2018 Chatbot Trends Archives - BotCore

4 Ways Marketing Teams Can Use Chatbots

Rakesh Reddy — Wed, 27 Jun 2018 14:23:42 +0000

4 Ways Marketing Teams Can Use Chatbots

Chatbots and virtual assistants have created a major paradigm shift in how humans interact with technology. The ability to chat through text or talk using voice with applications, services and brands are fueling this wave of innovation.

With the power of artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP), chatbots are solving a multitude of business challenges.

Besides handling customer care queries, AI-powered chatbots are grabbing more attention in the field of marketing by automating low level, mundane and repetitive tasks.

A survey by Business Insider shows that 80% of businesses want chatbots by 2020

With dynamic conversational capabilities, chatbots are becoming an incredibly powerful marketing tool for businesses to improve customer engagement, reduce costs, qualify leads, provide 24/7 support, and improve their internal team efficiencies.

GARTNER PREDICTS THAT 15% OF ALL CUSTOMER SERVICE INTERACTIONS WILL BE COMPLETELY HANDLED BY AI, AN INCREASE OF 400% FROM 2017 BY 2021.

Adopting a marketing chatbot in your organization has immense potential to give you a major competitive advantage as a marketer.

4 WAYS MARKETING CAN USE CHATBOTS

1.INTEGRATION WITH MARTECH APPLICATIONS

The constant need to interface disconnected LOB systems through manual means stands as a hurdle for many marketing operations.

Integrating an AI-powered chatbot can help marketing teams quickly switch across different applications like CMS, CRM, LOB, BI and analytics software to get customer insights and use them to make business-related decisions. It provides a gateway to tap into customer information and provide personalized experiences.

Chatbots can provide immediate, easy and anywhere access to data and act as a virtual assistant in terms of providing technical support, account management, or any marketing related information.

By 2019, 40% of enterprises will be actively using chatbots to facilitate business processes using natural-language interactions – Gartner

These bots extract relevant insights from information systems and send proactive KPI alerts to marketing teams providing them with real-time information and eventually boosting your marketing team’s productivity.

2. ENHANCE CUSTOMER SERVICE

Customer service and marketing have a harmonious relationship. Marketing is strained due to various pressures and there is a constant need to do everything possible to enhance their customer service capabilities.

Chatbots not only can help your team address repetitive tasks but also have the ability to handle a seemingly unlimited number of customer service requests simultaneously.

Juniper research forecasts that chatbots will be responsible for cost savings of over $8 billion per annum by 2022, up from $20 million this year

Chatbots act as the first line of agents and provide the right information to the user as soon as he/she asks a question. It provides real-time responses without incurring additional costs and can automate repetitive tasks. This helps increase employee productivity and result in a substantial reduction in operational costs.

If the marketing bot is unable to answer specific complex questions, a customer can always connect with human agents to get their issues addressed.

Expecting your support team to have the ability to answer each and every question on your social media profiles can be terribly time-consuming and expensive. Instead, leveraging chatbots allows you to keep your social media presence fresh and dynamic.

With a marketing chatbot, you can remain accessible to consumers 24/7, answer their queries and mimic real conversations with the help of natural language understanding.

These bots help reduce the stress on call centres and enable organizations to meet rising customer demand for self-service and stay competitive.

They offer virtual 24/7 assistance to your marketing team, employees and customers and provide the required information even during the non-service work hours.

Learn More: Top chatbot use cases in different industries

3. DRIVE HIGH-QUALITY LEADS

Qualifying leads can be tricky! It is not always easy for the marketing team to decide which leads can be a valuable prospect for your offerings. Qualifying a lead requires marketers to invest a lot of time in order to perform multiple levels of screening, which tends to eat into their productive hours at work. And often, the leads may not even qualified buyers, which further diminishes overall efficiency.

In such scenarios, leveraging chatbots can save time by asking qualifier questions to your customers and drawing important conclusions. They can also engage with customers right when they are on your website, which makes it easy to connect with website visitors and answer their questions in real-time, thereby facilitating closure of more leads and deals. After successfully qualifying a lead as a prospect, the chatbot will send it to your sales team for further steps which helps enhance productivity and enables faster conversion.

4. SEND RELEVANT NOTIFICATIONS

Usually, if there are any updates regarding your organization, products, or services, channels most commonly used to relay this information to customers and employees are emails, text messages and so on.

However, sending notifications this way may annoy your customer and may even depict a one-sided perspective which may eventually cause them to lose interest in your products.

As customer expectations and behaviours are seeing a massive shift, it has become more critical than ever for the marketing team to be sensitive and adapt to rapid changes.

Whether it is using chatbots to trigger regular updates to customers and employees or capturing and analyzing data to send personalized notifications to customers based on their usage patterns, chatbots are set to transform the way marketing teams operate.

CONCLUSION

Incorporating a chatbot into your marketing strategy can boost customer engagement, qualify leads, streamline your marketing efforts, reach new consumers and increase ROI.

While the thought of creating an AI-powered chatbot may seem challenging, using powerful chatbot building platforms can make this immensely easy and quick time to market.

Are you planning to get your own marketing chatbot for your business? If so, check out BotCore – An enterprise-ready chatbot builder platform that helps you to build your own bot that boost your marketing team’s productivity and enhance customer experience!

Learn More: Basic Resources Required to Build an Enterprise Chatbot

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.

FREE EBOOK

a guide to choosing an enterprise bot builder platform

The post 4 Ways Marketing Teams Can Use Chatbots appeared first on BotCore.

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.

FREE EBOOK

a guide to choosing an enterprise bot builder platform

The post 4 Amazing Things Enterprise Chatbots Can Do For Users appeared first on BotCore.

What’s Big in Chatbots in 2018 and Beyond

Jagan Jami — Thu, 11 Jan 2018 13:52:00 +0000

What’s Big In Chatbots In 2018 And Beyond

“BOTS ARE THE NEW APPS” – SATYA NADELLA

Noticeably Chatbots or bots are one of the most popular AI technologies and often referred to as “the darling of media”. Chatbots have been the buzzword in the tech industry for the past few years and are anticipated to replace mobile apps. From creating smarter business workflows to automating customer service to acting as an intelligent digital assistant for employees, AI chatbots have a ton of use cases in the B2B, B2C and B2E scenarios of the enterprise.

As a Microsoft Gold-Certified Partner and after deploying bots for several Fortune organizations we have collated the top 6 chatbot trends to watch for in 2018 and beyond.

SHARE THIS IMAGE ON YOUR SITE

<p><strong>Please include attribution to https://botcore.ai/ with this graphic.</strong><br /><br /><a href='https://botcore.ai/blog/whats-big-chatbots-2018-beyond/'></a></p>

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.

FREE EBOOK

a guide to choosing an enterprise bot builder platform

The post What’s Big in Chatbots in 2018 and Beyond appeared first on BotCore.