Conversational AI platform Archives - 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 can conversational AI help win the digital shelf?

Abhishek Shanbhag — Tue, 25 Jan 2022 07:08:00 +0000

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.

The post How can conversational AI help win the digital shelf? appeared first on BotCore.