Business Intelligence Archives - BotCore

Make Power BI Data Consumption Simpler: Integrate Chatbots

Shanawaz Sheriff — Sat, 08 Aug 2020 11:14:51 +0000

How Different CPG Companies Are Using Chatbots To Drive Customer Experience

Integrate chatbots with Power BI – If you’re a Microsoft customer you must be intrigued by this statement. You must be thinking along the lines of…

Is it even possible to integrate a bot with Power BI? How does the Power BI chatbot function? What are the benefits? or PowerBI also has Q&A , Trigger feature, how is it different?

Our short answer is – Yes! With the right chatbot builder platform, you can fully integrate a chatbot with Power BI and simplify data consumption.

As a Microsoft Gold Partner, we have helped several customers achieve this and build a culture of data in their organizations.

Before understanding more about Power BI chatbots, let’s have a quick look at the current state of Power BI users and how they access data.

Current State Of Accessing Power BI Data

The traditional way of accessing data through Power BI (or any BI system for that matter) is by logging into the application, navigating through dashboards, digging through irrelevant data, filtering them and generating the desired report.

Now imagine doing this every time you need a quick insight.

Say, you’re in the middle of a customer meeting and you are asked about a critical sales KPI you didn’t cover in your PPT. Or consider your boss asking for a specific performance metric in a review meeting. Or suppose you’re a C-Suite executive on the road and need a quick revenue KPI to make a significant business decision.

In all these scenarios, you can’t possibly access the needed insight from Power BI on the spur of the moment and as a result the opportunity to make an impact will be lost.

Because of the long drawn process of accessing data, employees won’t be motivated to use data more often in their everyday decision-making and thereby the adoption also decreases. In an age where data is the oil, employees need data at the tip of their fingers.

Integrate Chatbots With Power BI To Simplify Data Consumption

A chatbot is a computer program with artificial intelligence capability that can conduct conversations via auditory or textual methods. While chatbots are all the rage in customer service domains, an additional use case of chatbots is that they can be used to fetch information quickly from an organization’s business intelligence systems, making data access a breeze.

Learn more: Business Intelligence Chatbots

For example, one might simply ask natural language questions like “What are my predicted sales for product X?” and the bot will instantly answer via text or any multimedia format (image, graphs, pie charts etc.) with the relevant information. In order to better understand how this works, look at the following example.

Example:

Nathan is a Sales Manager at ABC Corp who usually travels one location to another to meet multiple customers in the region. Since he is on-the-go, he doesn’t have the time to constantly open the Power BI application, switching dashboards and filtering data. He needs quick granular information at his fingertips.With a sales intelligence chatbot, he can have a quick chat, ask natural language questions about KPIs and also get the required reports.

Here is a quick example:

Nathan is scheduled to meet with the head of Alpha Foods, a long-standing customer of the company. One of the issues that Alpha Foods is facing is a steep decline in sales. Before he walks into the meeting, Nathan wants to be abreast of the company’s revenue and sales data.

He decides to use Mylo, ABC Corp.’s BI chatbot in Slack that is integrated with the company’s Power BI system.

Nathan: Hi Mylo.

Mylo: Hello Nathan. How can I help you today?

Nathan: Show me Alpha Foods’ annual revenue details for last year.

Mylo: Sure. Alpha Foods’ annual revenue for 2017-2018 is 90 Billion.

Nathan: Okay, can you break that down by region?

Mylo: USA – 32B, Asia Pacific region – 35.7B, Europe – 22.3B.

Nathan: Okay, can I see a graphical representation of their sales in the Asia Pacific region?

Mylo: Yes.

Nathan: Well, that doesn’t look good. What about their sales in Europe and the USA?

Mylo: They seem to be doing pretty well there. Sales in Europe have seen an improvement of 6% on average annually. Sales in the USA are on the uprise too – at an average annual rate of 2%.

Nathan: Map sales numbers for Asia Pacific with their trade promotional campaigns from the last 5 years.

Mylo: There are no trade promotions from Alpha in Asia Pacific between the years 2013 – 2018.

Nathan: Okay. Can you mail these figures to me as well?

Mylo: Sure. The details have been sent to your email.

Nathan has understood that Alpha Foods is facing an issue specifically in the Asia Pacific region as they are facing a hard time attracting customers to their products. Nathan uses the data insights provided by Mylo to suggest a new trade promotional campaign to boost sales for Alpha in the Asia Pacific region.

Did you see how easy that was? Now imagine the amount of work it would take for all this data to be generated manually using the traditional Power BI workflow. The vast difference in the convenience factor and speed of fetching relevant data, is what makes chatbot integration with Power BI so desirable. Using the bot, you don’t even have to login to your BI system or switch multiple apps to access the desired analytics and data. In a nutshell, data consumption becomes much easier when a chatbot is integrated with Power BI.

Here’s one more example of a Power BI chatbot:

Power BI Q&A Vs Power BI Chatbot

As you are reading through this article, you might be wondering how a Power BI chatbot is different from Power BI Q&A and what more can a chatbot solution offer. While the Q&A feature of Power BI is effective, a chatbot is even more powerful for access insights. Here’s why:

Q&A feature delivers results solely based on the report/dashboard’s keywords. i.e if any one of the keywords in the user’s query doesn’t match with the values in a dataset, those values will be missed out in search results. Whereas an AI-powered chatbot provides flexibility to use natural language for searching data and delivers relevant results based on intent and entities.
In addition, for using Power BI Q&A feature, users should be fully aware of the data stored in the dashboards so they can use the right keywords in their search query.
Power BI c can also deliver proactive alerts on KPIs. Users can set alerts for their desired KPIs and the chatbot sends an alert message whenever there is a notable deflection to the KPI.

Build A Power BI Chatbot Using Botcore

Acuvate builds Power BI chatbots with our enterprise chatbot builder platform – BotCore. BotCore is powered by Microsoft Bot Framework and is fully deployable into Microsoft Azure and leverages many of the features available in it.

With BotCore’s Power BI bot, you can get data and reports within your third-party messaging applications like Skype For Business, Skype, Slack and many more. This helps users get actionable insights through a conversational interface without having to access the BI software and analyzing information every single time. Instead, with a simple natural language chat with the bot, the required insights can be obtained right within the messaging application.

Here’s a quick demo video of our Power BI bot:

Acuvate is a Gold Certified Partner with Microsoft. It is no wonder then that BotCore’s BI chatbot is the chosen chatbot technology to be integrated with the Microsoft Power BI system.

Some of the features of the our Power BI chatbot, include:

Multi media responses: Bots can respond to users in both text and rich media formats.
Bots can function in both on-premise and cloud
Seamless Integration – BotCore’s Power BI chatbot can seamlessly extract data from various other data systems such as ERP, CRM, LoB and Data warehouses.
Natural Conversations – The chatbot uses NLP (Natural Language Processing) and learns the office jargon.
Real-Time Alerts – The chatbot is also equipped to periodically send key data or analytical updates that are relevant to the user. Especially in case of any data trends, the BI chatbot swiftly updates the user.
Security – BotCore BI chatbots are highly secure and are integrated with various access checkpoints such as User Authentication, User Authorization, Multi-Factor Authentication, One Time Authorization and Channel Authorization.

If you’d like to learn more about our solution, please feel free to get in touch with one of our Power BI and AI experts for a personalized demo!

FREE EBOOK

a guide to choosing an enterprise bot builder platform

The post Make Power BI Data Consumption Simpler: Integrate Chatbots appeared first on BotCore.

How Voice Assistants Are Transforming The Enterprise Workplace

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

How Voice Assistants Are Transforming The Enterprise Workplace

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

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

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

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

voice aI-based knowledge capture

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

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

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

voice-based updates in CRM

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

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

taking notes during the meeting

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

customer support

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

conversational business intelligence

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

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

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

time management

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

predictive ability

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

wrapping up

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

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

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

The post How Voice Assistants Are Transforming The Enterprise Workplace appeared first on BotCore.

Chatbots: The Past, Present, And Future

Rakesh Reddy — Wed, 19 Dec 2018 10:42:00 +0000

Chatbots: The Past, Present, And Future

Chatbots currently are one of the most popular AI technologies in the enterprise world.

Bots are being deployed for different functions of an organization – be it engaging customers, training employees, driving sales, providing IT Helpdesk or HR support, generating leads etc. These intelligent machines provide instant service, round the clock – you don’t need to keep your customers/employees waiting 24 hours for the next support agent to come online. 80% of businesses want chatbots by 2020.

However, bots weren’t equipped for intelligent and smart conversations when they were first invented. Chatbots have undergone several advancements in the past few years. The history of chatbots is intriguing, and so is the future. Let’s walk through all that chatbots were back in time, are today, and can be in the future.

the history of bots: where and how it all began

The word chatbot comes simply translates to conversation enabled by bots. As such, there are two components to this word – chat, which means conversation, and bot, which refers to the ‘computational’ element.

ELIZA, a 1964 computer program was one of the earliest examples of chatbots taking shape. Utilizing Natural Language Processing – something that allows computers to understand human language, ELIZA was able to recognize keywords and key phrases (inputs) and respond using pre-written scripts.

Soon after, an ‘intelligent’ version of ELIZA followed. This one was smarter in the sense that if ELIZA could understand inputs from a real person – PARRY could impersonate a real person! Invented by Psychiatrist Kenneth Colby, PARRY was indeed able to impersonate a patient with schizophrenia.

More inventions kept taking place to one-up older, outdated bots. And, the world soon transitioned into times when chatter bots could be openly used by masses. The first and most popular of these humanoids is A.L.I.C.E (Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity) or Alice. It was the most powerful NLP chatbot of its time and was awarded the Loebner Prize three times!

Interesting fact: If you’ve watched the academy-award winning movie ‘Her’, it would be interesting to know that A.L.I.C.E was the inspiration for the movie.

the present state of chatbots: where we are today

Bots were now being deployed by businesses across various industries, all over the world. With the advancements in AI and machine learning, 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.

In a consumer world, chatbot adoption increased because of an increase in the usage of messaging platforms. Consumers now rely on a chatbot for connecting and interacting with their favorite brand, troubleshooting basic issues, purchasing products that have been highly personalized based on their interests and likes, and keeping up to date with the latest deals and discounts on their favorite products!
According to Business Insider, by 2017, messaging apps have ousted social media platforms. You can check the following chart to get the stats and figures on global monthly active users.

chatbots in today’s enterprise

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.
Let’s dig into some detailed chatbot use cases in the present day scenario.

chatbots for customer service

Customer service is the most popular use case of enterprise chatbots today. Businesses across industries are using customer service chatbots as the first line of support to reduce costs, improve customer experience, and increase agent productivity. Capabilities like 24/7 availability, multilingual support, instant responses, agent handover have made chatbots the most desired AI technologies in customer service.

chatbots for IT helpdesk

A number of enterprises are implementing IT helpdesk chatbots to accelerate response time, improve support staff productivity, automating IT workflows, and to deliver service related information on-demand.

Deploying chatbots can help alleviate your IT help desk challenges by making the whole process less labor-intensive, less complicated, highly interactive, and less costly.

With a chatbot at your disposal to answer basic queries raised by your employees in real-time, your IT help desk staff can focus on more complex and key tasks, thereby increasing your support efficiency!

chatbots for business intelligence

Data is the oil of the 21st century! Many companies today are integrating AI chatbots into their existing BI systems like PowerBI, Oracle, SAP BI etc. to help decision-makers get super quick access all the information and reports they need, in no time.

Simply ask your bot “What is my predicted sales for December 2019” and the bot will generate an accurate response after analyzing tons of data instantly. That too in a format that you prefer (image, graphs, pie charts, etc.)!

Learn More: Business Intelligence Bots, Power BI Bots

chatbots for HR

HR is one of the most popular functions for which chatbots are deployed. HR chatbots simplify and automate workflows throughout the employee life-cycle. Employees can use bots to ask simple or complex HR queries, perform tasks like applying for leaves or giving an appraisal etc. Whether it’s talent management or onboarding or employee engagement or off boarding, chatbots have successfully reduced HR costs in all stages of the employee life-cycle and streamlined the entire process.

Learn more: How Chatbots are Revolutionizing The HR Department

statistics on adoption of chatbots

Chatbots are expected to cut business costs by $8 billion by 2022 – Juniper Research
Furthermore, by 2021, conversational AI-first will be adopted by the majority of enterprise IT – Gartner.
By 2021, 50% of enterprises will be spending higher on chatbot creation than on mobile app development. – Gartner

For more such insights and statistics on the state of chatbot adoption, read through this blog post.

the future of chatbots: where we are headed

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

Chatbot-RPA integration: Enterprises are taking customer and employee experiences to the next level by combining the power of automation from RPA and cognitive intelligence from chatbots. RPA helps chatbots access legacy enterprise systems which lack modern APIs. Bots can trigger RPA robots to perform complex actions without routing to a human agent – increasing productivity.

Voice Bots: Gartner predicts that, by 2023, 25 percent of employee interactions with applications will be via voice, up from under 3 percent in 2019. In the future, chatbots will no longer be just text-based interfaces. As AI-powered speech-to-text and text-to-speech hosted services improve, voice bots will be used for a variety of enterprise applications including conversational BI, IT helpdesk, scheduling meetings etc.

Chatbots will be more human: As key chatbot components like NLP, Machine Learning, sentiment analysis, contextual and language understanding etc. become more advanced, chatbots will be able to conduct much more complex conversations – just like a human does.

There might be soon a time when your bot will be reminding you of your sales meeting scheduled for the day. There’ll soon be times when a smart speaker will take your order at a restaurant. Bots speaking to bots can become the reality of the future. What next? We can only wonder.

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

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exploring the use cases of an enterprise chatbot

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Comparing The Top Bot Development Frameworks

Abhishek Shanbhag — Fri, 05 Oct 2018 14:21:00 +0000

Comparing The Top Bot Development Frameworks

Chatbots are noticeably one of the most popular AI technologies. In the past few years, chatbots have been transforming customer and employee experience, simplifying business workflows and reducing costs. With the rise in demand for chatbots, several frameworks and chatbot platforms have influxed the market. Enterprise leaders who participate in our Build-A-Bot workshops, often seek help in understanding the functionalities of different bot frameworks and platforms.

This blog differentiates between a chatbot development framework and chatbot platform, enlists some of the major bot development frameworks and their key features.

how is it different from a bot development platform?

Most people confuse bot framework with a bot platform or use the word interchangeably

A bot framework is a which helps you develop chatbots with predefined functions and classes. Frameworks are usually used by developers as they involve some programming or coding. They provide some predefined set of tools for faster development of bots.

An enterprise-grade chatbot platform helps you build, train and manage chatbots. It allows non-technical users to build bots without any coding or programming knowledge.

A platform is where the bot is deployed, run and made to perform actions as requested by users. Whereas the framework helps develop and keep together all constituents of a bot. It involves predefined functions and tools that expedite code writing and bot deployment.

major bot development frameworks

Now that we have differentiated between bot development frameworks and platforms, let’s deep dive into some of the most popular bot frameworks and their different features and capabilities.

Microsoft Bot Framework

Microsoft Bot Framework is one of the most comprehensive frameworks for building enterprise chatbots. You can build a simple Q&A bot or a sophisticated virtual assistant.

It is not only intelligent and feature-rich, but it’s also flexible and scalable. Developers can build bots that interact with users in a natural language. This is enabled by Microsoft’s Language Understanding Intelligent Service (LUIS) which extracts intents and entities from conversations. With LUIS, you can constantly improve the natural language models.

The Bot Connector feature of this framework allows bot integration of a variety of platforms such as Slack, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, Webchat, SMS, email, Skype etc.

It also leverages Microsoft’s QnA Maker which allows you to build basic QnA bots based on existing FAQ URLs, structured documents and product manuals.

One of the main advantages of the framework is that it supports Azure Bot Service. Azure allows you to quickly respond to user queries, even if there is high volume. And by using Azure Bot Service, you only have to pay for messages delivered using the Premium channel. In addition, with the service you can have complete ownership and control over data.

Another benefit of this framework is that it provides an open source SDK to build and test chatbots. You can also test and debug bots with Microsoft’s desktop application – Bot Framework Emulator.

Learn More: Why CIOs should consider Microsoft Bot Framework to build Enterprise Bots

WIT.AI

Facebook’s Wit.ai is a natural language bot development framework which enables developers to build both voice and text based bots on virtually any messaging platform of their choice.

It also allows developers to build voice interface for their apps. Moreover, the platform also shares the bot learnings with the developer community who can leverage it to further enhance the user experience.

Additionally, Wit.ai is an effective solution for home automation. It can control any smart device including home appliances and wearables.

Pre-build entities like temperature, URLs, emails, etc. make Wit.ai an excellent virtual assistant. However, the developers may have to work on refining engine training which currently takes a little long.

Dialogflow

Dialogflow, previously known as API.AI, runs on the Google Cloud platform. Powered by Google’s machine learning, it enables bot to understand the intent of the user and respond in the most accurate manner. It also takes user-machine interaction to a new level with voice and text-based conversational interfaces.

It can be integrated with any platform including Google Assistant, Alexa, Cortana, Facebook Messenger, Slack, websites and many more. Dialogflow also supports almost all types of devices such as wearables, phones, car audio, smart devices etc. This means you can connect with your users irrespective of which devices or platforms they’re using. With its ability to support over 20 languages, it helps you expand your global reach.

Another benefit that this framework offers is that it allows fast coding, thus allowing quicker time-to-market.

Botpress

Botpress is an open-source bot development framework built for the developers’ community. The framework is 100% based on Javascript. Since it’s based on a modular architecture, it’s easy to continuously add new features to it.

Botpress is quite flexible in terms of hosting. Depending on their business requirements, users can host it on their enterprise systems, on-premise or on the cloud environment. Also, it’s one of the most user-friendly frameworks. It doesn’t require a user to have the technical knowledge to manage it after it’s deployed.

It allows required customization and facilitates limitless and easy integration with third-party applications and APIs. This also means that users can interact with Botpress bots on all major messaging platforms.

In addition, it allows you to monitor bot application and performance. It records user-bot interaction and with analytics, it allows you to make the required changes to make your bots more intelligent.

RASA Stack

Rasa is another open-source framework which is powered by machine learning. It can be customized fully which makes it a fit choice in enterprise architecture. There are two main components of this framework – Rasa NLU and Rasa Core. Rasa NLU is a natural language processing tool which classifies intents and extracts entities in chatbots. It analyses free text and takes out structured data from it. For example – address, date, numbers etc. Rasa Core uses intents and entities of Rasa NLU to create a reply dialogue. The deep learning technology empowers it to conduct complex conversations.

Rasa’s powerful and intuitive interface facilitates faster training and improves user experience.

Conclusion

These are some of the leading bot development frameworks available today. Every framework has its own pros and cons. It would be difficult, or rather unfair to comment on which one is the best. There is no “best” bot framework in its absolute sense.

Choosing the right bot framework depends on your business needs and technological landscape.

What’s sure is that the conversational bots are here to stay. They’re going to change the face of customer service, employee productivity and business workflows in the coming years.

Acuvate’s own enterprise chatbot builder platform, BotCore can be deployed both on cloud and on-premise environments and helps you deploy enterprise chatbots, train, and administer them according to your needs

If you’re planning to deploy chatbots for your business and need guidance in choosing a powerful bot framework, feel free to get in touch with one of our chatbot experts for a quick consultation.

FREE EBOOK

a guide to choosing an enterprise bot builder platform

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Envisioning The Work-Life Of An Employee In A Chatbot-Driven Enterprise

Jagan Jami — Fri, 07 Sep 2018 10:09:00 +0000

Envisioning The Work-Life Of An Employee In A Chatbot-Driven Enterprise

Meet Nathan. He has recently joined ABC Corp. as a Marketing Manager. The new job means a new city and the tension associated with relocation. But one thing that Nathan is thankful for is that the hiring and on-boarding process was seamless and did not require him to visit their office again and again. But how was this achieved? Well, luckily for Nathan, ABC Corp. happens to be one of the forward-thinking organizations that uses chatbots for all their HR, ITSM, and Business Intelligence related tasks.

what is a chatbot?

A chatbot is a computer program or an artificial intelligence which conducts a conversation via auditory or textual methods. Chatbots are often designed to convincingly simulate how a human would behave as a conversational partner and are used for various practical enterprise use cases including customer service, IT helpdesk, HR or information acquisition (Business Intelligence).

ABC Corp uses BotCore’s AI chatbot which enables organizations to build and deploy customized AI chatbots. So, let us see how Nathan’s life at ABC Corp. has been impacted by chatbots.

chatbots – making nathan’s life easier

Nathan has joined as a Marketing Manager. A typical day in the life of someone in this role entails multiple team meetings, client interactions and brainstorming sessions that require them to access records and data insights on the go. Also, since marketing managers almost always have days that are jam-packed, having someone take care of handling internal processes such as applying for leave, giving appraisals, searching for reports and information and keeping them abreast of upcoming meetings etc. would be a boon. Someone like a personal assistant; BUT, not everyone can have an assistant tracking these details. It is just not a feasible option. However, everyone can seek help from a virtual assistant. In order to see how chatbots are helping Nathan handle daily life at ABC Corp., let us look at some scenarios.

Recruitment

When Nathan applied for the position at ABC Corp., he was immediately sent a text message by Allie, ABC’s recruitment bot.

Allie: Hello Nathan. I am Allie from ABC Corp. I am reaching out to you in response to your application for the position of Marketing Manager.

Allie: We see that your skill set matches that which is required for the role. Could I go ahead and set up an interview for you with our GM-Marketing?

Nathan: Thanks, Allie Sure!

Allie: Thank you Nathan. Would the 1st July 2019, 12 PM work for you?

Nathan: Umm…will I be required to come to your HQ location?

Allie: That will not be necessary. I see that you are based in a different city, hence we could have the interview via Skype. Is that okay?

Nathan: That would be perfect. Thank you!

Allie: You are welcome. Please add ABCCorp as a contact on Skype. I have sent you a calendar invite for the interview. Kindly acknowledge the same.

Nathan: Sure.

Allie: Thank you Nathan. Have a great day ahead. And good luck for the interview!

Nathan was extremely pleased with how efficient Allie was in reaching out to him quickly, understanding his location criteria and setting up an interview accordingly. 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. In fact, about 66% of candidates were comfortable with AI and chatbots taking care of interview scheduling and peripheral activity.

Essentially, a recruitment chatbot can collect information from candidates such as their resume and contact information, help set up an interview with a human stakeholder based on his/her calendar, collect screening details such as experience and skills and answer the candidate’s basic questions about the job.

Learn more: How Chatbots Can Simplify the Recruitment Process

HR Onboarding

Once Nathan cleared the interview and was offered the job, he was reached out by Allie once again.

Allie: Hello Nathan. This is Allie. Congratulations on the offer, Welcome to ABC Corp!

Nathan: Hi Allie. Thank you very much.

Allie: Before we start the onboarding formalities, do you have any questions I can help you with?

Nathan: As a matter of fact, yes. Could you please send me any company related information I should be well-versed in before getting started?

Allie: Absolutely! Below is a company overview video to get you started with!

Allie: You can also refer this intranet page for more information [Read Now]

Nathan: Great! Thanks Allie. Could you also send across the leave policy and the list of holidays for this year?

Allie: Sure. Here are the leave policy and the holiday calendar. [Check Now]

Now, please note that as part of the onboarding process, you are required to send across copies of the following documents to hr@abccorp.com:

Personal Identification Details – any authority attested identification card would do

Last 3 payslips from your previous employer

Bank account details

Nathan: Sure, I will send them across.

Allie: Okay. Also sending across the NDA. Please sign the same and send it across.

Nathan: Okay.

Allie: Great! Thank you Nathan..

Nathan: I’d like to raise an IT request for requesting a new laptop

Allie: Sure, your request is recorded. An IT agent will get in touch with you soon!

Nathan: That’s great, Thanks Allie!

Learn More: How Chatbots are Revolutionizing The HR Department

IT Helpdesk

Nathan has started his first day at ABC Corp. and has met his team. He has been given access to the company’s marketing dashboard but is unable to sign in. He remembers that ABC Corp. uses an IT helpdesk bot that can be accessed using the internal messaging tool. He decides to seek help.

Nathan: Hi.

IT Bot: Hello Nathan. Welcome to ABC Corp. How can I help you?

Nathan: Well, I am unable to sign in to the marketing dashboard.

IT Bot: Have you been granted access?

Nathan: Yes. I was sent an email earlier that I can now access the dashboard to see project-specific details. But my sign-in credentials do not work.

IT Bot: Sorry about that. Let me check.

Nathan: Sure.

IT Bot: Looks like there was a technical problem with credential generation. I have sent across a password reset link to your email ID. Kindly use it to sign in with the new password.

Nathan: Okay. Thank you.

IT Bot: My pleasure. Is there anything else I may assist you with?

Nathan: No.

IT Bot: Okay! Have a nice day Nathan.

Nathan uses the password reset link to quickly sign-in to the dashboard. He is happy that instead of having to waste time locating and asking the right people for the fix, he was able to reach out to the IT helpdesk bot in no time.

business intelligence

It has now been a couple of weeks since Nathan joined ABC Corp. Today he is scheduled to meet with the head of Alpha Foods, a long-standing customer of the company. One of the issues that Alpha Foods is facing is a steep decline in sales. Nathan has been asked by his manager to focus on the issue in order to come up with a fix. Before he walks into the meeting, Nathan wants to be abreast of the company’s revenue and sales data. He decides to use Mylo, ABC Corp.’s Business Intelligence bot.

Nathan: Hi Mylo.

Mylo: Hello Nathan. How can I help you today?

Nathan: I have a meeting with Alpha Foods. Can I see their annual revenue details for last year?

Mylo: Sure. Alpha Foods’ annual revenue for 2017-2018 is 90 Billion.

Nathan: Okay, can you break that down by region?

Mylo: USA – 32B, Asia Pacific region – 35.7B, Europe – 22.3B.

Nathan: Okay, can I see a graphical representation of their sales in the Asia Pacific region?

Mylo: Yes.

Nathan: Well, that doesn’t look good. What about their sales in Europe and USA?

Mylo: They seem to be doing pretty well there. Sales in Europe have seen an improvement of 6% on average annually. Sales in the USA are on the uprise too – at an average annual rate of 2%.

Nathan: Map sales numbers for Asia Pacific with their trade promotional campaigns from the last 5 years.

Mylo: There are no trade promotions from Alpha in Asia Pacific between the years 2013 – 2018.

Nathan: That explains it. This is enough insight for now. Can you mail these figures to me as well?

Mylo: Sure. The details have been sent to your email.

Learn More: Why Business Intelligence Needs Chatbots to Boost User Adoption & ROI

Intranet/Employee Assistant

Nathan routinely reaches out to Mia, the company’s intranet & employee assistant bot to check on internal company updates and to set up meetings.

Nathan: Hi Mia. Please schedule a meeting with Alex from the Sales team for tomorrow at noon.

Mia: Confirming, meeting tomorrow with Alex Knoxville at 12 PM?

Nathan: Confirm.

Mia: Meeting scheduled. Calendar invite sent to Alex.

Nathan: Any other updates?

Mia: Yes. The leave policy for the year 2019 has been updated. Tap to see the latest policy.

Nathan: Well, send it to my email instead.

Mia: Updated leave policy sent to your email.

Mia has made simple, daily tasks a breeze for Nathan.

Learn More: The Role of Chatbots in the Intranet

explore how chatbots can help

While these are only a few popular work-life scenarios in which chatbots can help Nathan, the fact is that several other ways bots can simplify work for him or any normal employee. 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.

If you’re interested in learning more about chatbots and how they help your organization, feel free to get in touch with one of our chatbot consultants. Acuvate leverages its enterprise chatbot builder platform, BotCore to build, deploy, train and manage AI chatbots for large and medium sized enterprises.

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Major Artificial Intelligence Applications In The Telecommunications Industry

Rakesh Reddy — Tue, 14 Aug 2018 18:04:00 +0000

Major Artificial Intelligence Applications In The Telecommunications Industry

Over the last few decades, the telecom industry has rapidly shifted from basic phone and internet services to a far more evolved space featuring mobile, wearables and automation, making it one of the biggest businesses in the world currently and always upgrading to the cutting edge technology.

According to IDC, 63.5% of telecommunications organizations are making new technology investments for AI systems.

While having to be on the bleeding edge of technology is a good thing for customers and the competition.

The industry itself is a great candidate for adopting AI driven solutions which offer the hope of reduced costs and increased efficiencies through automation. Needless to say, frontrunners have already started playing with AI solutions and deploying them across various business areas including customer-facing and internal processes.

In this blog, we’ll talk about various use cases of AI and related technologies, which can help telecom companies in reducing their operations cost and conserve the money to invest more in upgradations, predictive maintenance to reduce any fall in customer experience and chatbots in the telecommunications industry.

applications of artificial intelligence in the telecommunications industry

Network Operations

Communication service providers are now adopting software-defined networks (SDN), network function virtualization (NFV), cloud-based applications, and 5G technologies, making AI a rather critical element to success. The premise for AI’s success in these areas is rather straightforward – it enables businesses to make faster and more effective decisions by combining and processing network data in real time and then automating network functions. The result is that service providers are able to make changes even before issues arise – making the switch from reactive to proactive mode is a critically important step to increasing efficiencies.

Further, AI systems are also designed to predict and identify anomalies or network issues, allowing organizations to proactively take measures to fix them before customers even become aware or are impacted in any way. This frees up time for IT teams as well, so they can focus on more high priority tasks requiring human expertise, instead of troubleshooting repetitive and mundane tasks.

Predictive Maintenance

Any downtime for telecom service providers can spell disaster in terms of expenses incurred. It is beyond critical for businesses to offer a reliable and secure network at all times. This means they have to find means to ensure that are consistently keeping a watch on infrastructure and equipment, including but not limited to, cell towers, servers in data centers, set-top boxes, power lines and so on.

AI systems are a great solution to this challenge as they can identify patterns that indicate a failure in their routine maintenance checks of the equipment. This enables businesses to take measures proactively before any downtime even happens.

Case Study: AT&T

AT&T implemented Machine Learning and AI into its systems to facilitate autonomous repair of their communications networks.

As one would imagine, any failure in communications networks immediately earns the aggravation of customers. Therefore, it is particularly important to identify and rectify errors and gaps before outages ever happen. Therefore, AT&T employed AI technologies to quickly locate breakpoints in both hardware and software and designed systems in such a way as to enable automatic repair.

Without AI, the organization would have been forced to send field workers to perform maintenance checks on hardware only periodically, thereby, leaving them to react to problems only after they arise.

However, with the implementation of AI, by observing the signals and behavior of various “nodes” within the AT&T network can send updates to the company about any potential issues, so they can quickly send a field worker to the problem area and have it rectified swiftly, without causing any inconvenience to customers.

aI chatbot applications in the telecommunications industry

Customer Service

Customer service is a critical aspect of the telecom industry. There are a variety of customer actions that specifically require customer service assistance – whether it is related to changing their bill plans or recharges, making payments, raising complaints and so on. Given the frequency with which these actions occur, it can be rather counterproductive and frustrating for both customers and service providers. Customers have to be put through the exasperating experience of voice prompt hell as they make attempts to reach different departments for different queries. In the same vein, service providers are forced to equip themselves with a very large labor workforce to manage the massive numbers of queries, making the entire process expensive and cumbersome.

Chatbots, on the other hand, are able to deliver superior customer service very quickly. They become a single point of contact for customers and are available to them 24/7, enabling them to take required actions without having to depend on a human agent to come around and help. The result is lowered costs and improved efficiency.

Case Study: Spectrum

The Ask Spectrum virtual assistant leverages AI to assist customers with updating account information, troubleshooting as well as answering their basic queries about SPectrum services. Whether the customer wants to enquire about service outages or subscription details or ordering Pay-Per-View events, users can take help from virtual assistant, Ask Spectrum to navigate the company’s website and if they’re still unable to find what they are looking for, they can easily contact the Live Chat to have their questions addressed quickly and effectively.

lead engagement

Case Study: Century Link

CenturyLink is one of the largest telecommunications providers in the United States, serving both small and large businesses nationwide. The company collects thousands of sales leads from the businesses it serves. Their goal is to provide deeply personalized interactions to each of these consumers. Pursuing these hot leads is critical because it would have a considerable impact on the company’s bottom line.

CenturyLink introduced an AI-powered sales assistant to its operations to enable the company to identify hot leads. This is work that would otherwise require an entire fleet of sales reps to comb through extensive data sets. However, the virtual assistant named Angie, sends about 30,000 emails a month and then does the groundwork of interpreting these responses to determine who is a hot lead. The VA then goes on to create appointments for the relevant salesperson and seamlessly passes on the conversation to the human agent for further nurturing.

Angie provides with prospective customers to get quick and relevant help, while at the same time-saving time and effort for sales reps, who can then focus on the leads that show the most potential. CenturyLink has run a pilot to test their strategy and Angie was able to understand 99% of the emails she received; the remaining 1% of emails were sent to her manager to be processed further.

Scott Berns, CenturyLink’s Director of Marketing Operations confirmed that while the company has approximately 1,600 salespeople, the Angie pilot started with four of them. As they began to see success with the pilot, the number quickly grew to 20 and it continues to grow. While initially, Angie was processing about 25 hot leads per week, the number has now grown to 40, thereby generating the ROI the company was looking for.

botcore – an enterprise bot building platform

There are numerous AI and chatbot use cases for the telecom industry even as these technologies continue to evolve, introducing a whole lot of new opportunities. While it goes without saying that these technologies can be potential game changers for driving business efficiencies, companies do need to first align their business objectives with these technological initiatives and not the other way around.

By leveraging our Enterprise Chatbot Platform – BotCore, Acuvate helps telecom companies deploy custom and persona-based AI chatbots to enhance customer service and employee productivity. You can schedule a free demo to understand our chatbot features and capabilities and success stories in the telecom industry.

If you’d like to know more about chatbot and artificial intelligence applications in the Telecommunications industry, feel free to sign up for a free AI and bot strategy session with our experts.

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How Chatbots Can Help The Hospitality Industry Transform The Guest Experience

Rakesh Reddy — Mon, 23 Jul 2018 18:53:00 +0000

How Chatbots Can Help The Hospitality Industry Transform The Guest Experience

The hospitality industry is one of those industries in which warmth, personalization and customer satisfaction remain critical components to capture, retain and foster brand loyalty and ensuring bottom-line profitability. In this blog, we’ll discuss how chatbots are proving to be an effective solution for bridging the emotive personalization gap between hospitality businesses and the guest experience.

Chatbots have become a significant technological trend for many important reasons. Before discussing how chatbots can transform the guest experience let’s understand the different benefits of bots from both guest-facing and business-facing perspectives.

KEY GUEST-FACING BENEFITS OF CHATBOTS

Nothing is more frustrating to a guest than having to wait for a response whether it is on the phone, on email or while queuing up to meet a customer services agent in person. Chatbots are available instantaneously, and customers appreciate, first and foremost, the ability to have simple questions answered quickly.
Chatbots are also available 24/7 and accessible anywhere, anytime, on multiple online platforms, which makes access to the business easy and effortless.
Instantaneous access means that problems can be resolved quickly.

KEY BUSINESS-FACING BENEFITS OF CHATBOTS

Chatbots enable you to scale up your operations quickly in a cost-effective manner because of their ability to handle unlimited conversations simultaneously. This also means that chatbots are able to bring in exponentially more business via leads.
Chatbots enable you to tap into a younger or more tech-savvy market that is increasingly mobile and prefers chat conversations to live ones.
Chatbots also drive the benefits of engagement, feedback, insight into consumer behavior trends, as well as mass marketing, on a significantly larger scale.
Chatbots help in understanding the likes and dislikes of guests and tailoring the services accordingly

TRANSFORMING THE GUEST EXPERIENCE WITH CHATBOTS

The hospitality industry covers a large berth of businesses including hotels, restaurants, cafeterias, nightclubs, resorts, travel agencies and tour operators. Chatbots have a number of different applications that can be tailor-made to suit the requirements of each business and its corresponding customer or guest profiles. Consider a few examples of such applications:

1. VIRTUAL ASSISTANCE FOR BOOKING ROOMS/FLIGHTS OR SPECIFIC SERVICES

Traditionally guests have always had to call in or use online platforms to book rooms/flights or packages. Chatbots are available instantaneously which means that guests no longer need to wait for a response. Chatbots are also available 24/7 and can even send multilingual responses, which adds more convenience to the guests. from check-in

A chatbot can also personalize the guest experience by offering options, recommendations, and custom solutions as well as answering any specific questions the guest may have. Here is an example of a live chatbot conversation that simulates this interaction on a basic level:

[Chatbot: I am the XYZ Hotel bot! How may we be of assistance today?

Guest: Hi! I’d like to know what your lowest room rate is?

Chatbot: How many guests will be staying?

Guest: 2

Chatbot: Thank you. Our lowest room category rate starts at $29 per night for a standard double room. Please see a detailed list of our options along with their prices below.]

Chatbots can even handle ad-hoc requests, concierge requirements or more complicated requests such as:

[Guest: I’m running late because of my delayed flight. Can you check me in early?

Chatbot: Sure I can help you with that! At what time are you likely to reach the hotel. Our standard check-in is at 3 PM

Guest: 7.30 PM

Chatbot: okay, done I have checked you in! Please contact the reception desk for your room keys on arrival.]

2. INSIGHT DRIVEN SERVICES

Chatbots are a rich source of data on consumer behaviour, trends, and preferences achieved in many different ways. Feedback and survey options given during a conversation collect data on the guest experience, what they liked and what they didn’t like which is valuable fodder when it comes to improving services or marketing your business’ most attractive features.

Consistent collection of data over the long term can pinpoint trends in the types of questions that customers ask the most. For instance, if “How can I contact the Spa to book a massage?’’ is your most frequently asked question’, it’s time to ensure that the answer to this is more clearly articulated or presented to the consumer in your website or overall communications strategy. Pre-emption and over-delivering on expectations are essential to creating the perfect guest experience. Chatbots also can be used to create attractive schemes or manage the workforce more optimally. Chatbots help in creating a very personalized experience by understanding the likes and dislikes of guests in general and loyal guests in particular.

MARKETING COMMUNICATIONS THAT WOW THE GUEST

Given their potential and reach, chatbots are an effective way to channelize marketing communications that can generate genuine returns. It is important to mention here that spamming offers only serves to turn off customers and may actually stop them from wanting to come back.

On the other hand, specific marketing messages that look like they’ve been customized for the guest are mostly welcome and/or appreciated by guests. Here are some examples:

[Chatbot: We saw your inquiry about the Lakeview Suite from before. We are offering a 25% discount on the room rates if you book between 1st to 15th July. Would you like to know more? ]

[Chatbot: You’ve accumulated enough loyal points for a free nights’ stay at our hugely popular Club Oriental Suite. Book your stay now before your points expire! ]

GOING THE EXTRA MILE

Last but not the least, chatbots can also direct complex requests that are beyond its scope (inquiries, complaints, troubleshooting etc.) to human administrators who can ensure that the guest receives a call or personal attention to have the matter addressed satisfactorily.

FINAL WORDS

Looking at the upward trajectory that chatbots have been experiencing in recent times, there is no doubt that chatbots are here to stay. In an environment where more and more businesses are seeking to outvie each other to capture and retain customer loyalty, the adoption of chatbot technology, especially in the hospitality industry is a fundamental no-brainer.

If you’re looking to implement chatbots for your business, you might be interested in checking out our enterprise chatbot builder platform – BotCore. Deployable both on cloud and on-premise environments, BotCore is used by several Fortune 500 and large enterprises to build custom chatbots for their customers and employees.

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

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4 Top B2B Chatbot Use Cases You Must Know

Rakesh Reddy — Fri, 06 Jul 2018 10:18:00 +0000

4 Top B2B Chatbot Use Cases You Must Know

If you are wondering how to make your sales teams more efficient, leaner, highly predictable and motivated and reduce training costs, chatbots are the answer. This blog post will explore why.

Chatbots are making headlines in the B2B marketing world as the next big thing to assist businesses in their efforts towards enhancing customer service. Artificial Intelligence (AI) bots are expected to transform how people and businesses interact with brands and services.

Their ability to provide personalized and contextual responses via a chat interface on messaging apps like Facebook Messenger or Skype and through virtual assistants like Alexa, Cortana etc. without the constant need for involvement of human agents is touted to provide immense cost savings.

And in addition to the cost savings, the trend of people preferring to get information via chat compared to a traditional phone call is increasing.

The advancements in Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing (NLP) enabled the evolution of intelligent bots that could provide responses in a very natural language tone.

From lead qualification to data gathering, and finally to closing sales or problem-solving, chatbots can indeed create engaging and unique experiences with excellent results across the board, all while saving B2B companies time and money. Here is how:

4 B2B CHATBOT USE CASES YOU MUST KNOW

B2B CHATBOT USE CASE #1
LEAD QUALIFICATION

The road to get prospects to engage with a company on the website and turn them into serious customers is not a short one, but chatbots can be deployed at every stage to make it smoother in both B2B and B2C settings. A chatbot that can ask a website visitor the right questions and help them narrow down products or services that directly relate to their interests.

This eliminates the need to sift through content that is not relevant to the business or individual’s interests. Furthermore, bots can also analyze visitor patterns to help determine if they are likely a qualified lead, to begin with, saving the sales team precious time.

Chatbots facilitate a much faster sales cycle at every step of the way, but especially in the critical beginning stages. In turn, this reduces frustrations for your sales team and enables a much more seamless experience for prospects. Bots also make sales teams leaner and more productive by helping them chase better qualified leads, thereby reducing the sales training and direct sales costs significantly.

B2B Chatbot Example:

RapidMiner a B2B Technology company that provides analytics solutions deployed a website chatbot – MarlaBot, which asks relevant questions to visitors and determines their needs in a personalized manner.

The bot asks a series of qualifier questions starting with a simple “What brought you to RapidMiner today?”. This process cuts the wheat from the chaff and only the leads which are qualified will be connected to sales reps.

MarlaBot doesn’t completely eliminate the need for a sales staff, but it cuts down on their tedious workload and simultaneously collects data to improve future user interactions.

Other bots of these sort exist. Adopting them as sales assistants with a focus on helping human sales agents and customers alike, is key for their successful implementation.

B2B CHATBOT USE CASE #2
DATA MINING

Closely tied with lead qualification lies data gathering. Customers are not the only ones who must explore sources, process large amounts of information and then try to make informed choices. Sales teams also have to analyze data to figure out what the customers want or need, or to figure out the most qualified leads.

Especially when dealing with B2B marketing at a large scale, it is not possible for human agents to manually mine all of the relevant data, organize it, and also analyze it in order to improve services, target products to their desired audience, and tailor special approaches. Bots can automate the process of data management and can help human staff at mapping the data based on the changing organizational trends.

B2B CHATBOT USE CASE #3
CUSTOMER SERVICE

Chatbots can help an organization by improving the customer response rate around the clock. In other words, chatbots can give accurate, personalized and instant responses to common issues 24/7. Clients value this greatly, especially when checking for reliability and access information on products and services.

In addition, chatbots allow agents to focus on more complex customer service issues by handling a large volume of repetitive and basic queries without the need for interference.

Chatbots are customizable for different languages too, so it is not necessary to hire large numbers of staff who are fluent in many languages in order to assist clients from around the world. For these reasons, chatbots greatly reduce operational costs associated with the need to hire specialized staff or extra agents who need to be available at 24/7.

With the concept of data injection and machine learning, bots are learning faster based on the conversation they have with multiple users.

B2B CHATBOT USE CASE #4
EASY INFORMATION ACCESS FOR B2B SALES REPS AND MARKETERS

Sales representatives need access to key metrics to make informed decisions during the sales process. Having a virtual assistant to provide this information immediately, at any time and from anywhere saves time and enables a data-driven decision-making.

Acuvate’s AI Sales chatbot – SIA, can be added to a company’s internal messaging apps for sales teams to chat with and get data from CRM, LOB and BI systems.

SIA can be integrated with multiple databases and answers queries quickly and in natural language. Sales teams don’t have to manually obtain the required information from multiple systems and they can focus on more critical aspects of the sales process.

BOTCORE – AN ENTERPRISE CHATBOT BUILDER PLATFORM

In conclusion, B2B businesses are slowly realizing the potential of chatbots for customer service, sales, and marketing. Many B2B businesses have already deployed chatbots at least one of these business areas and exploring further use cases. At the very least, Chatbots can streamline the Lead Qualification process, greatly improve and speed up data gathering, enhance customer service, and simplify information access.

The use cases of B2B chatbots are endless and still emerging. If you’re planning to get started on your chatbot journey, you might be interested in our Build-A-Bot workshop in which we help enterprises capture the right bot use case and build a bot strategy. Alternatively, if you’re exploring different chatbot solutions, our enterprise chatbot builder platform – BotCore might interest you!

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

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4 Amazing Things Enterprise Chatbots Can Do For Users

Abhishek Shanbhag — Tue, 12 Jun 2018 14:24:22 +0000

Amazing Things Enterprise Chatbots Can Do For Users

A report by Markets and Markets reveals that the chatbots market is set to be worth 3,172.0 Million USD by 2021. It isn’t too far fetched, at this point, to claim that bots just may be one of the most popular AI technologies today.

However, despite their popularity and increasing awareness around the incredible benefits that chatbots can bring to businesses, there hasn’t been nearly as much discussion around what chatbots can actually do for users. So while chatbots are touted as the next big thing across a variety of industries, businesses still do not know them for much beyond their ability to answer their customer’s most basic FAQs.

Before we delve into incredible new benefits that chatbots can bring to your users, let’s first take a step back to understand chatbots and their functionality.

A chatbot is essentially a computer program that enables conversation with an end user via auditory and textual methods. There are currently two types of chatbots- rule-based and AI-powered chatbots, and unsurprisingly, the former is rapidly becoming less and less relevant.

As we experience brand new advancements in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing, we are starting to see chatbots that are smarter than ever and provide intelligent, highly relevant answers. Typically, chatbots reside as a contact in messaging apps used by the organization, such as Slack, Skype, Skype for Business and so on.

Enterprise chatbots today are built by leveraging powerful enterprise chatbot building platforms that can both enable organizations to build and deploy chatbots. It would be interesting to note that before chatbot platforms were introduced into the market, building a bot was complicated, time-consuming, and required a specific set of sophisticated skills. As robust chatbot building platforms enter the market, it’s become easier than ever for businesses to get started with minimum deployment time and zero coding skills.

Enterprise chatbots are a trending technology and are in fact, easy to build. Therefore it is imperative that business leaders take the time to understand ways in which chatbots can impact their organizations and its operations.

Before making the decision to build bots, it is critical to evaluate specific challenges that the business may be facing and identify ways in which a chatbot can address and resolve them. Therefore, the chatbot development process begins by first strategizing and assigning specific tasks you want your bot to do.

In this blog, we’re going to explore five top tasks your chatbots can perform. Read on to see which one of these use cases would be most relevant to your business and its functions:

4 AMAZING THINGS ENTERPRISE CHATBOTS CAN DO FOR USERS

THEY CAN PUSH 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.

Users also have the option to decide the frequency, timing and type of alerts they’d prefer to receive – chatbots can deliver alerts in multimedia formats- and schedule accordingly.

Chatbot administrators can also schedule specific type of alerts that are meant to be delivered to a desired set of users.

Alerts can be both simple text-based notifications or ones which require users to perform an action.

Here are 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, included 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.

THEY CAN COMPLETE 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 of record or making form-based data entries that employees and customers need to perform commonly. Using a chatbot not only saves time but also eliminates repetitions, that may be caused by human error.

Chatbots also eliminate the need to switch across multiple applications, go through various mundane procedures or depend on personnel to get tasks done. By automating the process, you are saving time for both customers and employees. 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:

Employees can request an IT helpdesk chatbot to generate an IT ticket for any issues they may be encountering
Using an HR chatbot, employees can apply for leaves or generate payslips
Employees can request a Business Intelligence chatbot to update or make changes to a report.
Customers can place a product order
With Healthcare chatbots, patients can schedule appointments with doctors

FETCH INFORMATION

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

Users can specify parameters and filters they require for the information they need and chatbots can share required information with users in a way that’s easy for users to scan, understand and send along for further processing.

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.

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.

Examples:

Employee to a BI chatbot: What is the marketing ROI for 2016 and 2017?
Employee to a BI chatbot: Get me the sales report for Antwerp from Jan to April
Customer to a banking chatbot: Generate a report of my FICO score

THEY CAN ANSWER QUESTIONS

This is a functionality that most people who’ve ever heard of a chatbot are already familiar with.

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.

Using an enterprise chatbot platform, administrators can detect the most commonly asked questions by users to the bot. Thereby you can constantly update the FAQ database of the bot and consistently enhance user experience and adoption

Developers

For more complex questions, chatbots can search for answers from pre-defined websites or databases, which can be in a variety of formats – word, PDF and others.

Examples:

Employee to HR bot: How many leaves do I have left?
Employee to IT helpdesk bot: How do I reset my password
Customer to tech support: Can you tell me more about a product or service

CONCLUSION

Enterprise chatbot technology is evolving at an incredibly rapid rate and chatbots are quickly replacing traditional apps, whose functionalities are not adept at answering customers queries effectively.

Chatbots that drive enterprise productivity perform a variety of functions – much more than simply answering basic FAQs – they have the power to quickly become the backbone of enterprise search.

We recommend that business leaders work closely to define a robust enterprise bot strategy before embarking on the journey of building one. This strategy should address specific organizational challenges and how they plan to leverage chatbots to address these.

A workplace chatbot should be built to handle a variety of requests rather than having individual chatbots for each department or type of function. The idea is to have a go-to bot that employees and customers can rely on to find the information they require.

If you’re interested to learn more about chatbots or how you can integrate them into your business, get in touch with one of our experts who will help you explore the right use case of a chatbot for your organization.

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Top chatbot use cases in different industries

Abhishek Shanbhag — Fri, 25 May 2018 14:25:01 +0000

Top Chatbot Use Cases In Different Industries

Chatbots are proliferating in every industry known to humans. Almost 80 percent of businesses look forward to investing or deploy in chatbots by 2020. With penetrating adoption rate, the production and implementation of chatbots would also increase.

The interesting part is that Chatbots that come with different abilities and fulfil a different purpose in each industry. We have gathered some use cases for each industry and examples of how they have been deployed. This will help you explore and evaluate how you can use a chatbot for your industry. Chatbots are still emerging technologies and so are the use cases. Here are some use cases.

RETAIL AND CONSUMER GOODS

Customers keep clicking through navigation bars and travel multiple screens to just find that one product that they wish to purchase. A lot of customers abandon carts if this discovery process takes too long. Ta-da! Chatbots fix the long product discover journey for a consumer. The chatbot use cases in retail are more. This is applicable to e-commerce, in-store retailers, fashion, food, and beverages. Either physical or digital, chatbots allow consumers to access product information and make a purchase on-the-go using mobile devices.

Chatbots are a sigh of relief even for employees in the retail industry, especially for the on-field salesforce. 66 percent of their time is not spent on selling. Chatbots undo this scenario and help them focus more on sales. Chatbots assist sales personnel by seamlessly integrating with CRM, BI and LOB systems at the background and provide accurate sales data and real-time alerts. They can analyze and compute at the background to provide personalized customer information that can equip salesforce with highly localized, timely, and relevant data.

The employees of a leading soft drinks company, with operations in Great Britain (GB), Ireland, France and Brazil had a hard time fetching their sales and operations information from their OBIEEE and SAP system. To resolve this they looked for a single window solution which could reduce their time and effort to fetch high-level precise information. Lucy, a sales chatbot helped sales team to query sales and operations related metrics like Net Revenue, Stocks, Trading Contribution, etc., on-the-go.

BANKING

The banking industry has been one of the early adopters of Chatbots. 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. Bank of America introduced Erica, a chatbot for its customers to perform similar functions for them. Customer support and feedback are other areas where chatbots have taken over.

While this is on the customer-facing front, the business side of banking also uses chatbots. Chatbots also perform tasks for banks like contract review and analysis, employee engagement, IT ticketing, parse messages, and password management. We have collated a lot more detailed use cases of chatbots that can empower the banking and finance industries.

LEGAL

JP Morgan Chase launched COIN, a chatbot to manage its back-office operations. It can analyze complex contracts quicker and more proficient than human lawyers. The Chabot use cases in the legal industry are discovered in unimaginable ways. Legal jargon is a language of its own and piles up every day, across multiple document structures. Analyzing these documents is a time-consuming process for humans.

The inspiration for using chatbots in the legal world dates back to the creation of DoNotPay. This is a chatbot built to fight the unfair issuance of parking tickets in the United Kingdom and New York. Chatbots reduce the time to analyze with use of artificial intelligence and exponential power to process natural language.

With machine learning, chatbots have also been trained to be legal advisors for mundane and redundant queries. Legal companies have complex intranets which can now be integrated into a chatbot for a better experience. Legal firms have also started using chatbots for HR tasks such as leave application management, onboarding, and setting up notifications and reminders. You can access our full guide to the application of chatbots in the legal industry here.

INSURANCE

For insurance buyers, confusing jargon and insurance policies have been synonymous. Traditional insurance agents have not been able to fully fill the gap of educating customers with what they are looking for. This is because of the fast-paced regulations and updates that happen within the industry. Magda is a revolutionizing chatbot in this industry which sold insurance policies online.

Chatbots in the insurance sector are taking the avatar of insurance agents, virtual hosts, analyst, insurance advisor, and other roles that can relieve humans to do far more advanced tasks.

CHECK OUT HOW A CANADA BASED INSURANCE FIRM IMPROVED CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE BY LEVERAGING AN AI BOT TO PROVIDE PERSONALIZED RESPONSES

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 a student with school culture and for administrative formalities. AdmitHub created a chatbot to help new students navigate the college transition process. Jill Watson is a chatbot that works as a teaching assistant. Duolingo, on the other hand, is a language teaching chatbot.

In fact, more and more teachers and students are independently trying to create their own chatbots by using platforms like Botcore.ai.

HEALTHCARE

For hospitals and clinics, chatbots have been saving a lot of money. While one category of chatbots performs tasks for receptionists, nurses and interns, another category assists doctors with patient progress reports, checking in on post-op recoveries, assessing drug interactions, and so on. Your.MD is a chatbot used by patients and clinicians. It learns common symptoms and provides recommendations for relevant resources.

A few other advanced areas where chatbots are applied in healthcare are patient engagement, population health management and care coordination, expediting triaging patients, and research.

MANUFACTURING

Manufacturing industry that has been constantly struggling with communications has found a solution. This sector is ruled by assembly lines, distributor, wholesalers, and obscure designers. To connect people and build interaction, manufacturers have fast adopted chatbots.

Vendor management and engagement, HR-related tasks, crew and workplace maintenance assistance, and product recall assistance are some of the areas where chatbots have been used in the manufacturing industry. We have provided a detailed value proposition of how chatbots can help manufacturers.

HOSPITALITY

Chatbots are working towards providing better guest service experience, acting as a personal travel assistant and virtual concierge for hospitality leaders. Chatbots are available 24/7 to provide a positive experience that builds customer loyalty and satisfaction. This quality of chatbots helps the hospitality to keep pace with the rest of the world.

AIRLINE

Travel bots used by the airline industry are deployed to send announcements, for ticketing, facilitate web check-ins, personalized search and purchases, provide flight options, and make other travel arrangements.

OIL AND GAS

Exxon Mobil, a large oil and gas exploration company has used AI bots for hydrocarbon exploration and production. These bots have also helped the company in improving productivity and cost-effectiveness while reducing worker risk.

Shell, a leading British-Dutch oil and gas company has introduced an AI chatbot – LubeChat for its B2B Lubricant customers. The bot provides real-time customer support by providing information about the company products, services lubricants data etc.

OTHER CHATBOTS

While these are some industry-specific use cases, some chatbots are used in many other scenarios. Irrespective of the industry, few functions remain constant. The function that thrives and is most sought after is Sales. SIA, a sales assistant chatbot helps the sales team improve top-line revenue by helping them make informed decisions. It can be added to Skype, Slack, Yammer, O365 and other existing collaboration tools.

Another exuberant function is the IT department itself. The IT helpdesk chatbot uses machine learning to provide answers to repetitive IT support requests, thereby improving help desk response rate. MESH Bot is a Sharepoint Intranet bot that improves intranet adoption rates. HR Bots help in creating a better rapport between the organization and the employees by answering queries and improving operational efficiency.

Chatbots have a variety of use cases but it is important to find a high-yielding use case which can deliver high ROI. Should you need any help with more case studies, get in touch with us, and we will connect you to relevant experts who can share more about the use of chatbots in your industry.

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

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The post Top chatbot use cases in different industries appeared first on BotCore.