Enterprise Chatbots Archives - BotCore

A Quick Guide to Assess your Chatbot’s Maturity

Satheesh Kothakapu — Mon, 20 Jun 2022 12:06:31 +0000

A Quick Guide to Assess your Chatbot’s Maturity

Conversational AI platforms — chatbots, voice assistants, and AI-driven virtual assistants, have become the go-to medium of interaction within enterprises — be it, customers or employees. Automating conversations through chatbots not only brings increased customer satisfaction, reduced attrition, and enhanced employee engagement, it helps organizations reduce costs, scale operations, and build a favourable brand image.

Typically used in customer service, chatbots have now assumed a variety of roles within enterprises, automating workflows that enhance business efficiencies and improve overall experiences.

According to research by Technavio, the chatbot market share is expected to increase by USD 1.10 billion from 2019 to 2024, and the market’s growth momentum will accelerate at a CAGR of 28.51%. Several factors have fueled this growth, including the advancements in cognitive technologies like AI, a wider acceptance of conversational AI interfaces, and the need for quick and speedy resolutions.

What facilitates a good chatbot interaction is the level of maturity it has attained, which is defined by a host of features and functionalities. When chatbot engagements are non-conversational, mechanical, and inferior to what a human agent may offer, businesses may have a challenging time getting to increase conversational AI adoption.

Regardless of where you currently stand in your chatbot journey, you need to assess your chatbot’s maturity and devise ways to deliver more complex and powerful experiences for your customers and employees.

Below, we present a quick guide to assessing your chatbot’s maturity.

A 101 on Assessing Your Chatbot’s Maturity

To assess a chatbot’s maturity, also known as conversational AI maturity, organizations leverage what’s known as a chatbot maturity model.

A chatbot maturity model uses performance benchmarking to help in-house chatbot experts evaluate their bot and take measures to achieve more mature futuristic levels.

A chatbot maturity model defines the different stages of chatbot readiness, the characteristics in each of these stages, and potential deployment opportunities to exploit to achieve early success with your digital assistants.

Maturity Level	Defining Features	Deployment Potential
Immature	No NLP (Natural Language Processing), Predefined keywords, No learning	Simplest Q&A
Infant	Simple NLP, Chatbot cannot learn from user conversations	Simplest Q&A+tasks
Mature	Advanced NLP + Supervised learning mechanisms	Moderately intelligent
Advanced	Powerful NLP + context and sentiment management + self-learning	Meaningful, intelligent AI virtual assistant , and contextually aware conversations

Delivering exceptional customer and employee engagement through chatbots is not every chatbot developer’s cup of tea. It requires a consistent, multidisciplinary approach to developing an extensive strategy around the six pillars of chatbot strategy. Benchmarking features that help assess how advanced your chatbot is, include the following:

The Six Pillars of Chatbot Maturity

Pillar	Questions to benchmark your chatbot
Functionality	Is your chatbot able to answer both simple and complex questions? Can it automate mundane, repetitive tasks? Can it pull information for the user? How good are the existing alternatives to achieve the same tasks?
Conversational intelligence	Is the chatbot able to comprehend the context of the conversation? Is the bot able to successfully extract the intent from the interaction? Is it able to understand the nuances of the language, including grammar and slang? Is the bot able to handle dialog changes? Can the chatbot retain context and pick up conversations from where they were left without the user having to repeat himself? Can the chatbot learn from past conversations and hold personalized, context-rich user interactions?
Emotional Intelligence	Is the chatbot able to comprehend the tone and emotion (sad, joyful, angry, frustrated, etc.) of a user’s utterance? Consequently, is the bot able to alter its own style of interaction or handover the conversation to a human agent?
Omnichannel and Multilingual capabilities	Is the bot able to provide consistent engagement across all channels (social, web, messaging, voice) and devices (desktop, mobile, smart speakers)? Can the bot converse in multiple languages, and understand the nitty-gritty of each, including canonical word forms?
Flexible Integrations	Can the bot integrate with legacy and backend systems, including ERP, CRM, etc., and enterprise databases, and draw the right information to perform various tasks?
User Experience	Encompasses the bot’s accessibility, usability, and the pleasure of interacting with it. Can the user easily access the bot to initiate a conversation? Can the virtual digital assistant provide maximum support by asking the bare minimum number of questions?

How can Acuvate help?

At Acuvate, we help clients build and deploy mature, intelligent chat and voice bots using our enterprise bot-building platform called BotCore.

As a Microsoft Gold Partner, we leverage core Microsoft Azure and AI technologies that arm bots with advanced, future-ready functionalities like Knowledge Graphs, context management, voice commands, dialog builders, machine learning, and a superior NLP engine, BotCore is used by over 150 customers across industries for a range of customer and employee use cases.

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

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

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

The post A Quick Guide to Assess your Chatbot’s Maturity appeared first on BotCore.

4 Ways Chatbots Are Making Life Easier for Remote Workers

Abhishek Shanbhag — Fri, 30 Jul 2021 11:20:00 +0000

4 Ways Chatbots Are Making Life Easier for Remote Workers

In 2021, artificial intelligence will recover 6.2 billion hours of worker productivity globally.
~ Gartner

When the COVID-19 pandemic began last year, organizations had to face a startling reality – “business as usual” was no longer the norm. Instead, within a couple of days, the entire global workforce shifted to working from remote locations.

For most businesses, their existing processes weren’t capable of handling this change. Employees struggled with connectivity, accessibility, and various other IT issues. HR teams had their email boxes full of questions from employees worried about work status, paycheck, and lack of procedural clarity.

In short, employees had many queries, and they couldn’t wait for long to get answers to the most urgent ones. Organizations soon realized that most of these queries were similar, specific questions that were frequently emerging.

Consequently, they decided to optimize support for commonly asked questions by deploying AI-enabled chatbots. Such chatbots leverage advanced technologies, such as machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP), to provide human-like support, guide users to relevant knowledge-based articles, and walk them through steps to solve simple issues, for example, changing the system password. However, besides solving routine queries, chatbots cater to various use cases that help elevate the overall employee experience.

This blog talks about the future of work and the numerous ways in which chatbots are making life easier for remote workers.

The Future of Work

One year into the pandemic, and it’s clear – remote working is here to stay. A survey done by Gartner has shown that 82% of company leaders plan to allow employees to work remotely some of the time. Moreover, 59% of workers indicate they agree more with the statement, “I would only consider a new position or job that allows me to work from a location of my choice.”

While organizations like Deloitte UK have already announced flexible working for their entire workforce, a few like JPMorgan Chase still feel there is no substitute for the office.

Workplace dynamics have changed completely, and it is unlikely that the entire workforce will return to the office. In other words, the future of work will be a hybrid working model – a mix of traditional office-based work and remote working.

In such a scenario, delivering an exceptional employee experience (EX) becomes a crucial differentiator for organizations looking to acquire and retain the best talent and achieve higher customer satisfaction and better bottom-line results.

As seen above, AI-powered chatbots have become ubiquitous in the employee experience space, helping organizations simplify everyday work for their remote employees. Let’s understand further.

4 Ways Chatbots Are Making Life Easier for Remote Workers

1. Answer employee queries instantly - irrespective of where they work from!

As seen above, a shift to remote working increased incoming queries to employee help desks as remote workers dealt with connectivity issues, confusion about new workflows, and questions related to HR matters.

An AI-enabled chatbot fathoms user intent and can answer simple and complex queries alike – 24X7, at scale, and with minimal cost to the organization.

Users can ask queries from anywhere using mobile messaging apps – whether they are at home, in the office, or traveling somewhere – and get instant responses, increasing their overall efficiency and simplifying remote work.

The chatbot can provide personalized responses to questions like, “What is my leave balance?” Or, it can guide the user step-by-step to the end result for issues like, “How can I establish a VPN connection?”

If needed, the chatbot can also automatically escalate the issue/request to a human support agent.

2. Simplify and automate repetitive/everyday tasks for enhanced productivity

As employees work remotely and counter daily issues, hundreds of tickets are being received by the employee help desks, making it difficult for the staff to focus on tasks that add business value.

By leveraging technologies like robotic process automation (RPA), chatbots automate mundane, time-consuming tasks, such as generating IT tickets, updating the sales database, completing log reports, etc.

Additionally, remote employees can use chatbots to simplify everyday tasks like applying for leaves, booking business travel, issuing asset requests, etc.

3. Fetch required information quickly - anytime, anywhere!

Quick and seamless knowledge discovery is handy for employees, particularly the remote staff, as it helps boost productivity and reduce burnout.

Chatbots help employees fetch files, documents, FAQ pages, or other information from anywhere across the organization’s digital workplace – including all internal and external apps within the organization.

4. Send personalized alerts to increase remote employee engagement.

Remote employees work in silos. Lack of social interaction and problems in collaboration often take a toll on their physical and emotional well-being.

Chatbots can push personalized alerts and notifications to remote employees to increase employee engagement and alleviate work-related stress.

From upcoming events and news to issues requiring employee attention (e.g., a scheduled IT downtime, documents added, latest policy changes, and much more), chatbots can send notifications to the concerned employees depending on their role, geography, interests, etc.

A Remote Employee Experience Chatbot for Every Use Case

A) IT Chatbot

Manage service disruptions and initiate upgrades, remediation workflows, and software fixes.
Answer standard IT queries, e.g., “How to reset the system password?”
Simplify and automate IT onboarding processes – allocating preferred laptops to new users, setting up email accounts, etc.
Automate other IT tasks, including sending outage alerts, wiping off stolen laptops, and issuing asset request notifications.

B) HR Chatbot

Provide answers to queries regarding salary, leave balance, income tax, yearly holidays, policies, etc.
Automate recruiting and onboarding activities (screening candidates, collecting document proofs, scheduling interviews, etc.)
Allow employees to apply for leave, book business travel (flights, hotel, etc.), and much more.

C) Data Analyst bot

Fetch required data from the Business Intelligence (BI) app via text or multimedia (graphs and dashboard images). For example, “What were the sales of Product A in Q1-18?
Send requested BI reports to the employee’s email id.

D) Intranet Chatbot

Search and retrieve documents, files, and other content from anywhere across the company’s knowledge base.
Get personalized, contextual, and meaningful search results from enterprise-wide tools and apps.

How Can An Aggregator Bot Ensure a Seamless Remote Working Experience?

With the growing usage of employee-facing chatbots, every internal department wants to build and deploy its own chatbot. Such chatbots cater to their function’s unique use cases and help remote employees solve different issues. However, the problem with having separate chatbots for HR, IT, BI, etc., is that employees must adapt to varying interfaces, conversation styles, and bot personas and remember the capabilities of each of these bots.

Moreover, if an organization deploys multiple bots, the cost of building, training, and maintaining such bots is significantly higher too.

An aggregator bot, sometimes known as a universal or concierge bot, provides a consistent employee experience by linking individual bots (also known as Child bots) to create a Master bot. It elevates remote employee experience by functioning as a personalized Virtual Employee Assistant (VEA).

When an employee types in a query, it first reaches the Master bot. The Master bot checks for authorization and permission levels and passes on the request to the specialized child bot (IT, HR, etc.)

Implementing an aggregator bot saves the cost of building and training multiple bots. Moreover, any feature enhancements done in the Master bot can be leveraged by the Child bots.

How can Acuvate help?

At Acuvate, we help clients make life easier for remote workers by deploying employee-facing chatbots for various use cases, including IT, HR, Business Intelligence, intranet, etc., with our low-code enterprise bot-building platform BotCore.

As a Microsoft Gold Partner, we use the best of Microsoft’s AI, machine learning, and natural language processing technologies, including LUIS, Azure Cognitive Services, and the Microsoft Bot Framework, to build chatbots for enterprises.

Our bots are omnichannel and multilingual, and support all popular enterprise messaging channels (Teams, Slack, ProofHub, etc.) and languages including French, German, English, Italian, etc.

We also deploy aggregator bots to help our clients deliver consistent and seamless engagement to remote employees.

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

The post 4 Ways Chatbots Are Making Life Easier for Remote Workers appeared first on BotCore.

5 Reasons For Enterprise Chatbot Failure and How to avoid them

Abhishek Shanbhag — Mon, 21 Jun 2021 12:08:00 +0000

5 Reasons For Enterprise Chatbot Failure and How to avoid them

A Forrester Report declared that “the majority of chatbots were poorly- implemented, systematically ruining customer experiences and – in the case of the worst incarnations – nothing more than “virtual idiots.”

Cut to today – and chatbots have become a key element of the digital transformation initiatives that businesses have undertaken globally. While the pandemic has undoubtedly had a disruptive impact on many social, economic, and financial aspects, it has been a significant catalyst in the chatbot’s “return to life.”

As consumers were forced to move to online modes of shopping, their digital footprint increased exponentially, with a huge rise in the use of digital channels, including social media messaging, email, and chatbots. Chatbots help customers solve queries faster, at scale, anytime, and anywhere.

Moreover, remote and distributed workforces are here to stay, and by implementing chatbots, organizations can simplify knowledge management, automate repetitive tasks, and free employees to focus on strategic, revenue-generating activities or on customers that demand more attention.

However, even now, achieving full-scale implementation and adoption is difficult, with many chatbot projects stuck in the pilot mode or hesitant to move to large-scale deployment.

So, why do chatbots fail? Most importantly, what can enterprises do to avoid such failures?

5 Reasons for Enterprise Chatbot Failure

1. Trying to achieve too much at the onset

Organizations often try to do much with chatbots right at the beginning, which leads to failure at the pilot stage. At the end of the day, it’s all about the value that the chatbot provides. Therefore, it’s best to limit the bot to a narrow set of use cases that serve customers and employees well on the get-go, and then gain momentum, as needed.

2. Lack of alignment on success metrics

There could also be a misalignment on the success metrics for a chatbot. That is, organizations may not be able to define the right set of KPIs that decide how effective the bot is. For example, an organization builds a chatbot mainly for the purpose of answering customers’ FAQs.

In such a scenario, measuring the success of the pilot run by “how funny and natural sounding” the bot is doesn’t serve the purpose of the business.

Moreover, organizations must approach chatbots as a long-term investment that requires a dedicated team to continuously monitor trial results and improve performance over time.

3. Lack of involvement from business users

Failure to manage change effectively is another reason why chatbots don’t move past the pilot stage. As humans, it’s harder to alter habits and adapt to new tools.

While the end-users may be drawn in by the hype of a chatbot release, they may soon revert to their old methods of communication. Moreover, technology teams in-charge of the chatbot may move on to another project without investing the time and effort required in improving the bot’s content.

4. Lack of specificity

Customers and employees are looking for quick and specific answers when they get in touch with a chatbot. Sometimes, chatbots bombard the user with web pages and FAQ documents, instead of providing the exact resolution.

When chatbots aren’t designed well to solve the user’s queries, it lowers their success rate in the pilot stage, deterring organizations from implementing them on a large-scale in the future.

4. Lack of specificity

Based on customer mood, transaction value, or its inability to solve the user’s issues, the chatbot must be capable of transferring the conversation to a human agent with the full contextual elements.

Moreover, queries requiring multi-step resolutions must be resolved seamlessly without the customer having to repeat information or steps already completed.

However, chatbots that fail to do so provide little utility to the user and may be shelved in the pilot stage.

Tips to avoid chatbot failure

Scaling a chatbot is less about AI or conversational design than it is about information architecture, knowledge management (KM), and organizational alignment. Firms must radically simplify how they deploy and support bots instead of overengineering them.

So, here are a few tips to avoid enterprise chatbot failure –

Think about the goal of the chatbot from the user’s perspective and the objectives of the business. For example, do you only want your bot to respond quickly? Or, is the quality of response and user satisfaction more important?
Put the right people in charge of deployment, with the right budget, and the right chatbot KPIs in mind.
Ensure the quantity and quality of data that feeds the bot is optimum. Keep collecting more data, but don’t over-complicate the process with an overabundance of data from siloed systems.
Pick the right vendors to ensure the chatbots are well-designed to understand user intent and the context of the conversation, respond accurately, and escalate the chat to human agents when needed.
Demonstrate the benefits of the chatbot to help employees embrace the change. For example, let them know that by automating a certain percentage of customer interactions, they can spend “X” amount of time on the more challenging tasks.

How can Acuvate help?

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

With its low-code, graphical interface and visual tools, organizations can deploy omnichannel, multilingual chatbots within a few weeks.

As Microsoft Gold Partners, we use the best of Microsoft Technologies, including artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing (for example, Microsoft Bot Framework, LUIS, Azure Cognitive Services, etc.). We also help clients implement chatbots using the Microsoft Power Virtual Agents platform.

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

The post 5 Reasons For Enterprise Chatbot Failure and How to avoid them appeared first on BotCore.

Understanding Digital Customer Service And How To Improve It

Rakesh Reddy — Wed, 30 Dec 2020 09:48:00 +0000

Understanding Digital Customer Service and How to Improve it

The digital world has changed the buying process! Customers today are well-informed of products and the market. When they enter stores or talk to a sales representative, today’s customers already know what they want to buy and how much they want to pay for it. They have access to digital channels like blogs, vlogs, websites, social media, chatbots and digital marketplaces that provide them with a plethora of relevant information. In fact, once the sale is closed, customers take the time and use those same channels to either shame or promote the seller with a mere click of the button. Today’s customers don’t just want to enjoy the benefits of their purchases, they also want to enjoy the journey of making those purchases.

Therefore, to give the customers what they want, businesses have realized that they must provide exemplary digital customer services – paving the way for a complete customer service transformation.

Customer service leaders today are facing tremendous pressures:

Ensure customer journey in digital channels at lowered costs
Match up to competition’s service standards
Assure leadership that the service center is more than just a cost center

According to Karen Freberg, Associate Professor in Strategic Communication at the University of Louisville, digital customer service is a necessity in today’s business landscape as it presents a unique opportunity to build a two-way dialogue with customers and learn about their wants and needs.

Understanding Digital Customer Service

In today’s digital age, with rapid adoption of technology, the rules of customer services are changing. The customer is now in the driver seat.

Digital customer service – defined as meeting the needs of customers using digital channels such as emails, mobile apps, blogs, vlogs, SMS, online chats, and social media, has become more than just engaging with the customer and handling their complaints and returns; it is about enhancing the entire end-to-end customer experience, where every interaction is seamless, fast, and personalized.

In fact, if done well, digital customer service can also become a valuable revenue driver, with Forrester estimating that 69% of customers preferring to buy from brands that offer consistent customer service across multiple channels. Therefore, business leaders are increasingly understanding that “how” they deliver is as important as “what” they deliver.

Additionally, new competitors are flooding the market by taking advantage of the low barriers of entry provided by globalization, de-regulation, and technology developments. This further highlights the need for a robust digital customer service, with Deloitte stating that 67% of a company’s competitive edge comes from its customer service.

Improving Digital Customer Service

Digital customer service must not be seen as merely adding more digital options to the pre-existing customer service efforts. It must be approached as a multistage transformation, undertaken with rigorous planning, streamlined processes, and initiatives backed by the leadership. Here are some ways you can improve your digital customer service strategy:

1. Figure out the gaps

Digital channels produce terabytes of unstructured data, which when optimized can be a valuable source of information and insights. Therefore, it is necessary for businesses to deep dive into their existing customer service strategy and analyze various touch points and functionalities, and how they are offered to spot weaknesses and inconsistencies. This enables businesses to direct their investment into the right tools and processes.

Measuring the impact of the new initiatives across each digital channel individually and assessing the migration rate between them can help businesses improve their customer service results and identify the most effective digital channels. This ensures that the business can maintain control over various channels, understand the nature of the customer service requests, and its ability to resolve them. This can also help businesses identify the points where customers are abandoning self-service and calling the contact center.

Additionally, analyzing the prior customer service requests can help businesses identify priorities. For instance, businesses often find that a small number of problems account for the majority of customer requests and costs. One of the major reasons for this is a lack of direct digital solution. This means that designing the right solutions for those problems can help the business significantly cut costs and also enhance customer experience.

2. Develop targets and a service strategy

Once the business identifies the problem, it must set up well-defined targets, defined at the enterprise, group, and individual levels. This is initiated by developing a workflow for each involved personnel, as part of the larger framework to address the problem. For instance, a touchpoint map can show which customer request can be addressed at which digital touchpoint, which can help businesses pin-point which functionality to develop.

Businesses should consider the costs and savings-estimate when setting up the workflow. In fact, many businesses utilize service-to-sales functionality to some digital touchpoints in order to cross-sell services and cover the cost of the functionality development. However, it is crucial to push them selectively, and not too aggressively to prevent jeopardizing the customer service efforts and brand image.

3. Reach out to customers proactively

Proactive customer service involves anticipating the needs of customers and delivering the relevant information and solutions without being prompted. This can include notifying customers about new product errors and glitches, providing tailored advice, offering personalized product solutions recommendations etc.

For instance, consider the example of a shopping chatbot deployed by a retail or CPG company. When a customer interacts with the chatbot and shows interest in making a product purchase, the chatbot can analyze past shopping behaviour of the customer and recommend more products similar to the one he/she is trying to purchase.

In addition, the chatbot can suggest the usage of coupons or promotional offers while the customer tries to check out. It can also notify customers in advance if there is a delay in orders and provide an updated delivery ETA.

Proactive customer service not only improves customer satisfaction and confidence but also reduces costs and increases agent productivity. Human agents can spend less time answering routine questions and focus on other productive tasks. A report by Enkata shows that proactive customer service reduces call volumes by 30% and increases customer retention by 3-5%

4. Send updates on new products and services

Powerful digital customer service and engagement is crucial whenever an organization launches new products or services. You not only have to ensure customers are fully aware of the launch and understand the product benefits but also need to make sure they know how to use the product features and address any new concerns they might have.

A major insurance company based in Canada recently approached for our help on improving their digital customer service as they were planning to launch a new insurance plan. We helped the company deploy an AI virtual assistant on their corporate website within 8 weeks. Upon the launch of the new plan, the GDPR chatbot was able to educate customers about the plan, address their queries and help new members decide which scheme they should choose based on their demographic information. The bot deflected most of the questions from going to the company’s call center and reduced inbound call volume.

5. Address “How-to” scenarios

Another important aspect of digital customer service is helping customers understand the different ways they use a product or service. For instance, Knorr, a global CPG company and manufacturer of dehydrated soup and meal mixes, deployed a chatbot that provides different soup recipes, tips and tricks for preparation, and personalized ingredient recommendations.

This type of customer service initiatives help companies not only improve the overall customer experience and engagement but also drive sales and revenue.

6. Utilize AI-driven technologies

Businesses must look to adopt modern AI-powered technologies that can provide key advantages in improving digital customer service:

1. Chatbots and Virtual Assistants For 24/7 Customer Service

As seen above, a chatbot is arguably the most adopted digital customer service technology in recent times. With their highly interactive and human-like conversational interfaces, chatbots deliver personalized responses to customers based on their intent and preferences.

Their deployment can increase the company’s customer interactions capacity, and reduce human involvement to only when absolutely necessary or when the chatbots are unable to solve a specific problem, thereby saving costs. Moreover, their performance is easy to track. The data generated by chatbots can help businesses identify key customer trends and behaviors.

With their machine learning and Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities, chatbots can also learn from previous interactions to better understand customer vocabulary.

By acting as the first line of service agents, they enable human agents to focus on high value tasks. They can assist your customers 24 X 7, across multiple channels and languages.

Learn More:

2. Advanced Analytics To Extract The Value From Contact Centre Data

Contact centres produce humongous amounts of data. However much of this data is unstructured and present in different formats – free text fields, images, audio etc. and accessible only to the IT department. Therefore, businesses have been unable to tap into its value to guide their decision making.

However, today, with the development of NLP-driven advanced analytics, businesses can tap into this data, across multiple channels, and generate valuable insights to better understand customer behaviour and the general customer sentiment towards the product or the company.

Learn More: Advanced Analytics: 4 Simple Steps For Enterprise Adoption

Get Started

With McKinsey stating that 25% of customers will defect after just one bad digital experience, it’s time for customer service leaders to rethink their service strategy. Leading businesses make their digital customer service experiences useful, engaging, and consistent, at every touchpoint. They personalize it and keep it emotionally appealing across the entire customer life cycle. This enables them to drive brand loyalty and customer retention.

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

The post Understanding Digital Customer Service And How To Improve It appeared first on BotCore.

Top 6 Customer Experience Trends For 2021

Rakesh Reddy — Fri, 18 Dec 2020 10:12:00 +0000

Top 6 Customer Experience Trends For 2021

2020 has changed Customer Experience (CX) in an unprecedented way for both customers and brands. The previous “nice to have” experience improvements became “must to have” to ensure customers stay engaged. As the world changed dramatically overnight, customer service and experience leaders had to figure out how to shift to new operating models to serve customers.

Companies once used to differentiate themselves by their product, service or efficiency. Today, however, being distinct and competitive lies in creating a seamless customer experience across all platforms. Business leaders recognize the competitive edge gained by ensuring superior customer experience and the perseverance required to achieve such standards.

Reports show that post-COVID, for 59% of consumers, a brand’s customer experience is a key deciding factor while making a purchase. Only 38% felt the same pre-COVID.

In a nutshell, customer experience directly influences purchasing decisions and a brand’s revenue in 2021. With that in mind, here are some trends to consider, to deliver powerful customer experiences in 2021.

6 Major Customer Experience Trends For 2021

1. Showing empathy: Building Relationships over transactions

The pandemic has disrupted the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of people worldwide and compelled everyone towards social isolation. Customers are seeking empathy and care from brand interactions and evaluating businesses on a human scale. Salesforce research shows that 71% of consumers cite companies who show sensitivity to the current climate are more likely to earn their loyalty.

This means throughout the pandemic and 2021, organizations need to think beyond just solving customer issues but also consider providing emotional support. Contact center agents need to be provided with fresh guidelines on handling sensitive customer issues and showing empathy.

This also means that customer service leaders should focus more on metrics like CSAT and NPS instead of just AHT.

In addition, customer service chatbots need to be trained with sentiment analysis capabilities. This enables bots to understand customer sentiments and moods and deliver the appropriate response.

2. Providing personalized diagnosis and recommendations

In 2021 and beyond, brands will be focusing more on providing personalized customer diagnosis and recommendations to improve the overall customer experience. Consider Ponds’ (a Unilever brand) AI Skin Advisor chatbot. Considering the skin problems people face amid COVID-19 due to prolonged mask wearing and continued all-day exposure to screens, Ponds deployed a chatbot on Shopee, an e-commerce platform in Southeast Asia.

Based on an individual’s headshot photo, the bot identifies key skin concerns like wrinkles or acne etc and recommends the right skincare product. The bot received appreciation from over 98% of customers who interacted with it.

This type of personalized recommendations and engagement goes a long way in improving the overall customer experience.

3. Providing Quick Information

Throughout the pandemic, we have seen a huge influx in customer requests. But a majority of these requests and queries are basic and simple in nature and take a lot of time to answer. Customers who need minor information like “What’s the status of my flight” or “What are the new operating timings of the nearby retail store” or “Does my insurance policy cover COVID-19 costs” etc. are made to wait in long queues before getting their questions answered.

This not only frustrates customers and affects brand loyalty but also decreases the agent productivity. In 2020, we have seen many companies deploy FAQ chatbots to address this issue and this trend is likely to continue in 2021. Chatbots are available 24*7, handle numerous requests at a time, provide instant answers and can be deployed in multiple channels seamlessly.

4. Capturing Customer Feedback and Suggestions

Now more than ever, businesses are looking to increase agility in their operations, product development processes and business models. As a result, customer feedback becomes an invaluable guiding source to make quick adjustments, improve product quality and adapt to changing conditions. While there are many ways to capture customer feedback, companies are now leveraging customer service chatbots. Chatbots can go beyond the usual 1-5 rating and ask the customer to send the specificities of the feedback. With a chatbot, customers can also upload media like photos and videos to provide suggestions in detail.

Based on the feedback, chatbots can also be trained to take follow-up actions. For example, if a customer expresses dissatisfaction for delayed order delivery, the chatbot can apologize to the customer and offer a discount coupon or cashback.

5. Proactive updates on new products and offers

Keeping customers proactively informed and engaged is a crucial part of improving customer experience in 2021 and beyond. Brands should anticipate the needs of customers in advance and deliver the relevant information and solutions without being prompted. This can include notifying customers about new products, latest offers, status of their ticket/order, potential errors and glitches, providing tailored advice, and offering personalized solutions, recommendations etc.

A report by Enkata shows that proactive customer service reduces call volumes by 30% and increases customer retention by 3-5%.

For instance, consider the example of a shopping chatbot deployed by a retail or CPG company. When a customer interacts with the chatbot and shows interest in making a product purchase, the chatbot can send a notification about a potential sale or offer about a similar product.

6. Providing Product Usage Help

Another important customer experience trend in 2021, is helping customers understand the different ways they use a product or service. For instance, Knorr, a global CPG company and manufacturer of dehydrated soup and meal mixes, recently deployed a chatbot that provides different soup recipes, tips and tricks for preparation, and personalized ingredient recommendations.

Such customer experience initiatives help companies not only improve the customer engagement and satisfaction but also drive sales and revenue.

Need further insights?

If you’d like to learn more about the top customer experience trends to watch for in 2021, please feel free to get in touch with one of our customer experience experts for a personalized consultation. You might also be interested in exploring our chatbot builder platform (BotCore) and learn how it helps you build low-code customer service chatbots within a few weeks.

The post Top 6 Customer Experience Trends For 2021 appeared first on BotCore.

How Chatbots Can Boost The Customer Retention Rate

Abhishek Shanbhag — Tue, 27 Oct 2020 10:19:00 +0000

How Chatbots Can Boost The Customer Retention Rate

As the world worked together to curb the COVID-19 pandemic, 2020 became the year when businesses were concerned with retaining customer loyalty, even if it meant taking a temporary hit to the bottom line. By putting customer-oriented policies in place, including flexible refunds, pricing, and change policies, and providing 24X7 service, organizations helped customers sail through the crisis.

As uncertainty loomed, contact centers became a significant touchpoint for anxious customers seeking answers, information, comfort, and support. AI-enabled customer service chatbots gained widespread adoption. Businesses leveraged chatbots to reduce wait-times and provide consistent support and quick information at scale and lower costs.

However, in 2021, as recovery and bottom line become extremely critical, businesses will now focus on leveraging chatbots to build customer loyalty, drive retention, and improve revenues.

Capabilities like omnichannel engagement, conversational IVR and sentiment analysis will become essential in delivering exceptional customer experiences and retaining brand loyalty.

In fact, a study by Harvard Business Review has concluded
increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%.

So, let’s explore how chatbots can boost customer retention rate in 2021.

Beyond Customer Service and Support: Developing a winning customer retention strategy with chatbots

While cost reduction and automation of inbound customer service requests are the main goals of deploying chatbots, a shift in focus to other use cases, including a decrease in customer churn and increased conversion rates, has gained traction.

1. Omnichannel customer engagement

Businesses today are leveraging multiple channels to reach out to their customers. In line with the increased usage of messaging apps and social media platforms, chatbots can now integrate with channels, like Facebook, WhatsApp, email, websites, mobile apps, voice assistants like Alexa, and Cortana etc., to assist customers in locating products and finding answers to their queries.

Omnichannel bots help businesses reach where their customers are. Using technologies such as machine learning, natural language processing (NLP), and natural language understanding (NLU), omnichannel bots understand and retain context and provide holistic, consistent, and meaningful support to customers across a host of channels.

Such wholesome customer experiences help reduce churn and boost retention.

2. Personalized engagement and recommendations

Chatbots collect data during their interactions with customers and analyze such information to craft buyer personas and identify customers who are on the verge of ending their relationship with your business.

Such data is critical in understanding needs, retaining customers, and increasing revenue.

For customers who are on the risk of leaving, chatbots can push special offers via different channels to re-engage them back with the brand
Chatbots can also be used to recommend other products to your existing customers, based on their interests and past purchasing behaviours, to increase retention and enhance revenue. For example, Consider Ponds’ (a Unilever brand) AI Skin Advisor chatbot, on Shopee, an e-commerce platform in Southeast Asia.

Based on the customer’s headshot photo, the bot identifies key skin concerns like wrinkles or acne etc and recommends the right skincare product. The bot received appreciation from over 98% of customers who interacted with it. This type of personalized recommendations and engagement goes a long way in improving the overall customer experience and retention.

Chatbots can be trained to ask customers for referrals and reward most loyal customers with discounts and coupons

3. Making purchases easier

By using chatbots, businesses can provide the purchasing facility directly from the chat interface. Your bots can recommend products, lead customers to your online store, and make payments easier.

When there is simplicity in carrying out purchases, your existing customers will keep coming back to your business, and you may also convert potential leads.

Chatbots make the buying process more seamless and engaging by educating customers on product features, comparisons, how-to videos etc.

4. Going local with multilingual bots

Customers prefer to interact with chatbots in their native tongue. Moreover, they trust brands that offer support in their native language more than the ones that don’t.

By deploying a multilingual chatbot which can interact with users in their preferred language, you can accelerate your localization efforts by understanding regional nuances and cultural subtleties, make your customers feel valued and understood, and allow issues to be resolved in the shortest time interval. Therefore, multilingual bots play a significant role in acquiring and retaining customers.

5. Asking customers for feedback

Every time a customer completes an online interaction, the chatbot can ask for short feedback, like, “Are you happy with our services?” or “What are the areas we should work on?” with multiple options for each question.

If customers don’t feel satisfied, the bot can ask them the reason. Data collected from such feedback can help improve customer service and go a long way in increasing customer retention.

6. Respond to customer queries 24x7

One of the most basic ways for businesses to increase customer retention is to swiftly respond to customer queries. A chatbot can provide quick and accurate answers to customer queries in real-time, within seconds of being contacted.

According to a report by Hubspot, 90% of customers cite instant response as a critical factor when it comes to customer service.

With chatbots, your organization is assured of round-the-clock customer service, thus supporting customers at their convenience, even outside business hours.

Get Started

According to research, the probability of selling to an existing customer is 3x to 35x higher.

By providing the following benefits, chatbots help boost your customer retention rate –

Giving quick and relevant answers to customer queries
Enhancing customer reach through omnichannel engagement
Improving CSAT levels with highly interactive and personalized conversations
Boosting the ability to recapture lost customers with customized messages and tailored offers
Providing personalized diagnosis and recommendations
Delivering localized experiences with multilingual capabilities
Collecting customer feedback to ensure better support in the future

At Acuvate, we help clients build and deploy AI-enabled chatbots with our enterprise chatbot building platform, BotCore.

BotCore’s core capabilities include –

Minimum coding requirements, graphical nodes, visual templates, and pre-built connectors empower you to quickly build and deploy chatbots across different channels with a single configuration.
BotCore’s chatbots support multiple languages, like French, German, Italian, etc., so you can reach and engage a broader consumer base.
Through automatic handling of API requirements, BotCore’s chatbots can easily connect to various channels, such as Facebook, SMS, email, WhatsApp, etc.
BotCore’s machine learning (ML) capabilities allow chatbots to learn from past interactions and retain context to provide more interactive and meaningful engagements.

The post How Chatbots Can Boost The Customer Retention Rate appeared first on BotCore.

Transforming Omnichannel Customer Service With Chatbots

Abhishek Shanbhag — Mon, 19 Oct 2020 09:31:00 +0000

Transforming omnichannel customer service with chatbots

With the onset of COVID-19, consumer buying worldwide shifted to digital platforms. Digital platforms are increasingly being used to interact with brands, view products, get information, check prices, and make purchases. Moreover, with the uncertainty surrounding the pandemic, they expected a super quick and highly efficient customer service to resolve their queries. They no longer tolerated traditional service approaches like frustrating IVRs, frequent agent transfers, or having to repeat their questions again and again to get the support they required.

Today’s customers desire convenient services through a variety of channels. For example, they may check a product’s features on Facebook, send an email to request more information, make purchases through a website, and seek technical assistance through IVR.

Therefore, an omnichannel customer strategy that integrates all communication channels has become the foremost priority for organizations. It is not only crucial for companies to be present on a particular channel; rather, it is also imperative to adapt to the unique formatting of each customer touchpoint and coordinate communication across channels to create a personalized and holistic brand experience.

A study by the Aberdeen Group revealed that organizations with a sustained omnichannel engagement strategy retain an average of 89% of their customers. In comparison, those without one retain an average of 33% only. Moreover, companies with omnichannel strategies experience 23 times higher rates of customer satisfaction.

An effective way to deliver fast yet personalized omnichannel experiences is through AI chatbots. So, let’s find out how organizations are transforming omnichannel customer service with chatbots.

Omnichannel Chatbots: Build Once, Deploy Anywhere

Customers expect their demands and needs to be met, even when they use different channels to communicate, and that’s where omnichannel chatbots come into the picture.

An omnichannel chatbot needs to be built just once and can then be deployed across multiple channels, including email, customer-facing websites, Facebook Messenger, Twitter, WhatsApp, mobile apps, and even voice assistants, such as Alexa and Google Home, and works seamlessly across all channels.

Enterprises today are using low-code chatbot builder platforms to build and deploy omnichannel chatbots. This means business teams can implement chatbots within a matter of a few weeks and little reliance on IT teams.

Omnichannel chatbots leverage technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, natural language processing (NLP), and natural language understanding (NLU) to comprehend customer queries, learn from past interactions, and store information from each user in a centralized database.

Once the data is collected, the bots access this information in real-time to deliver personalized conversational experiences to customers. Since bots retain the context of the original conversation, customers can easily switch from one channel to the next without the need to start over.

Omnichannel bots make customer interactions smoother and more consistent by –

Functioning seamlessly across virtually all channels in the digital landscape
Engaging in personalized conversations by understanding each customer’s individual needs and situation
Accessing real-time data and ensuring information consistency across all channels
Solving simple to more complex queries
Adjusting to new information and customer preferences over time
Escalating queries to human agents when needed.

Benefits of omnichannel chatbots

1. Improved customer satisfaction

Omnichannel chatbots help organizations increase CSAT levels in more ways than one. Keeping up with the increased use of messaging applications and social media platforms, bots can now be integrated with channels like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, etc. Bots can then assist customers in locating the products that suit their needs, answer questions regarding payment, delivery status, etc., carry out simple transactions on the customer’s behalf, or solve other queries. Or they may transfer the request to a human agent or schedule an agent call-back if needed.

Moreover, bots can handle multiple requests at once to provide customer support at scale, 24X7, and at lower costs.

In addition to delivering passive customer interaction, wherein bots only engage with customers when contacted, organizations can stay a step ahead by proactively reaching out to customers regarding new products or issues they might be facing and improve brand perception in the long run.

2. Fast response

An omnichannel bot can provide an immediate response, within seconds, on any channel it is deployed. According to an Inside sales research, there is a 10x reduction in the odds of retaining a customer, even if you wait 5 mins after the lead makes contact. Given these stats, it becomes prudent for all organizations to provide swift and accurate responses to customers, both current and potential.

By leveraging its machine learning capabilities and drawing insights from already stored data, an omnichannel bot can provide quick, personalized, and consistent answers to customer queries in real-time.

3. Increased revenue

If customers receive exceptional service, they remain satisfied and loyal to your brand and buy more. According to a Harvard Business Review report, a 5% increase in customer retention amounts to an increase of up to 95% in the company’s annual earnings.

The wholesome, interactive, and engaging experience offered by omnichannel chatbots can thus accelerate business growth.

4. Data collection

Omnichannel bots collect customer information from various channels and store all of the data in a centralized database. Such data provides insights into customer buying behavior, past interactions, requirements, etc., allowing companies to plan more focussed and strategic marketing and sales initiatives.

Go Omnichannel Today!

Consumer behavior is evolving, and establishing new ways to connect with them has become more critical than before.

By adopting an omnichannel strategy with the help of chatbots, companies empower customers to engage with them on the channel of their choice and create more meaningful, effortless, and successful user experiences. Establishing consistent support across all channels leads to enhanced customer satisfaction, higher brand loyalty, and greater revenue.

On top of that, the data you collect can help you establish more targeted and improved outreach and sales practices.

At Acuvate, we help clients build and deploy omnichannel bots with our enterprise bot-building platform called BotCore. BotCore’s core capabilities and features include –

With minimum coding requirements and pre-built connectors, it is easy to deploy chatbots, and also differentiate responses across channels by using channel-specific interface elements. A single configuration is enough for deployment across multiple channels.
BotCore’s chatbots support multiple languages, like French, German, Italian, etc. so you can reach and engage a wider consumer base.
Through automatic handling of API requirements, BotCore’s chatbots can connect to various channels, such as Facebook, SMS, email, etc. You need to simply click on the required checkboxes, and the deployment is done.
BotCore’s machine learning (ML) capabilities help chatbots retain the context of the conversation, allowing users to switch channels without the need to begin the conversation from scratch.

If you’d like to learn more about this topic, please feel free to get in touch with one of our enterprise chatbot consultants for a personalized consultation. You may also be interested in exploring our chatbot builder platform (BotCore).

The post Transforming Omnichannel Customer Service With Chatbots appeared first on BotCore.

How Agent Assist Bots Help Improve Customer Service Productivity

Rakesh Reddy — Fri, 04 Sep 2020 08:02:00 +0000

How Agent Assist Bots Help Improve Customer Service Productivity

Customer service agents not only have to resolve customer queries accurately but also need to do that in the least amount of time. Average Handling Time (AHT), therefore, is one of the most important metrics to determine if a contact centre’s service is productive or not. It impacts a customer’s satisfaction directly and is a key determinant of the overall customer experience. However, even the best customer service agents need help at times.

While handling complex queries, customer service agents have to put customers on hold to search for answers across multiple systems and documents, which usually is tedious and takes time. This increases AHT, frustrates the customer, and increases the likelihood of customer attrition – which in turn affects the company’s bottom line. This is where agent assist bots play a key role.

Agent Assist Bots Explained

Most customer service departments today use customer-facing chatbots. According to a report, 80% of the surveyed companies are or will be using customer-facing chatbots by 2020. These chatbots are usually equipped with AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP), and act as the first line of support agents. Complex conversations which need a human touch are transferred to a human agent.

But a chatbot’s applications in customer service doesn’t have to be limited to just customer-facing interactions.

Agent assist bots act as a companion to human customer service agents. They are programmed to work alongside live agents and provide customer information and smart suggestions to humans as per the query and the conversational flow. Moreover, they can also be programmed to handle the cumbersome, tedious, and time-consuming tasks of the agents like searching for information and automating CRM data entry. Agent assist bots are fast becoming a critical addition to deliver superior and more efficient customer service.

Improve Customer Service Productivity With Agent Assist Bots

1. Support during live calls or chats

Whenever human agents handle customer conversations via live chats or calls, agent assist bots analyze customers’ responses and identify their intents. This enables them to map the query to relevant topics and provide the needed information to agents to deliver faster resolutions.

At the same time, they can identify customers’ profiles and assess whether they are repeat callers or not by automatically analyzing the company’s customer database and relaying the information to the agent. Moreover, they ensure that the agents never hit a dead end during the conversation. When live agents do not know the answer for a specific query, chatbots provide immediate contextual suggestions.

2. Faster Access To Information

A majority of a human agent’s time is spent on manual search. Upon an agent’s request, agent assist bots can automatically connect to their knowledge bases, CRM and back-end systems to extract relevant articles and documents, and present it to the agent seamlessly.

3. Enhanced Live Agent Productivity

Whenever customer self-service interactions escalate to a human agent, an agent assist bot automatically provides the entire conversation history including sentiment scores and contextual information. They also suggest knowledge articles the agent can go through to fulfill the customer’s request. Additionally, agent assist bots can also help agents in tedious and time-consuming activities such as capturing customer information, post-conversation form filling and surveys, and thereby enhance the overall agent productivity.

4. Simplified and Automated CRM Data Entry

Manual data entry into CRM is a huge productivity roadblock for customer service agents. An agent assist bot mines audio calls/textual conversations whenever an agent speaks/chats with a customer. It captures key notes, details, insights from the customer and enters the data automatically into the CRM system.

Agents can also have quick chat with the agent assist bot and ask it to update/change the CRM records with the provided specifications.

Learn More: How Are Chatbots Boosting The CRM Adoption Rates

Get Started

Customer service agents and agent assist bots are complimentary in many ways. They have the same goals – improve customer experience and reduce the amount of time required to handle an interaction, but have different capabilities, which when synchronized can take customer service to the next level. While the agent can interact with the customers and make them feel at ease and comfortable, agent assist bots with their AI capabilities can extract and provide highly contextual and accurate information in real-time, enhancing the productivity of the company’s customer service.

If you’d like to learn more about agent assist bots, please feel free to get in touch with one of our contact center and chatbot experts for a personalized consultation. You may also be interested in exploring our enterprise chatbot builder platform (BotCore) which can help you build customer service and agent assist bots for your organization.

Further Insights:

FREE EBOOK

a guide to choosing an enterprise bot builder platform

The post How Agent Assist Bots Help Improve Customer Service Productivity appeared first on BotCore.

A Comprehensive Guide To Understanding Chatbots

Rakesh Reddy — Sat, 25 Jul 2020 10:53:51 +0000

A Comprehensive Guide To Understanding Chatbots

What is a chatbot
The past and the present of chatbots
What are chatbots capable of doing?
Important chatbot features you should be aware of
Use cases and benefits
Functions
Industries
Key implementation considerations
The future of chatbots

Chapter 1: What Is A Chatbot

A chatbot is a computer program which can converse via textual or auditory methods. Often regarded as the “darling of the media”, chatbots (or bots) are currently one of the most popular AI technologies. There are also rule-based bots which don’t have AI incorporated in them. However, their relevance is fast decreasing in today’s disruptive world.

Chatbots are the “apps” of voice and messaging platforms that define how users and customers converse with your digital business services and data

Usually built with a Chatbot Platform or Frameworks, bots are deployed on messaging apps or virtual assistants to converse with end-users.

The advancements in Artificial Intelligence and its related components like Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing (NLP) led to the creation of highly intelligent bots with smarter responses in a natural language tone.

Chapter 2: The Past And The Present Of Chatbots

The History Of Bots: Where And How It All Began

In order to understand chatbots, we first need to delve into Artificial Intelligence and how it gave rise to the intelligent Chatbots of today. It all began with Alan Turing asking a simple question in an article titled ‘Computer Machinery and Intelligence’ in 1950. In this article, Turing theorized on whether or not computer systems could think. He also outlined the Turing Test, a method to measure whether one was speaking to a human or to a computer programme. We can note this as being one of the first theories on the capability of AI technology.

Years later in 1965, Joseph Weizenbaum created ELIZA at MIT’s AI laboratory. ELIZA was capable of simulating human conversation by matching user prompts with scripted responses. This innovation paved the way for PARRY, an AI chatbot developed in 1972 by Kenneth Colby. PARRY could simulate the thinking patterns of a person. When psychiatrists were made to interact with PARRY, only 48 percent were able to identify the difference between PARRY and a real person. Ever since then we have seen many variations of AI-powered chatbots which have only gotten more and more sophisticated over time.

The Present Scenario

With the advancements in AI, bots have become more intelligent are able to conduct meaningful and personalized conversations. Now, bots could adapt and learn based on the interactions they had with people. They could now process tons of data, rapidly retrieve information, process information, and give the right output/answer in no time. There are two primary entities of AI that power a chatbot – Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing.

Machine learning is an application of AI, and a scientific study of algorithms and statistical models that provides computer systems the ability to learn and perform a specific task without explicitly trained to do so. With machine learning, systems rely on patterns and inference to learn automatically. With the help of machine learning, chatbots can use historic interactions and the built-in instructions during training, to continuously learn and better themselves.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a component of AI, and is the ability of a computer program to understand human or natural language, as it is spoken/written. NLP helps a bot understand the semantics of the language being used and logically respond using natural language, consistent with the user’s query.

Organizations today are using chatbots for a variety of use cases and the usage varies from industry to industry and function to function. And the benefits chatbots offer are plenty including enhancing customer experience, improving employee productivity, automating mundane tasks, reducing costs and simplifying business workflows.

Enterprises are now leveraging chatbot builder platforms to effectively build, deploy, manage and train AI chatbots.

Learn More: Chatbots: The Past, Present, And Future

Chapter 3: What Are Chatbots Capable Of Doing?

Unlike a typical application’s or website’s traditional Graphic User Interface (GUI), the Conversational User Interface (CUI) of a chatbot simplifies business workflows, tasks and much more. Before understanding how chatbots drive value, it’s imperative to understand what chatbots can do.

1. Fetching Information

Chatbots provide users with an easy way to access data or generate reports and facilitate better decision making for both your customers and employees.

Decision makers can easily obtain granular business insights and key metrics right within the actively used messaging app. This eliminates the need for them to log into applications or scan through multiple dashboards or filter data to access the information they require. Instead, relevant information is made available to them right at their fingertips, saving time and greatly increasing efficiency.
Enabling users with chatbots allows them to easily request for information they require through voice commands and basic keystrokes.
Chatbots can easily answer questions via text or any multimedia format, including but not limited to images, graphs, pie charts and so on.

Examples:

Employee to a business intelligence chatbot: “What is the marketing ROI for 2016 and 2017?”
Customer to a banking chatbot: “Send my account mini statement”

2. Send Personalized Alerts

Just like a mobile app, chatbots have the capability to deliver personalized notifications and alerts to customers and employees directly from your enterprise systems. This serves to ensure that your business users are kept updated about various changes and news in the organization. and also engage to get more details by asking questions in natural language.

Here are a few examples of how notifications and alerts can help across a variety of organizations and departments:

An intranet chatbot can send notifications to relevant employees when there is a new document added to the intranet knowledge base.
A sales chatbot can keep users notified about changes in important metrics, including but not limited to MSL, leads, OTIF, payment terms and so on. These alerts can also be customized based on the location of the sales personnel and the specific customer they are about to meet, so they have access to the most relevant information required to make a sale. Chatbots can notify users about a dip in revenue from specific regions or brands etc. As a result, the sales personnel will be able to immediately dive into why it’s happening and take appropriate measures to fix.
A banking chatbot can send alerts to customers reminding them to make payments or to advise them that they have exceeded the credit limit, so they do not attract unforeseen fees.
An e-commerce chatbot can send alerts on incomplete orders. If a customer has items that have been left in the cart, he is reminded to complete the transaction to secure the items he wanted to purchase.
Chatbots can alert users about upcoming ERP downtimes.

3. Perform Tasks

There are a variety of repetitive tasks that have to be performed across organizations for a variety of reasons. These routine tasks can be time-consuming and hamper productivity. A chatbot can easily be introduced to address these tasks and complete them without glitches.

These tasks can involve collecting, modifying, posting information in systems or making form-based data entries that employees and customers need to perform repetitively.

Chatbots also eliminate the need to switch across multiple applications, go through various mundane procedures or depend on personnel to get tasks done. Users can get all their simple, yet repetitive tasks are done, simply by “conversing” with the chatbot via their actively used organization wide messaging app.

Examples:

Employee to a helpdesk chatbot: “There is an issue with my laptop. Generate an IT helpdesk ticket”
Customer to a banking chatbot: “I want to make my credit-card payment”

4. Answering Questions

Most websites are equipped with chatbots that proactively ask visitors questions that enable them to provide a personalized experience and help the user reach exactly the information or page they are looking for.

This same functionality also applies within businesses – from the most simple FAQs to more complex questions, chatbots can be designed to address a wide range of queries from employees across the organization.

Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) enable bots to understand the query and the intent and therefore, provide highly accurate answers.

Well-designed chatbots can also quickly adapt to the office jargon, offering users the most relevant and informed answers to their queries.

Examples:

Employee to IT helpdesk bot: “How do I reset my password?”
Customer: “Can you tell me more about that product?”

Chapter 4: Popular Chatbot Features You Should Be Aware Of

A) Knowledge Base

The knowledge base of the bot is central to its functioning. It supports the following functions:

Creating Guided Conversations: Bot interactions ought to be streamlined so that the outcomes are pre-defined.
Handling Q&A Scenarios: Equips bots to answer all possible queries.
Entity Fulfilment & Actions: This enables a bot to give relevant responses to capture all required entities to perform an action.

b) Broadcasting

When we say there can’t be a bot platform without broadcasting, we mean it. Through broadcasting, the admin of a chatbot can easily send a notification to all the users regarding any important event. This feature of a chatbot platform has gained significance during noteworthy events such as the People’s Choice Awards, World Surf League etc., in which users were kept informed and updated about future events.

c) Effective conversation system

Based on the particular need and situation, the bot should have the ability to initiate a tailored conversation with the user.

An efficient bot would have features such as

Trigger service – Service that an integrating application can use to send a trigger
Message queuing – Trigger messages are queued for large scale message volume
User & channel data store – Triggers can be sent to users on one or more channels that they are connected to with the bot.
Human hand off: The bot should transfer the conversation to a human when the conversation becomes too complex for the bot to handle or upon users’ request.

d) Vocabulary

If the bot gives a standard response with limited phrases, the user may be discouraged from continuing the conversation. An efficient chatbot should have a high range of variable vocabulary and understand familiar user phrases. Chatbots should also be ingested with business/domain specific vocabulary for seamless adoption

e) Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment analysis empowers chatbots with the ability to understand the emotions and mood of the user by analyzing their text or voice input. This helps chatbots to drive the conversation wisely and deliver appropriate responses.

f) Administration

Bots need to be monitored and regulated. They need to be equipped with:

Training Module: For learning and understanding new concepts.
Maintenance Mode: The results of new learning and actions can be tested here.
Logs: This module helps record bot errors.

Learn More: Take Your Chatbots To The Next Level With New Capabilities

Chapter 5: Use Cases And Benefits

Functions

1. Human Resources

Chatbots can be used at different stages of an employee’s life cycle – right from recruitment and onboarding to engaging the employee and fostering retention, in order to optimize the whole process.

- Recruitment

Given the large volume of applications that Human Resources teams tend to receive, keeping all candidates updated in a timely manner is a burdensome task. In all practicality, most HR personnel barely have the time and bandwidth to update rejected applicants especially when they are occupied with sourcing the right ones. Due to this, a majority of the candidates never hear back from their prospective recruiters, lowering the quality of the applicant’s experience.

This creates an opportunity for chatbots to manage and accomplish such repetitive, and time-heavy tasks.

Use Cases

Recruitment chatbots can perform the following functions in the recruitment process:

Parsing the resumes uploaded onto the recruitment portals
Filtering applicants for the screening process by making significant inquiries
Delivering updates about the status of an application
Responding to FAQs, thereby saving the recruiter’s time and efforts for other tasks
Additionally, a chatbot can also conduct and record feedback surveys from the candidate about their recruitment process and gain insights on any areas of improvement.

While these are some of the more specific tasks a chatbot can perform with regards to the recruitment processes, use of recruitment chatbots can also lead to several benefits for the company. The most crucial one being significantly lower costs and time involved in hiring, since a large part of the process will be automated and will lead to higher productivity and efficiency.

Benefits

Deploying AI-powered chatbots can help in reducing the workload of recruiters. Given the complex current hiring scenarios where simultaneous engagement with several candidates is required, automated chatbots ensure seamless candidate experience. With the help of chatbots, you can:

Reduce cost-per-hire
Increase recruitment team productivity
Eliminate paperwork
Enhance candidate experience
Reduce recruitment time by qualifying and disqualifying candidates swiftly at scale
Automate the manual and administrative recruitment work
Keep candidates engaged throughout the process
Reduce missed opportunities
Improve employer brand

In a recent survey by Allegis it was noted that:
58% of candidates were comfortable interacting with AI and recruitment chatbots in the early stages of the application process.
About 66% of candidates were comfortable with AI and chatbots taking care of interview scheduling and peripheral activity.

- Onboarding

Since on-boarding involves performing several smaller activities in a shorter span, automating the same using chatbots can help streamline the whole process. Some of the crucial chatbot use cases during onboarding can be –

Helping HR personnel during initial tasks such as collecting and recording KYC, tax forms, signed legal documents etc. Chatbots can effectively streamline and speed this process by tracking the same for employees and reminding them to submit the required documents on time.
Hand holding new hires through company policies. A large part of initial orientation involves sharing standard operating procedures and company policies, chatbots can severely reduce the HR workload by handling the process and queries online
Apart from orientation, AI powered chatbots can also help relay all relevant information to do with the organization and internal teams. This can reduce dependency on the HR team for sharing troves of information with regards to their teams, roles, key contacts, general organizational landscape, etc.

- Learning and Development

Employee training and development is a key process in the HR lifecycle. It involves providing the employees with specific knowledge and skills to boost their productivity and efficiency.

Chatbots can be used to conduct tests and quizzes to track progress of employees.

Employees often run through the long-cycle of time consuming training sessions and coaching mechanisms. A chatbot that is made available 24×7 allows employees to get trained in an agile mode and round the clock, adding flexibility to their work life. Employees can consume these conversational training modules, in the form of mini-questionnaires and tests.

Training bots also take care of administrative aspects like sending reminders and fixing coach appointments.

By use of chatbots, employees can also track their learning and development goals and remain on par with the company’s goals and objectives.

- Retention and Engagement

Effective employee engagement is perhaps the most dynamic application for a HR bot. By providing a seamless employee digital experience, companies can increase employee retention.

Chatbots offer a solution by providing self-service options to employees. Chatbots enable employees to ask natural language questions such as, “How many holiday days have I got left?”, “What are the company policies on applying for time off?” and other FAQs to the chatbot. This helps them get all the information they need right at their fingertips, without having to wait for the HR team to get back on their queries.

Chatbots act as the first line of HR support for your employees and thereby increase your team productivity. This also reduces your cost-per-contact significantly since the bot takes care of all the repetitive, basic and simple issues.

- Off-boarding / Exit Management

When an employee quits a firm or submits his resignation, there are several HR related formalities that follow.

They are first required to confirm the last date of their employment based on their notice period, account for the leaves used that year, get settlements on their pending invoices, get approvals on their pending receipts, etc.
Finally on the last working day, the formalities to do with the handover are supposed to be completed, like surrendering of company devices & ID cards, settlement of pending accounts, submission of relevant forms & applications and any information that needs to be relayed to important associates, clients or colleagues.
There is also the exit interview that takes place, to get feedback from the employees about their experience at the firm. Given the several significant and meticulous tasks involved, the whole process could take days or weeks to finish.

Since these tasks are part of a time and effort consuming yet pre-fixed, routine process, these can easily be taken up by an AI-powered HR bot. An HR bot can streamline the process by creating forms, all collated in one place, additionally, the process flow can be created such that the subsequent step becomes active only when the step before it is completed. This can help put an end to incomplete documentation and human error.

Apart from the formalities, a bot can offer easy query resolution to do with any key aspect such as leave balance, taxes, benefits, duration of notice period, etc. As for the last step – the exit interview, having an HR bot conduct the same can ensure an honest and unbiased outcome.

Not only will the employees be more candid and honest with a virtual chatbot, but the interview responses can be collated and help analyse retention and other HR challenges in the organisation. Therefore, an HR bot can easily undertake the step-by-step process with minimal supervision and help render off-boarding as an effective and smooth-running process.

Learn More: How Chatbots Are Revolutionizing The HR Department

2. IT Helpdesk

Apart from just HR functions, chatbots are capable of resolving first-level IT issues as well. Just like the HR department, the IT helpdesk is often inundated with routine questions. AI chatbots act as the first line of help desk agents by answering all the basic FAQs. As soon as a request is raised, IT chatbots help the user do basic troubleshooting and in most cases fix the issue and thereby reduce the employee downtime.

If the issue isn’t resolved or the user isn’t satisfied with the outcome, bots provide the option to connect with a support agent – thereby leaving the more complex queries to human agents. Employees can stay updated on the progress of their tickets by asking the chatbots natural language questions.

This leads to faster resolution times, improved incident management, improved security, better handling of outages and ensuring that employees are kept informed with steady and timely alerts.

If the issue remains unresolved or the user is not completely satisfied with the outcome, bots offer the option to connect with a support agent – thereby leaving the more complex queries to human associates.

Employees can then stay updated on the progress of their tickets by inquiring with chatbots using natural language questions. This leads to faster resolution times, streamlined incident management, better security, improved handling of issues and ensuring that employees are kept informed with steady and timely outage alerts.

Use Cases

Check the status of tickets
Answer common troubleshooting questions like VPN or password not working
Ask instructions for common IT issues
Reset passwords for devices and network
Talk to a live agent (human-handoff)
Raise tickets
Fill form fields via conversation
Access the knowledge base
Check on the pending case reports
Look-up case-related information
Receive information on – Incident notifications, New change request notifications, Task notifications, Access request notifications, Asset request notifications and Outage alerts

Benefits

Reduced employee downtime
Provide self-service to employees
24/7 availability
Eliminate calls
Reduce cost per ticket
Answer FAQ
Increase IT staff productivity
Address level 1 issues
Spread awareness about IT policies & initiatives
Modernize incident management
Categorize and route incidents better
Quicker resolutions
Increase employee experience and productivity

Learn More:

3. Sales

Chatbots can integrate with data warehouses and CRM, BI and LOB Systems to perform tasks such as creating new leads, updating lead status, getting visual reports in multimedia formats, updating CRM records etc.

Use Cases

Check the lead status
Ask pinpointed prospect-related queries
Check on the sales KPIs
Get pin-pointed answers of any information available in the CRM or BI systems.
Fill lead details
Send email of the desired dashboard
Set and get alerts about dip or rise in any sales KPI.
Receive notifications about change in lead’s status
Access reports available in the CRM, BI or LOB or DWH systems.
Get links to the desired dashboards

Benefits

Increase CRM adoption
Simplify and automate data entry into CRM systems
Update CRM records quickly
Access customer/prospect intelligence swiftly during calls/meetings
Reduce manual data-entry and administrative tasks for sales reps
Increase sales reps productivity
Enable data-driven decision-making
Increase lead conversion ratio
Stay updated with real-time KPIs and lead intelligence

4. Marketing

Chatbots can gather data about potential customers that equips marketers with essential information to design their products and advertising strategies. They can be integrated with various social media channels and used to reach out to customers of various demographics.

Use Cases

Lead generation
Lead qualification
Book sales meetings
Schedule demos/consultations
Suggest relevant content based on user’s website activity
Capture email addresses and other visitor details in a simplified manner

Benefits

Personalize website experience
Skyrocket visitor to lead conversions
Qualify leads effortlessly and generate only high qualified leads for sales teams
Engage visitors
Gather visitor/lead intelligence
More demos/consultations with potential customers
Eliminate the filling of long forms in landing pages
Grow your email list
Close more deals and accelerate revenue

Learn More: 4 Ways Marketing Teams Can Use Chatbots

5. Intranet/Employee Assistant

Employees can use the company’s intranet chatbot to perform simple actions such as checking on internal company updates, accessing documents, applying for leaves etc.

Use Cases

Proactively take the announcements and news in the intranet to the employee
Get intranet information via natural language questions
Get links to desired intranet documents
Content authors can update content with a chat interface
Get personalized alerts and timely updates
Perform tasks like leave requests, travel settlement requests, IT requests etc.

Benefits

Drive intranet adoption, collaboration & ROI
Personalize the intranet experience. Employees don’t have to swift through unrelated intranet content.
Access intranet resources faster
Reduce intranet redesign investments
Improve employee experience and productivity
Faster intranet content updation

Learn More: Chatbots For SharePoint Intranet

6. Business Intelligence

Chatbots can be integrated with Power BI, SAP Business Objects, Oracle or any other BI tool, as well as CRM and LOB systems or data warehouses, in order to simplify data consumption.

Use Cases

Ask queries about business KPIs and get pin-pointed answers from any information available in the BI system
Ex: What is the top performing product in 2018?
Access reports available in the BI or LOB or DWH systems.
Get links to the desired dashboards
Update records and details
Bot can send email of the desired dashboard
Get visual reports in multimedia formats

Benefits

Simplify the consumption and interaction with data
Drive business intelligence adoption and data-driven decision-making
Get data on fingertips
Ask questions in a natural language tone
Set and Get alerts on any dip in KPIs like low stock, revenue, etc.
Eliminate multiple logins to BI systems and filtering dashboards
Sales and supply chain assistants
Help in Increasing topline and reduce inventory

Learn More: Business Intelligence Bots

Industries

1. Banking & Financial Services

Some of the chatbot use cases for banking begin with personalized banking with an aim to improve customer satisfaction and engagement. Banks have enabled their customers to interact with chatbots to clarify banking queries. They can access and ask for account balance, bank statements, transfer funds, create a deposit, saving and investment advice, and so on.

Use Cases in Customer Service

Checking the account balance, transaction history, credit limit etc.
Help in upsell
Finding the nearest ATM or branch
Inquiring about different offerings and products
Generating a mini statement for the desired time period and the interest rate report
Updating contact information
Connecting to a live agent (human hand-off)
Transferring money from one account to another
Suggest money saving ideas
Generating bill payment alerts and Individualized financial advices
Resetting the card PIN

Business Benefits

Personalize banking services
Personalize marketing strategies and drive sales
24/7 availability and customer service
Get customer feedback and measure customer satisfaction
Self-service transactions
Handle FAQ, basic and simple queries
Improve ESAT and customer loyalty

2. Consumer Goods & Retail

CPG and retail companies are increasingly using chatbots to transform customer experience. Chatbots fix the long product discover journey for a consumer by allowing consumers to access product information and make a purchase on-the-go using mobile devices. They can assist sales personnel by seamlessly integrating with CRM, BI and LOB systems at the background and provide accurate sales data and real-time alerts.

Use Cases in Customer Service

Product exploration and discovery
Product recommendations
Product surveys
Check the shipment status
Add items to cart
Place orders
Book appointments
Connect to customer support agents
Provide product related information, and alerts on a new product launch, and suggestions on discounts or coupons or any other sales offers

Business Benefits

Product exploration and discovery
Product recommendations
Product surveys
Check the shipment status
Add items to cart
Place orders
Book appointments
Connect to customer support agents
Provide product related information, and alerts on a new product launch, and suggestions on discounts or coupons or any other sales offers

3. Insurance

Chatbots in the insurance industry are being used to enhance the customer experience. Top insurance companies including Liberty Mutual Insurance, Lincoln Financial Group and Allstate Business Insurance are using chatbots to handle routine customer questions, address minor insurance related challenges, provide quotes, automate the claim process, and reduce call center costs.

Use Cases in Customer Service

Help in filing a claim
Answer Scheme and plan related questions
Provide recommendations to prevent loss
Provide guidance for choosing the right plan
Send Insurance documents of the customer
Send personalized quotes to users

Business Benefits

GDPR compliant conversations
Simplify complex jargon for customers
Help customers understand the policies or any domain-specific terminology better
Streamline claim filing process
Simplify regular tasks like payments and updating user info
Better marketing through personalized plan recommendations and alerts on new plans
Increase customer agent productivity by answering FAQ

Learn More: Chatbots For Insurance Industry

4. Legal

Legal jargon is a complex language of its own and piles up every day, across multiple document structures. Analyzing these documents and accessing the relevant ones is a time-consuming process for humans. Chatbots reduce the time to analyze with use of artificial intelligence and exponential power to process natural language. With machine learning, chatbots have been trained to be legal advisors for mundane and redundant customer queries.

Use Cases In Customer Service

Helping attorneys with finding information quickly
Understand legal services and offerings of law firm
Queries for better understanding unknown legal jargon
Basic legal queries while staying anonymous
Book appointments with attorneys at the desired time

Business Benefits

Offer a certain amount of free legal advice
Drive leads and appointments
GDPR complaint conversations
Self-service and 24/7 availability
Learn complex legal jargon swiftly and effortlessly

Learn More: Legal Industry Bots

5. Education

Chatbots are changing the face of education right from personalizing education, helping people learn new languages, spaced interval learning, student feedback, professor assessment, essay scoring, acquaint students with school culture and for administrative formalities.

Use Cases in Customer Service

Handling queries related to the university and courses during registration, assessment related questions, tuition fees, time tables, scholarships, grades etc.
Get university policy documents, enrollment certificates, academic information, disability and other personal information
Provide course and administration related information
Access course documents
Handle university registration
Send feedback about professors, courses etc.
Update contact information
Register for courses
Fill applications
Apply for permissions

Business Benefits

Provide a personalized 24/7 self-service student experience
The bot act as a single point of contact for all needs of the student – right from registration to farewell
Reduce administrative costs
Improve the productivity of teachers and administration staff

Learn More: Chatbots for Educational Institutions

Chapter 6: Key Chatbot Implementation Considerations

When implementing chatbots in your organization, here are a few factors to consider to plan your implementation better and achieve maximum business value from your chatbots:

Define your goals – Clearly define the purpose of your chatbot and what actions you would want it to handle. Usually, chatbots are used to provide customer service, improve the brand’s online presence, or used to collect BI or process user queries on the intranet.
Start small: Start small but quickly. Establish many small milestones. This will help you stay ahead of competition and by having many small milestones you will understand the pulse of the users. Thenceforth, you can start making changes and updates to the chatbot. An enterprise chatbot platform will be helpful for this process.
Understand your audience – You must profile the users for whom the chatbot is intended in order to understand their needs, behavior, and expectations. Classifying your audience gives you insight that is essential to keep your chatbot strategy focused. Setup live ops to continuously incorporate behaviour pattern and to make adjustments
Outline the user actions – In order to establish a streamlined design, you must outline the key intents, or user actions, that the chatbots will complete as they move through the conversation funnel.
Pay attention to Security and Privacy – Ensure that chatbots are compliant with GDPR or any other industry-specific or location-specific regulations and policies. Provide information to users based on their authorization levels and adopt authentication measures such as user identity authentication, intent level authorization, channel authorization, end to end encryption, and intent level privacy, to enhance the security and privacy of your chatbot.
Chatbot implementation can become expensive, without proper expertise – Building chatbots without prior experience can make the implementation a mismanaged, disorganized, and costly venture. Choosing from a reputed “off-the-shelf” solution, is a better option.
Set the right expectations – Users must be made aware of the capabilities of a chatbot before they are deployed.
Infuse NLP and Machine Learning – Infusing NLP and Machine Learning into bots makes them relatable to the user, thus enhancing adoption, and providing an enhanced and personalized user experience.
Future-proof your chatbot – Ensure your chatbot can leverage any AI service available today and will scale for future services. This can be achieved by choosing bot platforms with cognitive abstraction that ensures you’re not locked down to any specific AI chatbot vendor or product.
Ensure that there is a human hand-off, when required – There should be a human that can take over the conversation in cases where the chatbot cannot drive a query to its conclusion. The hand-off should be as seamless as possible without reducing user experience.
Help employees overcome their resistance to chatbots – Employees may fear that AI and chatbots pose a threat to their jobs. Hence, you should make them aware that a bot has the capability to relieve them of their repetitive work and make them more productive.
Align the chatbot with your brand identity – A tailor-made bot that matches your brand identity and tone is imperative in enhancing the user experience.

Learn More: 10 Key Chatbot Implementation Considerations You Should Be Aware Of

Chapter 7: The Future Of Chatbots

According to Orbis Research, the Global Chatbot Market is to grow at a CAGR of 34.75% during the period 2019-2024.

As the chatbot technology continues to mature, the future of bots is becoming interesting. Here are a few important trends to watch for:

1. Integrating Chatbots with RPA

As chatbots are increasingly being used to perform a greater range of tasks, they will need back office bots that can quickly find information and complete transactions on behalf of users. Integrating front-office chatbots with legacy systems is achieved with the help of Robotic Process Automation (RPA).

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

2. Chatbot-to-Human Handover

There can be times when a chatbot needs to hand off the conversation to a human being to handle issues that are complex. The bot should recognize the situations when it needs to hand off and provide the user with a clear, smooth transition.

One of the simplest and an effective method of initiating a handoff from is provide a user-driven menu. The bot can be programmed to provide the user with a menu of predefined options after every message.

When the chatbot senses that the user is trying to reach for a human assistance, it can simply provide the user with an option of chatting with a human agent. The user can then select the option if the chatbot seems incapable of solving the problem.

Another scenario in which handoff becomes imperative is in the case of escalations. The chatbot should effectively inform the user that the interaction is being transferred so as to address their concerns better. It also should always provide users an option to talk to a live agent.

Learn More: Human Handoff In Service Desk Bots

3. Voice Bots

A ComScore study forecasts that by 2020, 50% of all searches will be voice-based.

Although in the current scenario text-based chatbots are ruling the roost, the application of voice technology is gaining momentum. Since most people prefer talking as opposed to typing, it is no wonder that organizations are increasingly implementing voice bots for both customers and employees. At the moment, voice bots are a good fit when it comes to handling simple, linear tasks and queries. However, at the rate at which voice technology is evolving, with applications in smart devices such as speakers, TVs, watches etc., voice bots may very well be what the future looks like for AI chatbots.

Learn More:

4. DataOps With Chatbots

A large amount of data is captured from chatbots. Data analytics employs new approaches like DataOps to leverage data that is captured through chatbots. This data can be analyzed and integrated with the other sources of internal and external data for better marketing and customer service.

In Conclusion

Organizations are significantly utilizing Chatbots to automate their internal business processes, productivity, boost revenue and enhance the customer experience.

Juniper Research forecasts that chatbot conversations will be responsible for cost savings of over $8 billion per annum by 2022.

The conversational interface of chatbots simplify everyday workflows for employees and eliminates the hassle of switching multiple apps. Chatbots act as a single point of contact to get tasks done and access information. The use cases of chatbots are diverse and emerging across functions and industries. Enterprise leaders should have a powerful bot strategy to make the most of this technology.

About BotCore

BotCore is an enterprise-grade bot builder platform using which enterprises can create, build, train, deploy and manage chatbots for their organization. BotCore is fully deployable on both on-premise and cloud environments.

BotCore is an accelerator that enables you to launch customized, AI-powered conversational bots in your organization. With the help of “Cognitive Abstraction”, it can leverage any AI service available today and will scale for future services.

BotCore today powers chatbots at several large enterprises and Fortune 100 companies.

If you are planning to adopt a chatbot in your organization, Acuvate’s bot workshops like the Build-A-Bot program helps you get a subject matter expert opinion to plan your bot journey.

The workshop helps identify specific use cases within your enterprise and evaluate different technologies. Acuvate provides a 1 day bot strategy workshop within your company premises for both business and IT leaders.

The post A Comprehensive Guide To Understanding Chatbots appeared first on BotCore.

How Will Voice Bots Transform The Workplace In The New Normal?

Rakesh Reddy — Wed, 22 Jul 2020 10:37:53 +0000

How Different CPG Companies Are Using Chatbots To Drive Customer Experience

In response to the COVID-19 crisis, businesses have been focused on ensuring strong collaboration for their remote workforce by adopting new technologies such as modern intranets, cloud, and AI.

However, now, when lockdowns ease but COVID-19 continues to loom, businesses need to start thinking about bringing employees back to the workplace while ensuring social distancing and physical safety. Given that almost every surface has the potential to carry and transmit the virus, the way employees interact with the built environment has to be reimagined.

Voice technologies and contactless interfaces can be the key enablers in establishing safe working environments and ensuring customer experience. In this blog, we’ll discuss how companies can use voice assistants in the new normal.

Understanding Voice Bots

A voice assistant is a software that uses voice recognition, language processing algorithms, and voice synthesis to understand voice commands and deliver responses or perform tasks. Voice bots initially gained popularity in the consumer electronics industry with the launch of smart speakers like Google Home, Amazon Echo, etc.

Back in 2016, chatbots and voice bots weren’t a top priority when a company implemented an ERP or HR solution. But now, as more enterprises realize the business benefits of bots, providing an easy-to-use, conversational interface has become a norm. In the past few years, we’ve seen several enterprises deploy voice assistants for use cases like IT helpdesk, HR operations, customer service, sales, etc. By 2021, Gartner, Inc. predicts that 25 percent of digital workers will use a virtual employee assistant (VEA) on a daily basis. This will be up from less than 2 percent in 2019.

Learn more: The Amazing Benefits Of Voice-Enabled Business Intelligence

A 451 Research report has predicted voice bots to become the top investment choice for businesses as their workforce returns to offices. Let’s discuss why.

Voice Bots In The New Normal

1. The Voice-First Workplace

We can’t go about our regular business like we used to amid this pandemic. It’s no longer safe to touch even everyday objects like doorknobs which could potentially expose us to the virus.

Many companies had already been exploring the potential of voice technology at their workplace even before the pandemic. Now, voice technology would have a huge role to play in this redesign of offices. Voice-activated controls can be utilized in office entry and exit points, elevators, meeting rooms, shared office devices to reduce the amount of physical contact needed to navigate in the workplace.

Use cases like integrating meeting room equipment with voice-enabled virtual assistants like Microsoft Cortana, Alexa For Business, Google Assistant will become more popular. With these integrations, employees can give voice commands to perform tasks like managing meetings, and controlling conference room devices and settings – temperature and lighting, etc. Last year, we could have thought of these as “nice to have” but these are now imperative for a safe workplace.

2. Voice technology powering customer service and experience

Social distancing will continue to be the most effective way to prevent the spread of the virus until a COVID-19 vaccine becomes widely available. Thus, retailers will need to ensure business continuity without compromising the health and safety of their consumers by minimizing physical contact.

COVID-19 has pushed automation for all industries, nudging them towards digital transformation. Many businesses such as Amazon have adopted tap card payments to ensure contactless transactions but the physical interaction can be further minimized with voice technology.

Voice automation is being adopted at a rapid rate across multiple locations and industries. Businesses in industries such as airports, restaurants, retailers, etc. have seamlessly adopted voice bots to power their customer interactions while ensuring social distancing and high customer experience.

3. Voice assistants will improve remote worker productivity

Remote workers can leverage voice assistants to improve their productivity and collaboration. Microsoft recently integrated its virtual assistant, Cortana, into its Microsoft Teams app. This integration enables Microsoft 365 Enterprise users to complete communication, collaboration and meeting-related tasks using spoken natural language. They can connect with their colleagues by making a voice query such as “Call Mark” or “Send a message to my upcoming meeting”. Users can schedule meetings, share files, check calendars and more without any keyword stroke or mouse click.

Learn More: Cortana in Microsoft 365

Conclusion

There is no doubt that the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted human interactions all over the world. As businesses reopen their workplaces, social distancing will continue to be the norm. However, one certain thing is that to safeguard the employees, businesses will accelerate the adoption of digital technologies with voice bots leading the pack.

If you’d like to learn more about voice assistants, please feel free to get in touch with one of our experts for a personalized consultation. We’d also be happy to share our success stories and how we can help you implement voice bots for your business .

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The post How Will Voice Bots Transform The Workplace In The New Normal? appeared first on BotCore.