Digital Assistants Archives - BotCore

Top use cases of Chatbots in the Banking and Finance Industry

Pradeep Tigulla — Thu, 04 Aug 2022 08:11:20 +0000

Top Use Cases of Chatbots in the Banking and Finance Industry

Chatbots have come a long way since the first time they were used by a banking application in 2015. With advancements in AI, NLP, and new communication channels like Google Home, Alexa, and social media platforms, they are now widely being used by almost all popular banks and financial institutions.

These ChatBots perform various repetitive tasks easily and accurately. Further, they can be personalized for each of the customers.

The conversational bots can be text-based or voice-based. They can be accessed from a mobile app, a banking website, social media messaging platforms, or voice-based personal digital assistants.

Generally, ChatBots used by banks are more popular in the finance and banking industry. However, chatbots are used for more complicated and personalized tasks beyond conventional uses.

Though as bank customers using digital services we all experience ChatBots, they are also used by employees working in financial institutions to retrieve information easily. When we go to a bank to learn more about a policy the employee retrieves information not from big bundles of paper on their desks, but rather from the organization’s memory using a ChatBot.

In 2017, Acuvate published a blog on top use cases of chatbots in the banking and finance industry. A lot has changed in these five years. They can guess the information we seek, suggest policies and initiatives, and are more convenient to use.

Here are 5 ways banks and financial institutions are using chatbots

1. Addressing Customer’s concerns

Unlike banking personnel, digital tools like websites are available for customers 24×7. To make it further easy for users, chatbots integrated into websites and mobile apps can answer the most common questions faster and with fewer clicks.

For example, reporting a hacking attempt, locking your account to stop a hacking attempt, or finding out more information about an unidentified debit would previously require the customer to log in to the website, search for the option, and take action. These are the most common tasks that a banking chatbot in the banking website or social media app can answer in just a few seconds. Since the app is on your mobile phone, verifying your credentials is easy. Here’s an example

The ambit of the operations a chatbot can perform has greatly widened these days with advancements in security systems and technologies. ChatBot interactions are now more personalized and natural.

2. Retaining old customers and expanding customer base

Customer engagement is beyond human interactions between customers and employees at the office. With more customers using digital tools like websites, apps embedded in mobile phones, and other personal digital assistants like Google Home or Alexa, each of these tools have ChatBots to answer customers and cater to their needs in time.

These tools simplify various processes and save time and effort. ChatBots are integral to all digital tools to engage with a large number of customers and provide personalized services. They define the quality of service and ease of operations a financial institution provides its customers.

For example, ChatBots identify new customers and present them with options of information they are more likely to seek. For older customers, ChatBots identify them, address them by their name, and with knowledge of their account details, they present a different set of actions for each of them. With advanced ChatBots, customers can’t say if they’re talking to a human or a digital assistant.

When embedded in IoT digital assistants like Alexa or Google Home, the latest advancements in NLP ( Natural Language Processing) technologies help the audio-based Chatbots provide a pleasant conversational experience to customers along with information they asked for and may be interested in.

3. Generating useful Marketing Leads

Modern ChatBots backed with Artificial Intelligence can build interest in a financial institution’s products and services. Chatbots are the perfect tools to implement digitalized marketing techniques to find new customers and sustain old ones. They are effective in keeping customers active by providing the convenience of being there for them always.

The ChatBots collect information from customers and provide them with information on various initiatives that are likely to interest them. This helps in identifying potential customers and in growing the customer base.

4. Recommendations and upselling

As the services of banking and financial institutions grew wider, it is important to let the right customers know about the right policies and initiatives. Intelligent digital systems like chatbots can more accurately identify interested customers. Chatbots make it easier to maintain customer profiles, identify who wants to buy other products, and get feedback on existing products and services.

Moreover, these Chatbots learn and adapt to situations. Hence they learn more about customers and get better and more accurate over time.

5. Personal Financial Assistant

Chatbots help users track their spending and receive a timely reminder of impending payments. Payments can be automated to avoid late fees. They do help customers refrain from overspending and provide regular reports of their expenses.

The information collected by chatbots can be used to profile customers based on their financial needs, status, and expenses. They especially make loan approvals and investment decisions easier and more manageable.

How to build the most reliable chatbots?

Chatbots reduce costs, no doubt, but that’s not the main advantage. They provide a better customer experience and make essential processes simpler. Every bank and the financial institution needs a chatbot.

However, these simple solutions are not so easy to build. As with any other financial system, since they involve sensitive information and must be error-free, they should be built with care and by trustable experts. Moreover, unlike physical assets, digital infrastructure like chatbots need to be updated continuously to address changing needs of customers and to stay relevant and competitive in the market.

BotCore - the powerful enterprise bot builder platform from Acuvate

Over the past few years, we have helped several enterprises build & launch bots to meet the needs of their employees, customers, and vendors. After observing several enterprise scenarios large landscape of user intents, and common pain points across various departments, we spent more than 15 person-years of research, design & development on building a highly flexible and powerful enterprise bot builder platform – “BotCore”.

BotCore is the perfect accelerator that enables banks and financial institutions to train, build, and launch customized conversational bots powered by artificial intelligence. Using “Cognitive Abstraction” it can leverage an AI service available today and are scalable for future services.

BotCore today powers chatbots at several Fortune 100 & large enterprises. To learn more about how Botcare can help your business in providing superior customer engagement, please mail us at

The post Top use cases of Chatbots in the Banking and Finance Industry appeared first on BotCore.

Conversational Commerce in various Social Channels

Abhishek Shanbhag — Wed, 06 Jul 2022 12:17:59 +0000

Conversational Commerce in various Social Channels

We live in an era where artificial intelligence (AI) has taken over every aspect of our being. And customer experience (CX) is not alien to it.

As the world embraces new-age customer experiences (CX) with open hands, warranting the delivery of hyper-personalized customer engagement to a more informed, connected, and empowered customer, organizations are left to deal with several questions and dilemmas.

After all, endless customer conversations are happening online on various social channels — Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Twitter — it’s challenging to cover every digital touchpoint and use the enormous amount of customer data it generates to fathom “what customers want.”

That’s where conversational commerce comes to the rescue. Powered by AI, conversational commerce solutions like chatbots, voice bots, and other digital assistants have enabled companies to render human-like customer interactions at scale. Conversational commerce apps on various social channels leverage the unending amount of customer data to analyze customer behavior, predict their needs to deliver proactive engagement, and provide more personalized support.

Let’s explore more.

Conversational commerce in various social channels - What can it do for your business?

“Human interaction matters now — 82% of U.S. and 74% of non-U.S. consumers want more of it in the future. Regardless, the technology supporting human interaction must be seamless and unobtrusive across channels,” stated PWC’s latest report, Experience is everything: Here’s how to get it right.

Conversational commerce solutions in the form of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp chatbots are making this a reality.

Conversational chat commerce, powered by advanced technologies like machine learning, artificial intelligence, and natural language processing, is the latest paradigm in the customer experience world that draws in huge investments from the C-suite leaders. Chat and voice bots available on various social channels are now being used to solve a host of simple and complex customer queries 24X7, understand customer emotions, store information about purchase history, discover patterns in their behavior, and act accordingly to achieve maximum customer satisfaction.

Modern customers live online. They may be awake at two at night, browsing for new products or even reaching out to customer support. And they may do so from their desired social channel, be it Messenger, WhatsApp, or Instagram. Moreover, they may want to switch channels amidst an ongoing support case, i.e., change from WhatsApp to Facebook. Here conversational commerce solutions take charge. Not only do they provide instant, round-the-clock customer support, but e-commerce bots can retain the original context of the conversation to allow seamless switching without the customer being asked to start over.

So, what are the use cases of conversational commerce? How can chat and voice bots present on various social channels delight customers and build value at each stage of the sales funnel?

Let’s find out.

Curating a personalized sales journey through conversational commerce

Below, we present to you the use cases of conversational commerce on various social channels that can help organizations tailor sales journeys and win the life-long loyalty of their customers.

Amplify reach to new customer segments by pushing alerts about new products, collecting customer preferences and behavior data, answering initial queries, and delivering personalized recommendations and tips.
Acquire customers by curating creative marketing campaigns on the most popular social channels, assisting customers with website navigation, payment, checkout, and product use, and tailoring product suggestions according to purchase history and past behavior.
Is this shirt available in a different color? When will I receive my package? Customers can get their queries addressed simply by approaching the brand’s chatbot on the social channel of their liking. In this way, not only customer support becomes more accessible, but brands also get hold of valuable information that can help personalize CX.
As and when the customer’s desired product becomes available, e-commerce bots can push notifications and alerts through various social channels and provide a CTA to “Buy Now.” It can also suggest alternative and supplementary products as the case may demand.
Collect customer feedback through Instagram and Facebook surveys on a test batch of a new product.
Curate loyalty programs and send personalized discount and reward coupons to encourage customers to share product ratings and feedback and develop long-lasting relationships.

Take a look at the type of conversations a bot can have with your customers.

A sneak peek into a few conversational commerce solutions on various social channels

At Acuvate, we help clients build and deploy bots on various social channels that consistently deliver exceptional CX with minimum friction or hassle with our enterprise bot-building platform called BotCore.

BotCore is a Microsoft Preferred Co-Sell-ready solution that leverages Microsoft’s best AI, machine learning (ML), and natural language processing (NLP) technologies.
Our conversational commerce solutions are deployable on popular social channels (WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, etc.) and support multiple languages, including German, French, Italian, English, etc.

Here are a few examples of how brands are using conversational commerce in various social channels to engage, inform, and support their customers.

1. POND’s SAL chatbot for Facebook Messenger

An FB Messenger bot, also available on webchat in different countries, POND’s SAL can be accessed through Unilever’s flagship store on Shopee. Using technologies like AI and augmented reality (AR), SAL interacts three-dimensionally with customers to deliver personalized and more immersive shopping experiences.

When a user uploads a selfie, SAL works on identifying critical skincare concerns across four significant areas, namely, pimples, wrinkles, spots, and uneven skin tone.

The bot also sends relevant skincare articles and beauty tips to keep the users engaged.

Having completed the skin analysis, SAL then recommends suitable products from POND’s according to the customer’s skin condition.

2. pRANA’s chatbot for Facebook Messenger

Sustainable clothing company prAna’s chatbot for Facebook Messenger uses a casual, friendly tone to help customers shop online or get the information they need.

The bot helps shoppers navigate through the online store by asking them to choose between options like “Shop Women’s, “Shop Men’s, or “Shop Best Sellers.” Moreover, the bot’s intuitive conversational AI interface gives the option to type a message or easily navigate to the previous menu.

3. BMW’s “Follow Now” chatbot on WhatsApp

To combat the massive inflow of service requests when summers and winters are approaching, BMW launched its “Follow Now” chatbot on WhatsApp to help customers book an appointment from the convenience of their home from an app they use every day.

The bot offers real-time updates on the service status of their car and intimates them when their cars are ready for pickup. Moreover, service assistants can intervene and answer certain queries if the bot isn’t able to answer those.

4. Clear’s Cera chatbot for Facebook Messenger

Clear is Unilever’s leading anti-dandruff shampoo brand. The company’s chatbot Cera, available for the Indonesian market on Facebook Messenger, acts as your go-to hair care assistant offering personalized hair diagnosis, advice, and product recommendations for dandruff, dry hair, oily hair, etc.

The bot proactively sends relevant articles to the users after analyzing their behavior, preferences, and needs and delivers answers to a range of frequently asked questions related to hair care.

5. Roma by Rochi’s chatbot for Instagram

Roma by Rochi is a popular fashion brand in Argentina that revolves around encouraging women to embrace their sense of style.

Though quite popular on Instagram from likes, comments, and story mentions, recently, the brand launched a digital assistant on the social media platform to assist with a “tag and like” giveaway.

Post the deployment of the bot; the brand experienced an astounding 82% increase in reach in one week and a whopping 741% rise in engagement.

The brand also has a Facebook Messenger bot, which they use to answer queries, upsell products, and notify customers when sales begin.

We, at Acuvate, can help clients across industries build engaging conversational commerce experiences in various social channels using our enterprise bot-building platform called BotCore. To know more, please feel free to schedule a personalized consultation with our AI experts.

The post Conversational Commerce in various Social Channels appeared first on BotCore.

Choosing your Conversational AI Platform

Abhishek Shanbhag — Thu, 30 Jun 2022 14:18:01 +0000

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.

The post Choosing your Conversational AI Platform appeared first on BotCore.

How to Effectively Support Your Remote Workforce With HR Digital Assistants

Rakesh Reddy — Fri, 17 Apr 2020 13:16:00 +0000

How To Effectively Support Your Remote Workforce With HR Digital Assistants

The COVID-19 pandemic has turned the world upside down, leaving many businesses grappling to adjust to a new normal that is constantly changing. Specifically, extended lockdowns are forcing businesses to implement a long term work-from-home model. In fact, leading tech giants are heading this revolution with most of them allowing their employees to work from home for the rest of 2020 while others are implementing various solutions to ensure limited capacity in their offices. In the case of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, the CEO, informed his employees that they can continue working from home “forever”.

Are HR managers prepared for this shift?

As weeks turned into months, it is clear that the adoption of a work-from-home model hasn’t been as seamless as expected for most companies. This can be attributed to a variety of factors, spanning from the lack of collaboration tools to inefficient processes and poor training. HR and IT teams are overburdened with managing requests pouring in from employees working across geographies and time zones.

Given that the effects of the pandemic will continue to impact businesses for a long while to come, HR and other business leaders are realizing the need to invest time and resources into digital transformation and implement solutions that can increase productivity. It’s no surprise that HR digital assistants which were already on the CHRO radar prior to the pandemic, have now become a top priority.

Let’s discuss a few ways companies are leveraging virtual assistants to not only support their remote workforce but also improve HR team productivity during these uncertain times.

Leveraging HR Digital Assistants

Answering FAQ

In the wake of the current crisis, employees will have a variety of concerns regarding the new work-from-home policies, for which they typically turn to the HR department. Addressing these questions takes the HR team’s time away from completing more productive or complex tasks. A digital HR assistant, however, can ensure that your employees are given accurate and thorough answers in real-time. The employees would just have to input their questions in natural language and have their concerns addressed directly, rather than navigating multiple screens or interfaces.

Moreover, with a digital HR assistant, employees will no longer have to wait for a human assistant to get to their question/request and respond back to them and instead get instant responses 24/7. In the event that these questions are too complex for the virtual assistant to answer, the conversation can be transferred to an HR agent.

Chatbots are essential not only because they answer FAQs of employees, but also for their ability to conduct human-like conversations – something very desirable when people are isolated and going through difficult times.

As a Microsoft Gold Partner, Acuvate is helping customers leverage Power Virtual Agents to deploy customized Crisis FAQ bots to support their remote workforce and answer questions related to work-from-home policies, travel advisories, emergency contact information etc.

Learn More: Acuvate’s Essential Apps Suite For Enterprises In The New Normal

Crisis Communications

The importance of communication during remote working can’t be overstated. Given their availability across different channels and devices, chatbots are a must-have in your crisis communication suite. HR leaders can leverage crisis communication chatbots to

Send public health information to employees from sources like WHO and CDC
Notify employees about company’s new policies, news and advisories
Send work-from-home tips

Recruiting and Onboarding

With social distancing protocols in place, a digital HR assistant can play a major role in ensuring seamless and effortless recruitment and onboarding processes by automating major parts of the process. For instance, businesses can leverage them to filter resumes, track applicants, and schedule online interviews across multiple messaging channels. They can also drive virtual onboarding by enabling remote access to relevant training policies, and materials. You can also automate onboarding processes like filling forms.

Track and support employee health

HR teams can leverage chatbots to track employee well-being by doing regular health status checks. They can also use bots to send safety, disease prevention, social distancing and remote working tips

In fact, Global Telecom, a Filipino telecommunications company, has implemented a chatbot named Digital Usher for Disasters and Emergencies (DUDE) to keep the management updated on its employee’s health and well-being. The chatbot does daily health status checks for its 8000+ employees.

“The insights that we have been receiving from DUDE really give us a good picture of where our employees are at,” said Nico Bambao, Director for Globe’s Employee Experience Team. “When we ask them if they are unwell, they don’t just reply with their symptoms, they tell us if they’re feeling overwhelmed, anxious, or even feeling lonely or depressed.” (Learn More)

Learn More: How Chatbots Are Helping The Fight Against The COVID-19 Crisis

Virtual Training Programs

Training playbooks, performance support materials, capability assessments and other learning and development activities can all be carried out within a virtual environment. A virtual assistant can perform these programs autonomously without much involvement from the HR team.

Get Started

The COVID-19 pandemic is changing how work gets done in an organization. It’s propelling businesses towards an increasingly remote workforce. Consequently, in order to ensure robust internal communications, employee engagement and simplified HR workflows, adopting HR digital assistants is becoming imperative for organizations.

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

A Return To Workplace Checklist For HR Leaders

The post How to Effectively Support Your Remote Workforce With HR Digital Assistants appeared first on BotCore.