virtual assistants 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.

Transforming The Retail Experience with Metaverse and Virtual assistants

Abhishek Shanbhag — Fri, 10 Jun 2022 13:30:00 +0000

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.

The post Transforming The Retail Experience with Metaverse and Virtual assistants appeared first on BotCore.

The Future of Chatbots: Top statistics to look for in 2021 and beyond

Abhishek Shanbhag — Tue, 18 May 2021 12:47:00 +0000

The Future of Chatbots: Top statistics to look for in 2021 and beyond

According to a study by Allied Market Research, the global intelligent virtual assistant market was pegged at $3.44 billion in 2019 and is expected to hit $44.25 billion by 2027, registering a CAGR of 37.7% from 2020 to 2027.

Owing to the rapid digitization of business, the rise in the penetration of smart devices, the high demand for automation in customer services coupled with the evolving employee expectations, chatbots and voice-enabled assistants are being used in a wide range of industries and use cases.

From searching for information, finding hotels and restaurants, listening to music, and shopping for products to solving customer queries, carrying out routine HR and IT tasks, and getting personalized alerts and recommendations, intelligent virtual assistants (IVA) have taken the entire business landscape by storm.

Today’s market is filled with AI-enabled chatbots and voice assistants, including Microsoft Cortana, Google Home, Apple Siri, and Amazon Alexa, embedded on every platform and device, such as websites, social media apps, smartphones, portable speakers, smartwatches, and tablets. Indeed, it’s time for organizations to jump on board with this transformation to survive and thrive in the market.

So, if you plan to implement chatbots/virtual assistants for your customers and employees, read on to learn about the latest industry trends and use cases, and top statistics to look out for in 2021.

Customer and employee challenges

33% are most frustrated by having to repeat themselves to multiple support reps. (HubSpot Research)
60% of customers feel that long holds and wait times are the most frustrating parts of a service experience. (Zendesk)
30% of customers will leave a brand and never come back because of a bad experience. (IDC)
The average business worker uses 4 different applications for daily work.
Employees spend over 3 hours a day on easily automatable tasks. (Business Standard)
70 to 80 percent of business intelligence initiatives end up failing due to bad user experience. (Gartner)
In a survey, 99% of the respondents said it is valuable for employees to easily find HR information, such as maternity leave or other company policies. (ServiceNow HR Tech Conference and Expo)

Chatbot Adoption Statistics:

3 in 5 millennials have used chatbots at least once in their lives. (Outgrow)
There are more than 300,000 active bots on Messenger. (Review42)
About 7 billion conversations take place on Facebook Messenger every day. Messages are opened more often than emails, with a 30-40 percent CTR. (G2 Learn Hub)
Teams that use chatbots to automate conversations are 27% more likely to meet rising customer expectations than those that don’t. (Tech Republic)

Customer Service Chatbot Statistics:

By 2023, 30% of customer service organizations will deliver proactive customer services by using AI-enabled process orchestration and continuous intelligence. (Gartner)
By 2025, proactive customer engagement interactions will outnumber reactive customer engagement interactions. (Gartner)
By 2023, more than 60% of all customer service engagements will be delivered via digital and web-serve channels, up from 23% in 2019. (Gartner)
By 2025, customer service organizations will elevate operational efficiency by 25% by embedding AI in their multichannel customer engagement platforms. (Gartner)
Chatbot conversations will deliver $8 billion in cost savings by 2022. (Juniper Research)
By 2023, 25% of the customer interactions will be via voice. (Gartner)

Employee Chatbot Statistics:

In 2021, artificial intelligence will recover 6.2 billion hours of worker productivity globally. (Gartner)
By 2022, 70% of white-collar workers will interact with conversational platforms on a daily basis. (Gartner)
Support leaders whose teams use chatbots are 60% more likely to report an improvement in resolution times and 30% more likely to report an increase in customer satisfaction than those who do not. (Tech Republic)
Organizations are increasingly using RPA chatbots to automate diverse, repeatable tasks and back-office operations in HR, IT, etc. RPA software spending will total $2.4 billion in 2022. (Gartner)
92% of HR teams agree that chatbots will be important in directing employees toward finding the information they need in the future. (ServiceNow HR Tech Conference and Expo)
90% of businesses report faster complaint resolution with chatbots. (MIT)

Chatbot Market Statistics: Outlook in 2021 and beyond

The global chatbot market in BFSI is projected to reach $2,186 million by 2024, growing at a CAGR of 29.7% from 2018 to 2024. (Allied Market Research)
The operational cost savings from using chatbots in banking will reach $7.3 billion globally by 2023, up from an estimated $209 million in 2019, representing a whopping 862 million hours of time saved for banks. (Juniper Research)
The retail sector will gain the most from chatbot technology. By 2023, 70% of chatbots accessed will be retail-based. (Juniper Research)
The smart speaker market segment will grow at a CAGR of 40.3% until 2027. (Allied Market Research)
Voice shopping is estimated to hit $40+ billion across the U.S. and U.K. by 2022. (Tech Crunch)
By 2021, early adopters of the technology who have redesigned their websites to support voice search capability will increase revenue by 30%.
By 2024, consumer retail spend via chatbots worldwide will reach $142 billion – up from just $2.8 billion in 2019. (Insider Intelligence)
The Healthcare chatbots market is poised to value over $340 million by 2027 end with a CAGR of over 20.5% during the forecast period 2020 to 2027. (Future Wise)
AI may automate more than 100,000 supportive roles in the legal sector within the next two decades. (Deloitte)
85% of travelers book travel activities via mobile. (Hotel Tech)
87% of users would interact with a travel chatbot if it could save them both time and money. (Hospitality Technology)

How can Acuvate help?

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

With minimalistic coding requirements and a visual design interface, enterprises can build and deploy chatbots for a wide range of use cases, including HR, IT, intranet, business intelligence, customer service, and contact center support, within a few weeks. Our bots leverage the best of Microsoft’s AI, machine learning, and natural language processing technology to understand what the user wants, learn from past conversations, retain context, and provide proper support.

Moreover, BotCore allows organizations to create an intelligent virtual assistant network by connecting multiple bots within your enterprise, supporting third-party app integration, and enabling built-in support for Power Virtual Agents, LUIS, and QnA Maker.

Enterprises can also cater to a global customer and employee audience with support for multiple languages like French, German, English, etc.

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

The post The Future of Chatbots: Top statistics to look for in 2021 and beyond appeared first on BotCore.

Understanding Digital Customer Service And How To Improve It

Rakesh Reddy — Wed, 30 Dec 2020 09:48:00 +0000

Understanding Digital Customer Service and How to Improve it

The digital world has changed the buying process! Customers today are well-informed of products and the market. When they enter stores or talk to a sales representative, today’s customers already know what they want to buy and how much they want to pay for it. They have access to digital channels like blogs, vlogs, websites, social media, chatbots and digital marketplaces that provide them with a plethora of relevant information. In fact, once the sale is closed, customers take the time and use those same channels to either shame or promote the seller with a mere click of the button. Today’s customers don’t just want to enjoy the benefits of their purchases, they also want to enjoy the journey of making those purchases.

Therefore, to give the customers what they want, businesses have realized that they must provide exemplary digital customer services – paving the way for a complete customer service transformation.

Customer service leaders today are facing tremendous pressures:

Ensure customer journey in digital channels at lowered costs
Match up to competition’s service standards
Assure leadership that the service center is more than just a cost center

According to Karen Freberg, Associate Professor in Strategic Communication at the University of Louisville, digital customer service is a necessity in today’s business landscape as it presents a unique opportunity to build a two-way dialogue with customers and learn about their wants and needs.

Understanding Digital Customer Service

In today’s digital age, with rapid adoption of technology, the rules of customer services are changing. The customer is now in the driver seat.

Digital customer service – defined as meeting the needs of customers using digital channels such as emails, mobile apps, blogs, vlogs, SMS, online chats, and social media, has become more than just engaging with the customer and handling their complaints and returns; it is about enhancing the entire end-to-end customer experience, where every interaction is seamless, fast, and personalized.

In fact, if done well, digital customer service can also become a valuable revenue driver, with Forrester estimating that 69% of customers preferring to buy from brands that offer consistent customer service across multiple channels. Therefore, business leaders are increasingly understanding that “how” they deliver is as important as “what” they deliver.

Additionally, new competitors are flooding the market by taking advantage of the low barriers of entry provided by globalization, de-regulation, and technology developments. This further highlights the need for a robust digital customer service, with Deloitte stating that 67% of a company’s competitive edge comes from its customer service.

Improving Digital Customer Service

Digital customer service must not be seen as merely adding more digital options to the pre-existing customer service efforts. It must be approached as a multistage transformation, undertaken with rigorous planning, streamlined processes, and initiatives backed by the leadership. Here are some ways you can improve your digital customer service strategy:

1. Figure out the gaps

Digital channels produce terabytes of unstructured data, which when optimized can be a valuable source of information and insights. Therefore, it is necessary for businesses to deep dive into their existing customer service strategy and analyze various touch points and functionalities, and how they are offered to spot weaknesses and inconsistencies. This enables businesses to direct their investment into the right tools and processes.

Measuring the impact of the new initiatives across each digital channel individually and assessing the migration rate between them can help businesses improve their customer service results and identify the most effective digital channels. This ensures that the business can maintain control over various channels, understand the nature of the customer service requests, and its ability to resolve them. This can also help businesses identify the points where customers are abandoning self-service and calling the contact center.

Additionally, analyzing the prior customer service requests can help businesses identify priorities. For instance, businesses often find that a small number of problems account for the majority of customer requests and costs. One of the major reasons for this is a lack of direct digital solution. This means that designing the right solutions for those problems can help the business significantly cut costs and also enhance customer experience.

2. Develop targets and a service strategy

Once the business identifies the problem, it must set up well-defined targets, defined at the enterprise, group, and individual levels. This is initiated by developing a workflow for each involved personnel, as part of the larger framework to address the problem. For instance, a touchpoint map can show which customer request can be addressed at which digital touchpoint, which can help businesses pin-point which functionality to develop.

Businesses should consider the costs and savings-estimate when setting up the workflow. In fact, many businesses utilize service-to-sales functionality to some digital touchpoints in order to cross-sell services and cover the cost of the functionality development. However, it is crucial to push them selectively, and not too aggressively to prevent jeopardizing the customer service efforts and brand image.

3. Reach out to customers proactively

Proactive customer service involves anticipating the needs of customers and delivering the relevant information and solutions without being prompted. This can include notifying customers about new product errors and glitches, providing tailored advice, offering personalized product solutions recommendations etc.

For instance, consider the example of a shopping chatbot deployed by a retail or CPG company. When a customer interacts with the chatbot and shows interest in making a product purchase, the chatbot can analyze past shopping behaviour of the customer and recommend more products similar to the one he/she is trying to purchase.

In addition, the chatbot can suggest the usage of coupons or promotional offers while the customer tries to check out. It can also notify customers in advance if there is a delay in orders and provide an updated delivery ETA.

Proactive customer service not only improves customer satisfaction and confidence but also reduces costs and increases agent productivity. Human agents can spend less time answering routine questions and focus on other productive tasks. A report by Enkata shows that proactive customer service reduces call volumes by 30% and increases customer retention by 3-5%

4. Send updates on new products and services

Powerful digital customer service and engagement is crucial whenever an organization launches new products or services. You not only have to ensure customers are fully aware of the launch and understand the product benefits but also need to make sure they know how to use the product features and address any new concerns they might have.

A major insurance company based in Canada recently approached for our help on improving their digital customer service as they were planning to launch a new insurance plan. We helped the company deploy an AI virtual assistant on their corporate website within 8 weeks. Upon the launch of the new plan, the GDPR chatbot was able to educate customers about the plan, address their queries and help new members decide which scheme they should choose based on their demographic information. The bot deflected most of the questions from going to the company’s call center and reduced inbound call volume.

5. Address “How-to” scenarios

Another important aspect of digital customer service is helping customers understand the different ways they use a product or service. For instance, Knorr, a global CPG company and manufacturer of dehydrated soup and meal mixes, deployed a chatbot that provides different soup recipes, tips and tricks for preparation, and personalized ingredient recommendations.

This type of customer service initiatives help companies not only improve the overall customer experience and engagement but also drive sales and revenue.

6. Utilize AI-driven technologies

Businesses must look to adopt modern AI-powered technologies that can provide key advantages in improving digital customer service:

1. Chatbots and Virtual Assistants For 24/7 Customer Service

As seen above, a chatbot is arguably the most adopted digital customer service technology in recent times. With their highly interactive and human-like conversational interfaces, chatbots deliver personalized responses to customers based on their intent and preferences.

Their deployment can increase the company’s customer interactions capacity, and reduce human involvement to only when absolutely necessary or when the chatbots are unable to solve a specific problem, thereby saving costs. Moreover, their performance is easy to track. The data generated by chatbots can help businesses identify key customer trends and behaviors.

With their machine learning and Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities, chatbots can also learn from previous interactions to better understand customer vocabulary.

By acting as the first line of service agents, they enable human agents to focus on high value tasks. They can assist your customers 24 X 7, across multiple channels and languages.

Learn More:

2. Advanced Analytics To Extract The Value From Contact Centre Data

Contact centres produce humongous amounts of data. However much of this data is unstructured and present in different formats – free text fields, images, audio etc. and accessible only to the IT department. Therefore, businesses have been unable to tap into its value to guide their decision making.

However, today, with the development of NLP-driven advanced analytics, businesses can tap into this data, across multiple channels, and generate valuable insights to better understand customer behaviour and the general customer sentiment towards the product or the company.

Learn More: Advanced Analytics: 4 Simple Steps For Enterprise Adoption

Get Started

With McKinsey stating that 25% of customers will defect after just one bad digital experience, it’s time for customer service leaders to rethink their service strategy. Leading businesses make their digital customer service experiences useful, engaging, and consistent, at every touchpoint. They personalize it and keep it emotionally appealing across the entire customer life cycle. This enables them to drive brand loyalty and customer retention.

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

The post Understanding Digital Customer Service And How To Improve It appeared first on BotCore.

How Agent Assist Bots Help Improve Customer Service Productivity

Rakesh Reddy — Fri, 04 Sep 2020 08:02:00 +0000

How Agent Assist Bots Help Improve Customer Service Productivity

Customer service agents not only have to resolve customer queries accurately but also need to do that in the least amount of time. Average Handling Time (AHT), therefore, is one of the most important metrics to determine if a contact centre’s service is productive or not. It impacts a customer’s satisfaction directly and is a key determinant of the overall customer experience. However, even the best customer service agents need help at times.

While handling complex queries, customer service agents have to put customers on hold to search for answers across multiple systems and documents, which usually is tedious and takes time. This increases AHT, frustrates the customer, and increases the likelihood of customer attrition – which in turn affects the company’s bottom line. This is where agent assist bots play a key role.

Agent Assist Bots Explained

Most customer service departments today use customer-facing chatbots. According to a report, 80% of the surveyed companies are or will be using customer-facing chatbots by 2020. These chatbots are usually equipped with AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP), and act as the first line of support agents. Complex conversations which need a human touch are transferred to a human agent.

But a chatbot’s applications in customer service doesn’t have to be limited to just customer-facing interactions.

Agent assist bots act as a companion to human customer service agents. They are programmed to work alongside live agents and provide customer information and smart suggestions to humans as per the query and the conversational flow. Moreover, they can also be programmed to handle the cumbersome, tedious, and time-consuming tasks of the agents like searching for information and automating CRM data entry. Agent assist bots are fast becoming a critical addition to deliver superior and more efficient customer service.

Improve Customer Service Productivity With Agent Assist Bots

1. Support during live calls or chats

Whenever human agents handle customer conversations via live chats or calls, agent assist bots analyze customers’ responses and identify their intents. This enables them to map the query to relevant topics and provide the needed information to agents to deliver faster resolutions.

At the same time, they can identify customers’ profiles and assess whether they are repeat callers or not by automatically analyzing the company’s customer database and relaying the information to the agent. Moreover, they ensure that the agents never hit a dead end during the conversation. When live agents do not know the answer for a specific query, chatbots provide immediate contextual suggestions.

2. Faster Access To Information

A majority of a human agent’s time is spent on manual search. Upon an agent’s request, agent assist bots can automatically connect to their knowledge bases, CRM and back-end systems to extract relevant articles and documents, and present it to the agent seamlessly.

3. Enhanced Live Agent Productivity

Whenever customer self-service interactions escalate to a human agent, an agent assist bot automatically provides the entire conversation history including sentiment scores and contextual information. They also suggest knowledge articles the agent can go through to fulfill the customer’s request. Additionally, agent assist bots can also help agents in tedious and time-consuming activities such as capturing customer information, post-conversation form filling and surveys, and thereby enhance the overall agent productivity.

4. Simplified and Automated CRM Data Entry

Manual data entry into CRM is a huge productivity roadblock for customer service agents. An agent assist bot mines audio calls/textual conversations whenever an agent speaks/chats with a customer. It captures key notes, details, insights from the customer and enters the data automatically into the CRM system.

Agents can also have quick chat with the agent assist bot and ask it to update/change the CRM records with the provided specifications.

Learn More: How Are Chatbots Boosting The CRM Adoption Rates

Get Started

Customer service agents and agent assist bots are complimentary in many ways. They have the same goals – improve customer experience and reduce the amount of time required to handle an interaction, but have different capabilities, which when synchronized can take customer service to the next level. While the agent can interact with the customers and make them feel at ease and comfortable, agent assist bots with their AI capabilities can extract and provide highly contextual and accurate information in real-time, enhancing the productivity of the company’s customer service.

If you’d like to learn more about agent assist bots, please feel free to get in touch with one of our contact center and chatbot experts for a personalized consultation. You may also be interested in exploring our enterprise chatbot builder platform (BotCore) which can help you build customer service and agent assist bots for your organization.

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The post How Agent Assist Bots Help Improve Customer Service Productivity appeared first on BotCore.

Understanding The Difference Between A Chatbot And A Virtual Assistant

Abhishek Shanbhag — Sat, 08 Aug 2020 11:35:58 +0000

Understanding The Difference Between A Chatbot And A Virtual Assistant

Gartner predicts that by 2020, 25 percent of customer service and support operations will integrate bot technology of some kind. Chatbots and Virtual Assistants (VA) are a result of this digital shift. Primarily, both Chatbots and Virtual Assistants are computer programs powered by AI with the ability to interact with humans. It has now become very common for people to interact with one or both of these technologies day in and day out and most users are of the notion that both these technologies are the same. However, Chatbots and Virtual Assistants are very different computer programs with different roles and purposes. A closer look at these two technologies would divulge their differences.

What is a Chatbot?

Chatbots are computer programs that interact with humans through textual or auditory means. Chatbots are developed using Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithms that provide a framework for programming computers in order to process and analyze large amounts of natural language data. Chatbots are mainly deployed in customer service, HR, IT and marketing functions. Chatbots today are enabled by conversational AI, NLP, and machine learning, making them sophisticated enough to understand the ‘intent’ behind user queries and successfully simulate human-like conversation. Chatbots can, therefore, be used to handle simple and to an extent, complex tasks such as providing information, answering FAQ, sending instant acknowledgments, collecting user information, etc. They are capable of addressing customer queries regarding a product and helping customers gain the required knowledge and information. Additionally, they are also used to facilitate internal communication, help make Business Intelligence data easier to access and can even schedule meetings, and appointments on command.

What is a Virtual Assistant?

Software programs that simulate the tasks of a personal assistant such as managing schedules, handling travel needs, booking appointments, sending reminders about events and so forth, are known as Virtual Assistants. Virtual Assistants are implemented with a strong focus on the end-user and are programmed to take inputs and perform tasks through verbal commands. Virtual Assistants have the ability to understand human speech and are supported by artificial neural networks that enable them to predict the intent of the user no matter how random the query.

Virtual Assistants are AI-powered and are hence capable of learning the user’s preferences and habits over time, constantly evolving and getting smarter. They can understand natural language, recognize faces, identify objects, and communicate with other smart devices and software. Virtual Assistants are generally present in handheld devices such as a mobile phone (think iPhone’s Siri) and can be used to control the device and handle simple tasks like sending emails, make to-do lists etc. All these tasks can be executed by giving an appropriate verbal command to the Virtual Assistant. IBM Watson, Google Assistant, Cortana, Alexa and Siri are some of the well-known Virtual Assistants in the market.

Difference Between Chatbots And Virtual Assistants

The terms Chatbots and Virtual Assistants are interchangeably used to refer to conversational computer programs that can interact with humans. However, these programs significantly differ from each other and there has been ambiguity in understanding the distinction between them. Primarily, Chatbots are developed to perform only limited activities that are pre-selected. They are capable of performing those tasks without altering much of their responses. Whereas Virtual Assistants are developed to perform activities based on the inputs that they receive from the user that are not necessarily pre-programed. Many times, a Virtual Assistant also acts as a concierge or Aggregator to several chatbots.

While Chatbot communication is traditionally text driven, audio and pictures can also be used for interaction. Virtual Assistants on the other hand are primarily operated through verbal commands, though they’re capable of processing text input as well. Chatbots and Virtual Assistants despite having similar technical foundations, differ in their functionality. Following are the areas in which Chatbots and VAs differ fundamentally:

1. Intelligence

Chatbots

Virtual Assistants

They can answer only those queries that they have been programmed for and can fail if the query is other than the ones they have learnt. Chatbots cannot hold lengthy and coherent interaction. They lose the context of a conversation if the interaction breaks. Chatbots are not very proficient in processing languages due to the limited bandwidth in their programming.

Virtual Assistants are more advanced in their capacity to interact. They are adept in processing language and can also understand the semantics of the commands. They can also perceive the mood and emotions of the user. Unlike Chatbots, VAs can have a long conversation even after breaking the flow. Complicated tasks like finding navigation to places and making appointments at restaurants can be performed by Virtual Assistants.

2. Design

Chatbots	Virtual Assistants
Chatbots are built based on models that provide an architecture on how to generate responses. There are several models that govern the design of Chatbots and depending on the purpose for which they’re used, relevant models are selected to build them. Chatbots are then trained to generate coherent responses.	Virtual Assistants are powered by artificial neural networks (ANNs) to continually learn from historic inputs. ANNs are used to recognize, classify, predict and analyze the inputs of the user that enable them to arrive at accurate results for the user’s queries.

3. Usage

Chatbots	Virtual Assistants
Chatbot has limited scope in its use and is not suitable for complex processes. It serves as a great tool to acquire information from customers. While most Chatbots cannot continually learn, advancement in artificially learning is gradually enabling Chatbots to learn from the interactions.	Virtual Assistants have a wide range of scope in their usage and have the ability to carry out complex tasks like interacting with people on their own. Unlike Chatbots, Virtual Assistants gain accuracy in their performance with use.

4. Programming

Chatbots

Virtual Assistants

Chatbots do not possess proficient language processing skills. They pick certain words from the user’s input that are idiosyncratic to the particular query and answer it with a response programmed into them. Chatbots have a structured dialogue and are programmed with specific replies to specific questions. Chatbots cannot respond to questions that are complex and questions that are outside the purview of their program.

Virtual Assistants lay emphasis on both Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Natural Language Understanding (NLU). Virtual Assistants can also understand slang used in colloquial conversations. They also possess the intuition for empathy and understand sentiments conveyed through languages. NLP gives Virtual Assistants a human-like trait with enhanced conversational ability than Chatbots.

Benefits Of Chatbots And Virtual Assistants

Organizations are significantly utilizing Chatbots to streamline their internal business processes, increase productivity, boost revenue and drive customer experience. Chatbots on websites improve engagement by providing quick and personalized answers. This greatly reduces waiting time for customers which would otherwise take longer time to get a response through conventional telephonic means. Chatbots have a very high adoption rate due to their ease of use. Adopting Chatbots opens up the floodgates of opportunities for organizations to improve their customer engagement process and operational efficiency, thus reducing the cost for customer service.

Virtual Assistants on the other hand, simplify the process of organizing and executing our routine tasks. Be it setting reminders and alarms, adding tasks to the calendar, making calls or fetching information from the web, Virtual Assistants come very handy in assisting our tasks. VAs are now capable of handling smart devices at home like lights, thermostats and audio devices. Although Virtual Assistants are limited to usage by individuals for personal needs, they are gaining quick ground in being utilized in businesses as well.

Conclusion

Both Chatbots and Virtual Assistants are a form of Artificial Intelligence and have similarities in their technical foundations. However, both greatly differ in various aspects. Both these technologies address different needs and are employed differently – Chatbots being used predominantly in enterprise systems whereas Virtual Assistants are used in the consumer world and in handheld devices such as smartphones, tablets etc. Both Chatbots and Virtual Assistants fundamentally differ in their design and one cannot perform the excat same functions as the other.

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

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A Comprehensive Guide To Understanding Chatbots

Rakesh Reddy — Sat, 25 Jul 2020 10:53:51 +0000

A Comprehensive Guide To Understanding Chatbots

What is a chatbot
The past and the present of chatbots
What are chatbots capable of doing?
Important chatbot features you should be aware of
Use cases and benefits
Functions
Industries
Key implementation considerations
The future of chatbots

Chapter 1: What Is A Chatbot

A chatbot is a computer program which can converse via textual or auditory methods. Often regarded as the “darling of the media”, chatbots (or bots) are currently one of the most popular AI technologies. There are also rule-based bots which don’t have AI incorporated in them. However, their relevance is fast decreasing in today’s disruptive world.

Chatbots are the “apps” of voice and messaging platforms that define how users and customers converse with your digital business services and data

Usually built with a Chatbot Platform or Frameworks, bots are deployed on messaging apps or virtual assistants to converse with end-users.

The advancements in Artificial Intelligence and its related components like Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing (NLP) led to the creation of highly intelligent bots with smarter responses in a natural language tone.

Chapter 2: The Past And The Present Of Chatbots

The History Of Bots: Where And How It All Began

In order to understand chatbots, we first need to delve into Artificial Intelligence and how it gave rise to the intelligent Chatbots of today. It all began with Alan Turing asking a simple question in an article titled ‘Computer Machinery and Intelligence’ in 1950. In this article, Turing theorized on whether or not computer systems could think. He also outlined the Turing Test, a method to measure whether one was speaking to a human or to a computer programme. We can note this as being one of the first theories on the capability of AI technology.

Years later in 1965, Joseph Weizenbaum created ELIZA at MIT’s AI laboratory. ELIZA was capable of simulating human conversation by matching user prompts with scripted responses. This innovation paved the way for PARRY, an AI chatbot developed in 1972 by Kenneth Colby. PARRY could simulate the thinking patterns of a person. When psychiatrists were made to interact with PARRY, only 48 percent were able to identify the difference between PARRY and a real person. Ever since then we have seen many variations of AI-powered chatbots which have only gotten more and more sophisticated over time.

The Present Scenario

With the advancements in AI, bots have become more intelligent are able to conduct meaningful and personalized conversations. Now, bots could adapt and learn based on the interactions they had with people. They could now process tons of data, rapidly retrieve information, process information, and give the right output/answer in no time. There are two primary entities of AI that power a chatbot – Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing.

Machine learning is an application of AI, and a scientific study of algorithms and statistical models that provides computer systems the ability to learn and perform a specific task without explicitly trained to do so. With machine learning, systems rely on patterns and inference to learn automatically. With the help of machine learning, chatbots can use historic interactions and the built-in instructions during training, to continuously learn and better themselves.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a component of AI, and is the ability of a computer program to understand human or natural language, as it is spoken/written. NLP helps a bot understand the semantics of the language being used and logically respond using natural language, consistent with the user’s query.

Organizations today are using chatbots for a variety of use cases and the usage varies from industry to industry and function to function. And the benefits chatbots offer are plenty including enhancing customer experience, improving employee productivity, automating mundane tasks, reducing costs and simplifying business workflows.

Enterprises are now leveraging chatbot builder platforms to effectively build, deploy, manage and train AI chatbots.

Learn More: Chatbots: The Past, Present, And Future

Chapter 3: What Are Chatbots Capable Of Doing?

Unlike a typical application’s or website’s traditional Graphic User Interface (GUI), the Conversational User Interface (CUI) of a chatbot simplifies business workflows, tasks and much more. Before understanding how chatbots drive value, it’s imperative to understand what chatbots can do.

1. Fetching Information

Chatbots provide users with an easy way to access data or generate reports and facilitate better decision making for both your customers and employees.

Decision makers can easily obtain granular business insights and key metrics right within the actively used messaging app. This eliminates the need for them to log into applications or scan through multiple dashboards or filter data to access the information they require. Instead, relevant information is made available to them right at their fingertips, saving time and greatly increasing efficiency.
Enabling users with chatbots allows them to easily request for information they require through voice commands and basic keystrokes.
Chatbots can easily answer questions via text or any multimedia format, including but not limited to images, graphs, pie charts and so on.

Examples:

Employee to a business intelligence chatbot: “What is the marketing ROI for 2016 and 2017?”
Customer to a banking chatbot: “Send my account mini statement”

2. Send Personalized Alerts

Just like a mobile app, chatbots have the capability to deliver personalized notifications and alerts to customers and employees directly from your enterprise systems. This serves to ensure that your business users are kept updated about various changes and news in the organization. and also engage to get more details by asking questions in natural language.

Here are a few examples of how notifications and alerts can help across a variety of organizations and departments:

An intranet chatbot can send notifications to relevant employees when there is a new document added to the intranet knowledge base.
A sales chatbot can keep users notified about changes in important metrics, including but not limited to MSL, leads, OTIF, payment terms and so on. These alerts can also be customized based on the location of the sales personnel and the specific customer they are about to meet, so they have access to the most relevant information required to make a sale. Chatbots can notify users about a dip in revenue from specific regions or brands etc. As a result, the sales personnel will be able to immediately dive into why it’s happening and take appropriate measures to fix.
A banking chatbot can send alerts to customers reminding them to make payments or to advise them that they have exceeded the credit limit, so they do not attract unforeseen fees.
An e-commerce chatbot can send alerts on incomplete orders. If a customer has items that have been left in the cart, he is reminded to complete the transaction to secure the items he wanted to purchase.
Chatbots can alert users about upcoming ERP downtimes.

3. Perform Tasks

There are a variety of repetitive tasks that have to be performed across organizations for a variety of reasons. These routine tasks can be time-consuming and hamper productivity. A chatbot can easily be introduced to address these tasks and complete them without glitches.

These tasks can involve collecting, modifying, posting information in systems or making form-based data entries that employees and customers need to perform repetitively.

Chatbots also eliminate the need to switch across multiple applications, go through various mundane procedures or depend on personnel to get tasks done. Users can get all their simple, yet repetitive tasks are done, simply by “conversing” with the chatbot via their actively used organization wide messaging app.

Examples:

Employee to a helpdesk chatbot: “There is an issue with my laptop. Generate an IT helpdesk ticket”
Customer to a banking chatbot: “I want to make my credit-card payment”

4. Answering Questions

Most websites are equipped with chatbots that proactively ask visitors questions that enable them to provide a personalized experience and help the user reach exactly the information or page they are looking for.

This same functionality also applies within businesses – from the most simple FAQs to more complex questions, chatbots can be designed to address a wide range of queries from employees across the organization.

Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) enable bots to understand the query and the intent and therefore, provide highly accurate answers.

Well-designed chatbots can also quickly adapt to the office jargon, offering users the most relevant and informed answers to their queries.

Examples:

Employee to IT helpdesk bot: “How do I reset my password?”
Customer: “Can you tell me more about that product?”

Chapter 4: Popular Chatbot Features You Should Be Aware Of

A) Knowledge Base

The knowledge base of the bot is central to its functioning. It supports the following functions:

Creating Guided Conversations: Bot interactions ought to be streamlined so that the outcomes are pre-defined.
Handling Q&A Scenarios: Equips bots to answer all possible queries.
Entity Fulfilment & Actions: This enables a bot to give relevant responses to capture all required entities to perform an action.

b) Broadcasting

When we say there can’t be a bot platform without broadcasting, we mean it. Through broadcasting, the admin of a chatbot can easily send a notification to all the users regarding any important event. This feature of a chatbot platform has gained significance during noteworthy events such as the People’s Choice Awards, World Surf League etc., in which users were kept informed and updated about future events.

c) Effective conversation system

Based on the particular need and situation, the bot should have the ability to initiate a tailored conversation with the user.

An efficient bot would have features such as

Trigger service – Service that an integrating application can use to send a trigger
Message queuing – Trigger messages are queued for large scale message volume
User & channel data store – Triggers can be sent to users on one or more channels that they are connected to with the bot.
Human hand off: The bot should transfer the conversation to a human when the conversation becomes too complex for the bot to handle or upon users’ request.

d) Vocabulary

If the bot gives a standard response with limited phrases, the user may be discouraged from continuing the conversation. An efficient chatbot should have a high range of variable vocabulary and understand familiar user phrases. Chatbots should also be ingested with business/domain specific vocabulary for seamless adoption

e) Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment analysis empowers chatbots with the ability to understand the emotions and mood of the user by analyzing their text or voice input. This helps chatbots to drive the conversation wisely and deliver appropriate responses.

f) Administration

Bots need to be monitored and regulated. They need to be equipped with:

Training Module: For learning and understanding new concepts.
Maintenance Mode: The results of new learning and actions can be tested here.
Logs: This module helps record bot errors.

Learn More: Take Your Chatbots To The Next Level With New Capabilities

Chapter 5: Use Cases And Benefits

Functions

1. Human Resources

Chatbots can be used at different stages of an employee’s life cycle – right from recruitment and onboarding to engaging the employee and fostering retention, in order to optimize the whole process.

- Recruitment

Given the large volume of applications that Human Resources teams tend to receive, keeping all candidates updated in a timely manner is a burdensome task. In all practicality, most HR personnel barely have the time and bandwidth to update rejected applicants especially when they are occupied with sourcing the right ones. Due to this, a majority of the candidates never hear back from their prospective recruiters, lowering the quality of the applicant’s experience.

This creates an opportunity for chatbots to manage and accomplish such repetitive, and time-heavy tasks.

Use Cases

Recruitment chatbots can perform the following functions in the recruitment process:

Parsing the resumes uploaded onto the recruitment portals
Filtering applicants for the screening process by making significant inquiries
Delivering updates about the status of an application
Responding to FAQs, thereby saving the recruiter’s time and efforts for other tasks
Additionally, a chatbot can also conduct and record feedback surveys from the candidate about their recruitment process and gain insights on any areas of improvement.

While these are some of the more specific tasks a chatbot can perform with regards to the recruitment processes, use of recruitment chatbots can also lead to several benefits for the company. The most crucial one being significantly lower costs and time involved in hiring, since a large part of the process will be automated and will lead to higher productivity and efficiency.

Benefits

Deploying AI-powered chatbots can help in reducing the workload of recruiters. Given the complex current hiring scenarios where simultaneous engagement with several candidates is required, automated chatbots ensure seamless candidate experience. With the help of chatbots, you can:

Reduce cost-per-hire
Increase recruitment team productivity
Eliminate paperwork
Enhance candidate experience
Reduce recruitment time by qualifying and disqualifying candidates swiftly at scale
Automate the manual and administrative recruitment work
Keep candidates engaged throughout the process
Reduce missed opportunities
Improve employer brand

In a recent survey by Allegis it was noted that:
58% of candidates were comfortable interacting with AI and recruitment chatbots in the early stages of the application process.
About 66% of candidates were comfortable with AI and chatbots taking care of interview scheduling and peripheral activity.

- Onboarding

Since on-boarding involves performing several smaller activities in a shorter span, automating the same using chatbots can help streamline the whole process. Some of the crucial chatbot use cases during onboarding can be –

Helping HR personnel during initial tasks such as collecting and recording KYC, tax forms, signed legal documents etc. Chatbots can effectively streamline and speed this process by tracking the same for employees and reminding them to submit the required documents on time.
Hand holding new hires through company policies. A large part of initial orientation involves sharing standard operating procedures and company policies, chatbots can severely reduce the HR workload by handling the process and queries online
Apart from orientation, AI powered chatbots can also help relay all relevant information to do with the organization and internal teams. This can reduce dependency on the HR team for sharing troves of information with regards to their teams, roles, key contacts, general organizational landscape, etc.

- Learning and Development

Employee training and development is a key process in the HR lifecycle. It involves providing the employees with specific knowledge and skills to boost their productivity and efficiency.

Chatbots can be used to conduct tests and quizzes to track progress of employees.

Employees often run through the long-cycle of time consuming training sessions and coaching mechanisms. A chatbot that is made available 24×7 allows employees to get trained in an agile mode and round the clock, adding flexibility to their work life. Employees can consume these conversational training modules, in the form of mini-questionnaires and tests.

Training bots also take care of administrative aspects like sending reminders and fixing coach appointments.

By use of chatbots, employees can also track their learning and development goals and remain on par with the company’s goals and objectives.

- Retention and Engagement

Effective employee engagement is perhaps the most dynamic application for a HR bot. By providing a seamless employee digital experience, companies can increase employee retention.

Chatbots offer a solution by providing self-service options to employees. Chatbots enable employees to ask natural language questions such as, “How many holiday days have I got left?”, “What are the company policies on applying for time off?” and other FAQs to the chatbot. This helps them get all the information they need right at their fingertips, without having to wait for the HR team to get back on their queries.

Chatbots act as the first line of HR support for your employees and thereby increase your team productivity. This also reduces your cost-per-contact significantly since the bot takes care of all the repetitive, basic and simple issues.

- Off-boarding / Exit Management

When an employee quits a firm or submits his resignation, there are several HR related formalities that follow.

They are first required to confirm the last date of their employment based on their notice period, account for the leaves used that year, get settlements on their pending invoices, get approvals on their pending receipts, etc.
Finally on the last working day, the formalities to do with the handover are supposed to be completed, like surrendering of company devices & ID cards, settlement of pending accounts, submission of relevant forms & applications and any information that needs to be relayed to important associates, clients or colleagues.
There is also the exit interview that takes place, to get feedback from the employees about their experience at the firm. Given the several significant and meticulous tasks involved, the whole process could take days or weeks to finish.

Since these tasks are part of a time and effort consuming yet pre-fixed, routine process, these can easily be taken up by an AI-powered HR bot. An HR bot can streamline the process by creating forms, all collated in one place, additionally, the process flow can be created such that the subsequent step becomes active only when the step before it is completed. This can help put an end to incomplete documentation and human error.

Apart from the formalities, a bot can offer easy query resolution to do with any key aspect such as leave balance, taxes, benefits, duration of notice period, etc. As for the last step – the exit interview, having an HR bot conduct the same can ensure an honest and unbiased outcome.

Not only will the employees be more candid and honest with a virtual chatbot, but the interview responses can be collated and help analyse retention and other HR challenges in the organisation. Therefore, an HR bot can easily undertake the step-by-step process with minimal supervision and help render off-boarding as an effective and smooth-running process.

Learn More: How Chatbots Are Revolutionizing The HR Department

2. IT Helpdesk

Apart from just HR functions, chatbots are capable of resolving first-level IT issues as well. Just like the HR department, the IT helpdesk is often inundated with routine questions. AI chatbots act as the first line of help desk agents by answering all the basic FAQs. As soon as a request is raised, IT chatbots help the user do basic troubleshooting and in most cases fix the issue and thereby reduce the employee downtime.

If the issue isn’t resolved or the user isn’t satisfied with the outcome, bots provide the option to connect with a support agent – thereby leaving the more complex queries to human agents. Employees can stay updated on the progress of their tickets by asking the chatbots natural language questions.

This leads to faster resolution times, improved incident management, improved security, better handling of outages and ensuring that employees are kept informed with steady and timely alerts.

If the issue remains unresolved or the user is not completely satisfied with the outcome, bots offer the option to connect with a support agent – thereby leaving the more complex queries to human associates.

Employees can then stay updated on the progress of their tickets by inquiring with chatbots using natural language questions. This leads to faster resolution times, streamlined incident management, better security, improved handling of issues and ensuring that employees are kept informed with steady and timely outage alerts.

Use Cases

Check the status of tickets
Answer common troubleshooting questions like VPN or password not working
Ask instructions for common IT issues
Reset passwords for devices and network
Talk to a live agent (human-handoff)
Raise tickets
Fill form fields via conversation
Access the knowledge base
Check on the pending case reports
Look-up case-related information
Receive information on – Incident notifications, New change request notifications, Task notifications, Access request notifications, Asset request notifications and Outage alerts

Benefits

Reduced employee downtime
Provide self-service to employees
24/7 availability
Eliminate calls
Reduce cost per ticket
Answer FAQ
Increase IT staff productivity
Address level 1 issues
Spread awareness about IT policies & initiatives
Modernize incident management
Categorize and route incidents better
Quicker resolutions
Increase employee experience and productivity

Learn More:

3. Sales

Chatbots can integrate with data warehouses and CRM, BI and LOB Systems to perform tasks such as creating new leads, updating lead status, getting visual reports in multimedia formats, updating CRM records etc.

Use Cases

Check the lead status
Ask pinpointed prospect-related queries
Check on the sales KPIs
Get pin-pointed answers of any information available in the CRM or BI systems.
Fill lead details
Send email of the desired dashboard
Set and get alerts about dip or rise in any sales KPI.
Receive notifications about change in lead’s status
Access reports available in the CRM, BI or LOB or DWH systems.
Get links to the desired dashboards

Benefits

Increase CRM adoption
Simplify and automate data entry into CRM systems
Update CRM records quickly
Access customer/prospect intelligence swiftly during calls/meetings
Reduce manual data-entry and administrative tasks for sales reps
Increase sales reps productivity
Enable data-driven decision-making
Increase lead conversion ratio
Stay updated with real-time KPIs and lead intelligence

4. Marketing

Chatbots can gather data about potential customers that equips marketers with essential information to design their products and advertising strategies. They can be integrated with various social media channels and used to reach out to customers of various demographics.

Use Cases

Lead generation
Lead qualification
Book sales meetings
Schedule demos/consultations
Suggest relevant content based on user’s website activity
Capture email addresses and other visitor details in a simplified manner

Benefits

Personalize website experience
Skyrocket visitor to lead conversions
Qualify leads effortlessly and generate only high qualified leads for sales teams
Engage visitors
Gather visitor/lead intelligence
More demos/consultations with potential customers
Eliminate the filling of long forms in landing pages
Grow your email list
Close more deals and accelerate revenue

Learn More: 4 Ways Marketing Teams Can Use Chatbots

5. Intranet/Employee Assistant

Employees can use the company’s intranet chatbot to perform simple actions such as checking on internal company updates, accessing documents, applying for leaves etc.

Use Cases

Proactively take the announcements and news in the intranet to the employee
Get intranet information via natural language questions
Get links to desired intranet documents
Content authors can update content with a chat interface
Get personalized alerts and timely updates
Perform tasks like leave requests, travel settlement requests, IT requests etc.

Benefits

Drive intranet adoption, collaboration & ROI
Personalize the intranet experience. Employees don’t have to swift through unrelated intranet content.
Access intranet resources faster
Reduce intranet redesign investments
Improve employee experience and productivity
Faster intranet content updation

Learn More: Chatbots For SharePoint Intranet

6. Business Intelligence

Chatbots can be integrated with Power BI, SAP Business Objects, Oracle or any other BI tool, as well as CRM and LOB systems or data warehouses, in order to simplify data consumption.

Use Cases

Ask queries about business KPIs and get pin-pointed answers from any information available in the BI system
Ex: What is the top performing product in 2018?
Access reports available in the BI or LOB or DWH systems.
Get links to the desired dashboards
Update records and details
Bot can send email of the desired dashboard
Get visual reports in multimedia formats

Benefits

Simplify the consumption and interaction with data
Drive business intelligence adoption and data-driven decision-making
Get data on fingertips
Ask questions in a natural language tone
Set and Get alerts on any dip in KPIs like low stock, revenue, etc.
Eliminate multiple logins to BI systems and filtering dashboards
Sales and supply chain assistants
Help in Increasing topline and reduce inventory

Learn More: Business Intelligence Bots

Industries

1. Banking & Financial Services

Some of the chatbot use cases for banking begin with personalized banking with an aim to improve customer satisfaction and engagement. Banks have enabled their customers to interact with chatbots to clarify banking queries. They can access and ask for account balance, bank statements, transfer funds, create a deposit, saving and investment advice, and so on.

Use Cases in Customer Service

Checking the account balance, transaction history, credit limit etc.
Help in upsell
Finding the nearest ATM or branch
Inquiring about different offerings and products
Generating a mini statement for the desired time period and the interest rate report
Updating contact information
Connecting to a live agent (human hand-off)
Transferring money from one account to another
Suggest money saving ideas
Generating bill payment alerts and Individualized financial advices
Resetting the card PIN

Business Benefits

Personalize banking services
Personalize marketing strategies and drive sales
24/7 availability and customer service
Get customer feedback and measure customer satisfaction
Self-service transactions
Handle FAQ, basic and simple queries
Improve ESAT and customer loyalty

2. Consumer Goods & Retail

CPG and retail companies are increasingly using chatbots to transform customer experience. Chatbots fix the long product discover journey for a consumer by allowing consumers to access product information and make a purchase on-the-go using mobile devices. They can assist sales personnel by seamlessly integrating with CRM, BI and LOB systems at the background and provide accurate sales data and real-time alerts.

Use Cases in Customer Service

Product exploration and discovery
Product recommendations
Product surveys
Check the shipment status
Add items to cart
Place orders
Book appointments
Connect to customer support agents
Provide product related information, and alerts on a new product launch, and suggestions on discounts or coupons or any other sales offers

Business Benefits

Product exploration and discovery
Product recommendations
Product surveys
Check the shipment status
Add items to cart
Place orders
Book appointments
Connect to customer support agents
Provide product related information, and alerts on a new product launch, and suggestions on discounts or coupons or any other sales offers

3. Insurance

Chatbots in the insurance industry are being used to enhance the customer experience. Top insurance companies including Liberty Mutual Insurance, Lincoln Financial Group and Allstate Business Insurance are using chatbots to handle routine customer questions, address minor insurance related challenges, provide quotes, automate the claim process, and reduce call center costs.

Use Cases in Customer Service

Help in filing a claim
Answer Scheme and plan related questions
Provide recommendations to prevent loss
Provide guidance for choosing the right plan
Send Insurance documents of the customer
Send personalized quotes to users

Business Benefits

GDPR compliant conversations
Simplify complex jargon for customers
Help customers understand the policies or any domain-specific terminology better
Streamline claim filing process
Simplify regular tasks like payments and updating user info
Better marketing through personalized plan recommendations and alerts on new plans
Increase customer agent productivity by answering FAQ

Learn More: Chatbots For Insurance Industry

4. Legal

Legal jargon is a complex language of its own and piles up every day, across multiple document structures. Analyzing these documents and accessing the relevant ones is a time-consuming process for humans. Chatbots reduce the time to analyze with use of artificial intelligence and exponential power to process natural language. With machine learning, chatbots have been trained to be legal advisors for mundane and redundant customer queries.

Use Cases In Customer Service

Helping attorneys with finding information quickly
Understand legal services and offerings of law firm
Queries for better understanding unknown legal jargon
Basic legal queries while staying anonymous
Book appointments with attorneys at the desired time

Business Benefits

Offer a certain amount of free legal advice
Drive leads and appointments
GDPR complaint conversations
Self-service and 24/7 availability
Learn complex legal jargon swiftly and effortlessly

Learn More: Legal Industry Bots

5. Education

Chatbots are changing the face of education right from personalizing education, helping people learn new languages, spaced interval learning, student feedback, professor assessment, essay scoring, acquaint students with school culture and for administrative formalities.

Use Cases in Customer Service

Handling queries related to the university and courses during registration, assessment related questions, tuition fees, time tables, scholarships, grades etc.
Get university policy documents, enrollment certificates, academic information, disability and other personal information
Provide course and administration related information
Access course documents
Handle university registration
Send feedback about professors, courses etc.
Update contact information
Register for courses
Fill applications
Apply for permissions

Business Benefits

Provide a personalized 24/7 self-service student experience
The bot act as a single point of contact for all needs of the student – right from registration to farewell
Reduce administrative costs
Improve the productivity of teachers and administration staff

Learn More: Chatbots for Educational Institutions

Chapter 6: Key Chatbot Implementation Considerations

When implementing chatbots in your organization, here are a few factors to consider to plan your implementation better and achieve maximum business value from your chatbots:

Define your goals – Clearly define the purpose of your chatbot and what actions you would want it to handle. Usually, chatbots are used to provide customer service, improve the brand’s online presence, or used to collect BI or process user queries on the intranet.
Start small: Start small but quickly. Establish many small milestones. This will help you stay ahead of competition and by having many small milestones you will understand the pulse of the users. Thenceforth, you can start making changes and updates to the chatbot. An enterprise chatbot platform will be helpful for this process.
Understand your audience – You must profile the users for whom the chatbot is intended in order to understand their needs, behavior, and expectations. Classifying your audience gives you insight that is essential to keep your chatbot strategy focused. Setup live ops to continuously incorporate behaviour pattern and to make adjustments
Outline the user actions – In order to establish a streamlined design, you must outline the key intents, or user actions, that the chatbots will complete as they move through the conversation funnel.
Pay attention to Security and Privacy – Ensure that chatbots are compliant with GDPR or any other industry-specific or location-specific regulations and policies. Provide information to users based on their authorization levels and adopt authentication measures such as user identity authentication, intent level authorization, channel authorization, end to end encryption, and intent level privacy, to enhance the security and privacy of your chatbot.
Chatbot implementation can become expensive, without proper expertise – Building chatbots without prior experience can make the implementation a mismanaged, disorganized, and costly venture. Choosing from a reputed “off-the-shelf” solution, is a better option.
Set the right expectations – Users must be made aware of the capabilities of a chatbot before they are deployed.
Infuse NLP and Machine Learning – Infusing NLP and Machine Learning into bots makes them relatable to the user, thus enhancing adoption, and providing an enhanced and personalized user experience.
Future-proof your chatbot – Ensure your chatbot can leverage any AI service available today and will scale for future services. This can be achieved by choosing bot platforms with cognitive abstraction that ensures you’re not locked down to any specific AI chatbot vendor or product.
Ensure that there is a human hand-off, when required – There should be a human that can take over the conversation in cases where the chatbot cannot drive a query to its conclusion. The hand-off should be as seamless as possible without reducing user experience.
Help employees overcome their resistance to chatbots – Employees may fear that AI and chatbots pose a threat to their jobs. Hence, you should make them aware that a bot has the capability to relieve them of their repetitive work and make them more productive.
Align the chatbot with your brand identity – A tailor-made bot that matches your brand identity and tone is imperative in enhancing the user experience.

Learn More: 10 Key Chatbot Implementation Considerations You Should Be Aware Of

Chapter 7: The Future Of Chatbots

According to Orbis Research, the Global Chatbot Market is to grow at a CAGR of 34.75% during the period 2019-2024.

As the chatbot technology continues to mature, the future of bots is becoming interesting. Here are a few important trends to watch for:

1. Integrating Chatbots with RPA

As chatbots are increasingly being used to perform a greater range of tasks, they will need back office bots that can quickly find information and complete transactions on behalf of users. Integrating front-office chatbots with legacy systems is achieved with the help of Robotic Process Automation (RPA).

Learn More: RPA Bots: Understanding The Chatbot And RPA Integration

2. Chatbot-to-Human Handover

There can be times when a chatbot needs to hand off the conversation to a human being to handle issues that are complex. The bot should recognize the situations when it needs to hand off and provide the user with a clear, smooth transition.

One of the simplest and an effective method of initiating a handoff from is provide a user-driven menu. The bot can be programmed to provide the user with a menu of predefined options after every message.

When the chatbot senses that the user is trying to reach for a human assistance, it can simply provide the user with an option of chatting with a human agent. The user can then select the option if the chatbot seems incapable of solving the problem.

Another scenario in which handoff becomes imperative is in the case of escalations. The chatbot should effectively inform the user that the interaction is being transferred so as to address their concerns better. It also should always provide users an option to talk to a live agent.

Learn More: Human Handoff In Service Desk Bots

3. Voice Bots

A ComScore study forecasts that by 2020, 50% of all searches will be voice-based.

Although in the current scenario text-based chatbots are ruling the roost, the application of voice technology is gaining momentum. Since most people prefer talking as opposed to typing, it is no wonder that organizations are increasingly implementing voice bots for both customers and employees. At the moment, voice bots are a good fit when it comes to handling simple, linear tasks and queries. However, at the rate at which voice technology is evolving, with applications in smart devices such as speakers, TVs, watches etc., voice bots may very well be what the future looks like for AI chatbots.

Learn More:

4. DataOps With Chatbots

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

In Conclusion

Organizations are significantly utilizing Chatbots to automate their internal business processes, productivity, boost revenue and enhance the customer experience.

Juniper Research forecasts that chatbot conversations will be responsible for cost savings of over $8 billion per annum by 2022.

The conversational interface of chatbots simplify everyday workflows for employees and eliminates the hassle of switching multiple apps. Chatbots act as a single point of contact to get tasks done and access information. The use cases of chatbots are diverse and emerging across functions and industries. Enterprise leaders should have a powerful bot strategy to make the most of this technology.

About BotCore

BotCore is an enterprise-grade bot builder platform using which enterprises can create, build, train, deploy and manage chatbots for their organization. BotCore is fully deployable on both on-premise and cloud environments.

BotCore is an accelerator that enables you to launch customized, AI-powered conversational bots in your organization. With the help of “Cognitive Abstraction”, it can leverage any AI service available today and will scale for future services.

BotCore today powers chatbots at several large enterprises and Fortune 100 companies.

If you are planning to adopt a chatbot in your organization, Acuvate’s bot workshops like the Build-A-Bot program helps you get a subject matter expert opinion to plan your bot journey.

The workshop helps identify specific use cases within your enterprise and evaluate different technologies. Acuvate provides a 1 day bot strategy workshop within your company premises for both business and IT leaders.

The post A Comprehensive Guide To Understanding Chatbots 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.

How Dynamics 365 Virtual Agents Can Supercharge Your Customer Service

Rakesh Reddy — Mon, 13 Apr 2020 09:40:49 +0000

How Dynamics 365 Virtual Agents Can Supercharge Your Customer Service

Delivering positive customer experiences has become critical for organizations to drive engagement, purchases, loyalty and retention. To this end, many enterprise leaders have deployed AI customer service technologies like chatbots for various use cases.

Several Microsoft customers are already using Bot Framework to build customer chatbots. These bots though effective require high coding and more resources. To overcome this, many customers are using Azure-driven low-code chatbot builder platforms like BotCore developed by Acuvate, a Microsoft Gold Partner.

With the launch of Dynamics 365 Virtual Agents, Microsoft is aiming to supercharge the capabilities of customer service bots and pave the way for a low-code and seamless bot building experience. In this article, we’ll give an overview of this new technology and what it means for Microsoft customers.

What Are Dynamics 365 Virtual Agents?

As the name indicates, Dynamics 365 Virtual Agents is a combined package of Microsoft’s two key technologies – Dynamics 365 (Customer Relationship Management Software) and Power Virtual Agents (low-code chatbot builder platform).

If you’re a Microsoft user, you must be familiar with Dynamics 365. With its no-code guided graphical interface, Power Virtual Agents enables business teams to build powerful chatbots quickly and with no developer help.

It is also a part of Microsoft’s prestigious Power Platform – a low-code business application platform which brings PowerApps, PowerBI, Power Automate and Virtual Agents under one umbrella.

As chatbot technology becomes critical in customer service operations, it’s integration with a CRM is a no brainer. Customer service teams can use Dynamics 365 Virtual Agents to easily identify and automate common support issues – without having to write code.

The Need For Dynamics 365 Virtual Agents

Let’s quickly explore the current state of customer service chatbots built with bot frameworks and the limitations associated with them.

The success of customer service chatbot largely depends on the quality and quantity of the bot’s knowledge – topics it understands and can deliver the right solutions. Customer service experts who actually interact with customers and know their problems are often disconnected from the bot development process due to the high coding most framework-based chatbots today require. This leads to poor bot conversations and customer experience. Empowering customer service teams to create virtual agents by themselves is imperative to success.
New requests and queries emerge due to changing market and business conditions. Ex: launch of a new product, roll out of a new product update, etc. This means the chatbot’s content should also be updated. Customer service teams should be provided with the ability to easily update the bot and add new topics without any hassle and long update cycles.
Customers can get frustrated if the bot doesn’t understand their intents. A chatbot should be equipped with AI and NLP capabilities that adapt to customer content.
Customer service chatbots should extend their capabilities well beyond responding to users – they should be able to perform tasks on behalf of customers. Hence, it’s key to integrate them with backend systems.

Learn More: RPA Bots: Understanding The Chatbot And RPA Integration

How Dynamics 365 Virtual Agents Can Help?

The solution provides a proactive workflow for resolving customer issues and a modern approach to customer service. Let’s deep dive into its key features.

1. Discover Issues to automate

With the Dynamics 365 Customer Service Insights dashboard, you can identify issues which are repetitive, trending and time-consuming for your agents. The AI in the software also provides recommendations on the right issues to automate.

2. Automate support issues with the virtual agent

Once the common support topics and issues to be automated are identified, customer service teams can easily build a virtual agent that’ll automatically address these issues. With a simple no-code graphical interface and ready-to-use templates, agents can build rich conversations within minutes. If there is no need to build a new virtual agent, human agents can also update the knowledge of an existing chatbot with the same ease.

3. Complete actions on behalf of users

Virtual agents can not only troubleshoot users’ problems by chatting with them but also perform actions on their behalf. By integrating Power Automate with Dynamics 365 Virtual Agents, your customer service team can enable a trigger which lets bots to access data or perform tasks in your back-end systems.

4. Human Hand off

When a virtual agent can’t solve an issue or the conversation becomes too complex to handle, it provides customers an option to “Talk to a human agent”. Once the customer agrees, the virtual agent hands off the conversation to a human agent.

Learn More: Human Handoff In Service Desk Bots

5. Monitor Performance with Analytics

Dynamics 365 Virtual Agents comes with an AI-powered analytics dashboard in which you can track topics that are handled, which topics need human handoff and overall performance of the virtual agent. The dashboard continuously provides suggestions on improving service experience and frees up the bandwidth of your agents.

Business Benefits Of Dynamics 365 Virtual Agents

The software drives a win-win-win situation for customers, human agents, and management. Customers will get better service experience, agents can focus on productive tasks and management can reduce operating costs. Here are some more benefits:

Increased Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) score
24*7 Self-service
Reduced customer service costs
Improved agent productivity
Personalized service experiences
Increased ROI from back end systems

Pricing

The pricing for the Dynamics 365 Virtual Agents package – which includes Power Virtual Agents + Dynamics 365 Customer Service Insights starts from $1,100 per tenant/month. This includes

2,000 Power Virtual Agents Sessions and 100,000 Dynamics 365 Customer Service Insights cases.

Get Started

Microsoft is coming up with new features for Dynamics 365 Virtual Agents including AI-driven dialogs, multi-lingual support, support for telephony and more! Microsoft customers planning to modernize their customer service should look into implementing this exciting new technology which brings the best of Microsoft innovations – Dynamics 365, Power Virtual Agents and Power Automate together. The future of delivering stellar customer experiences depends on the robustness of your service workflow and Dynamics 365 Virtual Agents helps you build a powerful one.

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

The post How Dynamics 365 Virtual Agents Can Supercharge Your Customer Service appeared first on BotCore.

10 Powerful Benefits Of Chatbots In Customer Service

Abhishek Shanbhag — Thu, 12 Jul 2018 11:34:00 +0000

10 Powerful Benefits Of Chatbots In Customer Service

Thanks to artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies, today’s chatbots have become invaluable tools for customer service operations. They are not only streamlining and optimizing customer experiences at every stage in the service process but are also proving to be helpful aids to customer service representatives. Here are 10 powerful benefits of adopting chatbots for customer service:

24/7 CUSTOMER SERVICE

Maintaining a support team that can care for customers at all hours can be very costly, but customers’ needs may arise outside of business hours. Frustration can build when problems are not addressed immediately, so providing a way for customers to ask questions and get answers at any time can be a major relief and a way to increase satisfaction as well as customer retention. Because chatbots allow customers to get help at any time, businesses can leave a positive impact on their minds even if service staff are unavailable.

RESOLUTION SPEED

A direct result of 24/7 availability is the obvious benefit of increased resolution speed. Quick response and fix to a problem can be the difference between keeping a customer or having them abandon a service. A chatbot can tap into a database and provide answers to questions immediately, at any time. Even if a human agent needs to intervene and provide further support, chatbots cut the workload and allow agents to focus on the more critical steps in finding solutions to customers’ problems.

INSTANT RESPONSE

As previously mentioned, even if chatbots can’t solve a problem immediately, they can at least provide an instant response relevant to the customer’s query. Customers do not like to wait for help but staffing costs do not justify keeping a large enough live team at all hours to guarantee that they get help immediately. Chatbots can be the first point of contact, reduce customer frustration, and fill in for agents when needed. Even if a follow up is required, the customer can feel well cared for due to the quick initial response.

REDUCED OPERATIONAL COSTS AND IMPROVED MORALE

One of the most immediate benefits of chatbots is monetary. Chatbots reduce operational costs by reducing staffing needs. A full-time support team is costly, so leaving the after-hours support to a chatbot provides enormous savings. Also, chatbots can handle tedious and repetitive tasks so human agents don’t have to. Agent productivity increases as they don’t have to answer repetitive and basic questions of customers. This saves time and money but also has the added benefit of positively impacting employee morale. People are much happier when they don’t have to reset passwords 100 times a day, for example.

LANGUAGE SUPPORT

Chatbots handle thousands of customer queries at once in multiple languages. They can not only work with several languages, but they can even understand different intents. This makes them very versatile and useful, especially for global companies. Sometimes it’s hard to find speakers of some languages, so these bots are a good alternative. While they cannot fully replace fluent human agents in all circumstances, they reduce the need to employ multiple language speakers as staff at all times.

CONSISTENCY AND ACCURACY (EVEN IN THE MOST REPETITIVE, LOW-VALUE TASKS)

The workload can be strenuous and tough on agents’ performance, especially when having to work on the same tasks over and over. Furthermore, they may sometimes experience off days, when they may not work to their full capacity. Chatbots have the benefit of needing no breaks and performing at the same level regardless of how many times they have to repeat an action.

DATA GATHERING OPPORTUNITIES

For people, it is hard to remember every part of a conversation, and it is even harder to analyze all the details in order to improve services and better meet customer expectations. Some chatbots, however, have the ability to gather analytics and can be trained to do so on the spot. Chatbots also give consistent responses that can be used to test customer responses without bias. This allows businesses to improve their service strategies.

REDUCED IVR FRUSTRATIONS

Most customers loathe the dreaded use of interactive voice response (IVR) systems during phone calls. Having to listen to the menu and being unable to get a personalized response is frustrating. To some people, it is even downright insulting. IVR systems are also too structured, and oftentimes leave no room for special requests or unique scenarios. Customers have very few choices and sometimes end up being routed to the wrong help team. Chatbots can fully replace these outdated systems. Customers can still be routed to the right team without the intervention of a human agent, but they at least feel like they are being cared for and understood. Finally, using a chatbot also reduces the time and cost associated with transferring a customer between different departments, especially if some of these transfers are wrong.

LESS CUSTOMER STRESS

Reducing stress and frustration happens on many different levels, not only when substituting IVR systems. Some customers may experience anxiety when having to contact the help department and explain their issue, for example. Having the option to speak to a chatbot instead reduces these fears. The immediate response and overall reduced resolution speed also lessen the negative emotional response that some customers may have. Chatbots streamline the entire customer service process and help keep customers happy and satisfied.

BETTER SELF SERVICE

Finally, while chatbots can help route customers to the right hands, some customers would rather find the solution to their issues independently. With improved machine learning technology, chatbots can direct customers to answers that will help them solve their own issues or gather the needed information. This helps keep a high level of customer satisfaction while simultaneously decreasing support tickets.

FINAL CONSIDERATIONS

Chatbots are becoming essential for a well-rounded and solid customer service strategy.
As you can see, chatbots provide responses and help that can either strengthen or substitute the need for two-way human intervention. This cuts operational costs and also leads to much greater levels of customer satisfaction.

BOTCORE – AN ENTERPRISE CHATBOT BUILDER PLATFORM

If you’re planning to customer service chatbots, you might be interested to check out our enterprise chatbot builder platform – BotCore which can be deployed both on cloud and on-premise environments. BotCore helps large and medium sized companies reduce customer service costs, improve agent productivity and enhance customer experience.

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

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