IT helpdesk Bot Archives - BotCore

5 Advanced Capabilities to look for in an IT Helpdesk Bot

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

5 Advanced Capabilities to look for in an IT Helpdesk Bot

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

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

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

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

Capabilities to look for in an IT Helpdesk Bot

1. One-stop solution for all your IT needs

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

Common IT use cases in various areas include the following –

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

Learn More: Create Ticket/Incident Use Case

2. Understand the user’s intention

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

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

3. Agent Handover capabilities

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

Capabilities that ensure a seamless handover include –

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

Learn More: Handover to Live Agent Use Case

4. Robotic Process Automation

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

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

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

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

5. Additional advanced capabilities

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

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

How can Acuvate help?

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

Key capabilities of our BotCore include –

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Manage High Call Volume During COVID-19 Using AI & Call Deflection

Rakesh Reddy — Mon, 25 May 2020 05:45:00 +0000

Manage High Call Volume During COVID-19 Using Call Deflection & AI

The COVID-19 pandemic, and the unique challenges it has posed, has engulfed customers in a wave of fear and uncertainty and put organizations in a jiffy.

There has been a sharp spike in the volume of calls as anxious customers seek support on a variety of issues.

A majority of customers consider call support as a flexible channel of communication as it allows them to verbally explain and negotiate with the agents. Moreover, customers prefer calling for urgent matters, including cancelled flights and refunds, health insurance coverage, timings of convenience stories, appointments for COVID-19 tests, loan approvals, and much more.

Particularly, contact centers in industries like banking, airlines, retail, and healthcare have been experiencing a nightmare with the unprecedented surge in call volumes.

Organizations are facing a myriad of challenges, such as -

Contact centers are ill-equipped to deal with the huge increase in the volume of incoming customer calls and chats, which has burdened their systems, their agents, and their ability to respond and deflect calls from the queues.
The Washington State Department of Health’s coronavirus hotline experienced an average wait-time of 10 minutes with calls dropping 20 minutes after the customers were put on-hold;

Due to the inherent tendency to use call support in times of crises, customers are abandoning self-service channels and instead directly calling and requesting agent support.
A lot of questions and requests are repetitive and basic
Voice-based channels are not only expensive but also difficult to scale
There has been a shortage of staff as support agents fall sick and are unable to continue work.
Many US airlines have requested their customers who do not have flights within the next 72 hours to wait until closer to their trip before calling up the contact center;
Adding more agents is not only expensive; but also not feasible at a short notice.

Reducing Call Volume With Call Deflection and AI-Enabled Virtual Assistance

To deal with the above issues and reduce contact center call volume, organizations can use a call deflection approach driven by AI chatbots. Call deflection involves diverting incoming customer calls to alternate means of answering questions like self-service and digital channels e.g. chatbots.

AI Chatbots can handle an unlimited number of requests at the same time, provide instant support, and decrease costs for the organization as lesser employees are needed to handle customer queries. Moreover, they can answer routine customer questions 24×7, without the need for human support.

A combination of call-deflection and AI-enabled virtual assistance can improve the productivity of contact center agents, while simultaneously managing the surge in the volume of calls.

Irrespective of whether your IVR is based on legacy technology or deployed on the cloud, it is possible to shift the incoming call traffic to a text-based channel.

When the customer is ready to engage via text, the virtual assistant can converse with the client using natural language processing to handle simple requests, such as leading the customers to the required information. Or it can enable them to self-transact. Or it can be an extensive bot that offers complex capabilities, like drawing up the required background information to provide personalized solutions to customer queries.

The purpose of deflecting incoming calls is that a bot can handle customer requests that are basic and repetitive, and thereby it eliminates the need for agent involvement. The request will be transferred to an agent only when a customer specifically requests the transfer or the bot determines the conversation is too complex for it to handle.

Learn More:

The 2 Types of Call Deflection

Proactive and reactive call deflection are the two ways of diverting calls to text-based channels –

Proactive call deflection

Proactive call deflection is an approach in which measures are taken to prevent customers from calling to the contact centres in the first place and instead drive them to proactively use self-service digital channels. This involves:

Setting expectations and keeping customers informed about service hours, availability of certain services and the possible alternatives.
Driving awareness about self-service messaging channels and creating opportunities for customers to adopt them.

Proactive deflection, when supplemented with automation, allows customers to engage in a two-way interaction with a chatbot to resolve issues without waiting for agents. Thus, customers can operate in a self-serve mode for routine queries, and be directed to human agents only for more complex ones.

Reactive call deflection

A reactive approach to call deflection starts once customers call the contact center. On calling the contact center, the customers should be allowed to select the channel of their choice.

Customers may then opt to resolve their issue in a self-serve mode, with the help of AI-enabled chatbots enabled in messaging channels like SMS, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp etc.

An alternate way of doing this is using Conversation IVR systems which leverage Natural Language Processing to interact with customers via voice and resolve their queries.

Steps involved in Reactive Call Deflection Supported by AI chatbots

Deflection – Customers call the contact center. When faced with long queues, they opt to divert their queries to a virtual assistant channel. Once the call ends, customers get a link to open a virtual agent and continue their conversation.
Automation – The customer opens the chatbot on his/her device. The virtual assistant can answer FAQs or carry out simple tasks. If faced with a more complex query, the bot captures customer information and/or schedules call-backs before forwarding the request to a human agent or offline processing.
Integration – The virtual agent should integrate with any existing live chat platform to allow escalation to a human agent, when the VA can’t handle the request.

Benefits of Call Deflection supported by AI

A study by Gartner indicates that, “As much as 40% of today’s live volume could be resolved in self-service channels.” Here are some benefits of using call deflection supported by AI.

Improved agent productivity
A self-service fix costs 80-100 times less than a live interaction
Chatbots can provide instant assistance to customers even beyond the working hours
They can handle unlimited requests at the same time
A chatbot can work in close tandem with live agents to handle complex queries;
Call deflection and AI reduce the incoming call traffic, leading to shorter wait-times. This avoids customer frustration;
Improved CSAT and customer experience at lowered costs

Get Started

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused an unprecedented increase in the number of customer calls to contact centers. To ease the burden off support agents, organizations can implement a combination of call deflection (proactive or reactive) and AI-enabled chatbots.

Such automation enables customers to self-serve and provides them with a 24X7 interactive experience at significantly lower costs. It also allows the support staff to focus on the complex queries, leaving the chatbots to handle routine asks.

We, at Acuvate Software, are helping clients deliver superior customer experiences through our intuitive, no-code bot-builder platform called BotCore.

BotCore presents several benefits –

The intuitive, no-code interface allows the quick implementation of AI chatbots
It can seamlessly integrate with existing legacy systems and AI services
It also allows the connection of existing bots across different departments
It is deployable on both on-site and cloud environments
Chatbots can be designed to simulate highly complex conversations

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.

The post Manage High Call Volume During COVID-19 Using AI & Call Deflection appeared first on BotCore.

Amid COVID-19, How Are Chatbots Solving IT Help Desk Challenges

Jagan Jami — Mon, 30 Mar 2020 11:03:00 +0000

Amid COVID-19, How Are Chatbots Solving IT Help Desk Challenges

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a serious wake up call for companies which put digital transformation and AI adoption in the back-burner. It made us all realize that adopting emerging digital and AI technologies is not so much an option but a necessity.

One significant area where digital transformation has become critical is ITSM. In the past few weeks, we have seen IT help desks in several companies struggling to manage the sudden unprecedented surge in incidents, issues and requests. Some of our key observations include:

Incidents are continuing to grow as a large number of employees are trying to access different types of applications simultaneously and remotely
In order to maintain smooth operations, organizations are rushing to rollout critical business apps without proper testing. Once the issues are detected in the production environment, more incidents come up
Incidents and requests range from simple ones like setting up VPNs, authentication issues to complex ones like accelerating the deployment of new digital initiatives to ensure business continuity
When troubleshooting end users’ issues with SaaS apps, it’s becoming difficult for service desks to determine whether the issue is related to the network connection, users’ equipment or the app itself

Ensuring that an IT helpdesk is running hassle free at all times has been an ongoing challenge for many enterprises even before this pandemic. Many of these organizations already face a shortage of help desk staff. And with the new unique challenges, the situation is becoming further overwhelming. Employees are being kept on hold for hours before their issue is resolved. Just imagine the loss of productivity.

How IT Helpdesk Chatbots Can Help?

A huge volume of requests are usually ‘basic’ or ‘simple’ questions that take a lot of time to answer. When most of your workforce is working remotely, the overhead on the helpdesk team to resolve such queries is huge.

One of the easiest ways to overcome these challenges is to deploy an IT Helpdesk Chatbot and enable self-service to employees.

A chatbot is not only a powerful solution to address repetitive and low-value requests but also super easy to deploy.

A chatbot will be available 24*7 on any device and can handle requests across the organization simultaneously. This will allow your IT staff to move away from a reactive environment where they are constantly putting out fires and focus on productive and proactive tasks.

Chatbots conduct multi-turn conversations (something most help desk requests involve) and guide users to resolve the issue through a series of steps.

In addition to solving simple requests and low-value tickets, chatbots are becoming increasingly intelligent to address several complex queries as well. The AI, NLP and ML integrated in a chatbot helps it learn from previous conversations, understand user intent better and deliver smarter responses.

When the chatbot can’t handle a particular query, it’ll handover the conversation to a human agent.

With low-code chatbot builder platforms like Microsoft Virtual Agents and BotCore, you can build and deploy a simple FAQ bot within hours and with limited resources! These chatbots also come with prebuilt connectors and easily integrate with your existing help desk platforms like ServiceNow, JIRA, Freshdesk etc.

Join Our Webinar:

24/7 IT Virtual Agents – Supporting your remote workforce anytime & everywhere

Benefits Of A IT helpdesk Bot

Easy and quick rollout
Seamless integration
Super fast responses
Reduced cost per ticket and IT support costs
Improved productivity of help desk agents
Eliminate calls and emails: The bot acts as a single point of contact for help desk requests
24X7 availability in both mobile and desktop devices
Real-time alerts
Enterprise level security
Employee self-service

Learn More: How AI Bots Can Revolutionize Enterprise Helpdesk?

Key Capabilities To Look For In A IT helpdesk Bot

Incident Management
Incident notifications
Incident creation
Submit change requests
New change request notifications
Task notifications and notes
Outage Management
Sends outage alerts
Displays real time outages
Sends outage reports
Security Management
Reset passwords for devices and network and generate tokens
Disable, wipe or suspend device
Real-Time Alerts
Access request notifications
Asset request notifications
Outage alerts
Authentication alerts
Human Hand off

The chatbot should be intelligent enough to recognize situations where it can’t help the user and should hand over the conversation to an agent. As soon as the bot learns that a human intervention is required, it should present users with an option to “chat with an agent”. Once the user clicks the option, an agent takes over the conversation.

Learn More: Chatbots Human Handoff

Get Started With A IT Helpdesk Chatbot

We are forced into the largest work-from-home experiment and many employees have little to no experience in adopting the new environment. Right from setting up their home offices, VPNs, to adopting video conferencing and collaboration apps, employees are facing a myriad of challenges and flooding the helpdesk with repetitive requests. An ITSM chatbot streamlines the helpdesk workflow, enables self-service and acts as a level-1 support agent.

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

The post Amid COVID-19, How Are Chatbots Solving IT Help Desk Challenges appeared first on BotCore.

Chatbots: The Past, Present, And Future

Rakesh Reddy — Wed, 19 Dec 2018 10:42:00 +0000

Chatbots: The Past, Present, And Future

Chatbots currently are one of the most popular AI technologies in the enterprise world.

Bots are being deployed for different functions of an organization – be it engaging customers, training employees, driving sales, providing IT Helpdesk or HR support, generating leads etc. These intelligent machines provide instant service, round the clock – you don’t need to keep your customers/employees waiting 24 hours for the next support agent to come online. 80% of businesses want chatbots by 2020.

However, bots weren’t equipped for intelligent and smart conversations when they were first invented. Chatbots have undergone several advancements in the past few years. The history of chatbots is intriguing, and so is the future. Let’s walk through all that chatbots were back in time, are today, and can be in the future.

the history of bots: where and how it all began

The word chatbot comes simply translates to conversation enabled by bots. As such, there are two components to this word – chat, which means conversation, and bot, which refers to the ‘computational’ element.

ELIZA, a 1964 computer program was one of the earliest examples of chatbots taking shape. Utilizing Natural Language Processing – something that allows computers to understand human language, ELIZA was able to recognize keywords and key phrases (inputs) and respond using pre-written scripts.

Soon after, an ‘intelligent’ version of ELIZA followed. This one was smarter in the sense that if ELIZA could understand inputs from a real person – PARRY could impersonate a real person! Invented by Psychiatrist Kenneth Colby, PARRY was indeed able to impersonate a patient with schizophrenia.

More inventions kept taking place to one-up older, outdated bots. And, the world soon transitioned into times when chatter bots could be openly used by masses. The first and most popular of these humanoids is A.L.I.C.E (Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity) or Alice. It was the most powerful NLP chatbot of its time and was awarded the Loebner Prize three times!

Interesting fact: If you’ve watched the academy-award winning movie ‘Her’, it would be interesting to know that A.L.I.C.E was the inspiration for the movie.

the present state of chatbots: where we are today

Bots were now being deployed by businesses across various industries, all over the world. With the advancements in AI and machine learning, 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.

In a consumer world, chatbot adoption increased because of an increase in the usage of messaging platforms. Consumers now rely on a chatbot for connecting and interacting with their favorite brand, troubleshooting basic issues, purchasing products that have been highly personalized based on their interests and likes, and keeping up to date with the latest deals and discounts on their favorite products!
According to Business Insider, by 2017, messaging apps have ousted social media platforms. You can check the following chart to get the stats and figures on global monthly active users.

chatbots in today’s enterprise

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.
Let’s dig into some detailed chatbot use cases in the present day scenario.

chatbots for customer service

Customer service is the most popular use case of enterprise chatbots today. Businesses across industries are using customer service chatbots as the first line of support to reduce costs, improve customer experience, and increase agent productivity. Capabilities like 24/7 availability, multilingual support, instant responses, agent handover have made chatbots the most desired AI technologies in customer service.

chatbots for IT helpdesk

A number of enterprises are implementing IT helpdesk chatbots to accelerate response time, improve support staff productivity, automating IT workflows, and to deliver service related information on-demand.

Deploying chatbots can help alleviate your IT help desk challenges by making the whole process less labor-intensive, less complicated, highly interactive, and less costly.

With a chatbot at your disposal to answer basic queries raised by your employees in real-time, your IT help desk staff can focus on more complex and key tasks, thereby increasing your support efficiency!

chatbots for business intelligence

Data is the oil of the 21st century! Many companies today are integrating AI chatbots into their existing BI systems like PowerBI, Oracle, SAP BI etc. to help decision-makers get super quick access all the information and reports they need, in no time.

Simply ask your bot “What is my predicted sales for December 2019” and the bot will generate an accurate response after analyzing tons of data instantly. That too in a format that you prefer (image, graphs, pie charts, etc.)!

Learn More: Business Intelligence Bots, Power BI Bots

chatbots for HR

HR is one of the most popular functions for which chatbots are deployed. HR chatbots simplify and automate workflows throughout the employee life-cycle. Employees can use bots to ask simple or complex HR queries, perform tasks like applying for leaves or giving an appraisal etc. Whether it’s talent management or onboarding or employee engagement or off boarding, chatbots have successfully reduced HR costs in all stages of the employee life-cycle and streamlined the entire process.

Learn more: How Chatbots are Revolutionizing The HR Department

statistics on adoption of chatbots

Chatbots are expected to cut business costs by $8 billion by 2022 – Juniper Research
Furthermore, by 2021, conversational AI-first will be adopted by the majority of enterprise IT – Gartner.
By 2021, 50% of enterprises will be spending higher on chatbot creation than on mobile app development. – Gartner

For more such insights and statistics on the state of chatbot adoption, read through this blog post.

the future of chatbots: where we are headed

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

Chatbot-RPA integration: Enterprises are taking customer and employee experiences to the next level by combining the power of automation from RPA and cognitive intelligence from chatbots. RPA helps chatbots access legacy enterprise systems which lack modern APIs. Bots can trigger RPA robots to perform complex actions without routing to a human agent – increasing productivity.

Voice Bots: Gartner predicts that, by 2023, 25 percent of employee interactions with applications will be via voice, up from under 3 percent in 2019. In the future, chatbots will no longer be just text-based interfaces. As AI-powered speech-to-text and text-to-speech hosted services improve, voice bots will be used for a variety of enterprise applications including conversational BI, IT helpdesk, scheduling meetings etc.

Chatbots will be more human: As key chatbot components like NLP, Machine Learning, sentiment analysis, contextual and language understanding etc. become more advanced, chatbots will be able to conduct much more complex conversations – just like a human does.

There might be soon a time when your bot will be reminding you of your sales meeting scheduled for the day. There’ll soon be times when a smart speaker will take your order at a restaurant. Bots speaking to bots can become the reality of the future. What next? We can only wonder.

If you’d like to learn more about enterprise chatbots please feel free to get in touch with one of our chatbot consultants for a quick consultation!

FREE EBOOK

exploring the use cases of an enterprise chatbot

The post Chatbots: The Past, Present, And Future appeared first on BotCore.

Envisioning The Work-Life Of An Employee In A Chatbot-Driven Enterprise

Jagan Jami — Fri, 07 Sep 2018 10:09:00 +0000

Envisioning The Work-Life Of An Employee In A Chatbot-Driven Enterprise

Meet Nathan. He has recently joined ABC Corp. as a Marketing Manager. The new job means a new city and the tension associated with relocation. But one thing that Nathan is thankful for is that the hiring and on-boarding process was seamless and did not require him to visit their office again and again. But how was this achieved? Well, luckily for Nathan, ABC Corp. happens to be one of the forward-thinking organizations that uses chatbots for all their HR, ITSM, and Business Intelligence related tasks.

what is a chatbot?

A chatbot is a computer program or an artificial intelligence which conducts a conversation via auditory or textual methods. Chatbots are often designed to convincingly simulate how a human would behave as a conversational partner and are used for various practical enterprise use cases including customer service, IT helpdesk, HR or information acquisition (Business Intelligence).

ABC Corp uses BotCore’s AI chatbot which enables organizations to build and deploy customized AI chatbots. So, let us see how Nathan’s life at ABC Corp. has been impacted by chatbots.

chatbots – making nathan’s life easier

Nathan has joined as a Marketing Manager. A typical day in the life of someone in this role entails multiple team meetings, client interactions and brainstorming sessions that require them to access records and data insights on the go. Also, since marketing managers almost always have days that are jam-packed, having someone take care of handling internal processes such as applying for leave, giving appraisals, searching for reports and information and keeping them abreast of upcoming meetings etc. would be a boon. Someone like a personal assistant; BUT, not everyone can have an assistant tracking these details. It is just not a feasible option. However, everyone can seek help from a virtual assistant. In order to see how chatbots are helping Nathan handle daily life at ABC Corp., let us look at some scenarios.

Recruitment

When Nathan applied for the position at ABC Corp., he was immediately sent a text message by Allie, ABC’s recruitment bot.

Allie: Hello Nathan. I am Allie from ABC Corp. I am reaching out to you in response to your application for the position of Marketing Manager.

Allie: We see that your skill set matches that which is required for the role. Could I go ahead and set up an interview for you with our GM-Marketing?

Nathan: Thanks, Allie Sure!

Allie: Thank you Nathan. Would the 1st July 2019, 12 PM work for you?

Nathan: Umm…will I be required to come to your HQ location?

Allie: That will not be necessary. I see that you are based in a different city, hence we could have the interview via Skype. Is that okay?

Nathan: That would be perfect. Thank you!

Allie: You are welcome. Please add ABCCorp as a contact on Skype. I have sent you a calendar invite for the interview. Kindly acknowledge the same.

Nathan: Sure.

Allie: Thank you Nathan. Have a great day ahead. And good luck for the interview!

Nathan was extremely pleased with how efficient Allie was in reaching out to him quickly, understanding his location criteria and setting up an interview accordingly. 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. In fact, about 66% of candidates were comfortable with AI and chatbots taking care of interview scheduling and peripheral activity.

Essentially, a recruitment chatbot can collect information from candidates such as their resume and contact information, help set up an interview with a human stakeholder based on his/her calendar, collect screening details such as experience and skills and answer the candidate’s basic questions about the job.

Learn more: How Chatbots Can Simplify the Recruitment Process

HR Onboarding

Once Nathan cleared the interview and was offered the job, he was reached out by Allie once again.

Allie: Hello Nathan. This is Allie. Congratulations on the offer, Welcome to ABC Corp!

Nathan: Hi Allie. Thank you very much.

Allie: Before we start the onboarding formalities, do you have any questions I can help you with?

Nathan: As a matter of fact, yes. Could you please send me any company related information I should be well-versed in before getting started?

Allie: Absolutely! Below is a company overview video to get you started with!

Allie: You can also refer this intranet page for more information [Read Now]

Nathan: Great! Thanks Allie. Could you also send across the leave policy and the list of holidays for this year?

Allie: Sure. Here are the leave policy and the holiday calendar. [Check Now]

Now, please note that as part of the onboarding process, you are required to send across copies of the following documents to hr@abccorp.com:

Personal Identification Details – any authority attested identification card would do

Last 3 payslips from your previous employer

Bank account details

Nathan: Sure, I will send them across.

Allie: Okay. Also sending across the NDA. Please sign the same and send it across.

Nathan: Okay.

Allie: Great! Thank you Nathan..

Nathan: I’d like to raise an IT request for requesting a new laptop

Allie: Sure, your request is recorded. An IT agent will get in touch with you soon!

Nathan: That’s great, Thanks Allie!

Learn More: How Chatbots are Revolutionizing The HR Department

IT Helpdesk

Nathan has started his first day at ABC Corp. and has met his team. He has been given access to the company’s marketing dashboard but is unable to sign in. He remembers that ABC Corp. uses an IT helpdesk bot that can be accessed using the internal messaging tool. He decides to seek help.

Nathan: Hi.

IT Bot: Hello Nathan. Welcome to ABC Corp. How can I help you?

Nathan: Well, I am unable to sign in to the marketing dashboard.

IT Bot: Have you been granted access?

Nathan: Yes. I was sent an email earlier that I can now access the dashboard to see project-specific details. But my sign-in credentials do not work.

IT Bot: Sorry about that. Let me check.

Nathan: Sure.

IT Bot: Looks like there was a technical problem with credential generation. I have sent across a password reset link to your email ID. Kindly use it to sign in with the new password.

Nathan: Okay. Thank you.

IT Bot: My pleasure. Is there anything else I may assist you with?

Nathan: No.

IT Bot: Okay! Have a nice day Nathan.

Nathan uses the password reset link to quickly sign-in to the dashboard. He is happy that instead of having to waste time locating and asking the right people for the fix, he was able to reach out to the IT helpdesk bot in no time.

business intelligence

It has now been a couple of weeks since Nathan joined ABC Corp. Today he is scheduled to meet with the head of Alpha Foods, a long-standing customer of the company. One of the issues that Alpha Foods is facing is a steep decline in sales. Nathan has been asked by his manager to focus on the issue in order to come up with a fix. Before he walks into the meeting, Nathan wants to be abreast of the company’s revenue and sales data. He decides to use Mylo, ABC Corp.’s Business Intelligence bot.

Nathan: Hi Mylo.

Mylo: Hello Nathan. How can I help you today?

Nathan: I have a meeting with Alpha Foods. Can I see their annual revenue details for last year?

Mylo: Sure. Alpha Foods’ annual revenue for 2017-2018 is 90 Billion.

Nathan: Okay, can you break that down by region?

Mylo: USA – 32B, Asia Pacific region – 35.7B, Europe – 22.3B.

Nathan: Okay, can I see a graphical representation of their sales in the Asia Pacific region?

Mylo: Yes.

Nathan: Well, that doesn’t look good. What about their sales in Europe and USA?

Mylo: They seem to be doing pretty well there. Sales in Europe have seen an improvement of 6% on average annually. Sales in the USA are on the uprise too – at an average annual rate of 2%.

Nathan: Map sales numbers for Asia Pacific with their trade promotional campaigns from the last 5 years.

Mylo: There are no trade promotions from Alpha in Asia Pacific between the years 2013 – 2018.

Nathan: That explains it. This is enough insight for now. Can you mail these figures to me as well?

Mylo: Sure. The details have been sent to your email.

Nathan has understood that Alpha Foods is facing an issue specifically in the Asia Pacific region as they are facing a hard time attracting customers to their products. Nathan uses the data insights provided by Mylo to suggest a new trade promotional campaign to boost sales for Alpha in the Asia Pacific region.

Learn More: Why Business Intelligence Needs Chatbots to Boost User Adoption & ROI

Intranet/Employee Assistant

Nathan routinely reaches out to Mia, the company’s intranet & employee assistant bot to check on internal company updates and to set up meetings.

Nathan: Hi Mia. Please schedule a meeting with Alex from the Sales team for tomorrow at noon.

Mia: Confirming, meeting tomorrow with Alex Knoxville at 12 PM?

Nathan: Confirm.

Mia: Meeting scheduled. Calendar invite sent to Alex.

Nathan: Any other updates?

Mia: Yes. The leave policy for the year 2019 has been updated. Tap to see the latest policy.

Nathan: Well, send it to my email instead.

Mia: Updated leave policy sent to your email.

Mia has made simple, daily tasks a breeze for Nathan.

Learn More: The Role of Chatbots in the Intranet

explore how chatbots can help

While these are only a few popular work-life scenarios in which chatbots can help Nathan, the fact is that several other ways bots can simplify work for him or any normal employee. 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.

If you’re interested in learning more about chatbots and how they help your organization, feel free to get in touch with one of our chatbot consultants. Acuvate leverages its enterprise chatbot builder platform, BotCore to build, deploy, train and manage AI chatbots for large and medium sized enterprises.

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4 Amazing Things Enterprise Chatbots Can Do For Users

Abhishek Shanbhag — Tue, 12 Jun 2018 14:24:22 +0000

Amazing Things Enterprise Chatbots Can Do For Users

A report by Markets and Markets reveals that the chatbots market is set to be worth 3,172.0 Million USD by 2021. It isn’t too far fetched, at this point, to claim that bots just may be one of the most popular AI technologies today.

However, despite their popularity and increasing awareness around the incredible benefits that chatbots can bring to businesses, there hasn’t been nearly as much discussion around what chatbots can actually do for users. So while chatbots are touted as the next big thing across a variety of industries, businesses still do not know them for much beyond their ability to answer their customer’s most basic FAQs.

Before we delve into incredible new benefits that chatbots can bring to your users, let’s first take a step back to understand chatbots and their functionality.

A chatbot is essentially a computer program that enables conversation with an end user via auditory and textual methods. There are currently two types of chatbots- rule-based and AI-powered chatbots, and unsurprisingly, the former is rapidly becoming less and less relevant.

As we experience brand new advancements in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing, we are starting to see chatbots that are smarter than ever and provide intelligent, highly relevant answers. Typically, chatbots reside as a contact in messaging apps used by the organization, such as Slack, Skype, Skype for Business and so on.

Enterprise chatbots today are built by leveraging powerful enterprise chatbot building platforms that can both enable organizations to build and deploy chatbots. It would be interesting to note that before chatbot platforms were introduced into the market, building a bot was complicated, time-consuming, and required a specific set of sophisticated skills. As robust chatbot building platforms enter the market, it’s become easier than ever for businesses to get started with minimum deployment time and zero coding skills.

Enterprise chatbots are a trending technology and are in fact, easy to build. Therefore it is imperative that business leaders take the time to understand ways in which chatbots can impact their organizations and its operations.

Before making the decision to build bots, it is critical to evaluate specific challenges that the business may be facing and identify ways in which a chatbot can address and resolve them. Therefore, the chatbot development process begins by first strategizing and assigning specific tasks you want your bot to do.

In this blog, we’re going to explore five top tasks your chatbots can perform. Read on to see which one of these use cases would be most relevant to your business and its functions:

4 AMAZING THINGS ENTERPRISE CHATBOTS CAN DO FOR USERS

THEY CAN PUSH PERSONALIZED ALERTS

Users also have the option to decide the frequency, timing and type of alerts they’d prefer to receive – chatbots can deliver alerts in multimedia formats- and schedule accordingly.

Chatbot administrators can also schedule specific type of alerts that are meant to be delivered to a desired set of users.

Alerts can be both simple text-based notifications or ones which require users to perform an action.

Here are 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, included 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.

THEY CAN COMPLETE 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 of record or making form-based data entries that employees and customers need to perform commonly. Using a chatbot not only saves time but also eliminates repetitions, that may be caused by human error.

Chatbots also eliminate the need to switch across multiple applications, go through various mundane procedures or depend on personnel to get tasks done. By automating the process, you are saving time for both customers and employees. 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:

Employees can request an IT helpdesk chatbot to generate an IT ticket for any issues they may be encountering
Using an HR chatbot, employees can apply for leaves or generate payslips
Employees can request a Business Intelligence chatbot to update or make changes to a report.
Customers can place a product order
With Healthcare chatbots, patients can schedule appointments with doctors

FETCH INFORMATION

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

Users can specify parameters and filters they require for the information they need and chatbots can share required information with users in a way that’s easy for users to scan, understand and send along for further processing.

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.

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.

Examples:

Employee to a BI chatbot: What is the marketing ROI for 2016 and 2017?
Employee to a BI chatbot: Get me the sales report for Antwerp from Jan to April
Customer to a banking chatbot: Generate a report of my FICO score

THEY CAN ANSWER QUESTIONS

This is a functionality that most people who’ve ever heard of a chatbot are already familiar with.

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.

Using an enterprise chatbot platform, administrators can detect the most commonly asked questions by users to the bot. Thereby you can constantly update the FAQ database of the bot and consistently enhance user experience and adoption

Developers

For more complex questions, chatbots can search for answers from pre-defined websites or databases, which can be in a variety of formats – word, PDF and others.

Examples:

Employee to HR bot: How many leaves do I have left?
Employee to IT helpdesk bot: How do I reset my password
Customer to tech support: Can you tell me more about a product or service

CONCLUSION

Enterprise chatbot technology is evolving at an incredibly rapid rate and chatbots are quickly replacing traditional apps, whose functionalities are not adept at answering customers queries effectively.

Chatbots that drive enterprise productivity perform a variety of functions – much more than simply answering basic FAQs – they have the power to quickly become the backbone of enterprise search.

We recommend that business leaders work closely to define a robust enterprise bot strategy before embarking on the journey of building one. This strategy should address specific organizational challenges and how they plan to leverage chatbots to address these.

A workplace chatbot should be built to handle a variety of requests rather than having individual chatbots for each department or type of function. The idea is to have a go-to bot that employees and customers can rely on to find the information they require.

If you’re interested to learn more about chatbots or how you can integrate them into your business, get in touch with one of our experts who will help you explore the right use case of a chatbot for your organization.

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Important Use Cases and Examples of Chatbots For The Retail Industry

Hemanth Kumar — Fri, 27 Apr 2018 11:32:00 +0000

Important Use Cases And Examples Of Chatbots For The Retail Industry

There is no denying the fact that technology and automation have rapidly transformed the way business is done. The rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI), in particular, has given rise to interesting speculations about how rapidly robots will take over the workplace.

Customer-facing industries have jumped on the chatbots bandwagon almost as soon as they arrived into the market. The results have been increased efficiencies and reduced costs, especially in customer service functions. It is no surprise then that businesses across a plethora of industries are looking into how they too can adopt chatbots and what it can mean for their business outcomes.

As consumers are spoilt for the convenience offered by e-commerce, consumers are increasingly expecting conversations related to their purchases to happen online, anytime, anywhere. This makes the role of chatbots increasingly apparent in a market saturated with businesses trying to outdo each other in terms of customer service.

Let’s explore areas in which chatbots can make shopping a simple and more enjoyable experience.

HOW RETAILERS CAN USE CHATBOTS TO PROVIDE BETTER CUSTOMER SERVICE

DRIVING CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT

The one thing that makes a customer come back to an app or a website is superior service and finding products suited for their needs. In order to stay ahead of the competition, it has become imperative that retailers are actively engaging customers 24/7. A happy and engaged customer is likely to spend more than the disengaged one.

Chatbots enable retail businesses to provide superior customer service by driving customer engagement 24/7 without requiring human intervention 24/7.

As an intuitive alternative to customer service, chatbots are making waves with their conversational user interface, backed by machine learning in order to provide efficient and personalized product recommendations and a way to smartly engage with the customers.

Chatbots also integrate with various communication channels such as Facebook Messenger, Kik, and e-commerce websites. This allows retailers to provide 24/7 support, enhanced shopper experience and recommendations. The overall result is happy returning customers and a noticeable boost in sales.

ENHANCE SHOPPING EXPERIENCE

Shopping online can be chaotic since there are a plethora of choices and large catalogos can often be clumsy and overwhelming. That said, how would you like it, if you felt like you’re in a physical store with a shopping assistant?

Chatbots are creating a similar experience as that of a physical store. They assist customers online by helping them navigate through various options to find the products they are looking for. With the intention to provide excellent customer service, chatbots are programmed to answer simple queries and provide front-line support to customers and to accentuate their shopping experience.

CHATBOT EXAMPLES IN THE RETAIL INDUSTRY

“Chatbots integrating with messaging apps” is an emerging retail trend.

Retail therapy, is no longer abstract. With the kind of experience messaging apps are providing in terms of usage, retailers are able to effectively eliminate friction for customers.

Also, integrating chatbots with a messaging app is enabling customers to experience a whole other level of shopping experience.

H&M

2016, saw a major upcoming trend with the launch of H&M’s chatbot on messenger app Kik. A significant amount of customers liked the recommendations and user experience. The experience enabled customers to choose from the recommendations, filters and style preferences. It enabled them to share product pages and favorite items with their contacts on the Kik app.

TACO BELL

Similarly, fast-food giant Taco Bell integrated their chatbot with the messaging app Slack, which allowed customers to use the app to request food items, prices, ingredients and pay. This integration led to the brand’s expansion and enhanced their brand image.

MACY’S

Macy’s optimized chatbots for mobile and web primarily to locate items and provide customer service, which includes answering queries and assisting customers in finding the product they’re looking for.

SEPHORA

Sephora is pushing towards conversational commerce with its debut on the messaging app. With Kik, Sephora is connecting with their customers to drive sales, by leveraging the one-to-one experience and replicate in-store conversations on mobile. Customers can directly make purchases within the Kik app. Sephora Chatbot enables users to make beauty recommendations, DIYs, read ratings and find products that are accurate for their skin type and tone.

The bot provides an experience similar to that of shopping with a friend or a store associate while interacting with the appropriate content and finding relevant products. Sephora Chatbot with the messaging app Kik is particularly targeting Gen-Z audiences and providing a fun, social platform to engage with their customers and improving the brand image with innovative ways of engaging with new and existing clients.

CHATBOT USE CASES FOR RETAIL EMPLOYEES

AI-POWERED SALES BOTS FOR FIELD SALES FORCE

Retail companies deploy several field-sales personnel who need quick and easy access to key sales data. Working in field force is all about the data – recording past interactions and saving data for future references is paramount when you’re talking to the customer during your front-line sales activities.

Allowing your sales personnel access to AI-powered intelligent sales bots provides them with valuable insights, which further gives them the leverage they need to close sales along with reminders and notifications which provide timely assistance to the sales force in doing their tasks leading to the elimination of manual efforts and increase in efficiency and saved time.

It is crucial for a salesperson in the field to have access to all relevant data and be able to prioritize the line of actions. With intelligent sales bots and the conversational interface they offer, it gets easy and quick to make informed decisions. Sales reps can focus on tasks that need their attention, be more productive in shorter time periods.

Further Reading:

AI-POWERED SALES BOTS FOR FIELD SALES FORCE

HR departments often struggle with managing a large and disparate workforce – right from managing job recruitment, selection, onboarding and promotion to developing and overseeing employee benefits and wellness programs. They also have to draft and enforce personnel policies. All of these are challenges that can be addressed by chatbots.

Automating HR functions and enabling conversational experiences eliminates paper-based workflows and allows the HR department to be better connected and more efficient.

Let’s walk through how chatbots can improve the process of hiring a new employee.

Chatbots can help the HR department smoothen the onboarding process. AI helps eliminate repeatable tasks and efficiently answer frequently asked questions related to – training processes, documentation feedback, work ethics, codes, etc. – all of which are particularly relevant and vital for new hires.

AI-powered chatbots facilitate change throughout the company, by regularly updating changes in the backend, and ensuring that all employees are notified immediately.

Chatbots for HR also enhance communication between the HR department and employees, enabling faster accomplishment of tasks.

Further Reading:

AI-POWERED BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE BOTS FOR REAL-TIME ALERTS

Now more than ever, it has become imperative for retailers to harness analytical data on supply chain motion, inventory levels, consumer demand, sales, etc. – all of which are critical to making sound business decisions, especially in the areas of marketing and procurement.

Chatbots enable advanced retail analytics that offers detailed customer insights, as well as insights into the business and processes of the organization, in order to highlight areas that can or should be improved. BI bots are particularly gaining popularity because of their ability to: engage in natural conversations, provide real-time alerts and effective security and enable seamless integration.

As businesses work hard to increase employee productivity, BI chatbots incorporate a culture of analytics to employees’ daily workflows.

Acuvate’s BI bot lets employees get access to relevant BI data and analytics via a 3rd party messaging app like Slack, Skype and more. The bot provides a persona to the BI system, filters data and eliminates the need to switch between multiple dashboards.

The BI bot from Acuvate can seamlessly adapt to office jargon and correctly interpret user intent. It sends data, key analytics and alerts to the relevant user, and keeps them updated about any data anomalies.

It also includes important features such as multi-factor authentication, channel authorization and user authentication. The bot seamlessly integrates within your line of business applications and makes transactions while searching for your documents.

FUNCTION-SPECIFIC USE CASES

While the above are industry-specific use cases of chatbots, retailers can also consider generic function-specific use cases of chatbots such as:

AI BOTS HELPING ENTERPRISE HELPDESK

By leveraging AI bots, enterprises are revolutionizing help desk practices with 24/7 availability and quick responses, thereby enabling employees to be more productive.

Increased support from the IT staff enables employees to access self-service without the need to constantly go through a ticketing system. AI bots help employees with basic issues and answer their queries to fix problems easily, without requiring human intervention.

AI bots reduce support costs by minimizing the size of the staff that is typically required to maintain the IT helpdesk department. Also, since employees can enlist the assistance of chatbots to get issues resolved, there is less dependence on a helpdesk for low-value tickets. This means there are fewer interruptions at work and subsequently, improved productivity.

Check out Acuvate’s Chatbots for IT Helpdesk

THE ROLE OF CHATBOTS IN INTRANETS

Successful Intranets are known to increase employee collaboration while contributing to knowledge management within an organization. An employee typically has to login to the intranet to gain access to new updates, messages, notifications, etc.

However, when a chatbot is implemented into the intranet, it can serve a variety of purposes – it can keep users notified about relevant updates, announcements, news, and other sources of information stored on the intranet. Chatbots facilitate an environment where employees are automatically made aware of vital information and are provided with hassle-free access to insights and quick suggestions, thereby motivating employees to continue using the intranet.

Acuvate’s MeshBOT helps mitigate intranet adoption challenges by empowering employees to optimally utilize intranet. As employees interact with MeshBOT, it gathers information and patterns, which enables it to provide a personalized experience.

LAUNCHING CHATBOTS IN THE RETAIL SPACE CAN BE A GAME CHANGER

Chatbots have a variety of use cases for industries across the board, but for retail, in particular, they hold great promise. Dramatically increased sales, upsell and cross-sell opportunities, informed decision making, personalized experiences, improved customer satisfaction, service and loyalty – all of these can be direct benefits of leveraging chatbots.

Build your own bot in a matter of hours using BotCore – an Enterprise Chatbot Accelerator solution by Acuvate. Learn more about our approach to building chatbots for the retail industry.

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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How Chatbots Can Help IT Helpdesk Teams Hit SLA Target

Rakesh Reddy — Fri, 30 Mar 2018 21:26:00 +0000

How Chatbots Can Help IT Helpdesk Teams Hit SLA Target

30 percent of tickets are password-reset related despite the fact that 69% of support teams allow their customers to reset at least some of their passwords without contacting the IT helpdesk
– HDI

Ensuring that an IT help desk or service desk is running hassle free at all times is an ongoing challenge for enterprises across the world. IT is the backbone of the modern organization – all employees are highly dependent on efficient running of IT services. It is, therefore, not surprising that they expect an instant resolution for the IT issues they run into on a frequent basis.

Especially towards the end of holidays, complications seem to arise at a faster pace and at greater volumes. As employees return to work, there is a barrage of requests for password resets. Sounds like a simple task, but owing to its repetitive nature when multiplied by the number of employees across the organization, this endeavour becomes rather challenging and time-consuming.

A BRIEF LOOK AT THE CHALLENGES FACED BY IT HELPDESK TEAMS:

Employees waiting endlessly on call to get in touch with the IT team.
Manually creating tickets for every issue that occurs across the organization
Ticket dispatch to route all incoming tickets to the relevant technicians. As service requests can come from a variety of channels, such as emails, calls, chat, ticket dispatch can be challenging
Incident management, which is closely aligned with the helpdesk. The service desk is challenged with resolving any disruptions and restoring normal services as quickly as possible.
Lack of streamlined communication with end users on the status of the ticket. Too much time is wasted on operating across too many communication channels, such as email, chat, call, etc.
Several help desks are still stuck using legacy systems and outdated tools, which further complicates achieving efficiency and providing quick support. Both users and IT help desk staff are left fighting an uphill battle.

Interesting though, most IT helpdesk tickets are actually low-value items and typically repetitive. Often, they are issues related to password resets, or the VPN not working, etc. These are not issues that require extensive expertise to resolve, but they are still time-consuming and detract from your helpdesk from issues that require their deep-seated attention.

When your helpdesk is busy resolving low-value issues, it greatly diminishes the productivity of your employees as well as helpdesk teams. The subsequent outcome is that SLAs are often missed and the cost per ticket rises rapidly.

What organizations will need to consider strongly is finding a way to enable their support teams to spend more time on addressing complex issues and high-value tickets.

IT HELPDESK SLA BEST PRACTICES – CAN IT SELF SERVICE PORTALS HELP?

In an effort to address this challenge of the IT helpdesk expertise not being leveraged efficiently, several organizations have deployed IT self-service portals for automation.

However, they come with their own set of challenges:

Flaws in user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) across most of these portals has resulted in low adoption rates
End users find it bothersome to have to fill out the same information repeatedly, when creating an incident report
Checking ticket status can also be challenging due to inefficiencies in navigation
While a few portals have successfully overcome issues related to information accessibility and workflows, they still haven’t been able to set in motion a streamlined and collaborative method of ticket resolution

Learn more: Why Your Employee IT Self-Service Needs Bots Instead of Portals

HOW TO IMPROVE SLA PERFORMANCE -CAN CHATBOTS BE THE ANSWER?

Forward-thinking organizations are increasingly turning to chatbots in order to equip their IT helpdesk teams to perform with greater efficiency, as well as provide employees with a true self-service option.

WHAT CAN CHATBOTS IMPROVE SLA PERFORMANCE:

Employees can interact with the Bot to resolve most of the common issues without any intervention from Helpdesk staff, thereby effectively reducing the number of tickets
Bots can help employees raise a ticket which then can be routed to the right agent or the bot can seamlessly handoff the conversation to an agent if there comes a point where it can’t help the user any more: maintaining employee experience

Bots can help the agent resolve more requests by making all the relevant information available – Effectively reducing the time spent on each ticket
Agents motivation will be high as they can spend more time on high-value issues while the bot answers repetitive questions and resolves low-value requests.

Chatbots enable employees to raise tickets, find out ticket status and get their issues resolved, all by simply sending natural language questions to bots.

Below is a glimpse of important use cases that bots help accomplish:

Creating tickets and updating their status on an ongoing basis
Providing status updates and relevant details to the end user
Enabling lookups for access requests
Sending alerts for instant action and resolution
Enabling the bot to address frequently asked questions across various channels, such as live chat, Skype for Business, Email, and so on

Bots help save time and effort for the IT helpdesk staff, by addressing and resolving all basic queries from the knowledge basis. They also provide the option to raise a ticket, in case an issue is not resolved or even connect to a live support agent, in case of urgent and complex queries. Bots can be made to be available 24*7 to help employees across a variety of channels, such as Skype for Business, Microsoft Teams, Slack and so on.

As bots handle all day to day IT issues, a lot of time, money and effort is saved for your organization, which enables your helpdesk staff to concentrate on resolving queries that require deep expertise. As your staff becomes more productive, your cost per ticket diminishes by over 25%.

This is a particularly efficient solution for when your organization scales as well because the helpdesk would still only be approached for complex queries.

An efficient IT Helpdesk bot increases productivity, minimizes disruptions and keeps employees aware of ticket status. However, in order to truly harness the value, a bot can bring to your organization, ensure that it integrates with all of your current applications. This element of integration will further amplify employee engagement and collaboration across these platforms.

Are you considering leveraging AI bots for your IT helpdesk? Our AI-Powered IT helpdesk chatbot might interest you.

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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Chatbots: AI’s Most Practical Use Case for The Digital Workplace

Abhishek Shanbhag — Fri, 23 Mar 2018 20:25:00 +0000

Chatbots: AI’s Most Practical Use Case For The Digital Workplace

WHAT DOES A DIGITAL WORKPLACE STAND FOR?

A survey by the SMG/CMSWire and Digital Workplace Group as an industry insight for the 2017 Digital Workplace Experience conference revealed that 95 percent of organizations agree that a digital workplace is important.

There are several definitions of a digital workplace, so it’s really important to understand what it really is. Gartner puts it eloquently, claiming that the Digital Workplace enables new, more effective ways of working; raises employee engagement and agility; and exploits consumer-oriented styles and technologies.

Needless to say, all of these important achievements for an organization and they want to get on the bandwagon as soon as possible. With all of the radical transformations in technology, the digital workplace is undergoing an upheaval of changes. How then does an organization prepare and adapt?

As the current of an issue as it is to digitize your workplace, it’s also important to note that this conversion should be addressed in its entirety, which means technology, process and people – all three contributing factors must be taken into account and accordingly brought together.

Even before we get into the specifics of how chatbots are key to a digital workplace, it should also be noted that a digital workplace is not a destination, but rather a journey. This means your organization must be prepared for constant innovation, improvement and transformation. With that being said, it is also imperative that the digital workplace strategy being employed must take into account that employees are of utmost importance in this journey – organizations must continually provide them with latest technologies and tools required.

Read More: 5 Digital Workplace Trends for 2018.

And that brings us to the discussion of a chatbot.

WHAT ARE CHATBOTS?

A chatbot is really just another software, which is often powered by machine learning and artificial intelligence and can carry human-like conversations. Conversations between the user and a bot happen via a chat interface using textual or auditory methods.

Bots are usually built using a chatbot platform or frameworks, and deployed on messaging apps like Skype, Skype for Business, Slack, Microsoft Teams etc. or virtual assistants like Alexa & Cortana to converse with end-users. Advancements in Artificial Intelligence and its components related to it like Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing (NLP) led to the building of highly intelligent bots with extremely relevant responses in a natural language tone.

The reason chatbots are gaining so much attention from businesses across the world is that they offer a myriad of practical applications for both employees and customers.

THE ROLE OF CHATBOTS IN THE DIGITAL WORKPLACE

Before we begin to discuss the role of chatbots in the digital workplace, it is essential to understand what chatbots can do for your workforce. Chatbots can:

Fetch information
Answer Questions
Push personalized notifications
Complete tasks

If you have watched the famous Marvel movie “Iron Man”, you must be be well acquainted with Tony Stark’s virtual assistant Jarvis and how Tony has him do a lot of groundwork for him like “Do a background check on that person”, “Launch the new missile”, “Connect me with Pepper”, “What is the latest news” etc.

An employee chatbot features similar functionality. Consider these scenarios:

George, a sales employee, wants to know the latest updates on the intranet. He can ask/send a quick natural language question such as, “What’s new?” to his/her intranet chatbot in Slack, Skype for Business etc. and obtain personalized updates.

George is facing issues with his VPN and wants to raise an IT helpdesk ticket, He can simply ask an IT helpdesk chatbot for instructions or raise a ticket to get in touch with a human agent. He doesn’t have to log in to ServiceNow or Jira to complete the action.

George wants to obtain specific information from the CRM or a BI system or a Reporting system. He can skip logging in, filtering dashboards and switching between windows – he simply has to ask the BI chatbot for the details he needs.

George is now wearing a field-sales personnel cap and needs to know if there have been rises or dips in sales. A field-sales chatbot can send personalized alerts so George is immediately notified when action needs to be taken.

George doesn’t know how to apply for a leave. He can simply ask the HR chatbot for instructions and apply by chatting with the bot in the language of his choice.

The greatest benefit that chatbots bring about is ensuring tasks get done in a single interface. There is no time wasted in switching between various apps or any ensuing confusion. George can get his daily tasks done efficiently because he has handed off most of the ‘manual’ work to the chatbot, getting it all done within his actively-used messaging app.

Chatbots provide a self-service option to employees and reduce their dependency on external IT or HR teams. This contributes towards delivering better employee experience and increased productivity, as well as easier knowledge access and sharing. Think of all time and costs saved! Chatbots are expected to cut business costs by $8 billion by 2022.

Chatbots provide enormous support to the emerging enterprise mobility. Remote employees can access chatbots to access information or get tasks done across multiple devices anytime and anywhere.

CHATBOTS PRESENT USE CASES ACROSS A RANGE OF DEPARTMENTS.

Take for example, the intranet system of an organization. What always begins with the highest expectations of collaboration and engagement, intranet installation often witnesses dismal adoption rates and eventually being relegated to the job of legacy reference systems or a repository of references. They are not remotely leveraged for their potential of generating interactive engagement across the organization.

This, of course, results in diminished ROI, and leaves employees working remotely void of the collaboration tool they require to stay plugged into the project and be productive in distributed teams. This inability to leverage the intranet’s potential functionality has left businesses rather concerned, as instances of distributed teams rise across the world.

The Gallup’s State of the American Workplace report reveals that “43 percent of Americans said they spent at least some time working remotely last year, up from 39 percent in 2012.”

IT’S THE RIGHT TIME TO CONSIDER CHATBOTS

As you begin your journey towards a digital workplace, we expect that chatbots will obviously figure into your path towards transformation. A bot strategy can help businesses identify the most profitable use case. Unlike other AI technologies, chatbots come with the least privacy and security issues and don’t require many cultural changes. They typically have high adoption rates due to ease of use, and deliver performance improvements rather quickly.

At Acuvate, we leverage our AI-Powered Chatbot Platform – BotCore to build custom bots for enterprises. Our readily available solutions also include:

If you are currently considering building a chatbot or are exploring what a chatbot can do to address your specific business challenges, sign up for a free bot strategy session with one of our AI experts!

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