AI Chatbots Archives - BotCore

Power Virtual Agents & Power Automate – Truly Powerful!

Abhishek Shanbhag — Wed, 23 Nov 2022 13:09:00 +0000

Power Virtual Agents & Power Automate – Truly Powerful!

Introduction

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

Understanding Power Virtual Agents

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Understanding Power Automate

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

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

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

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

Integrating Power Virtual Agents With Power Automate

Trigger bots to take action!

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

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

But with the launch of Power Automate this is solved.

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

Learn More: Add actions to a bot using Power Automate

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

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

Some key benefits include:

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

The post Power Virtual Agents & Power Automate – Truly Powerful! appeared first on BotCore.

The DOs and DON’Ts of Conversational AI

Satheesh Kothakapu — Wed, 13 Jul 2022 06:27:43 +0000

The DOs and DON’Ts of Conversational AI

Conversational AI is an emerging market that is taking over the business world by storm. Indeed, interest in chatbots, voice bots, and other AI-driven virtual assistants is growing by leaps and bounds, so much so that the conversational AI market is expected to reach $18.02 billion by 2027, growing at a CAGR of 21.02%.

While chatbots and other digital assistants have immense potential to improve customer satisfaction (CSAT) levels, enhance employee engagement, empower organizations with exceptional experiences, and improve brand image, not every conversational AI project may prove to be successful.

That’s where an effective conversational AI design comes into the picture. Effective conversational AI design builds the user’s trust and boosts their confidence in the virtual assistant. It keeps them engaged and brings them back again and again.

When a user enters a chatbot, they may be apprehensive about the quality of interactions at first and whether the chatbot can resolve their issue. While chatbots automate conversations and offload human tasks, the discussions should still feel human and akin to having a one-on-one chat with the brand.

So, what are the dos and don’ts of conversational AI? What best practices can you keep in mind while designing and implementing a chatbot?

Let’s explore.

DOs and DON’Ts of Conversational AI

Here are some key chatbot considerations and DOs and DON’Ts that organizations must be mindful of –

1. Ask yourself — what purpose is my bot designed to serve?

While a chatbot can do many things for your organization, answering queries, executing simple tasks, or even pulling relevant information, it’s essential to ensure it achieves its actual purpose. Narrowing down the chatbot’s purpose can help the organization ensure that the scripts, content, and functions required to make the chatbot successful aren’t ambiguous. Answer questions like-

Am I designing my chatbot to promote self-service? If yes, do I know the common contact reasons and transactional issues that burden my contact center?
Do I have sufficient data to design an AI chatbot to solve queries and hold an end-to-end conversation?
Are there restrictions on what the chatbot can/cannot do?
What if the bot is unable to fulfill its role? Is there a backup plan for that?

It’s imperative to set the right expectations when it comes to what your chatbot is supposed to do. Moreover, in large organizations with several departments, considering the needs of all business divisions may be tough and lead to delays in time-to-market. Rather, deploying separate conversational AI solutions for disparate use cases will be the wiser option.

2. Choose the right platform and expertise.

Jumping into the world of conversational AI without the right expertise in your hands can be daunting and make the entire process extremely disorganized and uneconomical.

Instead of burdening your IT team with the responsibility of learning, designing, and optimizing conversational AI technology and embedding automated workflows, try choosing a conversational AI tool from a host of vendors available in the market.

Depending on your needs and intended use cases, you can either go for a custom solution, a specific service/functional offering, or else a platform-based approach.

A platform-based conversational AI offering leverages game-changing no-code or low-code solutions (LCAPs) that help non-technical users build, improve, and adjust apps based on needs with little or no coding.

3. Security and privacy are must-haves

Data privacy and cybersecurity are significant conversational AI implementation considerations. Since chatbots can handle sensitive customer information at times, incorporating robust security protocols is a “must-do.”

After all, a cyberattack on the PII of customers has an enormous financial impact and can significantly hamper the brand image of your organization.

Keep up with the latest security regulations in the conversational AI space, including any industry or location-specific requirements.
Before implementing the chatbot, run comprehensive penetration and API security tests.
Space out dispensing information based on the users’ authorization levels. Implement user, intent level, and channel authorization and privacy, and ensure end-to-end encryption.

4. Simplify. Simplify. Simplify

Keep it simple for the user. Design the chatbot to minimize the list of asks for the user.

Avoid unnecessary questions or overly wordy sentences.
Use directions like “Tap, yes to continue” or “Please select one option from below” to tell the user exactly what is required.
Design auto pop-ups that tell what the chatbot can do and gently nudge the customer to discuss his queries.
Earn user confidence by matching your bots to your brand’s tone and identity.

5. Human handoff is always key.

Forcing customers to interact with a chatbot in the name of modernizing IT, scaling operations, or reducing costs isn’t the best option. While providing an intelligent, natural language interface that simplifies problems, understands context, and allows users to speak to the bot on their own terms is the best option, it’s also necessary to build an escalation pathway that supports an effortless transition to a human agent.

So, when an issue arises beyond the bot’s scope, or if the customer seems irate (sensed through sentiment analysis) and willing to speak to a human agent only, the bot must be able to escalate the call to ensure quick resolutions seamlessly.

6. Never stop working on making your conversational AI solution better.

As conversational AI technology progresses and your organization needs mature responses to deal with different intent types, make sure your chatbot is equipped to harness user data and deliver more meaningful and personalized engagement.

If required, keep on adding new responses and natural language and machine learning capabilities to progressively make your bot better and more human-like.

7. Don’t forget to integrate your bot with existing systems and digital channels.

Integrations with backend and legacy systems, such as ERP, CRM, or databases, are essential if you want to provide seamless support to your customers or employees.

Conversational AI platforms when integrated with other systems can help in checking the status of orders to answering queries, address problems from diagnosing a problem to resolving issues quickly. Also, with the data from the systems the Conversational AI platform can provide valuable insights. So based on your use case, identify what integrations are a must for your case.

8. Don’t forget to check — How successful is my bot?

Goal completion rates, bounce rates, and customer satisfaction scores are great examples of significant metrics and KPIs that determine the success/failure of conversational AI implementation.

As a result of monitoring, organizations can continually develop better and more seamless experiences for users and build a winning conversational AI strategy.

Want to implement the best-in-class conversational AI technology? Talk to our experts.

At Acuvate, we help clients develop and deploy powerful chatbots, voice bots, and digital assistants, keeping in mind the DOs, DON’Ts, and must-haves of conversational AI.

Our enterprise bot-building platform, BotCore, uses top-notch AI and natural language processing technologies to build intelligent bots and support exceptional customer and employee experiences.

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

The post The DOs and DON’Ts of Conversational AI appeared first on BotCore.

Optimize your customer support in this holiday season using customer engagement bots

Abhishek Shanbhag — Fri, 03 Dec 2021 12:25:00 +0000

Optimize your customer support in this holiday season using customer engagement bots

The holiday season is around the corner. With the festive cheer comes higher sales, more revenue, and significant work for the customer support teams of e-commerce businesses.

Increased demand for products leads to an influx of customer support requests. Coupled with employee shortage due to leaves and absenteeism during holidays, handling customer support during the festive season can be extremely challenging for contact center agents, leading to a drop in productivity and lower customer satisfaction (CSAT) levels.

Moreover, with the fear of catching COVID-19 reducing traffic to brick-and-mortar stores, online shopping will soar again this year, creating higher demand for e-commerce businesses and their support personnel. In 2020, U.S. consumers broke records of holiday shopping during Cyber 5, with online sales rising 20.6% year-over-year.

Holiday shopping isn’t the easiest. Sometimes, a customer may have an item in mind but cannot navigate the brand’s website to find it. At other times, customers may not be able to think of suitable gifting options. Or, they may want to know about the delivery status of items already bought.

Additionally, the business world has witnessed a paradigm shift in customer expectations over the past year, the most prominent being an increased demand for more convenient, personalized, and meaningful customer engagement.

Conversational AI and automation have emerged as the most vital trends in CX. Businesses have adopted AI-powered chatbots to deliver desirable and seamless omnichannel customer experiences that lead to hyper-personalized customer journeys, brand loyalty, and a competitive edge over other players in the market.

This blog talks about how brands in the e-commerce business can optimize customer support in this holiday season using customer support bots and AI-driven virtual assistants.

Optimize your customer support in this holiday season using AI chatbots for customer service

E-commerce brands perpetually witness a spike in demand around the holiday season. And with the fear of catching COVID-19 still looming in the air, online shopping will continue to grow even as in-store shopping begins reopening its doors.

Amidst such high demand, how can online brands create a foolproof strategy for holiday customer support? How can customer service chatbots help in this regard?

Let’s explore.

1. Help shoppers find the right products.

As discussed above, holiday shopping can be time-consuming and often tedious as consumers look for the perfect gift options.

A conversational AI bot can gather information about the tastes and preferences of the customer or ask questions about the intended recipient the customer wishes to buy a gift for and suggest suitable products.

At times, customers may tell the support chatbot what they are looking for, and the bot can throw up relevant search results.

Additionally, customer experience bots may assist visitors in navigating the website and inform them about seasonal offers, discounts, and product combos.

Marks and Spencer launched a Christmas Concierge chatbot to connect with customers during the festive season via Facebook Messenger. The chatbot allowed the brand to tailor product recommendations to the customers’ specific interests and needs – home, food, or both.

If the customer selected food, the bot asked specific questions about the type of food, dietary needs, etc. The bot then walked website visitors through menu options and allowed them to browse through recipes, request tips, and purchase directly from the recipe page.

2. Answer frequently asked questions (FAQs)

Businesses face their fair share of chaos during the peak holiday season. As customers rush to buy their favorite products and gifts, brands witness a substantial rise in queries.

In such a scenario, leveraging chatbots can take the burden off your support staff. Brands can automate some of the routine, mundane queries (for example, minimum order value for free delivery) by using AI chatbots. By analyzing and reviewing trends, patterns, and metrics from previous festive seasons, they can make a list of the most frequently asked questions and train the customer support bot to answer them.

Conversational AI keeps response times low, streamlines and optimizes the support process, and helps brands provide a seamless experience to customers.

3. Offer prompt round-the-clock support.

At times, customers may want to track the delivery status of their orders at 2 pm on a Sunday. Or, they may be shopping for products at 3 am and have related product queries.

Customers are always in a rush during the holiday season and want their questions answered as quickly as possible. Often, they resort to last-minute shopping, and if left waiting, they may get annoyed and visit a competitor’s website.

Moreover, customer support agents may be unavailable during holidays, leading to staff shortages at the contact center.

Fortunately, customer experience chatbots are always awake, don’t need holidays, and handle multiple customer queries 24X7X365 days a year.

4. Escalate irate customers to the human agents

There may be times when the bot is unable to answer customer queries, leading to customer frustration. Moreover, as the customers often rush and expect quick service, their chances of getting annoyed are much higher when questions remain unresolved.

AI-driven customer support chatbots can leverage sentiment analysis to comprehend customer emotion and route queries to a human agent to ensure a speedy and effective query resolution.

5. Drive lead generation and reduce cart abandonment with live chat triggers

Sometimes, customers may visit the brand’s website and find it challenging to locate the products they need. Or, they may add items to their cart but leave the website before checking out.

Bots integrated with live chat widgets can help brands onboard new customers, provide real-time responses, and personalize customer support, even when the agent isn’t available.

Moreover, such bots can recapture the interest of customers who may be trying to leave the website by throwing pop-up messages like “Flat 20% on order above $100 just for you.”

If the customer has left the website without buying the items in the cart, the bot may automatically generate and send an email saying, “We see you left something in your cart. Come back and get a 10% off on your purchase.”

How can Acuvate help?

At Acuvate, we help clients deploy AI-powered customer experience chatbots to optimize customer support in the holiday season with our enterprise bot-building platform called BotCore.

With minimalistic coding requirements and pre-designed templates, BotCore allows organizations to implement customer-facing chatbots within weeks. As a Microsoft Gold Partner, we leverage the best of Microsoft’s AI, ML, and NLP technologies to build chatbots that deliver highly personalized and frictionless customer interactions.

Moreover, our bots are multilingual and can cater to a global audience with English, French, Italian, German, and many more languages. Additionally, BotCore supports various platforms, including web, mobile app, and social media apps like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.

Additionally, we leverage Microsoft’s low-code bot-building solution, Power Virtual Agents (PVA), to help clients quickly build intelligent, conversational AI chatbots with little or no coding knowledge needed.

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

The post Optimize your customer support in this holiday season using customer engagement bots appeared first on BotCore.

Using Human Hand Off in Power Virtual Agents for Better Success

Abhishek Shanbhag — Tue, 25 May 2021 08:12:00 +0000

Using Human Hand Off in Power Virtual Agents for Better Success

Today, AI-enabled chatbots play a significant role in addressing both simple and complex queries of users. Statistics show that 3 in 5 millennials have used chatbots at least once in their lives. In fact, teams that use chatbots to automate conversations are 27% more likely to meet rising customer expectations than those that don’t.

Moreover, by 2022, 70% of white-collar workers will interact with conversational platforms on a daily basis.

While chatbots act as the first line of support, there will be situations when the conversation needs to be handed off to a human agent.

Microsoft customers using Power Virtual Agents (PVA) to build employee/customer-facing chatbots can explore the human agent hand-off functionality for better success.

But, what is PVA? Power Virtual Agents is a low-code app development SaaS platform that allows pro and citizen developers to build and deploy chatbots in a guided, no-code visual interface quickly.

Before delving deep into the nuances of handing over conversations to human agents using PVA, let’s understand why a human-in-the-loop is important?

Why is human-in-the-loop essential?

Chatbots help organizations automate customer and employee support – 24X7, at scale, and at significantly lower costs. They enhance efficiency and productivity and allow users to focus on tasks that add business value. Chatbots answer FAQs, send the required information, and provide smart suggestions based on the customer/employee profile.

Meaning, they augment human effort; however, in case of an escalation or upon the user’s request, the bot must be capable of seamlessly transferring the call to a live agent.

Let’s understand why a human-in-the-loop is critical.

1. User Sentiment

At times, the user is angry, frustrated, or annoyed. In such a scenario, the chatbot must be capable of detecting the mood or tonality of the user and handover the chat to an agent.

2. Critical conversations

Sometimes, the subject of the conversation may be sensitive/critical, the customer may be at a higher risk of churning, or it may be a high-value transaction. In such cases, it is prudent for the bot to hand over the chat to a human agent.

3. Highly-complex issues

Customer queries are diverse and evolving. At times, the chatbot may not be able to handle them and should recommend the “Chat with an agent” option.

4. User request

Users may be in a rush or prefer to talk to a live agent instead of a bot.

5. Training and Feedback

Training, calibrating and explaining AI-enabled systems requires human-in-the-loop architecture
Gartner

A chatbot needs a human-in-the-loop feedback system to constantly learn and become intelligent. Both users and agents can influence and improve its intelligence. In the case of consumer-facing chatbot, even the smallest customer’s feedback like “click here if you are satisfied with the solution” can help improve the machine learning algorithm of chatbots. In addition to consumer training, contact center agents can also classify outliers and exceptions and help modify the chatbot training data and behavior accordingly.

Initiating a handover to a human agent with Power Virtual Agents

Microsoft’s Power Virtual Agents (PVA) allows you to seamlessly hand over critical conversations to live agents.

Power Virtual Agents is a low-code app development SaaS platform that allows pro and citizen developers alike to build and deploy chatbots in a guided, no-code visual interface quickly.

While PVA is a part of Microsoft’s Power Platform, it leverages the Microsoft Bot Framework and Azure Bot Service and Cognitive Services to build chatbots and configure human agent handoff.

Pre-requisites:

Engagement hub that interacts programmatically using APIs or SDK
Product license for Omnichannel for Customer Service and a license for Power Virtual Agents
A chatbot built with Power Virtual Agents.

Types of agent handoff triggers:

Internal Triggers – The bot is unable to determine the user’s intent as there is no topic or matching option within a subject. Or the user requests an agent handover immediately or in the middle of a conversation. On detecting such an escalation, the bot redirects the user to the Escalate system topic.
Explicit Triggers – When bot developers create bot content, they may determine that certain topics may require human intervention. Consequently, they may add the “Transfer to agent” node to such topics.

Learn More: Adding transfer to an agent node

Handoff integration models:

The Microsoft Bot Framework supports two models for integration with agent engagement platforms.

Bot as an agent – This model helps onboard existing bots to the agent hub with minimal effort. In this mode, the bot connects to the agent hub and responds to user requests as if the requests came from any other Bot Framework channel. When the conversation is escalated to a human agent, the bot disengages from the interaction.
Bot as a proxy – In this method, the user talks directly to the bot. When the bot decides that it needs the assistance of a human agent, the message router component redirects the conversation to the appropriate agent but stays in the loop to collect transcripts, filter messages, or provide additional content to the agent and the user.

Contextual variables transferred upon hand-off:

When a bot hands over a conversation to a human agent, it shares the full context as well as user-defined variables to help agents resume the conversation smoothly. Microsoft has defined the contextual variables available upon handoff, which are as follows –

Context	Purpose	Example
va_Scope	Helps route escalations to a live agent.	“bot”
va_LastTopic	Helps route escalations to a live agent and helps ramp-up a live agent. Includes the last topic that was triggered by an utterance from the user.	“Return items”
va_Topics	Helps ramp-up a live agent.	[ “Greetings”, “Store Hours”, “Return Item” ]
va_LastPhrases	Helps route escalation to a live agent and helps ramp-up a live agent.	“Can I return my item”
va_Phrases	Helps ramp-up a live agent.	[“Hi”, “When does store open”, “Can I return my item” ]
va_ConversationId	Helps uniquely identify a bot conversation.	GUID
va_AgentMessage	Helps ramp-up a live agent.	“Got a gift from: HandoffTest”
va_BotId	Helps identify the bot that is handing off a conversation.	GUID
va_Language	Helps route escalation to a live agent.	“en-us”
All user-defined topic variables	Helps ramp-up a live agent.	@StoreLocation = “Bellevue”

Additionally, a transcript of the conversation that took place between the customer and the bot is transferred to the live agent.

Learn More: Configure hand off to any generic engagement hub

Learn More: Configure seamless and contextual hand-off to omnichannel for customer service

How can Acuvate help?

As a Microsoft Gold Partner, Acuvate helps clients deploy AI-enabled chatbots with Power Virtual Agents for customer and employee-specific use cases, such as HR support, IT service desk, sales and marketing, etc.

Organizations can then define scenario-specific workflows for seamless transfer to human agents when needed.

To know more about our services, please feel free to schedule a personalized consultation with our Power Virtual Agents experts.

The post Using Human Hand Off in Power Virtual Agents for Better Success appeared first on BotCore.

11 Examples of Facebook Messenger Chatbots To Take Inspiration From

Abhishek Shanbhag — Mon, 22 Mar 2021 13:11:00 +0000

11 Examples of Facebook Messenger Chatbots To Take Inspiration From

With consumers demanding 24X7 assistance in various industries, including retail, banking, health, finance, etc., chatbots and virtual assistants are rapidly gaining traction. Facebook Messenger bots have proven to be one of the most popular and effective ways of engaging with customers.

No wonder there are more than 300,000 active bots on Messenger. By giving personalized recommendations, collecting information, scheduling appointments, and solving simple queries, Messenger bots have helped brands provide interactive and engaging customer experiences at scale at much lower costs than a human counterpart. In fact, research by Business Insider predicts, “By 2024, consumer retail spend via chatbots worldwide will reach $142 billion – up from just $2.8 billion in 2019.”

If you are considering including bots for your marketing or customer experience efforts in 2021, here are a few Facebook Messenger chatbots to take inspiration from.

10 Inspiring Facebook Messenger Bots

1. Enjoy a healthy breakfast with Quaker Oats’ chatbot for Messenger.

Quaker Oats added a Facebook Messenger bot named Otis to its marketing mix. In today’s fast-paced world, when people are hard-pressed for time, the bot guides customers with online shopping, offers delicious recipes, sets reminders for overnight oats, and provides consultation for any queries they may raise.

Users may choose from a range of seasonal recipes, like a smoothie, or type in a food emoji if they know what they want to eat. The bot is an excellent way for the brand to gauge consumer preferences and personalize recommendations, including top recipes, favorite products, the ingredients they like, etc.

Otis has helped Quaker increase engagement by 13% year-on-year without any other marketing or media support.

2. SAL - Your personal skincare assistant by POND’s

In 2019, popular Skincare brand POND’s launched its Facebook Messenger bot called SAL across nine countries. When users upload a selfie, SAL leverages augmented reality to provide immersive customer engagement in the form of personalized skincare recommendations across four significant areas of concern – pimples, wrinkles, uneven skin tone, and spots. While the analysis is generated, which usually takes about 60 seconds, the bot keeps sharing skincare tips to retain the user’s interest.

Once the diagnosis is completed, users are informed about their skin condition, followed by POND’s personalized product recommendations.

SAL for Messenger generated 15 times higher purchase intent, with consumers spending up to 3 times more time on SAL and 98% users citing a positive experience with the bot.

3. Unilever’s All Things Hair Chatbot (Athena bot)

As a part of its All Things Hair initiative, Unilever wanted to deploy a Facebook Messenger chatbot that provides consumers with instant answers to hair queries, personalized hair product recommendations, style suggestions etc. Powered with Augmented Reality (AR), the Athena bot also lets users take selfie photos and try different virtual hairstyles.

4. Sustainable clothing brand, prAna’s chatbot for Messenger

Sustainable clothing company prAna uses a chatbot for Facebook Messenger to help users shop for clothes online. The bot’s choice of words, tone, and emojis lend a friendly, casual feel to the conversation, thus grasping the customer’s attention for a longer duration.

The bot shares information about the clothes shoppers view and helps them navigate through the online store, for example, asking them if they want to “Shop Women’s or “Shop Men’s.”

5. Estee Lauder’s Lip Artist

Estée Lauder’s Lip Artist allows users to try and buy lipstick shades right from the comfort of their homes. The users simply need to click a selfie or upload an image, and the bot will enable them to try on lipstick shades and see immediate results using augmented reality.

The chatbot gives personalized recommendations based on skin type, occasion, and color preferences. Based on the shades they choose, users can click on “Shop Now” and buy the lipsticks from Estée’s website.

6. Dom - Your one-stop-shop for scrumptious Pizzas

Dom, the Domino’s pizza chatbot for Facebook Messenger, brings the entire menu right at your fingertips. Users can then place a fresh order, track recent orders, or chat with customer support.

The bot shows the menu choices and an “add to order” button after each option. If the customer has ordered from the app before, the bot will ask if he/she will like to repeat the same.

7. Schedule your in-store service appointments with Sephora’s chatbot for Messenger

Sephora reservation assistant allows users to book specialized beauty treatments, such as a facial or a makeover, at their nearest Sephora location.

The bot asks a series of questions to understand when and where the customer wants to schedule an appointment. It then throws up a pop-up window to let customers select an available time slot. Finally, the bot picks up the user’s name and email address from Facebook and finalizes the booking.

In Sephora’s own words, implementing the bot led to an 11% higher booking rate.

8. Discovering health with Whole Foods

With its chatbot for Facebook Messenger, Whole Foods helps customers find recipes based on ingredients, dish type, and dietary restrictions, for example, for dinner, gluten-free, vegan, etc. Users may simply use emojis or a combination of text and emojis to discover new meals.

Users can also check if their nearest Whole Foods retail store has the necessary ingredients for a particular recipe in stock.ional’s AI-powered chatbot

9. Book a memorable stay with Marriott

Marriott Rewards members on Messenger can book travel at Marriott International hotels worldwide, handle hospitality-related arrangements, such as business conferences, communicate with guest services, plan their upcoming vacation with the digital magazine Marriott Traveler, and chat with the customer support executives when required.

Additionally, the company uses its chatbot to upsell its customers and encourage them to book the best suites and services.

10. Get the best clothing, accessories, and advice for new moms with Kindred Bravely

Kindred Bravely chatbot for Messenger helps women with infants shop for nursing clothes, pajamas, accessories, and other clothing for postpartum women. With a conversational-driven shopping experience, women are saved from the hassle of navigating multiple menus and filtering items.

They just need to click on “Shop Now” and choose from various items, colors, and sizes. The bot also provides an option to receive an order confirmation and shipping updates via Facebook Messenger.

11. WHO fights COVID-19 misinformation with Facebook Messenger

To curb the spread of rumors and misinformation regarding the global COVID-19 pandemic, WHO has launched its Health Alert interactive chatbot via Facebook Messenger.

The bot can potentially reach out to 4.2 billion people in languages, including English, French, Spanish, and Arabic, and help them gauge the facts about the disease and how to prevent its spread.

How can Acuvate help?

At Acuvate, we help clients build AI-enabled chatbots for Facebook Messenger with our intuitive, low-code, enterprise bot-builder platform called BotCore. With minimalistic coding requirements, it is quick and easy to deploy chatbots with channel-specific design elements. Our bots support several languages, including French, German, Italian, etc. Moreover, they can be easily trained to understand the context and simulate highly complex conversations.

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

The post 11 Examples of Facebook Messenger Chatbots To Take Inspiration From appeared first on BotCore.

How can AI and chatbots improve support agent experience & productivity

Abhishek Shanbhag — Mon, 15 Feb 2021 06:31:00 +0000

How can AI and chatbots improve support agent experience & productivity

According to a survey, post-covid, 59% of customers will care even more about customer experience than they did in the “before times” when deciding which companies to support or buy from.

With the increased expectation for a speedy resolution and more interactive engagement, customer service representatives (CSR) alone cannot handle the rapidly evolving needs of customer support. An American Express survey found that 78% of consumers have bailed on a transaction because of a lousy service interaction.

As the pressure to scale up processes and deliver quality customer engagements mounts, contact centers witness higher attrition and agent turnover. Hence, to be truly successful in providing exceptional customer experiences, an organization needs to view agent experience, meaning how efficient, empowered, and effective its agents are, as an integral part of its overall customer support strategy.

To augment agent effort, chatbots and other AI-driven technologies are making their way into contact centers. Let’s discuss how a hybrid, co-existential human and AI model improves support agent experience and productivity.

The Different Ways AI improves Agent Experience and Productivity

1. Cognitive Search

As agents routinely deal with tons of product information, they may have to put customers on hold while they skim through heaps of FAQs, blogs, documents, spreadsheets, and other internal sources of information in search of the right answers.

Moreover, traditional keyword-based searches lack context and often generate less relevant results that are not in sync with what the customer actually wants. This leads to a longer average handle time (AHT), a key performance metric for any support agent.

In such a scenario, AI-powered tools that understand the context and deliver highly meaningful search results come in handy. Such tools lead agents to the most relevant content within the vast array of structured and unstructured data that the organization holds.

Mesh 3.0 – A Modern SharePoint Intranet solution for enterprises, connects all your external and internal apps and offers a unified, AI-enabled cognitive search engine that reduces the time you spend locating the relevant information.

2. Smart AI Advisor

Today’s customers demand instant answers and expect the agent at the other end of the line to provide the best resolutions. However, on encountering a new query, agents may need time to review the customer’s account and evaluate potential solutions.

Advanced AI tools, including chatbots, can look into a customer’s history, including transactions, usage, preferences, and other information, and quickly provide a list of customized resolutions to assist the agents.

So, armed with contextual information and the right recommendations, agents can deliver more focussed, engaging, and meaningful interactions.

3. Reduce agent effort by understanding customer intent

Another critical metric involved in evaluating a support agent’s performance is the number of tickets closed.

Every time a customer emails an agent, even thanking them for their support, the service ticket gets reopened. Consequently, the support agent must manually update and close the ticket, leading to duplication of effort and an adverse impact on his KPIs.

With the help of AI, systems can detect the intent behind customer responses before deciding whether or not to reopen a ticket.

4. Act as an AI assistant

Traditionally, customer-facing chatbots and virtual assistants were used for simple FAQs. However, a chatbot’s applications need not be limited to just customer-facing interactions.

Today’s sophisticated agents can handle more complex work – understand where to look for the right information, recommend verbiage that agents can use with customers, and automate routine queries to free up the agent for more complex tasks.

Moreover, bots can assist agents in delivering superior and more efficient customer service –

Supporting agents during live calls or chats by providing the needed information and immediate contextual suggestions
Connecting to backend knowledge bases and CRM systems and extracting relevant articles and documents to help with the customer’s query
Escalating customer interactions to a live agent, when needed, and providing the entire chat history, including sentiment analysis scores and other contextual information, to the CSR
Automating time-consuming and tedious tasks, such as recording customer information, post-interaction form filling, surveys, etc.
Mining audio calls and textual conversations to capture significant details and insights
Act as a chat AI co-pilot by studying customer profile, mining prior conversations with higher CSAT scores, and recommending responses

5. Assist in quality control through active listening

For training and quality assurance purposes, call center managers listen in to agent conversations, but they are limited to only one agent at a time. With the advent of text-to-speech technologies and machine learning, AI systems can listen in on thousands of live conversations, understand customer intent and context, and present insights on the agent’s screen in real-time.

Additionally, by conducting sentiment analysis on every customer utterance and agent response, systems can alert managers about conversations that require a handover to or assistance from a supervisor.

Get Started

Businesses are built on the experiences they provide to their customers. And agent experience is fundamental to delivering an excellent customer experience. AI-powered solutions enhance support agent productivity and deliver next-generation, synergistic customer experiences.

The best results occur when AI and humans work shoulder-to-shoulder. By acting as smart virtual assistants for agents, handling mundane tasks, and providing scalable, 24X7 service, AI tools are paving the way for seamless outcomes for both support agents and customers.

At Acuvate, we help clients build and deploy smart, AI-enabled chatbots with our enterprise no-code, bot-building platform called BotCore.

Functioning as a handy source of on-demand information, providing intuitive and proactive assistance to agents, and handling routine queries, BotCore’s AI bots help improve support agent experience and productivity and reduce agent turnover.

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

Using AR and chatbots to increase customer engagement

Abhishek Shanbhag — Fri, 05 Feb 2021 07:15:00 +0000

Using AR and chatbots to increase customer engagement

Customers seek personalization while shopping for products. With most of the purchasing happening online, businesses are turning to advanced technologies to facilitate more interactive and engaging buying experiences for their customers.

An upcoming trend is the use of augmented reality (AR) in customer-facing chatbots. Since customers today have grown habitual to communicating with chatbots for queries and product purchases, adding AR to the spectrum opens a whole new world of immersive shopping experiences.

Estée Lauder’s Lip Artist chatbot allows you to upload a photo or click a selfie to try on lipstick shades and immediately see the results. Moreover, the bot acts as a personalized beauty consultant – suggests shades based on your skin type, asks questions about your color preferences and the occasions you are planning to wear the lipstick, and makes recommendations or gives surprise suggestions.
Based on what you like, you can click on “Shop Now” to purchase the lipstick from Estée’s website.

The Lip Artist is one among many examples of how AR is increasing customer engagement in customer-facing bots. So, let’s understand what AR is.

What is Augmented Reality (AR)?

As defined by Gartner, Augmented reality is the real-time use of information in the form of text, graphics, audio, and other enhancements integrated with real-world objects.

In other words, augmented reality is a live view of the physical, real-world environment.

Research shows, 10X marketers that employ AR see a 10x increase in engagement time, increasing retention and effectiveness. As such, 7 out of 10 media planners want to use AR to boost advertising and customer engagement.

When combined with chatbots, augmented reality allows brands the unlimited opportunity to interact three-dimensionally with customers and transform the entire customer journey into a personalized, interactive, and immersive experience.

Let’s look at some real-life examples and success stories of companies, which used AR to boost customer engagement in chatbots.

#1 POND’S

Skincare brand POND’S launched an AI-enabled skin-diagnostic chatbot called SAL, available in Indonesia via messaging app, LINE and Argentina, Columbia, UAE, and South Africa via Facebook Messenger.

SAL leverages a combination of advanced AI, AR, and skin diagnostic technologies to help consumers solve skincare problems across four significant areas – uneven skin tone, spots, pimples, and wrinkles.

Recognizing how confusing it can be for customers to pick the right skincare products, SAL provides them a more in-depth insight into their skin type and recommends the most effective products. Customers need to upload a selfie and complete a short quiz on SAL to receive a personalized skin diagnosis and product recommendations within a minute.

#2 Sephora

Beauty brand Sephora’s chatbot for Messenger helps customers make purchasing decisions on their own with its new offering, “Sephora Color Match.”

In partnership with a company that allows consumers to pick out and match colors using augmented reality, Sephora Color Match gives users the facility to hold up their camera to any face or image. Subsequently, the algorithm automatically detects and presents the identified lip color and other matching products from Sephora’s makeup line.

Additionally, customers can hold up their phones to ads and Instagram photos of personalities they admire, and the chatbot will assist them in finding suitable products to recreate the look. However, the feature is not just limited to faces. If users are looking

for matching palettes and products to complement a dress, they may hold up their camera to the outfit to locate the right products.

#3 Madison Reed

Madison Reed, a company that produces hair colors for an at-home hair treatment, talks to its customers via its Facebook Messenger chatbot, Madi. For customers, it’s like having a professional personal hair colorist right at their fingertips.

Customers need to upload a selfie, and using image recognition and hair localization, Madi identifies the primary hair color and secondary hair tones. She then asks questions about the desired outcome and suggests the perfect hair color, which can be purchased at Madison-Reed.com.

#4 IKEA

With IKEA’s Place app, customers can get a dynamic and immersive experience while shopping for furniture, keeping them engaged and convincing them about the utility of the purchase.

A chatbot built into the app assists customers in navigating the technology. The bot helps them point the camera at their surroundings, wherever they want to place the item in their living space. Customers can adjust the piece of furniture according to where they want to put it and test the shape, size, and functionality before purchasing it. In the AR environment created, they can walk around to look at the item from various angles.

Moreover, the bot comes up with suggestions and asks questions to guide the customer during the process.

The benefits of integrating augmented reality and chatbots

1. Unique selling point

A brand leveraging augmented reality in its chatbot stands out from the competition because it offers something no one else does. In such a case, a mere word of mouth is enough to make the brand “the talk of the town” and attract customers.

2. Increase engagement with personalized experiences

By showing customers how a particular product looks on them, augmented reality adds a touch of personalization to the shopping experience. Retailers can showcase their items more effectively, and the client can see the products more clearly and realistically. This leads to customized and immersive shopping experiences for customers and higher engagement rates for companies.

3. Higher revenue

Customers want to make informed purchase decisions. Chatbots that run on artificial intelligence understand customer needs better. Combine it with AR, and the customer has a memorable experience in shuffling through the various suggestions, trying out the different items, and selecting the right products. Since the customer’s decision is informative and smooth, the possibility of return orders declines, leading to increased revenues.

Final Thoughts

As seen above, using augmented reality in chatbots is the way to go for any industry where buyers require visual inspection and a look-test of the product.

The AR-chatbot customer experience model allows users to take a closer look at a new range of shoes, try out a lipstick or eyeshadow, check how a dress looks on them, and get tailored product recommendations before the actual purchase, all of this while sitting in the comfort of their homes.

Such unique and immersive experiences go a long way in generating buzz around the brand and increasing customer engagement.

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

Why The Future Of Chatbots is Low-Code

Abhishek Shanbhag — Fri, 15 Jan 2021 10:33:00 +0000

Why The Future Of Chatbots is Low-Code

Gartner predicts, Low-code application building would gather more than 65% of all app development functions by the year 2024.

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the entire business landscape and compelled businesses to face never-seen-before challenges and develop new workflows. Moreover, an increasing focus on the digitization of the industry drove up the demand for text and voice-based bots that automate day-to-day operations and deliver exceptional customer support.

With the IT department dealing with massive resource scarcity and struggling to develop apps for various business problems, enterprises started looking at smart solutions that allow people with little or no coding knowledge to quickly deploy AI-powered bots for a host of business use cases. No wonder many organizations turned to low-code app development platforms (LCAPs).

Low-code platforms are indeed the future of chatbot development. So, what’s a low-code app development platform? A low-code application platform, or an LCAP, is an interactive platform that leverages a visual interface, such as drag-and-drop tooling and pre-configured templates, to empower users to develop and deploy professional-grade bots within days.

Let’s explore further.

Benefits of building chatbots on a low-code platform

1. Infuses agility

The first and foremost advantage of low-code development is the agility that it allows in business operations because a) it’s quicker to build bots with pre-built modules and templates in a visual interface, b) employees, who are experts in their domains, can easily develop and refine their bots without the need to explain their ideas to others (coders). Research has shown low-code platforms can potentially reduce development time by up to 90%.

2. Reduces development costs

Hiring skilled developers proves heavier on the cost side. Low-code solutions require little or no coding knowledge, so professional and citizen developers alike can quickly build and deploy any app, making it economically viable to create intelligent chatbots for different business use cases, including service desk management, IT helpdesk, HR automation, etc.

3. Allows flexible integration

Low-code app development platforms allow integration with various SaaS-based and on-premise enterprise systems, helping organizations get a single-window view of their data.

4. Encourages innovation across functions and levels

Since low-code platforms enable domain/subject-matter experts to collaborate, develop, and customize their bots, they democratize innovation by not restricting it to a core team or group of individuals.

Seven low-code development tools for chatbots

1. Power Virtual Agents

Power Virtual Agents (PVA) is a Microsoft software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering in the low-code app development space. Microsoft’s Cloud services host the application; hence PVA significantly reduces the need for a conducive environment to deploy and maintain the bots.

Bot Framework and Azure Bot Service and Cognitive Services form the SDK to build chatbots using a guided, no-code visual interface, allowing citizen developers to build and deploy chatbots quickly. PVA greatly reduces the need to have the infrastructure to maintain and deploy chatbots as Microsoft’s Azure Cloud Services does all the heavy lifting of providing a conducive environment to host the application.

2. Chatfuel

Chatfuel is a leading low-code chatbot development platform for Facebook Messenger. Chatfuel supports many languages and allows integration with several third-party apps.
Chatfuel’s built-in guides and predefined bot templates help create bots for automated customer support and sales and marketing activities easily. An analytics dashboard allows users to monitor and analyze several business and chatbot metrics.

3. FlowXO

FlowXO enables users to build both simple and complex AI bots and connect them to more than 100 different cloud apps. FlowXO provides a visual flow editor, supports multilingual chatbots, and allows integration with popular apps, such as Facebook and Slack. Other features include the ability to send emails and attachments and build chatbot widgets for websites.

4. Botsify

Botsify uses an easy-to-navigate drag-and-drop interface that enables users to build template designs for chatbots. Botsify’s chatbots are used by well-established companies, including Apple and Shazam.

The bots integrate with services, such as WordPress, Alexa, ZenDesk, Google Sheets, etc., and can collate user information, track sales leads, and automate sales chats.

5. BotKit

With a semantic chat interface, BotKit’s chatbots imitate human conversations. The platform boasts interesting features like a visual conversation builder and open source libraries.

Other features include activity monitoring, detailed statistics, and flexible API integrations.

6. TARS

TARS is another low-code bot-building platform that democratizes the process of building chatbots with pre-built templates that are easy to edit and customize.

Other exciting features of the platform include – integration with Zapier, file and image upload, custom branding, API integration, and the option to export data to Excel/CSV.

7. BotCore

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

Fully deployable on Microsoft Cloud, BotCore’s graphical interface with drag-and-drop functionality, pre-built templates, and an integrated Knowledge Graph consisting of multi-functional nodes enable professional and citizen developers alike to create and deploy chatbots in a matter of days.

Some of the powerful features of BotCore include –

BotCore leverages Message Definition Language (MDL) to define bot responses
Technologies like natural language processing (NLP), natural language understanding (NLU), and machine learning enable our bots to understand the context, learn from past conversations, and respond to users in a human-like manner.
Seamless agent handover capability allows bots to handle simple requests while escalating the more complex ones to human agents when needed.
BotCore will enable clients to build multilingual bots that can be deployed across various channels, giving users a seamless omnichannel experience.
Our bots can aggregate the best of Microsoft technologies, including LUIS bots, Power Virtual Agents, QnA Maker bots, and other third-party bot applications.

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

9 Major Chatbot Trends for 2021

Abhishek Shanbhag — Sun, 10 Jan 2021 06:40:00 +0000

9 Major Chatbot Trends for 2021

It goes without saying that in 2020, AI & chatbots have accelerated digital transformation journeys of enterprises across the globe.

Due to the unique challenges posed by the pandemic, customers’ shopping habits transitioned to the online mode; simultaneously, the uncertainty and panic caused an unprecedented increase in contact center call volume, thus increasing the burden on support and call-center staff.

The pandemic also put unprecedented pressure on the HR and IT teams as they were burdened with hundreds of emails and calls from employees concerned about work status, pay check, and IT issues and incidents.

Organizations, particularly those in the airlines, government, healthcare, banking, and insurance industries, received hundreds of thousands of calls from anxious customers regarding flight status, cancellations, diagnosis information, health insurance, common pandemic queries, and much more.

As a result, COVID-19 started the urgency for organizations to accelerate digital transformation journeys with deploying AI chatbots as a key strategic priority.

An increasing number of organizations started using chatbots to service both customers and employees, reducing costs and easing the load off support agents by providing a self-service route to answer queries.

Organizations like Services Australia saw a 600 percent surge in the use of its Microsoft Cortana-powered digital assistants amid the pandemic.

Hence in 2020, chatbots played a major role in the fight against the pandemic by servicing customers and supporting remote employees and will continue to do so in the next year as well.

Let’s learn about the top 9 trends that will define the world of chatbots in 2021.

Top 9 Chatbot Trends for 2021

Trend #1: Low code platforms

The pandemic necessitated companies to be more agile in their operations. This led to the need for low-code development platforms and faster deployment of business apps. Due to the increased and urgent need for chatbots in the new normal, enterprises leveraged low-code chatbot platforms because of their ability to allow less experienced users build chatbots quickly. Employees across departments, with little or no coding experience, have infused agility in operations by deploying chatbots for HR automation, service desk management, customer support, sales support, and much more.

In 2021 and beyond, we will see more and more companies moving away from traditional framework-based chatbot development approaches to low-code development.

Low-code chatbot platforms like Microsoft’s Power Virtual Agents will be used to build and deploy chatbots on websites, social media channels and enterprise apps like Teams or Slack without the need for developer experience.

Learn More: How Low-Code Application Platforms Are Driving Agility In the New Normal

Trend #2: Convergence of Multiple Chatbots

As the adoption of chatbots boomed post COVID-19, organizations started implementing specialized chatbots for each function or department, including HR, IT, Business Intelligence, etc. As such, more and more chatbots were required to be implemented within the organization for different use cases.

Consequently, users had to interact with multiple chatbots and understand and adjust to the capabilities and diverse conversation styles of different chatbots.

With a centralized chatbot, also known as an Aggregator Bot, that links individual bots together, you can counter the issues that arise due to fragmentation across functions and provide consistent conversational experiences. The bot will act as your employees’ single virtual assistant. This will be a significant chatbot trend in 2021.

Learn More: The Aggregator Bot: Unify Multiple Chatbots Into A Single Bot

Trend #3: Human-in-the-loop

Training, calibrating and explaining AI-enabled systems requires human-in-the-loop architecture
– Gartner

Chatbot needs a human-in-the-loop feedback system to constantly learn and become intelligent. And throughout its lifecycle, a chatbot or any AI system interacts with different types of people who influence its intelligence. In the case of consumer-facing chatbot, even the smallest customer’s feedback like “click here if you are satisfied with the solution” can help improve the machine learning algorithm of chatbots. In addition to consumer training, contact center agents can also classify outliers and exceptions and help modify the chatbot training data and behaviour accordingly.

Trend #4: Going from conversation to action

In addition to chatbots, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is one more widely adopted technology in 2020 to reduce costs. When brought together, these technologies can solve significant operational and workflow-related problems for enterprises.

By combining the automation capabilities of RPA with cognitive intelligence of chatbots, organizations can automate their processes end-to-end. An RPA powered chatbot can integrate with disparate and multiple back-end enterprise systems. RPA enables chatbots to retrieve information from these systems and handle more complex customer/employee requests and queries at scale.

Chatbots will now be able to not only handle conversations and help find information but also perform transactions on users’ behalf.

At Acuvate, we’re helping clients achieve this by integrating Microsoft Power Virtual Agents and Power Automate.

Learn More: Power Virtual Agents & Power Automate – Truly Powerful!

Trend #5: Multilingual capabilities

Only 20% of the world’s population speaks English. To amplify your reach and enhance your localization efforts, it is essential to develop bots capable of holding conversations in multiple languages.

Customers generally trust brands that deliver interactions in their native tongue or any other preferred language. Therefore, to help you reach customers worldwide and boost CSAT levels, building a chatbot in their preferred language, like French, German, Spanish, etc., is a must.

Moreover, by deploying multilingual or polyglot bots, companies save vast amounts of money, generally spent to train employees to meet varied language needs. Additionally, a multi-language bot boosts employee efficiency by shortening the query turnaround time.

Learn More: Multilingual Chatbots | Build Chatbot In Different languages

Trend #6: Supporting remote workforce

According to research by Gartner, 74% of CFOs and Finance Leaders say that they will move at least 5% of their employees to remote working permanently after the pandemic. 25% of the participants say they will move 10% of their workforce to remote working permanently.

In the wake of the current crisis, remote working will continue to be the norm in 2021. Therefore, employees will have a variety of concerns daily that will often require urgent resolution.

In times like these, a dedicated chatbot available on the beck and call will help address a lot of issues including:

Answer FAQs related to work from home policies
Providing information on return to workplace strategies
Notify employees about health advisories, crisis communication, and work from home tips
Ensure seamless recruitment and onboarding
Track employee health

Trend #7: The human touch

Chatbots are becoming more intelligent and handling more complex conversations. The chatbots of 2021 will deliver highly meaningful, contextual, and personalized conversations with a human-like touch.

With advanced capabilities like context management, sentiment analysis, dialogue management, knowledge mining etc., they will remember conversation context, handle dialogue turns, understand the user’s emotion and respond accordingly, leading the way for more human-like conversations.

Trend #8: Personification of Bots

The need for the right chatbot personality becomes more prevalent in 2021. If the chatbot is built for a customer-facing function, its personality should ideally mirror that of your company’s and should be tailored keeping the end-user in mind. It should consistently represent what your brand stands for at every stage of the conversation – right from greeting the user to handling queries and signing off from the chat.

Trend #9: Evolution to Conversational Personal Assistants

In 2021 and beyond, we can see conversational personal assistants helping employees access information and complete their everyday tasks more efficiently. This means bots will be able to handle more complex tasks and conversations. A conversational personal assistant will be used for scheduling meetings, accessing a document, assigning a task to a team member, raising an IT ticket, requesting HR information and so on.

Get Started

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought to the forefront the pressing need for organizations to build resiliency, agility, and scalability in operations.

Chatbots have eased the pressure of handling routine, mundane queries and tasks, freeing up support personnel to focus on more critical and productive jobs.

And as they continue to improve employee support, boost productivity, and take CSAT levels to new heights in these turbulent times, chatbots are paving the way forward for a new level of quick, personalized, and delightful user experiences.

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

The post 9 Major Chatbot Trends for 2021 appeared first on BotCore.

Why Voice Bots Are The Future Of Contact Center Customer Service

Abhishek Shanbhag — Thu, 05 Nov 2020 11:31:00 +0000

Why Voice Bots Are The Future Of Contact Center Customer Service

2020 is the year of customer service transformation. The unique challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic caused a wave of uncertainty and panic among consumers.

Customers’ natural tendency to prefer voice call support over other self-service channels in times of crisis led to unprecedented call volumes and put tremendous pressure on traditional IVR systems, support agents, and their ability to respond and address all queries. This led to longer than usual wait-times, with calls dropping automatically after a few minutes, thus increasing customers’ frustration levels. Moreover, most customers were unwilling to go through extensive IVR menus and frequent agent transfers or repeatedly ask the same query to get the right support.

Additionally, voice-based channels are not only difficult to scale but are costly too, as traditional voice interaction, on average, costs $15 per exchange. Yet, voice as a medium to provide customer support isn’t going anywhere but is undergoing a massive change with the emergence of AI-powered voice bots.

In fact, Gartner predicts that by 2023, 25% of customer interactions will be via voice.

So, let’s explore what voice bots are and why they are the future of contact center customer service.

What are voice bots?

A voice bot is a computer program that understands spoken natural language and uses synthesised voice to converse with people. AI-powered speech recognition technology enables voice bots to recognize users’ spoken queries and respond to inquiries using text or voice.

In other words, voice bots are computers that can speak with people.

These bots are a scalable way to provide engaging, personalized, and interactive human-like support and ensure speedy resolution for your customers. Moreover, they ease the burden of human agents, allowing them to focus on more productive, higher-value work and pressing customer issues.

For example, you want to book a flight. Now, instead of going through the myriad of traditional IVR options, simply call up the contact center and say, “I want to book a flight to New York.” The bot will ask you for other details, including the date of the journey, preferred departure time, and book for you the flight of your choice, or directly route you to the right agent, saving you the long and tiresome drill of a legacy IVR system.

Hence, voice bots shall pave the way for interactive and wholesome conversational IVR in the contact centers.

Essential capabilities of a voice bot

Here, we list down the core capabilities that a voice bot should have to deliver better conversational experiences.

1. Understand the ‘intent’

Voice bots leverage natural language processing (NLP) to comprehend the semantics of the human language, including grammar, synonyms, canonical word forms, and slang.

Customers aren’t always literal in what they utter. NLP helps extract the intent behind user utterance and helps voice bots understand the meaning behind the words. For example, when a customer says phrases like “sure” or “why not,” the bot must be able to understand that they are most probably saying “yes.”

Hence, intent analysis is one of the most significant capabilities of a voice bot.

2. Allow a barge-in

The ability to pause, listen, and speak accordingly, whenever a customer interrupts an ongoing interaction saying, “Sorry, but that’s not what I’m looking for” or “no, I am not interested in this product,” is one of the best features of a smart AI-enabled voice bot.

3. Streaming recognition

Speedy and efficient resolution is essential for every business. Therefore, a bot must be able to interpret and act at the same pace at which the customer speaks. Slow responses and lags may hamper the reputation of a business.

4. Personalization

When a customer calls a business, they are looking for a fast response. For instance, after reaching a contact center, if customers need to identify themselves through details like account number, id, address, etc., it can really add to their frustration levels.

Therefore, optimal integration with the support desk database is vital for the bot to greet the caller by name, know caller history, identify the likely reason for the call based on past interactions and customer persona, and tailor suggestions based on the customer knowledge.

5. Handover to a live agent

At any point during the conversation, if the bot is unable to answer the user issue or if the customer asks for an agent handover, the bot must be capable of transferring the call to the right human agent or subject matter expert.

6. Keep Learning

An AI-powered voice bot must never stop learning. It should leverage its machine learning capabilities to improve accuracy and continuously learn from past interactions.

Advantages of voice bots

With voice bots, you can reap the following benefits –

1. Provide fast resolution to customers

Research by Harvard Business Review has concluded Customers who have a complaint handled in less than five minutes go on to spend more on future purchases.

Therefore, a customer complaint handled quickly can turn into a potential opportunity for earning more profit. Traditional IVRs force customers to go through multiple options and menus, wait for the next available agent, or try again during regular business hours. However, voice bots offer instant resolution with 24X7 support, even scheduling agent call-backs if needed.

2. Scale up your voice operations and reduce costs

A single voice bot can engage with thousands of customers at the same time and provide personalized support to each user. Moreover, by offloading mundane, repetitive tasks from human agents, contact centers can manage many more support issues than otherwise possible and dramatically reduce costs.

3. Reduce transaction times

When it comes to speed, voice is any day faster and more customer-friendly than typing. Moreover, specific tasks, such as purchases, bookings, and cancellations, can be performed more quickly by bots than humans, hence reducing the overall transaction times.

4. Humanize support staff

Repetitive tasks, the mundane nature of everyday operations, and the pressure to close as many tickets as possible often sap the humanity out of support center agents. With bots taking over most of the repetitive tasks and easing the workload of contact center staff, your support staff can take out the time to deliver human connection whenever needed.

5. Create sales opportunities

Voice bots continuously learn from past interactions and are equipped with natural language understanding (NLU) and synthesis; they can deduce what the customer really means and deliver more contextual, meaningful, and human-like conversations and provide personalized product recommendations. Such interactive voice engagements create opportunities for new sales.

Voice bots - The future of contact center customer service

Voice bots are indeed the future of contact center customer engagement. They lead to an enormous reduction in cost by taking over the resolution of common and repetitive queries at scale.

Moreover, they make personalized recommendations based on the customers’ preferences and previous purchases and enhance revenue through cross-selling and upselling.

The speed, accuracy, and 24X7 availability of voice bots improve first call resolution rates and positively impact customer experience.

At Acuvate, we help clients develop a voice of their own with our enterprise bot-building platform called BotCore, supporting them in delivering exceptional customer support by converting text to lifelike speech using Microsoft’s Azure Cognitive Services.

If you’d like to learn more about the top customer experience trends to watch for in 2021, please feel free to get in touch with one of our customer experience experts for a personalized consultation.

The post Why Voice Bots Are The Future Of Contact Center Customer Service appeared first on BotCore.

AI Chatbots Archives - BotCore

Power Virtual Agents & Power Automate – Truly Powerful!

Power Virtual Agents & Power Automate – Truly Powerful!

Introduction

Understanding Power Virtual Agents

Understanding Power Automate

Integrating Power Virtual Agents With Power Automate

Some key benefits include:

Conclusion

The DOs and DON’Ts of Conversational AI

The DOs and DON’Ts of Conversational AI

DOs and DON’Ts of Conversational AI

1. Ask yourself — what purpose is my bot designed to serve?

2. Choose the right platform and expertise.

3. Security and privacy are must-haves

4. Simplify. Simplify. Simplify

5. Human handoff is always key.

6. Never stop working on making your conversational AI solution better.

7. Don’t forget to integrate your bot with existing systems and digital channels.

8. Don’t forget to check — How successful is my bot?

Want to implement the best-in-class conversational AI technology? Talk to our experts.

Optimize your customer support in this holiday season using customer engagement bots

Optimize your customer support in this holiday season using customer engagement bots

Optimize your customer support in this holiday season using AI chatbots for customer service

1. Help shoppers find the right products.

2. Answer frequently asked questions (FAQs)

3. Offer prompt round-the-clock support.

4. Escalate irate customers to the human agents

5. Drive lead generation and reduce cart abandonment with live chat triggers

How can Acuvate help?

Using Human Hand Off in Power Virtual Agents for Better Success

Using Human Hand Off in Power Virtual Agents for Better Success

Why is human-in-the-loop essential?

1. User Sentiment

2. Critical conversations

3. Highly-complex issues

4. User request

5. Training and Feedback

Initiating a handover to a human agent with Power Virtual Agents

Pre-requisites:

Types of agent handoff triggers:

Handoff integration models:

Contextual variables transferred upon hand-off:

How can Acuvate help?

11 Examples of Facebook Messenger Chatbots To Take Inspiration From

11 Examples of Facebook Messenger Chatbots To Take Inspiration From

10 Inspiring Facebook Messenger Bots

1. Enjoy a healthy breakfast with Quaker Oats’ chatbot for Messenger.

2. SAL - Your personal skincare assistant by POND’s

3. Unilever’s All Things Hair Chatbot (Athena bot)

4. Sustainable clothing brand, prAna’s chatbot for Messenger

5. Estee Lauder’s Lip Artist

6. Dom - Your one-stop-shop for scrumptious Pizzas

7. Schedule your in-store service appointments with Sephora’s chatbot for Messenger

8. Discovering health with Whole Foods

9. Book a memorable stay with Marriott

10. Get the best clothing, accessories, and advice for new moms with Kindred Bravely

11. WHO fights COVID-19 misinformation with Facebook Messenger

How can Acuvate help?

How can AI and chatbots improve support agent experience & productivity

How can AI and chatbots improve support agent experience & productivity

The Different Ways AI improves Agent Experience and Productivity

1. Cognitive Search

2. Smart AI Advisor

3. Reduce agent effort by understanding customer intent

4. Act as an AI assistant

5. Assist in quality control through active listening

Get Started

Further Reading:

Using AR and chatbots to increase customer engagement

Using AR and chatbots to increase customer engagement

What is Augmented Reality (AR)?

#1 POND’S

#2 Sephora

#3 Madison Reed

#4 IKEA

The benefits of integrating augmented reality and chatbots

1. Unique selling point

2. Increase engagement with personalized experiences

3. Higher revenue