Artificial Intelligence Bots Archives - BotCore

5 Advanced Capabilities to look for in an IT Helpdesk Bot

Abhishek Shanbhag — Mon, 04 Oct 2021 10:08:00 +0000

5 Advanced Capabilities to look for in an IT Helpdesk Bot

The past year has witnessed the rapid adoption of IT helpdesk chatbots as remote work increased and companies received an influx of IT service requests. With employees trying to access different applications simultaneously and remotely, incidents and issues surged, ranging from simple ones like setting up VPN and authentication to complex troubleshooting.

IT helpdesk bots enable self-service by addressing simple, repetitive requests instantly. Being available 24X7, they can handle multiple requests at once at lower costs to the organization, allowing IT support agents to focus on other higher priority issues.

Since they were first launched, IT helpdesk bots have matured and now possess a host of powerful capabilities.

Let’s look at some of the advanced functionalities to look for in an IT Helpdesk bot.

Capabilities to look for in an IT Helpdesk Bot

1. One-stop solution for all your IT needs

The foremost purpose of an IT chatbot is to act as a virtual IT assistant, ensuring employees receive timely support on all their IT issues, whether it’s resetting passwords, updating software, resolving network outages, or creating and tracking IT tickets.

Common IT use cases in various areas include the following –

Fulfillment of common IT requests
Login to the VPN, install hardware/software, reset passwords, renew software licenses.
Management of IT Assets
Submit requests for hardware/software, check approval status, return devices, report a stolen device, wipe or disable a stolen device.
Automate incident management
Unlock accounts, report network outages, create and escalate major incidents, assist in troubleshooting IT issues (For example, WiFi connectivity problems), provide real-time IT alerts and notifications.
Answer network and configuration related FAQs
Configure connections with a network printer, tutorials on virus scanning and anti-virus software updates, troubleshooting guides based on various Windows versions, installing Microsoft 365, recovering deleted M365 accounts.

Learn More: Create Ticket/Incident Use Case

2. Understand the user’s intention

The IT bot must use powerful technologies, such as Natural Language Processing (NLP), Natural Language Understanding (NLU), and Machine Learning (ML), to understand the user’s intent and recommend suitable solutions.

Often, similar questions may confuse IT bots, and users may not receive the solutions they are looking for at the moment. In such a scenario, IT bots must reaffirm the user’s intention before providing answers.

3. Agent Handover capabilities

In certain scenarios, IT bots cannot handle employee queries, and the conversation may require a handover to a human agent. The issue may be complicated, or the employee may be anxious or frustrated. The IT bot must present the user with a “chat with an agent” option in such a case.

Capabilities that ensure a seamless handover include –

Handing over chat transcripts such as details about context and sentiment analysis scores.
Seamless integration with existing IT helpdesk software, including Service Now, JIRA, Service Desk Plus, etc., and live agent software, including Salesforce, LiveChat, etc.
Translating queries for the human agents while escalating the chat in cases where multilingual support is provided.
Agent observation, that is, agents merely supervise and monitor bot conversations instead of completely taking charge. In such cases, the IT bot privately takes agent authorization before recommending solutions to employees.

Learn More: Handover to Live Agent Use Case

4. Robotic Process Automation

Robotic Process Automation, or RPA, leverages artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to perform repetitive tasks like data entry, calculations, handling routine queries, etc.

The combination of RPA and IT helpdesk chatbots is powerful as it can solve significant operational and workflow-related issues for organizations. The automation abilities of RPA integrated with the cognitive capabilities of chatbots help IT teams automate processes end-to-end, perform transactions on the user’s behalf, and reduce costs.

The RPA-powered bot integrates with multiple disparate backend systems, retrieves information from such systems, and handles complex requests and queries at scale.

When the IT bot receives a request, it will ask a few questions to confirm the user’s intention and trigger the RPA bot to perform specific tasks without routing them to an agent.

5. Additional advanced capabilities

Other advanced capabilities you should look out for in your IT Helpdesk bot include –

Multilingual support
Even though English is one of the most popular languages globally, merely 7.5% of the world’s population are native speakers of the language. Organizations need to provide IT assistance to their employees in the language of their choice so that they feel included and supported. An IT bot must possess multilingual capabilities and answer employee queries in multiple languages, including German, Italian, Spanish, French, etc.
Search beyond the internal knowledge base
When needed, the IT bot must be capable of fetching relevant information from the internet when the answer to the employee’s query isn’t available in the company’s knowledge database.
Ability to create or update bot responses
The IT chatbot’s admin portal must allow users to add FAQs, create conversational flows, and modify bot responses whenever needed.
Take chat backup
Another interesting capability to look out for is the bot’s capability to take backups of employee chatbots and share them via email when requested.

How can Acuvate help?

At Acuvate, we help clients deploy IT Helpdesk bots with our enterprise bot-building platform called BotCore.

Key capabilities of our BotCore include –

An intuitive, low-code, graphical interface that allows the quick implementation of AI chatbots
Seamless integration with existing ITSM systems (ServiceNow, ServiceDesk Plus, JIRA, etc.) and AI services.
Our chatbots can be designed to simulate highly complex employee conversations.
As a Microsoft Gold Partner, we leverage the best of Microsoft’s AI, machine learning (ML), and natural language processing (NLP) technologies.
Our bots are deployable on almost all popular enterprise messaging channels and support multiple languages, including English, German, French, Italian, etc.
Users can create/update responses using rich media such as Buttons, Carousel, Images, Videos, etc., by dragging and dropping the required elements.
If the bot does not completely comprehend the user’s query, it will surface the top seven Bing search results.

To know more about our IT Helpdesk bots, click here, or please feel free to schedule a personalized consultation with our experts.

The post 5 Advanced Capabilities to look for in an IT Helpdesk Bot appeared first on BotCore.

5 Reasons For Enterprise Chatbot Failure and How to avoid them

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

5 Reasons For Enterprise Chatbot Failure and How to avoid them

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

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

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

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

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

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

5 Reasons for Enterprise Chatbot Failure

1. Trying to achieve too much at the onset

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

2. Lack of alignment on success metrics

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

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

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

3. Lack of involvement from business users

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

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

4. Lack of specificity

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

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

4. Lack of specificity

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

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

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

Tips to avoid chatbot failure

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

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

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

How can Acuvate help?

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

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

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

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

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

How Chatbots Can Boost The Customer Retention Rate

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

How Chatbots Can Boost The Customer Retention Rate

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Omnichannel customer engagement

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

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

Such wholesome customer experiences help reduce churn and boost retention.

2. Personalized engagement and recommendations

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

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

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

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

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

3. Making purchases easier

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

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

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

4. Going local with multilingual bots

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

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

5. Asking customers for feedback

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

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

6. Respond to customer queries 24x7

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

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

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

Get Started

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

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

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

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

BotCore’s core capabilities include –

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

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

How is AI Transforming Enterprise Software Applications

Rakesh Reddy — Thu, 25 Jun 2020 10:10:00 +0000

How Is AI Transforming Enterprise Software Applications

A recent survey by Gartner predicts, “By 2021, 40% of new enterprise applications implemented by service providers will include AI technologies.”

The world of business is undergoing a massive change owing to the rapid emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) for enterprise applications. Indeed, artificial intelligence has the power to solve several organizational problems as it offers functionalities that humans cannot practically perform at the same rate and accuracy.

AI has quickly changed status from a “technology to experiment” to a “technology to deploy.” By 2025, most enterprises will be using AI-enabled apps to gain a competitive edge from streamline operations, more incredible product innovation, and improved customer satisfaction.

Drivers of this shift include an unprecedented growth of enterprise data, advances in machine learning (ML), natural language processing (NLP) capabilities and the need to accelerate digital transformation journey.

Below, we present you with the latest insights into how AI is transforming enterprise software apps.

A Glimpse at AI for Enterprise Applications

1. Embracing conversational AI to simplify data analytics consumption

While data analysis is critical, it is extremely time-consuming to sift through multiple business dashboards and reports and find relevant data. To overcome such limitations, AI-enabled virtual assistants are integrated with business intelligence apps.

AI-enabled virtual assistants, leverage the NLP technology to converse with users in natural language. By merely initiating a chat on the enterprise messaging app, and sending simple messages like “What is the sales of product A for 2017?”, employees and business leaders can procure in-depth insights in the most granular form of data, without switching between multiple tools and dashboards. Users need not manually filter data to analyze information and arrive at crucial decisions.

This, AI is transforming the consumption of business intelligence and analytics, especially for on-field employees (for example, sales agents) or CxOs, who need quick access to information without having to dig through heaps of data.

Learn More: Business Intelligence Chatbots

2. Securing Every Aspect of Enterprise IT through AI

With the rise of remote working across the globe and as IT decision-making becomes more democratic, enterprises cannot ignore the increased threat of cyber attacks.

To combat the threat and secure every aspect of the IT infrastructure, organizations are scrambling to deploy applications that integrate machine learning to detect possible threats and vulnerabilities in real-time.

These tools use ML techniques to spot anomalies in network traffic, emails and user activities. Hence, they can quickly identify a potential attack and take steps to mitigate it, even if the threat is unlike anything the organization has witnessed before.

3. Transforming IT through AIOps

AIOps, an emerging variation of DevOps, uses machine learning (ML) algorithms on IT operative data to derive insights that optimize and improve operations.

While DevOps automates and simplifies IT operations, AIOps goes a step further by extracting information that is useful in overseeing IT activities.

Sometimes, it can automatically take requisite action based on such insights, thus enabling IT personnel to supervise larger IT environments than otherwise possible.

4. Making Intranet Smarter with AI

AI can make your digital workplace more intelligent – right from content management and collaboration to information accessibility, employee communication, and social networking.

Modern intranets, equipped with AI technologies, serve the following purposes –

Cognitive enterprise search: Cognitive enterprise search is an AI-enabled smart search tool that connects all the internal and external enterprise systems, thus acting as a one-stop-search engine for enterprise-wide knowledge and information It understands natural language phrases and enables shows personalized search results based on the users’ roles, locations, interests and past search activities
Automated metadata management: Enterprises can use AI bots to automate metadata generation, data-tagging, classification, and organization and generate good-quality taxonomy recommendations. As a result, organizations can illuminate and maximize the value of unstructured data
Personalized employee experiences: AI empowers the intranet to break the clutter and deliver personalized content recommendations to the users, based on their interests, locations, and job profiles
Improved collaboration: AI analyzes the user’s persona to suggest the right subject-matter experts to connect with within the organization; thus fostering a collaborative workplace culture
AI-powered analytics: AI-powered analytics help in harnessing and analyzing intranet users’ data. This provides insights into how employees across departments are engaging with the intranet.

5. Combining AI with CRM

The benefits of integrating AI into your customer relationship management are manifold. Here are a few reasons to start contemplating an AI-driven CRM software –

Increased CRM adoption: AI-enabled chatbots boost the CRM adoption rates by

(i) Automating data entry

(ii) Simplifying the data updating process

(iii) Allowing users to access information faster

(iv) Sending personalized updates automatically.

Prediction of future customer behavior: Artificial intelligence can draw learnings from the customers’ past decisions and historical engagement to generate valuable sales. Moreover, AI can analyze customers’ sentiments, to predict their future behavior
Automated segmentation: AI segments customers automatically into groups with similar characteristics and ensures your messages reach the right audience at the right time
Price optimization: AI can analyze past client data to predict the ideal discount rate and pricing that is most likely to lock the sales deal

6. Optimizing Supply Chain Management Through AI

Several enterprises are investing in AI-powered supply chain management apps. Such applications help improve just-in-time deliveries, anticipate potential issues, reduce costs, and recover from supply disruptions.

By leveraging AI-powered analytics, businesses can generate valuable recommendations and forecasts to build a resilient supply chain. Some of these scenarios include – demand forecasting, stock visibility, detecting out-of-stock situations, and supplier risk analysis.

Speaking volumes about the utility of these apps, a study by Mckinsey has found, “among organizations that were using AI for supply chain management, 61% experienced cost decreases, and 63% saw revenue increases.”

Learn More: Creating A Digital Supply Chain For The New Normal

7. Simplifying Vendor Billing through AI

AI is capable of simplifying financial operations within the enterprise.

Moving a step ahead from traditional Optical Character Recognition (OCR) systems that extract data from templated documents, an AI-embedded invoice management software can look at any document and extract all the critical information.

For example, by just feeding the software with invoices from different vendors, AI can figure out who the invoice is from, the due date, the amount to be paid, etc., without any human intervention.

Get Started

AI is and will continue playing a significant role in transforming enterprise software applications. As seen above, one cannot deny the essential role of AI-enabled apps in driving improvements in quality, speed, and efficiency within organizations. While it can be overwhelming for organizations to transform their operations and systems overnight, beginning the AI journey with low-hanging fruits can be a good start.

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

Further Insights:

The post How is AI Transforming Enterprise Software Applications appeared first on BotCore.

12 Experts Share The Biggest Chatbot Trends For 2020!

Poonam Chug — Fri, 14 Feb 2020 17:16:00 +0000

12 Experts Share The Biggest Chatbot Trends For 2020!

In the past decade, we have seen the emergence of several AI technologies. And one of the most significant one among them are chatbots. In the last few years, we have not only seen the emergence of AI chatbots but also their exponential growth and rapid adoption among enterprises.

While enterprises are already using chatbots for different use cases, we believe this is just the beginning of a long journey of this sophisticated technology. As someone who helped several medium and large organizations deploy enterprise chatbots, we’ve asked 11 experts the following question.

According to you, what is the biggest chatbot trend to watch for in 2020?

Here’s what they said…

#1 “…Facebook will integrate the messaging infrastructure of Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp greatly extending the reach of chatbots…”

Chatbots haven’t yet taken off with businesses today with only approximately 1% of companies actively using them. But In 2020, Facebook will integrate the messaging infrastructure of Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp, greatly extending the reach of chatbots to over 3 billion daily active users on a single platform. We believe this will make chatbots a must-have for businesses wanting to connect with users on those popular platforms.

– Larry Kim,
CEO, MobileMonkey.
LinkedIn | Twitter

#2 “…Chatbots should become generically more efficient at identifying the intent of a user…”

“The largest technical trend I see in 2020 is that Chatbots should become generically more efficient at identifying the intent of a user. As the work done on BERT at Google starts to be incorporated into offerings, the context of words (like prepositions) within an utterance will be given weight to enable more accurate understanding.

However, Chatbots are at the Peak of Inflated Expectations in the Gartner Hype Cycle for Artificial Intelligence in 2019, but the potential return is not inconsiderable. Consequently, within business we should see an increase in Chatbot Education allowing expectation to more closely match Reality and an increase in the meaningful adoption of chatbots.”

– Keith Williams,
Chatbot Consultant, Founder, KMW3.com,
Ex-HR Services Director – Technology, Unilever.
LinkedIn

#3 “…Conversational assistants will remain an extension of the brand and a sidekick for customer care…”

“Consumers are increasingly demanding real-time engagement, including self-service tools that allow for instant Q&A and problem resolution. As technology continues to improve and evolve, conversational assistants will remain an extension of the brand and a sidekick for customer care, providing not only contextual, personalized on-demand support, but critical insights on the customer journey back to the organization. Such tools are no longer nice-to-have, but critical elements for differentiation and success in the digital economy.”

– Theodora Lau,
Founder, Unconventional Ventures, Speaker, Writer, and Startup Advisor.
LinkedIn | Twitter

#4 “…we are going to see a huge surge in chatbots deployed to understand, retain & serve customers better…”

With about little over 2 years of enterprises trying out and experimenting with chatbots for internal employee-facing use cases, many are now confident about the technology and the usefulness. And now, many businesses are switching to the next level to use chatbots to engage their customers, which was the primary goal in the first place.

From bots on webpages, portals, WhatsApp and even Facebook messenger, we are going to see a huge surge in chatbots deployed to understand, retain & serve customers better. This will reduce the time to feedback leading to quicker innovation of products by businesses.

Last but not the least, chatbots will provide the half-life extension to social platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn. These platforms will change from knowledge and communication mediums to self-service platforms – One of the rare things B2C will be adopting from B2B. Overall 2020 will be the year of chatbot rising to help humans.

– Rakesh Reddy,
CEO, Acuvate Software.
LinkedIn

#5 “…Expect structure to come from the enterprise…”

Expect structure to come from the enterprise – more specifically, expect to see key advances in 2020 coming through more extensive AI integration for bot services of all kinds. The enterprise arena is an obvious spawning ground for innovation, as businesses of every kind are crying out for intelligent and highly scalable bot solutions to connect customers with product in a timely and efficient manner.

Given the mission critical nature of any technology investment for commercial purposes, it is extremely likely that the enterprise will offer the most effective ‘test-bed’ for a rapid evolution of more adaptive and verbose solutions, thus finally delivering on the promise of a ‘near-human’ chatbot interface.

– Andy Clayton-Smith,
Executive Editor, The Record, Tudor Rose.
LinkedIn | Twitter

#6 “…It (voice technology) has reached a tipping point where you can hardly differentiate between a human and machine…”

Gartner predicts that “chatbots will power 85 percent of all customer service interactions by the year 2020 and by then the average person will have more conversations with chatbots than with their spouse.” Voice technology has developed so much that it has reached a tipping point where you can hardly differentiate between a human and machine, Google Duplex is one brilliant example. An AI-powered chatbot will supercharge businesses improving customer care by connecting them to a whole array of personalized services in real-time.

– Alvin Foo,
MD, Reprise Digital.
LinkedIn | Twitter

#7 “…using chatbots to support the productivity of work teams..”

One of the trends is using chatbots to support the productivity of work teams. They start off as simple signposts to point people in the direction of useful learning resources, insights and practical skills. We will then start to see them move up the value chain, and offer simple coaching. Over the longer-term with data analysis, we might start to see improved engagement, better decision-making, and improved psychological safety.

– Andrew Spence,
HR Transformation Director,
Glass Bead Consulting.
Twitter | LinkedIn

#8 “…we would be able to start seeing early versions of a chatbot as your sidekick at work…”

“At the business level, I believe we would be able to start seeing early versions of a chatbot as your sidekick at work. Not as advanced as JARVIS in Ironman but at the minimal, chatbot that is able to make better suggestions based on your personal preferences, parameters as well as the vast amount of data it collects of you every single minute. For instance, if my day is packed with back-to-back meetings, it could suggest blocking one hour of reflection time to process those meetings. This is on top of more accurate voice processing which enables users to communicate with the chatbot faster than typing.”

– Adrian Tan,
HR Tech Solutions Architect at PeopleStrong.
LinkedIn | Twitter

#9 “..As the quality and accuracy of chatbots improve, the number of use cases will increase…”

The two biggest chatbot trends to watch will be the increase in the number of use cases, along with improvement in usability. Frankly, when it comes to chatbots, the user experience isn’t living up to the hype, but this will change over time. Chatbots are continually learning and need to get data fed in order to understand the words and phrases used for each vertical and each particular business or organization. As chatbots keep learning, they will improve their accuracy and the ability to respond to customer inquiries.

As the quality and accuracy of chatbots improve, the number of use cases will increase. While currently used for very basic inquiries and interactions, they’ll increasingly be used to better assist customers and agents and drive more complex interactions and transactions.

– Blair Pleasant,
Co-founder, UCStrategies.
Twitter | LinkedIn

#10 “…Sentiment analysis will be increasingly applied in the development of chatbots…”

Sentiment analysis will be increasingly applied in the development of chatbots — because at the moment, let’s face it — most bots still act rather like bots.

The race to properly react to human sentiment is on! (And we’ve already seen how it can go badly wrong, in the case of Microsoft’s Tay.)

As conversational AI bots continue to improve in 2020 onwards, it should become almost impossible for a customer to realize they are speaking with a machine.

Amazon Comprehend is one example of chatbot software paving the way.

– Sam Hurley,
Managing Director, OPTIM-EYEZ.
LinkedIn | Twitter

#11 “…We are starting to see them (chatbots) being used to automating certain aspects of commerce…”

Chatbots have been through their initial experimental phase, and we are starting to see them being used to automating certain aspects of commerce. The bad news is that they are starting to be used to spam us as the other channels of interruption marketing (advertising, cold calling, unsolicited emails) dry up. If Chatbots are to be taken seriously, people need to try and start using them, not to spam, but to create real-valued business processes. What do I mean? One of the spin-offs of the new technology of the iPhone, was social media. Social Media has changed how we work and changed society. Let’s hope Chatbot energy is channeled in the same way?

– Tim Hughes,
CEO and Co-Founder, DLA Ignite.
Twitter | LinkedIn

#12 “…Voice bots will not be limited to just asking weather or playing music…”

Voice chatbots will be more powerful for 2020 as we predict it with data backed by Botanalytics. The penetration of Google Home and Amazon Alexa is increasing dramatically and usage of voice bots will not be limited to just asking weather or playing music. Banks, Insurance and Travel companies will be more in the game by providing voice chatbots with specific skill sets. Maybe not providing lots of capabilities, but focusing on some skill sets. That will be the key to get success in 2020.

– Ilker Koksal,
CEO, Botanalytics.
Twitter | LinkedIn

How Acuvate Helps Enterprises Deploy AI Chatbots

We leverage our enterprise chatbot builder platform – BotCore to help various Fortune 500 companies, SMBs, and start ups to build, deploy, manage and train AI chatbots. Our chatbots are used to improve customer service, productivity, efficiency and coordination at workplaces.

MeshBOT: World’s premier chatbot for SharePoint intranet that can solve your intranet adoption challenges.
IT Helpdesk Bot: IT Helpdesk Bot uses machine learning to learn answers to repetitive support requests and improves the speed and work productivity of your helpdesk.
SIA Bot: An intelligent sales assistant which helps your sales team in making informed decisions and improves top line revenue.
Business Intelligence Bot: A chatbot which simplifies your data consumption and interaction.

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

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7 Ways To Improve FCR At Your Contact Center

Rakesh Reddy — Fri, 10 May 2019 12:28:00 +0000

7 Ways To Improve FCR At Your Contact Center

First Call Resolution (FCR) is an indispensable metric for contact centres to measure and improve.

Research conducted by Ascent Group suggests that 60% of companies measuring FCR for a year or longer reported improvements of up to 30% in their performance. Measuring FCR is beneficial as it evaluates the efficiency of the agents, reflects the quality of customer services and provides insights on the improvement areas.

FCR is a valuable business metric as it not only improves customer satisfaction but also helps in minimizing operating costs.

For instance, let’s say a contact centre receives 25,000 calls every month and the FCR rate is 60%. This shows that 40% of calls require follow-up support. If the FCR rate improves by just 10%, there will be 2500 fewer calls every month or 60,000 fewer calls every year. This reduction in calls enables a contact center to allocate resources better, and saves a lot of time and money!

Here are 7 actionable ways you can quickly improve your FCR rate and enhance customer experience.

7 Ways To Improve FCR

1. Deploy Chatbots and Conversational IVR

Chatbots have become an essential addition at contact centres to streamline several parts of customer service. “25% of customer service and support operations will integrate bot technology across their engagement channels by 2020, up from less than two percent in 2017”, report by Gartner suggests.

Enabled by conversation AI, NLP and ML, chatbots today are capable of understanding the ‘intent’ behind customer queries and conducting human-like conversations. This ability enables them to handle tasks such as providing information, answering FAQ, sending instant responses, collecting user information, among many more. Chatbots provide self-service options to customers and can be used 24/7 for customer care.

Chatbots also act as the first line of support and only route extremely complex conversations to agents. All these capabilities of chatbots help them to engage customers until the issue is resolved – thereby reducing the need for a follow-up conversation and improving the FCR.

Another emerging bot technology to consider is conversational IVR. Powered by AI and Natural Language Processing, conversational IVRs provide a unique voice-based and hands-free solution where customers can interact using natural language as opposed to choosing the options from a long static menu offered by traditional IVRs.

Reduced customer service costs, improved CSAT, increased agent productivity, streamlined workflows, a decrease in the number of customer emails and calls are some more key business benefits of deploying bots in contact centers.

Read More:

2. Incentivize Agents to Reduce Call-Backs

Rewarding agents on resolving issues on the first call is a great way to motivate agents to perform better and an investment that companies should make as the returns that they reap on reducing the number of call-backs is much bigger.

Evaluating agents based on the average handling time can prove to be an ineffective strategy as they can close calls without successfully resolving an issue to save time. Incentivising agents on resolving customer requests on the first call would be a good long term strategy as it relieves them from the pressure of saving time and shifts the focus to effectively resolve issues. This reduces call-back from customers and in turn saves time.

3. Employ Customer Journey Analytics

Customer journey analytics can be an eminent tool at call centres to have a well-rounded understanding of customer service journey. It is one of the primary steps to resolve FCRs and build an effective interaction with customers to avoid voice calls.

Traditionally, companies have relied on customer surveys to glean insights on escalations to agents, which proved to have serious limitations. Companies are deploying customer journey analytics to accurately understand the events throughout the customer service journeys that lead to failure escalations and failure in service.

Customer journey analytics provides insights to predict the likelihood of escalation and is a great tool to proactively design self-service to customers. With customer journey analytics, structured and unstructured data from various channels like website, mobile app, chatbot can be integrated. This is useful in eliminating the silos across the channels and have a comprehensive cross-channel understanding of customer behavior, issues and drop-offs, which offers a proactive preparedness for contact center agents for potential escalations from various channels.

4. Speech Analytics

In order to measure FCR, contact centres traditionally were dependent on reports by agents, QA team analysis and customer surveys. However, these practices are becoming increasingly ineffective. Agent reports can be inaccurate and biased, QA teams usually are not so confident in the data they’re provided and customers don’t actively participate in surveys.

Organizations are therefore implementing speech analytics – a great tool to understand customer pain-points by recognising patterns and keywords in conversations that indicate customer distress or dissatisfaction.

It can be used to measure the number of customers who call more than once to resolve their problem. It also helps in identifying trends, attrition hints, process issues and any inhibitors to FCR.

Speech analytics provides actionable information about customer calls and supports root cause discovery. This allows call centers to reduce repeat calls and the need for callbacks.

5. Provide the Right Training to Agents to Improve First Call Resolution

Equipping contact center agents with exhaustive knowledge and training meticulously on their function is fundamental to improve FCRs. Agent training hours is found to be one of the biggest drivers for first call resolution that yields improved rates of FCR and higher customer satisfaction.

6. Make Customer Data Available to Agents in Real Time

Following up on the previous point, while training agents it is also essential to equip their knowledge with all the essential information they may need to effectively help a customer.

Dashboards that provide a 360-degree view of customers can be a useful tool for agents to have a better understanding of the customers that approach them. These dashboards equip agents with all the necessary information about customers like purchase history, preferences, conversation history that are essential during a live conversation to provide a seamless interaction and resolve issues on the first contact.

This reduces the handling time as agents spend less time in gathering necessary information to understand the issue.

7. Focus on next issue avoidance

Next Issue Avoidance (NIA) is a useful metric to enable agents to predict prospective customer issues. NIA is derived by analyzing data from large sets of tickets raised by customers to anticipate the issue that customers can come up with, which can be leveraged to eliminate a large number of calls.

NIA is a critical strategy adopted by several contact centres to reduce customer effort, improve contact centre effectiveness and establish loyalty from customers. Research suggests that 46% of customer support cases are avoidable by predicting the next potential problem.

Wrapping Up

As customer service costs continue to increase, measuring and improving FCR is an imperative part of any effective Customer Experience (CX) strategy. By using the right processes, approaches, technologies and resources companies can now predict and resolve issues with the least Customer Effort Score (CES), reduce contact center volume and improve CSAT.

If you’d like to learn more about improving FCR at contact centers, please feel free to get in touch with one of our contact center and AI experts for a personalized consultation.

The post 7 Ways To Improve FCR At Your Contact Center appeared first on BotCore.

Take Your Chatbots To The Next Level With These New Capabilities

Abhishek Shanbhag — Fri, 29 Mar 2019 13:25:36 +0000

Take Your Chatbots To The Next Level With These New Capabilities

The adoption of chatbots in enterprises has grown exponentially in the last decade and today, we can see organizations of all sizes using bots for a variety of use cases and functions. A report by Markets and Markets shows that the chatbot market will be worth $9.4 billion by 2024.

The chatbot technology has evolved greatly in the past decade. Bots today are equipped with a host of new capabilities and have become more sophisticated. In order to gain greater business value from bots and use them in multi-faceted ways, it’s imperative for organizations to upgrade their bots. Without further ado, here are some significant and modern capabilities you should equip your enterprise chatbot with.

Explore these New Chatbot Capabilities

1. DataOps with chatbots

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

2. Chatbot – RPA Integration

Integrating chatbots (front-office bots) with Robotic Process Automation (RPA) can enable them to navigate through back-end enterprise systems that don’t have modern APIs. RPA enables chatbots to retrieve information from these systems and handle more complex and real-time customer/employee requests and queries at scale. RPA bots can perform more mundane tasks without routing them to a human agent.

By combining the power of automation from RPA and cognitive intelligence of chatbots, organizations can take their customer and employee experience to the next level, improve productivity, reduce costs and increase competitive advantage.

3. Make chatbots repeatable

Companies deploying chatbots for their business processes need to standardize chatbots and make them consistent across all channels – for instance, chatbots deployed on a company’s social media pages cannot be different from the one deployed on their official page.

4. Voice Bots

The next generation of AI assistants in the enterprise is the voice-based virtual assistants. Enabling chatbots to interact through voice relieves the agents and customers from the need to use devices (like mouse and keyboard) to interact with business applications.

According to Gartner, By 2023, 25% of employee interactions with applications will happen via voice, up from almost 3% in 2019. Voice bots can deliver more personalized responses with contextual understanding, speech synthesis, voice recognition, and natural language processing.

5. Incorporation Of Payments Within Chatbots

According to reports, 67% of US millennials said they are likely to purchase products and services from brands using a chatbot Incorporating automated payments in the process paves the way to easier purchasing during online shopping as it eliminates the need to visit a website, as chatbots will be able to handle the entire purchasing process.

6. Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment analysis empowers chatbots with the ability to understand the emotions and mood of the user by analyzing their text or voice input. This helps chatbots to drive the conversation wisely and deliver appropriate responses. The purpose of sentiment analysis is to provide a personalized experience and make chatbots effectively respond according to the customer’s mood.

Using this technology you can understand customers’ perception of the brand, enable seamless agent handoff, improve upselling/cross-selling and deliver memorable customer experiences.

7. Improve the ability to conduct complex conversations

A key driver of user adoption is the chatbot’s ability to understand complex responses that could have multiple intents. Chatbots should predict not only what customers want but also any key information they might have forgotten.

This could be achieved by upgrading your dialog systems with new features like knowledge graph, contextual understanding, topic switching, sentiment analysis, personality, etc.

8. Handling escalations using chatbots

Intelligent digital assistants can be trained to easily escalate a customer issue to a human agent using rules or failure conditions. Other options include a built-in live chat support app for your agents or you can integrate your existing live chat software as well.

Chatbot technology is becoming increasingly sophisticated and organizations should keep up with it in order to ensure improved user experience. In 2020 and beyond we can see more intelligent chatbots that can integrate with disparate systems, understand intent better, conduct more complex conversations and deliver meaningful responses.

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

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How To Convince Your Leadership To Deploy Enterprise Chatbots

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

How To Convince Your Leadership To Deploy Enterprise Chatbots

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

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

1. Demonstrate ROI with Hard Data

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Show What The Media and Industry Experts Are Saying

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

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

3. Present Case Studies

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

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

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

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

4. Demo The Technology

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

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

5. Suggest A Pilot Project

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Are Chatbots Boosting The CRM Adoption Rates

Rakesh Reddy — Fri, 08 Mar 2019 18:36:00 +0000

How Are Chatbots Boosting The CRM Adoption Rates

CRMs and the adoption problem

Less than 40% of businesses have a CRM adoption rate over 90% – CSO Insights.

One of the biggest challenges organizations face with Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platforms is the low usability and adoption rates. In our experience, this is caused primarily due to two significant reasons:

Manual data entry: According to HubSpot, manual data entry is the no. 1 CRM adoption challenge. Sales and customer support representatives are often bogged down by the extensive manual entry of customer data. This not only affects their productivity but also demotivates them to use CRM more often.
Poor UX: CRMs with poorly designed UX also result in decreased user adoption, productivity, and loss of sales opportunities which negatively impacts revenue.

A sales representative’s time is invaluable to the company and cutting down on the time spent on manual tasks like data entry allows representatives to close more deals and perform better.

One effective way to tackle these challenges easily is by integrating a chatbot with your CRM system. CRM chatbots can automate and simplify data-entry, provide faster access to data, enhance the user experience, boost adoption and empower sales reps to focus more on selling.

How Chatbots Help Boost CRM Adoption

1. Automate data entry

The CRM bot mines audio calls whenever a sales rep talks with a prospect or account executive speaks with a customer. It captures keynotes, details, insights from the prospect/customer and enters the data automatically into the CRM system, which sales reps have been manually entering. Bots can go to the lengths of logging all the customer information like budget, cost, challenges, and objections about a product while representatives are on a sales call with the customer.

2. Simplify data entry

Updating customer records will be made simpler with bots as sales representatives can achieve this without logging into the CRM system every time an update has to be done. Users can chat with the CRM chatbot in natural language and provide voice or text commands to update the records with the relevant details. Ex: “Change lifecycle stage of Customer X from lead to opportunity”, “Add customer Y’s phone number – 1234567890”.

3. Access data faster

In addition to simplifying and automating data entry, CRM chatbots also enable users to access customer information via chat. Users can ask natural language questions like “What is the deal size of customer A”, “When is the follow up due for customer B” etc. right within their actively used messaging app. This conversational workflow eliminates the need to continuously navigate through the complex UX of a CRM system for gaining customer/lead insights.

According to the input received, chatbots can send data in simple text or multimedia formats like graphs or pie charts, etc.

4. Personalized Alerts

Driven by artificial intelligence, CRM bots will be able to send alerts to sales representatives and account executives about pending action items, KPIs and even sales insights that come in handy during interactions with customers.

Integrate Chatbots With Your CRM systems For Better Adoption and productivity

Chatbots solve the two biggest problems that hinder your CRM adoption rate – manual data entry and poorly designed UX. Chatbots act as a single point of contact for your sales reps for data entry and data access. Users no longer have to go through the clunky UX of a CRM every time they need something from the system – a quick chat does it all.

The simplification and automation of data entry frees up sales reps who will have more time to handle critical and value-adding tasks that greatly improve productivity and revenue.

Acuvate helps organizations build CRM chatbots with our enterprise chatbot builder platform – BotCore. We support integrations for a plethora of CRM systems including Microsoft Dynamics 365, Salesforce, Zendesk, Oracle, etc. If you’d like to learn more about this topic and how our clients are benefitting from CRM bots, please feel free to get in touch with one of our chatbot consultants for a personalized consultation.

The post How Are Chatbots Boosting The CRM Adoption Rates appeared first on BotCore.

7 quick tips for designing a chatbot personality

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

7 Quick Tips For Designing A Chatbot Personality

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

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

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

7 quick tips for designing a chatbot personality

understand the persona of your target user

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

purpose of the chatbot

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

brand tone of voice

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

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

design chatbot personality at a country level

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

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

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

Learn More: Multilingual Chatbots: Benefits And Key Implementation Considerations

the greeting/opening a conversation

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

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

handling unexpected and unknown questions

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

humour

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

conclusion

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

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

FREE EBOOK

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The post 7 quick tips for designing a chatbot personality appeared first on BotCore.