Conversational AI Archives - BotCore Enterprise Chatbot Fri, 15 Mar 2024 09:24:45 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.6.1 https://botcore.ai/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/cropped-favicon-32x32-1-70x70.png Conversational AI Archives - BotCore 32 32 How Can Traditional Banks Challenge the Fintech Space With Conversational AI? https://botcore.ai/blog/traditional-banks-challenge-the-fintech-space-with-conversational-ai/ Mon, 05 Sep 2022 11:45:26 +0000 https://botcore.ai/?p=10687 How Can Traditional Banks Challenge the Fintech Space With Conversational AI? In today’s highly digitized business landscape, customers have come to expect seamless engagement across the broad spectrum of banking and financial services. More than two years into the pandemic, thanks to powerful advancements in artificial intelligence, automation, machine learning, blockchain, and other technologies, a […]

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How Can Traditional Banks Challenge the Fintech Space With Conversational AI?

In today’s highly digitized business landscape, customers have come to expect seamless engagement across the broad spectrum of banking and financial services. More than two years into the pandemic, thanks to powerful advancements in artificial intelligence, automation, machine learning, blockchain, and other technologies, a new wave of digitally-enabled financial firms have taken the entire banking industry by storm.

Fintech firms, also known as the digital challenger banks (Venmo, CashApp, PayPal), have quickly exploited traditional banks’ inability to scale up their digital transformation initiatives. Long branch queues, highly complex application forms, cumbersome login procedures, stringent guidelines, and inconsistent banking portal designs for different use cases have deterred customers from engaging with traditional banks.

Instead, banking customers have now made a steady move toward fintech firms providing an easy, cohesive, and well-designed suite of online and mobile banking services. From opening a bank account to making immediate peer-to-peer transfers to shopping online, executing international transfers, or making contactless payments, the ability to effortlessly perform common banking tasks from the convenience of one’s home and at the fingertips has made third-party fintech services a go-to choice for the younger, new generation of customers.

Research shows that 88% of incumbent financial institutions believe that part of their business will be lost to standalone fintech companies in the next five years.

However, all is not lost for traditional banks. To ensure frictionless banking experiences, reduce customer dropout, and build unified digital banking practices that can help traditional banks challenge fintech firms, it’s time to adopt conversational AI in banking, more popularly known as conversational banking.

Let’s explore more. 

Introducing Conversational AI in Banking

Conversational AI in banking can help traditional banks challenge fintech firms. AI-enabled chatbots in banking can recognize, understand, and resolve simple and complex requests while avoiding back and forth for the customers.

An intuitive conversational interface, unmatched speed and convenience, and the ability to offer a wide range of banking services on various digital channels, including social messaging apps, SMS, IVR, and the web, make conversational banking one of the strongest tools to challenge up and coming fintech firms.

Legacy banking systems are not capable of supporting the changing market expectations of today’s banking customers. With chatbots in banking, traditional banks can offer services akin to fintech firms while allowing banking agents to focus on other critical tasks that require higher attention.

Some of the features that chatbots in banking offer include the following —

1. 24x7 accessibility

Customer dynamics have changed drastically during the pandemic. Coming across a customer who needs banking services or answers to basic banking queries at an odd 2 am at night is not surprising in today’s times.

Even when bank branches and call centers have closed shop for the day, banking chatbots can help customers get answers to their queries and help them with any support they need 24×7.

2. A cohesive and intuitive experience.

Conversational AI in banking can help customers access a range of banking services via text or voice. Specifically, banking chatbots can overcome the hassles of traditional IVR systems and guide customers through everyday banking services such as money transfers, loan applications, blocking lost cards, closing and opening accounts, etc.

Also known as conversational IVR, banking chatbots integrated within traditional IVR systems can improve first-call resolution by quickly providing personalized answers and solutions to customer queries.

Customers are freed from the hassle of filling up long, complicated forms. Instead, chatbots can handle their queries, automate transactions, and comprehend what the customer really wants using natural language processing (NLP) and natural language understanding (NLU) technologies.

What’s more, contact center agents can leverage chatbots to draw up relevant background information on the customer, thus ensuring speedy query resolution.

3. Multilingual and omnichannel

Banking chatbots can be made available over a plethora of channels in the customers’ preferred languages. Technologies such as AI, NLP, and context management make it possible for chatbots to provide consistent experiences across all channels while ensuring customers can easily switch channels without having to start over.

Consistent conversational banking experiences leave a positive impression of your bank and its services. Moreover, allowing customers the option to chat in their preferred language makes them comfortable with your bank’s services, keeps them engaged, and is more likely to help banks retain them.

Personalized banking at the fingertips

Conversational banking chatbots can provide scalable, cost-effective, and personalized banking services at the customers’ fingertips. Customer support bots in banking can integrate with backend systems and also form comprehensive customer personas to act as “personal financial advisors.”

Not only can banks then offer personalized financial insights and product recommendations, but they can also design products and services tailored to their customer’s needs.

Additionally, banks can drive revenue and sales by offering customers products they are eligible for but aren’t fully aware of.

Sneaking in a quick example of a banking chatbot

Fintech Space With Conversational Ai Chat

How can Acuvate help?

At Acuvate, we help clients build intelligent chatbots using our accelerator BotCore, Microsoft’s Power Virtual Agents.

Interested to know more about Conversational AI or chatbots. Connect with us today.

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Deliver Total Experience With Microsoft Power Virtual Agents https://botcore.ai/blog/total-experience-with-microsoft-power-virtual-agents/ Thu, 11 Aug 2022 12:18:02 +0000 https://botcore.ai/?p=10556 Deliver Total Experience with Microsoft Power Virtual Agents With multiple technologies working together to decipher the language, context, and intent to respond in an almost human manner, Conversational AI has seen staggering growth in the last few years. 70% of the world’s white-collar population has adopted it as a way of life. Today, organizations worldwide […]

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Deliver Total Experience with Microsoft Power Virtual Agents

With multiple technologies working together to decipher the language, context, and intent to respond in an almost human manner, Conversational AI has seen staggering growth in the last few years. 70% of the world’s white-collar population has adopted it as a way of life. Today, organizations worldwide are using chatbots, among other technologies, to meet employee and customer experience needs and deliver what Gartner calls Total Experience (TX).

Microsoft Power Virtual Agents is one such intelligent no-code solution that allows businesses of all sizes to create chatbots to engage with customers and employees. This bot-builder is part of the Microsoft Power Platform that gives it access to powerful technologies, making it a compelling tool for your business.

What is Power Virtual Agent?

At its core, Microsoft Power Virtual Agents provides the building blocks for customizable AI chatbots. It allows businesses to stay connected to customers, employees, and other intended users 24×7, answer queries in real-time and improve self-service capabilities through company websites or employee platforms. Eventually, chatbots designed on Power Virtual Agents reduce the workload on CX, HR, and IT helpdesk teams.

Easy to customize for the unique needs of each business, Power Virtual Agents do not depend on high-end resources like data scientists and developers. This allows any business user, even in smaller firms, to build bots that deliver the same interactivity and experience as large brands. In addition, Power Virtual Agents is available as a standalone application on the web or as an app within Microsoft Teams, giving businesses the flexibility on where they choose to deploy it.

Power Virtual Agents vs. other bot builders – what's the difference?

With conversational AI becoming the new norm for TX, many fly-by-the-night bot builders are available. But none with the nuances and ease of use of Power Virtual Agents.

Some features that differentiate Power Virtual Agents include –

1. Ease of use and cost-effectiveness

Power Virtual Agents allows the bot to be built quickly without any high-end resources or skills. With its no-code, intuitive UI, PVA is perfect for users with little or no technical capabilities and advanced developers. In addition, the pre-built drag-and-drop features supported by Microsoft Power Automate make this no-code process easy to deploy.

2. Deep customization

Business can integrate their relevant processes with Power Virtual Agents with pre-built connectors. This allows them to quickly customize and deploy bots on your website, social media, and Microsoft Teams, among other platforms, to engage with the end-user in various contexts.

3. Simple escalation hierarchy

Power Virtual Agents addresses low-level requests, freeing up customer service resources. But it also enables the bot to flag a concern that needs live, human intervention. Ultimately, this means a quick resolution of customer or employee queries despite lean dependence on person-hours.

4. Performance monitoring

The inbuilt data-driven insights and AI-enabled analytics allow for real-time monitoring of the chatbot’s performance. This ensures continuous learning and improvement in a company’s conversational AI experience.

5. Real-time adaptation

The Microsoft Azure machine learning capabilities inherent to PVA allow the chatbots to adapt to real-time situations and deliver accurate responses. This ensures that your bot is almost human-like in its response, making the experience more personalized for the customer.

6. Round-the clock-customer support

No more waiting for opening hours! Chatbot’ agents’ can now be available for end-users in a time-zone agnostic manner. So, whether your employee wants information on healthcare insurance at 2 am during an emergency or your customer asks WISMO at midnight, you can rest assured that they will get the answers they need.

The evolution of Power Virtual Agents

As recently as May 2022, Microsoft announced many transformative new features that make Power Virtual Agents more potent than ever. According to Microsoft, the new and improved platform unifies the sophistication of Microsoft Azure Bot Framework Composer’s pro-code capabilities with the simplicity of the existing low-code platform. Simply put, Power Virtual Platform now allows professional developers and subject matter experts to work collaboratively to build a bot on the unified Microsoft Bot Building Studio. An additional feature will enable it to go from a simple bot-builder to a complete suite of interactive voice response (IVR) builder. This is made possible by incorporating an end-to-end backend support framework for telephony. It now also includes the agility of Power BI, which helps with data visualization, self-service analytics, and data protection.

This evolution is built around four main themes:

1. Unified bot building to leverage the true potential of the Microsoft stack

With the new single unified bot building studio, Power Virtual Agents now incorporates-

  • The advanced functionality of Bot Framework Composer with the bot-building experience of Power Virtual Agents.
  • Deep integration of Bot Framework Composer and Microsoft Cognitive Services, allowing professional developers and domain experts to collaborate easily in building powerful conversational bots and IVRs.

2. Advanced authoring for richer experiences

With this new feature, Power Virtual Agents now delivers –

  • Richer conversations with integrated multi-media response support through images and video sharing, adaptive cards, and quick response capabilities
  • Data storage, reuse, and transformation for professional developers. Made possible by the use of the Power FX editor to connect to the custom API via the Microsoft Power Platform connectors, elicit a response, resolve it into its parts and ultimately transform the information for use within the conversation
  • Reaction to events with contextual responses. For example, for a product delivery query, any system information on delivery updates will trigger the bot to respond with “Your product will reach you soon.” or “Your product is in transit in X location.”
  • Logic using variables, loops, and advanced conversational flows to make the interaction as close to mimicking a human interaction as possible

3. Seamless Fusion Teams collaboration

According to Gartner, 84% of companies have set up Fusion Teams, i.e., multi-disciplinary teams of technology and other experts. Power Virtual Agents now allows the collaboration of these Fusion Teams in the bot-building process, with features like multi-authoring and commenting that is similar to the MS Office experience. So, for example, your bot-building process can now have technology and psychology experts working together to deliver the most humane conversation AI experiences to your customers and employees.

4. IVR and Telephony for multichannel conversational AI support

Power Virtual Agents has progressed from a simple bot builder to an end-to-end IVR builder. Now, all businesses need is a phone number and a bot published on the back of it. And the next thing you know, your customers are engaging with your bot on the phone! This not only reduces customer service workload but also addresses delays in response times for the customer. More importantly, it makes conversational AI more inclusive, bringing elderly users into its fold who are more comfortable with phone conversations than with web- or platform-based chatbots.

How businesses are deploying Power Virtual Agents with Acuvate

With conversational AI becoming a must-have for organizations, Acuvate and Microsoft have delivered humane, sentient, and genuinely effective chatbots across the TX spectrum with Power Virtual Agents.

Some of the use-cases include –

1. Employee assistant chatbots

Using the latest features of PVA, Acuvate built Employee Assistant Chatbots to answer employees’ FAQs. This bot deployment was highly effective and helpful during the last two years of remote work and COVID concerns.

The chatbot can –

  • Issue COVID-related information, including insights from official sources, preventive measures and tips, COVID-19 health checks for employees, etc.
  • Deliver company-specific information, including advisories, news from the organization, and emergency contact details.
  • Act as an HR helpdesk, answering employees’ HR-related queries with minimal human intervention.

Yet another example of HR chatbots for employee experience include a turnkey project that Acuvate delivered for Neptune Energy, a large energy company that wanted to streamline its HR information seeding. With the sentient HR Handbook Bot built in a record two weeks using Power Virtual Agents, Neptune’s employees now have instant information and answers on terms and conditions, rewards and benefits, policies and procedures, and offshore employee guidance. Click here to read more about the success of Neptune’s HR Handbook Bot.

2. Customer support chatbots

No matter the size of your organization, ease of customer query resolution is always top of mind. Power Virtual Agents enables customer support automation with no-code capabilities. So, your customer support is up and running quickly and customized to deal with queries specific to the nature of your business. Simple questions like – ‘what are your working hours,’ ‘how soon can I expect my order to be delivered’ or ‘I need help to understand the refund process for the item I wish to return’ – can be easily programmed to be quickly dealt with by your chatbot. The system will flag queries beyond its scope and escalate seamlessly to a human agent wherever necessary.

3. IT helpdesk

IT-related issues can be aggravating, especially for employees working remotely. For example, imagine you are on a project deadline, and your system shuts down for unforeseeable reasons. When you call your IT Helpdesk, you are guided through all the possibilities of addressing the situation with automated IVR. If the matter is resolved, the ticket can be satisfactorily closed. If not, it can be escalated to a live helpdesk agent. This is how seamless and cost-effective Power Virtual Agents can make your IT and query resolution process.

Begin your chatbot journey with the next-gen Microsoft Power Virtual Agents

67% of consumers worldwide have interacted with a chatbot in the last 12 months, with an estimated 57-fold increase by 2025.

It is not too late to begin your conversational AI journey. Acuvate is ready to walk you through this process and help you achieve the maximum effectiveness from your Power Virtual Agents investment.

Talk to our experts today.

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The DOs and DON’Ts of Conversational AI https://botcore.ai/blog/dos-and-donts-of-conversational-ai/ Wed, 13 Jul 2022 06:27:43 +0000 https://botcore.ai/?p=10431 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, […]

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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.

The Dos And Don’ts Of Conversational

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.

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Choosing your Conversational AI Platform https://botcore.ai/blog/choosing-conversational-ai-platform/ Thu, 30 Jun 2022 14:18:01 +0000 https://botcore.ai/?p=10355 Choosing your Conversational AI Platform With the growing popularity of conversational AI as a facilitator delivering instant, personalized, and meaningful engagement to customers and employees, the market is flooded with constantly evolving tools and solutions that make this a reality. In fact, conversational AI is expected to mature into a $1.3 billion market by 2025, […]

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Choosing your Conversational AI Platform

With the growing popularity of conversational AI as a facilitator delivering instant, personalized, and meaningful engagement to customers and employees, the market is flooded with constantly evolving tools and solutions that make this a reality. In fact, conversational AI is expected to mature into a $1.3 billion market by 2025, with no signs of slowing down.

With much ado around AI and so many organizations embarking on their first conversational AI journey, choosing the right vendor for your needs can feel nothing less than looking for a needle in a haystack.

So, how do you select your vendor when making a foray into the world of conversational AI? 

Let’s explore more.

conversational AI platform - Capabilities

Improving customer satisfaction scores and empowering employees with exceptional experiences are the ultimate motives of conversational AI. Hence, choosing capabilities that help achieve these goals is the foremost criteria to be considered when selecting your conversational AI platform.

Even though user interest in chatbots, voice bots, and other digital assistants has grown by leaps and bounds, not everyone knows how to identify and select the optimal type of conversational AI solution amongst the plethora of options in the market.

Based on immediate needs and preferred use cases, organizations may choose from a wide range of conversational AI implementation approaches in the chatbot market: custom solutions, platform offerings, and targeted service/functional offerings.

  • Custom Solution: Most suitable when deep technical customizations are needed to address unique business problems, a custom approach uses a complex framework of software development kits (SDKs) to build conversational AI platforms and bot solutions.
  • Specific service/functional offering: Often used to target a specific business problem or the needs of a particular service or function, such as sales enablement or IT service desk optimization, a specific service/functional offering is usually built on top of an existing enterprise application.
  • Platform-based approach: With a low-code, administrator-type GUI implementation and maintenance approach, platform-based conversational AI offers ease of use and a host of chatbot-building capabilities. The best part? A platform-based approach is uniquely versatile because it provides intuitive, low-code, template-based options to build and edit chatbot applications while offering complex, custom solutions built leveraging APIs and SDKs.

Irrespective of the approach you select, here is our 101 on some of the critical capabilities that define a next-generation artificial-intelligence-based conversational platform. However, please remember that not all conversational AI projects require all the functionalities, and leaders must always consider the requirements and capabilities needed to address those.

1. Ease of use with low-code platforms

Building and deploying a conversational AI platform is only 50% of the job done. As business needs evolve, it is essential to maintain and upgrade your conversational AI platform accordingly.

Business users inside your company must have a handhold over managing and improving existing virtual agents. In line with this need, more and more vendors are offering low-code platforms that allow employees without technical skills or coding knowledge to upgrade their chatbots quickly or even build new ones.

These platforms also offer predefined templates & reusable content such as domain-specific  small talk and intents that expedite the bot-building process for both pro and citizen developers alike and accelerate the time-to-market. 

2. Exceptional UX

A chatbot’s UX describes its accessibility, usability, and the pleasure derived from interacting with it. While a conversational AI platform must understand and execute a user’s request with a bare number of questions asked, interactions must always feel natural and human-like.

Your chosen conversational AI platform must possess best-in-class machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) technologies, along with intent and identity-defining technologies, maintenance tools, testing and version management, channel-based personalization, dialog management, and sentiment analysis.

Moreover, not every customer may be willing to speak to a bot in matters that are highly sensitive. So, if an issue goes beyond the bot’s scope, or if the customer seems dissatisfied or irritated and willing to talk to a human agent only, the conversational AI platform must offer the option to quickly take an escalation pathway and transition the case to a human agent.

3. Omnichannel presence and multilingual proficiency

You would want to be where your customers are. Therefore, ensure your vendor supports the channels where your customer is, and their platform is capable of quickly adapting to emerging channels when need be.

A platform that builds a single chatbot optimized for multiple channels, including email, IVR, web, and messaging applications, and can optimize bots to engage with voice, text, and multimodal channels would be best suited to any organization’s needs.

Moreover, a vital capability of any conversational AI platform would be the possibility of building bots that can remember critical details from past conversations, comprehend both simple and complex conversations layered with twists, turns, and entity changes, and enable users to switch channels without losing context.

Additionally, conversational AI platforms that support multiple languages (i.e., possess multilingual capabilities) like German, French, Italian, English, etc., would allow you to expand to global markets, serve customers from different geographies, and ensure employees in all parts of the world are satisfied and highly engaged with the organization.

4. Integrations with the client’s existing tech stack

No matter what approach you choose, your conversational AI platform must support integrations with your backend and legacy systems, including ERP, CRM, billing tools, live-chat and routing applications, and helpdesks.

Not only will such integrations provide the necessary data that is the heart and soul of conversational AI, but they will also help export and import entities, pull out relevant information for the user, and build conversational flows that automate a host of simple and complex processes and workflows (robotic process automation).

5. Reporting, analytics, and security

Last but certainly not least, your chosen conversational AI platform must support GUI-type dashboards, visualizations, and programmatic capabilities that generate custom reports on the chatbot’s functioning.

To build better and more seamless experiences for both customers and employees, organizations must monitor, study, and leverage data analytics and key KPIs and metrics, including goal completion rates, customer satisfaction scores, and bounce rates.

Additionally, platform administration and privacy functions offer robust security features in terms of the ability to manage user accounts and platform access. Such functionalities enable organizations to meet compliance requirements, protect PII, and prevent data intrusion.

How can Acuvate help?

Looking for a conversational AI platform? We are here to tell you what’s best suited for your needs. 

At Acuvate, we follow a platform-based approach to help clients build and deploy chat and voice bots to provide exceptional customer and employee experiences with our enterprise bot-building platform, BotCore.

As a Microsoft Gold Partner, we leverage the best of Microsoft’s AI technologies that arm bots with powerful, futuristic functionalities like Knowledge Graphs, context management, dialog builders, machine learning, and an advanced NLP engine. 

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

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

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

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A Quick Guide to Assess your Chatbot’s Maturity https://botcore.ai/blog/chatbot-maturity-assessment/ Mon, 20 Jun 2022 12:06:31 +0000 https://botcore.ai/?p=10335 A Quick Guide to Assess your Chatbot’s Maturity Conversational AI platforms — chatbots, voice assistants, and AI-driven virtual assistants, have become the go-to medium of interaction within enterprises — be it, customers or employees. Automating conversations through chatbots not only brings increased customer satisfaction, reduced attrition, and enhanced employee engagement, it helps organizations reduce costs, […]

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A Quick Guide to Assess your Chatbot’s Maturity

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

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

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

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

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

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

A 101 on Assessing Your Chatbot’s Maturity

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

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

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

Maturity LevelDefining FeaturesDeployment Potential
ImmatureNo NLP (Natural Language Processing), Predefined keywords, No learningSimplest Q&A
InfantSimple NLP, Chatbot cannot learn from user conversationsSimplest Q&A+tasks
MatureAdvanced NLP + Supervised learning mechanismsModerately intelligent
AdvancedPowerful NLP + context and sentiment management + self-learningMeaningful, intelligent  AI virtual assistant , and contextually aware conversations

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

The Six Pillars of Chatbot Maturity

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

How can Acuvate help?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Transforming The Retail Experience with Metaverse and Virtual assistants https://botcore.ai/blog/retail-experience-with-metaverse-and-virtual-assistants/ Fri, 10 Jun 2022 13:30:00 +0000 https://botcore.ai/?p=10315 Transforming The Retail Experience with Metaverse and Virtual assistants Metaverse is the next big thing for retail! Everyone is talking about it. And why not? The global pandemic has brought us closer to the digital world like never before, throwing us into the exciting new world of augmented and virtual reality. While metaverse is the […]

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Transforming The Retail Experience with Metaverse and Virtual assistants

Metaverse is the next big thing for retail! Everyone is talking about it. And why not? The global pandemic has brought us closer to the digital world like never before, throwing us into the exciting new world of augmented and virtual reality.

While metaverse is the new buzzword globally, few understand it and its unlimited opportunity to help brands create unique experiences for their customers. So, what is metaverse?

According to Gartner, “Metaverse is a collective virtual open space, created by the convergence of virtually enhanced physical and digital reality. It is physically persistent and provides enhanced immersive experiences.” 

While still in its nascent stages, the concept of metaverse has caught the eye of tech giants, including the likes of Facebook and Microsoft. It’s the next big technology platform, with technology leaders, social networks, online game makers, and most importantly, big fashion brands vying to capture a piece of what experts predict to be an $800 billion market opportunity. 

By 2026, 25% of people will spend at least one hour a day in the Metaverse for shopping, education, social media, work, and entertainment. 

Here’s looking at how popular retail brands are leveraging the metaverse to drive more engaging and immersive experiences for their customers.

Dyson came with its virtual store to allow users to try out its products on a variety of hair types.  After logging into Dyson’s virtual store, customers can use its VR demo to style their hair in the metaverse or look deeply inside the products to understand their technology.

Popular sportswear brand Nike built Nikeland, its own metaverse studio, to turn sport and play into a lifestyle. Nikeland’s surroundings match the buildings and fields inside Nike’s real-life headquarters. 

What’s more, you can dress up your Nikeland digital avatar in classic Nike apparel and staple footwear like the Air Force 1, Nike Blazer, ACG, Nike Tech Pack, and Air Force 1.

Visitors can play games such as dodgeball, the floor is lava, and tag inside the virtual world. Creators can also develop their own mini-games using interactive sports materials.

Since Metaverse is the sum of all virtual worlds, including augmented reality, the internet, and other technologies, it undoubtedly encompasses tons of data generated by artificial intelligence (AI) that needs to be collected, analyzed, and leveraged for accelerated innovation.

In this blog, we’ll talk about online retail, one of the most upcoming and potentially game-changing use cases of AI-enabled virtual assistants in the metaverse of tomorrow.

Personalized Shopping Experiences with Virtual Assistants in Metaverse

The ability to shop in the metaverse is the next big retail trend. And leading retail brands are jumping on this bandwagon. With the integration of conversational AI technologies such as virtual assistants and voice bots, brands are now looking to offer interactive, real-time, and more immersive digital shopping experiences.

Imagine living in New York and trying on that pretty red dress from a Paris-based clothing brand virtually through a 3D fitting room or taking a thrilling test drive to buy your next car in virtual reality. Or try out the latest accessories, the coolest new sunglasses, or the trending makeup products. While it’s your virtual avatar doing that for you, you wouldn’t mind it considering your newfound ability to access global retail brands while sitting in the comfort of your living room.

That’s where the metaverse has the potential to take the world of retail. The integration of AI-powered virtual assistants and conversational AI bots allows brands to track customer activity, purchase behavior, and demographic profiles, learn from prior patterns, and leverage this data to provide more personalized product recommendations and encourage purchase.

Here’s how metaverse is making all this possible.

1. Shop beyond space and time with your virtual AI avatar

To tap into the unlimited potential of the metaverse, many brands are investing millions to make this vision a reality. Or should we say “virtual reality?” Pun intended. The virtual shopping experience involves 3D digital avatars that would help users interact with other 3D digital objects and digital humans in the virtual world. These digital humans are virtual sales assistants, who assist users (or, to put it in better words, their virtual avatars) with online shopping, guide them through the brand’s online store, provide advice, and hand-hold them throughout the sales process.

Customers (i.e., their virtual avatars) can try out products, check out discounts and offers, and pick out items for purchase.

Naturally, these digital humans are voice bots designed to ease the process of searching and buying products and ensure virtual shopping feels natural and frictionless, screaming out convenience for users. 

These virtual assistants have conversational AI capability that helps them understand an intent, carry on human-like conversations with users, and provide truly immersive and engaging human-like experiences in the virtual world.

What’s more, you can customize your virtual/ 3D digital avatars to render them human-like features and make them look like you, be it hair, makeup, or clothing. In fact, some brands solely design clothes to be worn only by avatars in the metaverse.

2. Generate personalized product recommendations in virtual reality

AI-powered virtual assistants can analyze, understand, and learn the users’ preferences and shopping habits and generate unique product recommendations and buying tips based on such data.

Let’s take a quick example. Outfit generator apps will be the next breakthrough in the metaverse, providing unparalleled shopping experiences in the virtual world. Advanced AI technologies will help create virtual wardrobes, wherein users can put their existing clothes and get personalized outfit recommendations, exposing them to completely new and unique shopping experiences.

How Can Acuvate Help?

We are a global player in next-gen digital services and consulting, Acuvate leverages next-gen technologies to build chatbots, voice bots, custom apps, and workflows that increase business efficiencies and support collaboration, information orchestration, and intelligent analysis.

If your company is new to the metaverse, it would be wise to understand the vast opportunities the technology is prospected to offer. We, at Acuvate, can help you take baby steps into the metaverse and help you explore retail experiences and environments from different industries in the virtual world.  

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

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Total Experience in the Age of Conversational AI Platforms https://botcore.ai/blog/total-experience-in-conversational-ai-platforms/ Wed, 18 May 2022 12:41:00 +0000 https://botcore.ai/?p=10254 Total Experience in the Age of Conversational AI Platforms This new decade that began with the COVID-19 pandemic ushered in an era of business experiences that are mobile, remote, and digital-centric. The keywords here being “experiences” and “digital.” Yes, we are in the midst of a business environment that feeds on experiences that empower, driven […]

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Total Experience in the Age of Conversational AI Platforms

This new decade that began with the COVID-19 pandemic ushered in an era of business experiences that are mobile, remote, and digital-centric. The keywords here being “experiences” and “digital.”

Yes, we are in the midst of a business environment that feeds on experiences that empower, driven by social, cultural, and economic changes. And yes, “digital” is the fodder fuelling these experiences. So, putting it in simpler words, the quality of the digital experiences businesses deliver to their customers is foundational to their success in today’s landscape.

After all, products and services are commodities that can be easily imitated and lose their differentiating value in the long run. But it’s the emotions and feelings that customers take away that matter the most and create memorable brands at the end of the day.

But, it’s not just about the customers anymore. To create exceptional experiences, it is vital to focus on providing meaningful employee experiences. After all, fulfilling even a minor customer request requires coordination amongst different departments at the workplace. A great employee experience makes it easier for employees to do their jobs and serve customers better. Moreover, it is only an engaged, motivated, and enthusiastic workforce that would work towards reaching outstanding CSAT scores.

Hence, intelligent, future-oriented organizations understand that they cannot separate customer (CX) and employee experience (EX) strategies into silos anymore. As important as it is for CX and EX to function outside the formerly created vacuum, it is equally vital to strengthen “experience” strategies with thoughtful user experiences (UX) and flexible multi-experiences (MX).

As put forth by leading analyst firm Gartner, “MX, UX, CX, and EX (or, simply “total experience”) are inextricably intertwined in the digital experience economy.”

In its latest report, “Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2022,” Gartner defines total experience (TX) as “a business strategy that integrates employee experience, customer experience, user experience, and multi-experience across multiple touchpoints to accelerate growth.”

Through holistic management of the expectations of various stakeholders, including customers, employees, suppliers, and vendors, TX boosts confidence, satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy.

So, how can an organization optimize experiences for its customers, employees, and other stakeholders?

The simple answer lies in enhancing the everyday interactions that make up a considerable chunk of a typical day at work. And mature conversational AI technologies and platforms can play a significant role in this.

Let’s explore further.

Understanding Total Experience from an Organizational Perspective

By 2024, Gartner estimates that organizations providing TX will outperform competitors by 25% in satisfaction metrics for both CX and EX. Additionally, by 2026, 60% of large enterprises are expected to employ a total experience strategy to transform their business models and achieve “world-class customer and employee advocacy levels,” in which both groups are motivated to promote the corporate brand.

So, what is total experience from an organizational perspective? TX consists of the following four components 

  • Customer Experience (CX) – Customers’ interactions and feelings about a brand
  • Employee Experience (EX) – Employees’ interactions, perceptions, and engagement with the company
  • User Experience (UX) – How a user feels after interacting with your product or service. Measured in terms of KPIs like error rate, abandonment rate, success rate, etc.
  • Multi-Experience (MX) – Delivering seamless and consistent experiences on multiple touchpoints, devices, and modalities.

Jason Wong, a distinguished VP analyst at Gartner, rightly stated, “While excellence in one area is valuable, the organization as a whole can be further strengthened if these four disciplines are intertwined as a Total experience (TX) strategy so that they mutually reinforce one another.”

As discussed above, everyday business interactions amongst the different stakeholders, including customers, employees, support agents, suppliers, and vendors, drive overall experience management in any organization.

These stakeholders demand new-world experiences that are A) personalized, B) consistent, C) resolution-driven, and D) enable faster decision-making. Often, these interactions are routine and repetitive, leaving massive room to automate and optimize them using the latest technologies. Additionally, even though managing individual stakeholder experiences may be effortless, problems arise at the points where they intersect.

With an explosion of interactions taking place across different channels, how can organizations deliver new-world experiences for everyone at scale and ensure seamless TX? Moreover, most prevailing digital technologies in the workplace fail to understand the context and respond conversationally to customer and employee queries, consequently increasing human dependencies and operational costs.

The solution lies in deploying AI-first conversational technologies that work in tandem with chatbots, voice bots, and other virtual assistants to offer contextual, meaningful, and personalized engagement to customers and employees, and a rich user experience with real-time alerts, nudges, and contextual information.

Conversational AI Platforms for Total Experience (TX)

Conversational Ai Platforms For Total Experience

An integrated conversational AI platform brings CX and UX together by helping users build automated workflows and deliver intelligent conversations that delight customers and engage employees.

Conversational AI platforms ensure a robust total experience (TX) by integrating powerful UX and MX and building intelligent virtual assistants and chatbots that provide user-friendly, consistent, multilingual experiences across numerous social, messaging, web, and voice channels.

Customer Experience

Chatbots and voice bots deliver exceptional, quick, personalized, and resolution-driven customer support. These bots leverage powerful AI, machine learning (ML), and natural language processing (NLP) capabilities to understand customer sentiment, learn from past customer behavior, and recommend the right products based on their interests, activities, and profiles.

Employee Experience

A conversational AI platform can make employees’ lives easier by building chatbot personas for every need. Be it HR, IT helpdesk, business intelligence (BI), or the intranet, employee-facing bots answer simple and complex queries, perform day-to-day tasks, and fetch relevant information.

Additionally, agent assist bots simplify the access to the CRM system and knowledge base for agents, providing contextual information and suggestions about the customers in the middle of interactions.

User Experience

A chatbot’s UX comprises its usability, accessibility, and the pleasure of interacting with it. Enhancing these three aspects constitutes an exceptional user experience. Simply put, the faster the bot is able to understand and execute the user’s request, the better will be the UX.

With the latest advancements in machine learning (ML), natural language processing (NLP), and natural language understanding (NLU) technologies, a conversational AI platform can ensure users have a seamless, natural, human-like conversations with customers and employees, understand their needs better and quicker, and offer maximum support by asking the bare minimum number of questions.

Multi-experience

Conversational AI platforms allow users to experience personalized engagement across multiple channels (social, web, voice, etc.), through multiple devices (mobile, desktop, smart speakers, etc.), and across multiple languages (multilingual functionality).

How Can Acuvate Help?

Acuvate is a Microsoft Gold Partner that helps clients build intelligent chat and voice bots using its enterprise bot-building platform called BotCore. Powered by Microsoft Azure and AI technologies and armed with advanced, future-ready functionalities like Knowledge Graphs, context management, dialog builders, machine learning, and a superior NLP engine, BotCore is used by 150+ customers across industries for a range of customer and employee use cases.

What’s more, you can offer customers the convenience of conversational IVR support with text-to-speech bots and the option to interact in the language of their choice with 90+ languages.

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

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

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How can conversational AI help win the digital shelf? https://botcore.ai/blog/how-can-conversational-ai-help-win-the-digital-shelf/ Tue, 25 Jan 2022 07:08:00 +0000 https://botcore.ai/?p=10051 How can conversational AI help win the digital shelf? Amidst the ongoing move from brick-and-mortar to online shopping, the number of digital buyers has jumped drastically. In 2020, during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, over two billion people purchased goods or services online, and during the same year, e-retail sales surpassed 4.2 trillion U.S. […]

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How can conversational AI help win the digital shelf?

Amidst the ongoing move from brick-and-mortar to online shopping, the number of digital buyers has jumped drastically. In 2020, during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, over two billion people purchased goods or services online, and during the same year, e-retail sales surpassed 4.2 trillion U.S. dollars worldwide.

The digital shelf has emerged as one of the most widely discussed terms in today’s age. Recall the last time you bought a product online. You may discover the product or service on Facebook, see your favorite influencer use it on Instagram, or simply scroll through the brand’s website to research and buy it.

The digital shelf is “anywhere and everywhere” customers can discover, research, and shop for something online. Think of it as the shelf in the local brick-and-mortar store, only with more product options and a broader set of touchpoints to choose from — be it retailer websites, social media, mobile apps, or third-party marketplaces. Customers can even interact with the digital shelf when they buy products in-store.

Conversational AI is the new paradigm in the customer experience (CX) world, allowing organizations a flexible, reliable, and speedy way to interact with customers digitally all day.

Let’s explore what conversational AI is and how it can help brands win the digital shelf in 2022 and beyond.

Conquering the Digital Shelf with Conversational AI

Before we delve deeper into winning the digital shelf with conversational AI, let’s first understand what conversational AI is.

Conversational AI is a set of powerful technologies & new-age technologies, including machine learning, natural language processing (NLP), and natural language understanding (NLU) — used in conjunction with chatbots to help brands interact with customers throughout the sales journey.

How is conversational AI supporting the digital shelf? Well, the answer is simple.

1. Providing options for self-service - Finding products and answers online.

Amidst an overwhelming demand for support, customers turned to self-service options like AI chatbots, during the COVID-19 pandemic.

More than a year and several “waves” of the virus later, customers are now accustomed to using chatbots to search for products online, make purchases via digital channels, and get their queries answered within seconds.

The CCW Digital Market Study released in August 2021 has noted,
“Customers are particularly willing to self-serve for informational issues. Just under 49% of consumers prefer to use self-service for inquiries like account balance checks and delivery date confirmations. Other popular self-service drivers include transactions (38%), desire for fast resolution (30%), and situations in which connecting with an agent would be inconvenient (26%).”

Chatbots can be embedded on various digital channels, including social media platforms like Facebook Messenger, common messaging apps (for example, WhatsApp), company websites, and mobile apps. They are easy to adopt, available 24X7, and help the brand service customers at scale.

To create awareness about their products & services, organizations deploy conversational AI bots on various channels that comprise the digital shelf.

Such bots can answer queries, push alerts about new products, analyze customer preferences, and send personalized tips. 

For example, many brands deploy conversational AI bots that initiate a conversation with the visitors as soon as they scroll past a particular point on the website, indicating potential interest in the product.

2. Tell customers what they should buy with personalized and proactive digital support

While customer needs have become more dynamic and challenging to fathom, customers still tend to prefer brands that can understand their requirements, predict what they may need, and tailor support accordingly. Brands that leverage generic and repetitive messaging lose out on customers.

Conversational AI bots can capture and evaluate customer interactions while they happen, generate real-time insights into customer preferences, perspectives, and intentions, and help brands personalize the entire digital sales journey — helping organizations win the digital shelf.

Brands can then take a proactive approach, provide customers assistance, and pitch new products, even before the customers ask.

While reaching the right customer segment is crucial, bots must also assist them in making informed decisions about what to purchase to help create a winning digital shelf.

Conversational AI Bots study customer information, recommend suitable products, guide on product use, assist in navigating the brand’s online store, and help with shopping, payment, and checkout.

To retain customers and build a long-lasting digital shelf strategy, brands must continue to engage them with relevant and meaningful messaging.

As a customer interacts more with conversational AI bots, the brand can collect the required data to help marketers understand customer needs, measure engagement, and develop proactive marketing campaigns.

Consequently, such bots can proactively inform customers about the latest offers and upcoming sales and help upsell/cross-sell products using the digital shelf.

Moreover, loyal customers advocate the brand’s products, spread positive word-of-mouth, and help build a winning digital shelf.

To cement customer loyalty and strengthen the digital shelf, organizations must leverage chatbots to tailor loyalty programs, send customized discount coupons and freebies through email and chat, and allow customers to manage reward balances and redeem gift points online.

3. Help customers experience the same level of digital service, no matter what channel they choose!

In the post-pandemic world, customers have attached newfound meaning to what exceptional brand engagement means. They not only want brands to meet and recognize them at every digital touchpoint but expect consistent and personalized experiences on each channel and want brand conversations to seamlessly flow across digital touchpoints, encompassing the entirety of the digital shelf.

That’s where omnichannel chatbots come into the picture. They allow brands to be present on popular customer channels (website, email, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, IVR, etc.), adapt to the unique features of each channel, and coordinate communications across all digital touchpoints. For example, a customer may become aware of a product through email, gather additional information through WhatsApp, and ultimately purchase the product through the brand’s website or in-store.

Omnichannel bots are built once and deployed across multiple channels. In an era where customers are increasingly levitating towards brands that can predict their needs and make suitable recommendations, omnichannel chatbots understand customer context, store information in a centralized database, comprehend customer needs, and retain the context of the original conversation — delivering personalized conversational experiences and allowing customers to switch channels without starting from scratch.

4. Carry out more meaningful customer conversations online with context management

Human conversations are seldom straightforward. They are often layered with interruptions and clarifications and move to a different topic without seeing the previous interaction to its logical conclusion.

Conversational AI Bots carry out the most natural and human-like interactions, create memorable user experiences, and conquer the digital shelf. Context and dialogue management allow bots to pause a particular customer task, switch intent, complete a different activity, and efficiently steer the conversation back to the original customer request without losing context.

The Customer Contact Week Digital report titled Customer Experience Trends, Challenges, and Innovation, states, “In addition to making it easy for customers to move between channels, leading brands will ensure their data follows suit. With a 360-degree view into each customer, the company and its employees can spot inefficiencies within the journey, tailor experiences to a given customer’s intent, personalize communication based on their profile and sentiment, and avoid the much-maligned habit of asking customers to repeat information.”

5. Amplify digital reach with multilingual chatbots.

Online brands can reach a global audience by deploying bots that speak different languages.

Often, large brands have customers located in different parts of the world who speak different languages. While interacting with brands, customers prefer having conversations with bots that speak their native tongue.

Creating a separate chatbot for each language isn’t feasible. That is where a multilingual chatbot comes into the picture. Chatbots are capable of supporting and conducting conversations in customers’ native tongue scale localization efforts, amplifying digital reach, and making customers feel valued and understood.

How can Acuvate help?

We at Acuvate can help clients build a winning digital shelf with conversational AI by leveraging our enterprise bot-building platform called BotCore.

  • An intuitive, low-code, graphical interface that allows quick implementation of conversational AI chatbots
  • Integrates seamlessly with existing LoB and enterprise systems and AI services
  • Our chatbots can also simulate highly complex user conversations.
  • We are a Microsoft Gold Partner and use the best of Microsoft’s artificial intelligence, machine learning (ML), natural language processing (NLP), and natural language understanding (NLU) technologies.
  • Our chatbots are deployable on almost all popular social media channels and support different languages, including English, German, French, Italian, etc.

We also help clients build and deploy AI-chatbots quickly with Microsoft’s low-code bot-building application Power Virtual Agents.

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

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All you need to know about conversational AI + what’s in it for your business https://botcore.ai/blog/all-about-conversation-ai/ Mon, 22 Nov 2021 22:21:00 +0000 https://botcore.ai/?p=9063 All you need to know about conversational AI + what’s in it for your business Ever since the pandemic wreaked havoc on the entire business landscape, customer and employee experiences (CX and EX) have transformed drastically. With the advent of various technologies, customers now expect personalized, immersive, and end-to-end brand engagement. Even employees are now […]

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All you need to know about conversational AI + what’s in it for your business

Ever since the pandemic wreaked havoc on the entire business landscape, customer and employee experiences (CX and EX) have transformed drastically.

With the advent of various technologies, customers now expect personalized, immersive, and end-to-end brand engagement. Even employees are now considered customers of a digital world— expecting seamless collaboration and tailored engagement, even as interactions become more virtual, mobile, and distributed.

Over the past year, conversational AI has emerged as the new spectrum in both CX and EX.  Businesses globally have adopted conversational AI to provide customers and employees exceptional experiences throughout their journeys with the organization.

As per Gartner, the conversational AI market is expected to reach an astounding AUD 22.6 billion by 2024.

This blog takes you through everything you need to know about conversational AI and what’s in it for your business.

What is Conversational AI?

Conversational AI is a set of powerful technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI), natural language processing (NLP), dynamic text to speech, intent and entity recognition, and machine learning (ML) that empower computers to understand, process, and respond to human utterances and text inputs naturally.

Conversational AI is used in chatbots, voice bots, and virtual assistants and helps conduct simple, natural, human-like conversations with customers and employees. It allows enterprises to design cost-efficient digital experiences, streamline internal operations, and deliver superior customer engagement.

Bots can operate 24X7 and provide instant solutions to millions of customer and employee requests simultaneously.

Users may experience the technology on various platforms, including social media (WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger), enterprise messaging apps (Microsoft Teams, Slack, Zoom), voice assistants (Alexa, Google Home), websites, and interactive voice response systems (IVR).

Emerging Capabilities of a Conversational AI platform

Let’s take a look at some of the emerging capabilities of conversational AI businesses should look out for —

  1. Low-code chatbot development – Low-code chatbot building platforms like Microsoft’s Power Virtual Agents allow people with little or no coding knowledge (citizen developers) to build professional-grade bots within a few days. Such platforms host a visual interface, pre-configured templates, and drag-and-drop features, and reduce development costs by up to 90%.

  2. Multilingual chatbots – Only 7.5% of the world’s population are native English speakers. Global organizations employ people from around the world and have a wide customer base that spreads over geographies. Multilingual chatbots help scale the business’s localization efforts and amplify reach amongst customers from different regions. By making them feel heard and supported, organizations that engage with their staff in their native language have higher chances of building loyalty and retaining employees.

  3. Omnichannel experiences – As discussed above, users can experience conversational AI through bots embedded on different channels. Here, a significant capability of the technology is its ability to empower users to start a conversation on one channel and continue it in another— without losing context.

  4. Proactive engagement – As the business landscape becomes more digitized, the users of conversational AI not only expect omnichannel engagement but also want organizations to understand their intentions and preferences and respond accordingly. Bots must anticipate customer and employee needs in advance, intervene at moments when they may need help, and push personalized, context-aware information at the right time.

  5. Sentiment analysis – Another key capability of conversational AI is sentiment analysis— a bot’s ability to comprehend the type and intensity of a user’s sentiment, steer conversations, and escalate to agents for human support.

  6. Context management – With conversational AI, interactions feel truly human-like. A chatbot can remember critical information from past dialogue and retain context from one response to the next, ensuring interactions don’t feel scripted.

Conversational AI for customer and employee experience

Conversational AI has a wide range of use cases for both employees and customers.

In the case of employees, function-specific bots for HR, IT, business intelligence, CRM, and enterprise intranets are making life easier for remote workers by fulfilling the following use cases—

  • Answer employee queries instantly— anytime and anywhere
    For example, “How do I reset my password?”, “What is my leave balance for this year?”
  • Simplify and automate mundane, repetitive tasks
    For example, raise IT tickets, book meeting rooms, schedule a video call
  • Fetch relevant information quickly
    For example, retrieve project files, HR policy documents, and business KPIs
  • Push personalized alerts and notifications
    For example, network outage, HR policy changes, upcoming events

Learn More: 4 Ways Chatbots Are Making Life Easier for Remote Workers

Moreover, chatbots transform customer experiences and ensure meaningful engagement at every stage of the sales funnel as follows—

  • Reach – Push alerts about new products, send personalized tips, collect data about customer preferences.
  • Acquisition – Suggest products to purchase, help customers navigate the brand’s online store, assist with checkout, guide on product use.
  • Retention – Analyze customer needs, inform customers about latest offers and sales, upsell/cross-sell products.
  • Loyalty/Advocacy – tailor loyalty programs, send personalized rewards and discount coupons, collect customer feedback.

Learn More: Customer Service and Beyond: Harnessing Chatbots to transform the customer experience

What can conversational AI do for your business?

By harnessing the power of conversational AI in everyday business, organizations can reap the following benefits

Benefits for customersBenefits for employees/organization
  • Increase revenue through upselling and cross-selling opportunities
  • Build a loyal customer base through personalized and meaningful engagement
  • Reduce customer effort
  • Improve net promoter scores
  • Improve employee productivity
  • Reduce voluntary turnover rates
  • Uncover data-driven insights to make intelligent business decisions
  • Reduce cost per contact

To learn more about conversational AI and how businesses can transform the post-pandemic digital CX with conversational AI, please feel free to go through our e-book “Transform the post-pandemic digital CX with conversational AI.”

In this guide, we’ll talk in depth about what is conversational and how it has helped transform customer experience in a post-pandemic world.

Conversational AI: A sneak-peek into real-life use cases

Una - Unilever’s chatbot for HR

Unilever leverages its HR chatbot Una to answer employee queries on various HR topics, including performance appraisal, allowance, and perform certain routine tasks like checking meeting room availability, claiming for healthcare, etc. Una is capable of conversing with employees in 106 countries, using 32 languages.

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Leena Nair, CHRO at Unilever, in an interview, said, “Una hub is like a google search  leverage scale in transaction answering. UNA handles about 7 million transactions in a year.

By using this technology, we have taken time away from the HR person, in some cases, as high as 1 hour a day, that usually they would spend in resolving queries and given them the time to do things that drive business performance which is doing interventions for teams, getting people focused on the big things to do.

In our recent Univoice survey, 93% of our people felt that they were really well supported during COVID with the equipment and technology that allowed them to be productive.”

Ponds Chatbot

POND’s SAL

POND’s SAL is an exciting real-life example of how conversational AI has transformed the digital customer experience.

SAL leverages technologies such as artificial intelligence and augmented reality to provide an immersive online shopping experience. Customers can say “hi” to SAL on Ponds’ flagship Shopee store.

Users must first upload a selfie, and while the personalized skin analysis takes place, SAL sends beauty tips to keep them engaged.

Post determining the customer’s skin type, SAL offers personalized product recommendations from POND’s across four significant areas – pimples, wrinkles, spots, and uneven skin tone.

95% of users who completed the SAL experience on Shopee have stated a positive experience with the bot.

How can Acuvate help?

At Acuvate, we help clients deploy customer and employee-facing chatbots that deliver fast, meaningful, and personalized interactions with our enterprise bot-building platform called BotCore.

As a Microsoft Gold Partner, we use the best of Microsoft’s AI, machine learning (ML), and natural language processing (NLP) technologies to build our bots.

BotCore hosts the following list of advanced capabilities —

  • An intuitive, low-code, visual interface, allowing the quick implementation of AI chatbots
  • Flexible integrations with existing legacy systems and AI services
  • Our chatbots simulate both simple and highly complex conversations.
  • Our bots are deployable on most of the popular enterprise messaging and social media channels and support several languages, including English, German, French, Italian, etc.

Moreover, we help clients build and implement AI chatbots using Microsoft’s low-code bot-building solution called Power Virtual Agents (PVA).

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

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Improve Your Customer Effort Score with Conversational AI https://botcore.ai/blog/improve-your-customer-effort-score-with-conversational-ai/ Mon, 11 Oct 2021 10:48:00 +0000 https://botcore.ai/?p=8860 Improve Your Customer Effort Score with Conversational AI 96% of customers with a high-effort service interaction become more disloyal compared to just 9% who have a low-effort experience. ~ Gartner In recent times, customer-centricity has led to the emergence of a new spectrum in the customer experience (CX) space, “Customer Effort Score (CES).” Simply put, […]

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Improve Your Customer Effort Score with Conversational AI

96% of customers with a high-effort service interaction become more disloyal compared to just 9% who have a low-effort experience.

~ Gartner

In recent times, customer-centricity has led to the emergence of a new spectrum in the customer experience (CX) space, “Customer Effort Score (CES).” Simply put, CES is the amount of effort that a customer puts in to reach a specific level of satisfaction after putting in a query. In other words, it is the ease a customer experiences while getting his queries resolved by a brand.

According to Gartner, “Effort is the strongest driver to customer loyalty.” As put by Andrew Schumacher, Senior Principal, Advisory, Gartner, “Exceeding customer expectations provides, at best, a marginal lift to customer loyalty. Our research finds that to win customer loyalty, customer service and support leaders must focus on consistently meeting customer expectations.”

A recently conducted CCW Digital Consumer Preferences Survey revealed easy and convenient experiences are the #1 way to attract customers. Indeed, by reducing customer effort, brands can deliver high-quality interactions at lower costs.

Post the COVID-19 pandemic, brands have adopted conversational AI to fulfill customer needs and deliver speedy, personalized, and proactive customer engagement.

This blog provides a detailed insight into how organizations can improve their customer effort scores with conversational AI.

Improve your customer effort score (CES) with conversational AI

Before delving deeper into the role conversational AI plays in improving customer effort scores, let’s first understand what conversational AI is.

Conversational AI is a group of advanced technologies like machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) that empowers computers to analyze, process, and respond to human utterances (text/voice inputs) naturally. Experienced through chatbots, voice bots, and virtual assistants, conversational AI offers a flexible, fast, and accurate medium for organizations to interact with customers every day.

In today’s highly digitalized era, customers are opting for self-service channels to research products, make purchases, and most importantly, get their issues resolved. Chatbots and virtual assistants provide instant, round-the-clock support while personalizing interactions to individual customer needs.

Customers desire to get their problems resolved with the least amount of effort. In fact, CCW Digital conducted a robust customer survey that found 62% of respondents are more likely to spend with brands that deliver easy experiences.

Let’s understand how conversational AI helps reduce customer effort and contributes to enhancing CES.

1. Reaching customers where they want with omnichannel chatbots.

Omnichannel chatbots allow customers to easily access support in the channel of their choice – the platform that suits them or through which they have first communicated with the brand.

Moreover, a customer may wish to switch channels in the middle of a support case. For example, a customer communicating with a chatbot may ask for agent assistance or switch to another platform (Facebook Messenger to WhatsApp).

Omnichannel chatbots store customer information, such as purchase history, previous support tickets, and other demographics, by leveraging natural language processing, machine learning, and natural language understanding to deliver personalized engagement.

With a 360-degree view of each customer, such bots can retain the context of the original conversation, coordinate customer interactions across channels, and ensure customers can easily switch channels without the need to repeat information.

2. Automating customer service to provide instant, round-the-clock support

Considering the extensive customer base of enterprises, providing fast customer support can be challenging, and customers might often end up waiting for painstakingly long times.

In certain instances, customers end up looking for support when contact centers are closed for business.

That’s where conversational AI chatbots come into the picture. Bots operate 24×7 and provide timely responses to a host of customer problems, both complex and straightforward, in their native language. Thus, the caseload of contact center agents reduces, improving the Mean Time To Resolution (MTTR) and customer effort score in the process.

3. Overcome the limitations of traditional IVR with conversational IVR

IVR continues to have a stronghold in contact center operations and remains the channel of choice for many customers.

However, an improved customer effort score means tackling the challenges related to traditional IVR, like navigating various menus and facing longer wait times before reaching the right agent.

In short, customers expect a speedy, hassle-free resolution of their queries, which involves a shift towards conversational IVR services.

Conversational IVR uses the text-to-speech capability of chatbots to provide interactive, accurate, and personalized human-like voice support.

For example, if a customer wants to book a flight, they can simply call up the support center and say, “Please book a flight to London.” Instead of sifting through the various IVR options, the bot will ask the customer for details, such as the preferred date and time of flight, book the next available flight, or directly route the customer to the concerned booking agent.

Interactive voice support and intelligent routing minimizes waiting time and improves MTTR and first-call resolution rates (FTC).

4. Deliver proactive assistance to improve customer effort score

Instead of reacting to a problem, brands must take the proactive approach and anticipate customer needs to provide them assistance even before they ask for it.

Conversational analytics studies customer utterances, words, and phrases, along with customer sentiment, purchase history, and buying behavior, to understand customer preferences, intentions, and perspectives and deliver tailored interactions based on a customer’s unique disposition and demeanor.

Let’s take a simple example.

Suppose a customer buys a product by interacting with the brand’s chatbot. Now, the brand knows that the product will require installation post-purchase and will see the customer visiting the website or calling the contact center for details.

In such a scenario, the chatbot must proactively take the customer through a step-by-step installation process, saving the customer an extra step and reducing customer effort and calls per event in the process.

Gartner’s Guide to Measuring Customer Effort Score

The Gartner Customer Effort Score (CES) is a customer experience survey metric that enables service organizations to account for the ease of customer interaction and resolution during a request.

CES is measured by asking the customer for feedback and scoring their response on a scale of 1 to 7, with 1 representing the highest level of disagreement.

Benefits of improving customer effort score with conversational AI

Here’s looking at a few metrics studied by Gartner that outline the benefits of improving your customer effort score

  • Net Promoter Score (NPS) measures the customer’s loyalty and satisfaction and is calculated by how likely the customer would recommend a product, service, or brand. NPS is 65 points higher for top-performing, low-effort companies.
  • A low customer effort interaction costs 37% less than a high-effort interaction by reducing escalations (50%), repeat calls (40%), and channel switching (54%).
  • 94% of customers with low effort interactions tend to repurchase compared with just 4% of those experiencing high effort.

How can Acuvate help?

At Acuvate, we help clients deploy customer-facing chatbots with our enterprise bot-building platform called BotCore.

Our bots help improve customer effort scores with key capabilities, including –

  • An intuitive, low-code, graphical interface that allows the quick implementation of AI chatbots
  • Seamless integration with existing backend and legacy customer support systems.
  • 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., in response to evolving customer needs.

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

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