Shanbhag — Mon, 28 Jan 2019 13:27:00 +0000

How Chatbots Help You Reduce Customer Service Costs

As businesses today incorporate AI and automation technology into their customer service workflows and day to day business in general, chatbots are a high-value addition to the mix. However, what business stakeholders really want to know are the different ways a chatbot implementation can reduce customer service costs and expenses. And let’s face it, money is one of the most crucial factors that drive business decisions. Today, we explore how chatbots can help considerably cut down on customer service costs.

chatbots – how can they help you?

A chatbot is a computer program or an artificial intelligence tool that conducts a conversation via auditory or textual methods. chatbots are often designed to convincingly simulate how a human would behave as a conversational partner and are used in dialog systems for various practical purposes including customer service, information acquisition and getting tasks done.

Chatbots are primarily of two kinds – scripted bots and ai bots. while scripted bots as the name suggests, follow a predefined stream of conversation, ai bots or intelligent bots use ai and natural language processing (nlp) algorithms to understand the ‘intent’ behind a question and respond back with the most appropriate answer possible.

Large and medium sized companies today have a customer base which is diverse, fragmented and presented all over the globe. providing excellent customer service is imperative for companies to gain a competitive edge, increase customer retention and loyalty.

With companies having established an air of accessibility with the help of social media, email, and instant messaging services, customers now expect a quick response at all hours of the day. but these communication channels do not come cheap. even back in 2017, forbes had assessed that customer service was a $350 billion industry. factor in the number of new companies and businesses that have permeated the market in the past two years, and you can imagine what that number must be today. with organizations working towards having leaner companies and cutting down costs, automated tools that can provide similar, if not greater customer service, that human resources could, have become all the rage. one such automated solution is the use of chatbots.

According to gartner ,inc, 25 percent of customer service and support operations will integrate virtual customer assistant (vca) or chatbot technology across engagement channels by 2020. this number has gone up drastically from less than 2 percent in 2017! according to gene alvarez, managing vice president at gartner, more than half of the global organizations have already invested in automated solutions for customer service, as they realize the advantages of automated self-service, together with the ability to escalate to a human agent in case of complex situations. gartner research also reports that organizations report a reduction of up to 70 percent in call, chat and/or email inquiries after implementing an automated solution such as a chatbot.

According to the aspect consumer experience index, 70 percent of millennials report positive experiences with chatbots, and many prefer chatbots for the convenience and immediate gratification. along with increased customer satisfaction, a 33 percent saving per voice engagement has also been noted.

But, do chatbots produce considerable and consistent savings?

yes, they do. here’s how.

chatbots – effective money savers

Some of the most prominent ‘money saver’ abilities that chatbots possess, are:

24/7 presence

Let’s imagine a scenario where you are using a video production tool for a project due tomorrow. after hitting ‘save & close’, you are suddenly unsure as to where the video has been saved. in spite of frantically trying to locate it, you are unsuccessful in doing so. panic hits and you immediately search for the tool’s customer service details. you don’t really care that it is 2 in the middle of the night; you need help, and you need it now.

In such a scenario, a perceptive company would ensure that 24/7 customer support is available for just these type of cases. however, if a company in an attempt to cut down costs, has done away with round-the-clock support, well, they better be ready for the customer’s wrath the next morning. the truth is, customers today pay for more than just the product. they pay for good service too. hence, it is crucial that companies provide it. so what can a company do to provide good customer service while cutting down on costs? use a chatbot.

The greatest thing about chatbots is, they don’t charge by the hour. whether you have implemented a chatbot for 9 hours in a day or 24, it costs the same. hence using chatbots to handle after-hour queries, is practical. this way, customers trying to establish contact do not feel deprived either. the company too is happy as no additional resources need to be hired.

reduced training expenses

An area of concern for most companies is the constant training of customer care agents. as newer products are added to the company’s portfolio, older processes reformed and new resources hired, training and updating becomes imperative. but this a cost that can quickly escalate and get out of hand. chatbots on the other hand are capable of constant and automated refinement. even in case of newer data, an update can be made to the centralized system and revision cascades to the overall chatbot operation. chatbots are actually in constant improvement mode as they get trained through user queries and form patterns to understand what the best response to respective questions might be.

helping increase company revenue

Chatbots are not just good at ‘saving’ the company’s money, but are also capable of ‘increasing’ revenue. how is this done, you ask? well, most companies today use chatbots for more than just user help. chatbots learn from past conversations from users and provide proactive and personalized product/service recommendations to customers. this personalization in customer experience helps drive sales and revenue.

optimizing workforce costs

Let’s face it, competent labour does not come cheap. while staffing still remains one of the biggest expenses globally, it is also the hardest to cut down. especially with respect to customer care, companies that have tried to have fewer resources man the field, have faced not just customer wrath, but also employee burnout. additionally, telephonic customer service has an added disadvantage; fewer resources mean a longer wait time for the customers, obviously meaning a heftier phone bill. so, essentially companies can end up spending more on phone bills than saving on staffing. but, imagine if a chatbot was to be used as a first line of service? while a human chat agent can effectively chat with about three customers at onc, efficient chatbots can handle an unlimited number of interactions simultaneously. this means that a chatbot could be employed to handle as many customer concerns as possible, transferring the service process to a human agent in case of very complex queries.

in conclusion

Essentially, chatbots can help organizations provide better customer care with fewer resources. although we cannot completely eliminate the human touch from customer service, chatbots can be used to cut down on human intervention as much as possible. this can be achieved by using chatbots to manage a larger volume of customer needs while reserving only the most complicated issues for human agents. this technique is capable of drastically cutting down on customer service costs. in fact, cnbc reports that chatbots are expected to cut down on business costs by as much as $8 billion by the year 2022. now that is a number worth taking seriously.

If you’d like to learn more about enterprise chatbots please feel free to get in touch with one of our chatbot consultants for a quick consultation!

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7 Actionable Tips To Reduce Contact Center Call Volume

Abhishek Shanbhag — Wed, 16 Jan 2019 13:09:43 +0000

7 Actionable Tips To Reduce Contact Center Call Volume

Providing a great customer experience while reducing call volume and costs is the ultimate goal of any contact center. Over the years, contact centers have invested in various types of customer-facing technologies – right from IVR, CTI, CRM, ACD to AI. But in spite of deploying these technologies, most organizations are not able to improve operational efficiencies, enhance CX or maximize their ROI.

Most organizations today believe that technology alone is the solution to reduce costs and by focusing solely on implementing the technology they allow CX and their core operations to take a hit.

But there are ways in which the number of calls that a contact center receives can be reduced while ensuring good customer experience and better business growth. In the following section, we discuss the top 5 tips to reduce call volumes in your contact center.

7 tips to reduce contact center volume

map the customer journey

The first step in cutting down inbound call volume is to determine why customers are calling the contact center in the first place. This includes recognizing the most common issues that customers are facing with respect to a product, process or service. Often, it is a bunch of similar reasons that tend to lead to the majority of inbound calls.

Once the most common reasons behind inbound calls are established, we can use customer journey analytics to map the customer service journey. Analytical data gives us an insight into the effectiveness of the service provided by the agents in the contact center as well as recognize the pain points faced by the customer.

Using customer journey analytics helps assess the information that is readily available to customers, determine the ease with which customers can reach out to the contact center when required and establish the top reasons why customers call-in. Armed with this information, companies can take the primary steps required to reduce inbound call volume.

measure customer effort score (CES)

Customer Effort Score refers to the ease of customer interaction and getting a resolution for a request. High-effort experiences include switching between channels, repeat interaction, transfers, etc. Tracking CES helps you reduce call volume and costs whilst improving customer experience. According to Gartner, low-effort experiences reduce costs by decreasing up to 40% of repeat calls. Gartner also recommends asking this single question to measure CES.

focus on multiple channels and provide self-service options

Use different channels for communication and promote these channels evenly. Assign KPIs for each channel. Allow customers to choose their options. Enable smart self-service options across web, mobile, and telephone. Some self-service best practices include:

Highly visible and updated FAQs
Customized CRM portals
Strong and NLP enabled knowledge base solution
Self-help links integrated into web pages that lead to the respective help document(s).
Online community discussion portals

A more modern and efficient self-service option through which customers can look for answers is via Chatbots and conversational IVR systems. Chatbots today can be deployed from handheld devices such as mobile phones and tablets as well as from the desktop. They are increasingly being integrated in social media applications such as Facebook, as well. We will learn about chatbots in detail in the next section.

using AI chatbots

Chatbot adoption in contact centers has grown exponentially in the past couple of years, across industries. According to Gartner, 25 percent of customer service and support operations will integrate bot technology across their engagement channels by 2020; this statistic used to be less than two percent in 2017.

Chatbots today are powered by conversational AI, NLP, and machine learning, and offer the same conversational experience as communicating with a human agent. In contact centers, they are deployed as the first line of support in order to handle tier-1 interactions. The 24/7 availability and an easy-to-use conversational interface of chatbots make them an efficient self-service option for customers. Chatbots reduce the number of calls that human executives have to handle, without compromising on the customer experience.

Learn more: 10 Powerful Benefits of Chatbots in Customer Service

chatbot agent handoff

Although chatbots are great at handling customer interactions by simulating human-like conversations, a common misconception that customer service leaders may have is that a chatbot alone is sufficient to handle customer service. But the truth is that there may be scenarios where the customer interaction needs to be handed off to a human agent.

In such a scenario, the chatbot must be able to identify the need for human intervention and seamlessly transition the interaction to the appropriate agent. In this way, the inbound call volume can be cut down by fulfilling basic, preliminary tasks such as aggregating user information, and recording customer concerns with the help of a chatbot. Only those tasks that absolutely need human intervention can be routed to the human agents.

Learn more: Human Hand-off in Service Desk Bots

conversational IVR

Chatbot technology in call centers is also intended to replace traditional IVR systems that tend to be a major pain point for customers looking for quick and effective issue resolution. Unlike traditional IVR systems, conversational IVR uses NLP and Machine Learning to understand the content of customers’ speech and enables dynamic and hassle-free experiences. Customers no longer have to navigate through the complex navigation menu of a traditional IVR.

ensure first call resolution ( fcr)

A major factor that contributes to increased inbound call volume in contact centers is that most issues are not resolved in the first call, requiring multiple calls to ensure resolution. This leads to calls adding-up while also being detrimental to customer satisfaction.

Essentially, customer satisfaction is directly related to the First Call Resolution (FCR) rate of the contact center. One of the ways to ensure FCR is to frequently measure CSAT with the aim to improve it.

optimize in order to reduce repeat calls

When contact centers receive calls regarding issues with certain ineffective customer-oriented processes, they must have a resource in the backend team to modify or improve these processes and related self-help pages accordingly. By improving pages and processes based on support calls, contact centers can reduce the occurrence of repeat calls for the same issues in the future.

Reducing call volume is key to reduce business costs in any contact center. And this involves streamlining and automation of processes and intelligent orchestration of work.

If you want to learn more about this topic, please feel free to get in touch with one of our customer experience and AI experts for a personalized consultation.

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How Voice Assistants Are Transforming The Enterprise Workplace

Abhishek Shanbhag — Fri, 04 Jan 2019 12:39:00 +0000

How Voice Assistants Are Transforming The Enterprise Workplace

Leading industry analysts like Gartner predict that voice assistants are gaining a firm hold in the workplace. It is believed that by 2021, 25% of the entire digital workforce will use a virtual employee assistant. Another interesting prediction that Gartner makes is that by 2021 consumer and business spending on VPA speakers will top $3.5 billion in 2021. All the attention that this technology has received so far, isn’t without reason.

Though text-based chatbots have till date been rapidly deployed by a number of organizations, enterprises are willing to take on the next wave of innovation in conversational AI. A number of organizations today are eager to learn about voice-based bots. Some are even using have Amazon’s Alexa or Google Assistant on the business front.

From scheduling meetings to setting alarms to reading emails aloud to bringing in efficiency and order to the helpdesk to helping make more sound decisions, voice assistants are transforming the enterprise workplace.

Want to know what all a simple voice assistant can do ( and do much better than any human can) for your enterprise workplace? Read on.

voice aI-based knowledge capture

AI-based voice bots can be trained in capturing knowledge from a Subject Matter Expert (SME), transcribing audio, tagging and storing in Knowledge Management systems like SharePoint, Azure, etc.

Enterprises can now leverage an AI bot to tag your documents in ECM accurately, at lower overall costs, and a higher speed. Manually tagging one item costs around $4 to $7 and is highly error-prone. AI bots not only tag your documents but also transform your taxonomy into a living and breathing entity that automatically evolves along with your enterprise.

Learn more: How to Leverage AI to Improve Information Discovery in Your Enterprise

voice-based updates in CRM

If integrated with your CRM systems, voice bots can eliminate the need for manual data entry into CRMs. Consider this scenario. As soon as a salesperson finishes a meeting, he/she can make a phone call to the voice bot and update the meeting notes, opportunity, etc. directly in SFDC, Dynamics CRM or any other CRM system.

Users can have a quick conversation with the CRM voice bot and ask it to update/change the records with the provided specifications. They don’t have to undergo the hassle of logging into their system, navigating throw dashboards, and make changes to the records. Imagine the amount of time saved and increased productivity!

taking notes during the meeting

Let’s consider a simple scenario. You have to take down minutes of the meeting but your laptop battery dies. You’d probably have to take mental notes, half of which you’d not be able to recall later. However, with a voice assistant, you can simply ask out loud to ‘take notes’.

customer support

Voice bots can provide relief from the long IVR menu to customers. They can connect callers to the right department by asking questions like a human secretary. Voice bots transform the live chat experience. They can be integrated with social media apps, emails or live chat windows. Instead of typing lengthy texts, customers can quickly express the problem they’re facing. Transaction times for repetitive tasks like cancellations, booking, and booking can be drastically reduced.

conversational business intelligence

Now, let’s consider a more complex work process. Today, most large businesses store data in their Business Intelligence, LOB and CRM systems. Retrieving and processing information accurately with tons of data to decipher has become manually impossible, making the case for AI voice assistants stronger.

Employers can rely on voice assistants that are integrated with these systems for fetching data and processing information in a matter of seconds.

With intelligent chatbots like Acuvate’s Business Intelligence bot, you can easily access data and analytics within your 3rd party messaging applications like Skype For Business, Skype, Slack, etc. Simply ask “What is my predicted sales” and the bot will respond via text or voice. In this way, decision-makers get all the information instantly with a bot at their service.

time management

One of the basic steps, yet a road less traveled towards productivity, is time management. Most of us find it difficult to properly manage time. Today, voice assistants can help us track our time and utilize it efficiently. And, it couldn’t get any simpler. You can ask your Google Assistant to create time entries by simply saying, “Create a new time entry for 4 hours for Mark Day”. Similarly, attendance bots are also helping employees at the workplace manage their work hours and PTOs better. Be it attendance management, absence management, or shift management, attendance bots help you manage it all easily.

predictive ability

We’ve discussed the capability of AI-enabled voice assistants to quickly provide the right information at the right moment from your data storage systems. Additionally, voice assistants can analyze this data to cleverly predict our future needs or requirements. If your inventory is nearing the finish line, your voice assistant can remind you to restock. If you’ve not turned off your office lights, your voice assistant will let you know. That’s the predictive power of intelligent voice assistants. They’ll utilize data to be of any help that you tune them to be!

wrapping up

Voice is a new innovation in the chatbot ecosystem. Whether it’s a bank that you have called in for resolving your money transfer query or a healthcare service provider who you want to book your next appointment with – bots will be everywhere in the future.

This trend is likely to continue strong, and there will be soon a time when you will no longer need to write full-fledged emails to your HR to explain things like leave policy or payroll. Instead, a voice-based will handle all this for you. As such, employee and customer satisfaction will drastically increase when they get instant responses to all their queries. With bots taking over the workplace, each function will witness an increase in efficiency levels, streamlined workflows, and reduced costs.

As AI continues to fuel productivity, are you joining in the voice and chat technology-enabled bandwagon? Talk to our experts now!

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