10 Key Chatbot Implementation Considerations You Should Be Aware Of
According to a report featured by Business Insider, 80% of businesses want chatbots by 2020!
Chatbots today are being deployed across large, medium and small organizations to simplify business workflows and reduce customer service costs. Chatbots provide seamless self-service options to your customers and employees. They help your IT support, HR and customer service teams focus on productive activities and reduce time and effort involved in mundane tasks.
Any technology is only as good as how it’s implemented and leveraged across the organization
Implementation and deployment of enterprise chatbots are fraught with a few challenges as well. Without a robust bot strategy and being aware of some key governance, privacy and security considerations, organizations can’t make the most of their chatbot implementation. Many CIOs and IT executives who consult us at our Build-A-Bot strategy workshop, seek advice on some common chatbot deployment challenges in their organization.
Based on our learnings and after deploying chatbots for several Fortune 500 companies, we have enlisted those below to help you plan your chatbot implementation better and achieve maximum business value from your chatbots-
security and privacy
Any organization implementing chatbots should pay close attention to privacy and security. One should ensure that chatbots are compliant with GDPR or any other industry-specific or location-specific regulations and policies. Providing information to users based on their authorization levels is also crucial to ensure the privacy of information. User identity authentication, intent level authorization, channel authorization, end to end encryption, and intent level privacy, are some ways to enhance the security and privacy of your chatbot.
Learn more: 9 Ways To Enhance Chatbot Security
chatbots implementation can get expensive without proper expertise
Building home-grown chatbots without prior experience and understanding of the do’s and don’ts can make the implementation a mismanaged, disorganized, and costly venture. Especially customized chatbots may require a lot of lead time and technological understanding in implementation. Choosing “off-the-shelf” ready solutions from experienced chatbot service providers is one option.
setting the right expectations
Owing to the hype around Artificial Intelligence in the media, chatbots are largely considered as the one-stop solution that can solely streamline all business operations. However, this is not true. It’s imperative for a service provider to set the right expectations for their clients. Users must be made aware of the capabilities of a chatbot before they are deployed. This can be achieved by
Recognizing the champion user: There may be a large number of user groups or internal departments working together on or with the chatbot, however, it’s crucial to identify and thoroughly train one champion user from each department on the functioning of the bot.
Internal Marketing: Prior to deploying the chatbot, all users should be educated on the various use cases, capabilities and benefits of this new tool. If employees are not made aware of the bot functioning, there exists a high risk of low adoption and thereby low project ROIs or even failure of the project.
The right time to market: Large corporations may have thousands of employees in several departments dispersed across different countries and languages. Considering the needs and nuances of all the business divisions and cultures involved may take a lot of time. The extensive wait for the chatbot deployment might result in lowered enthusiasm.
infusing NLP and machine learning
In order for users to like and adopt chatbots, they should find them to be useful, relatable, and trustworthy. Users should be well aware of the capabilities of the chatbot. Though bots cannot entirely conduct human-level conversations, they should give a feel of meaningful interaction and people should be satisfied with the responses either through text or voice. Infusing NLP and Machine Learning into bots is a must for an enhanced and personalized user experience.
understanding how successful your chatbot is
The user experience with chatbots needs to be gauged. You may take feedback from your users and ask them about their chatbot experience and understand how the chatbot could be improved which helps you to find out if they are any developmental areas. You can also assign some business KPIs to your chatbot performance. Direct KPIs can be a reduction in customer service or HR or IT costs, a difference in the number of tickets raised, etc. A few indirect KPIs are employee engagement, customer experience, and so on.
future-proofing your chatbot
Chatbot technology is advancing at a very fast pace. 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. This abstraction layer also ensures you’re not locked down to any specific AI chatbot vendor or product.
improve chatbot capabilities with data
Data gathered by the chatbot can be leveraged for user insights, allowing you to understand the user needs and improve the capabilities of the chatbot continuously. Robust enterprise chatbot platforms usually are equipped with chatbot analytics to harness user data.
human hand-off
There’s always some cases when a chatbot simply cannot drive a query to its conclusion, so organisations need to ensure that there is always a human that can take over the conversation if necessary. Transferring the conversation to a human should be as seamless as possible without reducing user experience.
overcoming resistance
There could be a fear in many employees that AI and chatbots may pose a threat to their jobs. Employees should be made aware and ensured that a bot has the capability to relieve them of their repetitive work and make them more productive.
ensuring your chatbots fit in with your brand identity
Bots have to be tailor-made to match your brand identity and tone. This also helps in enhancing the user experience.
Chatbots are undoubtedly one of the most promising enterprise AI technologies. But maximizing the value from them requires extensive technical and functional expertise and a robust implementation methodology.
If implemented in an effective and data-driven manner with all challenges managed efficiently, chatbots can bring a huge transformation in your employee and customer service workflows.
If you’re planning to implement chatbots for your company, feel free to get in touch with us for a personalized consultation with one of our Artificial Intelligence and chatbot experts. Acuvate’s highly regarded expertise in AI and bots can help you overcome all teething issues and implementation challenges and help you achieve maximum returns from your chatbot investments.
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.
Jagan Jami is the COO @ Acuvate Software. He heads the delivery unit at Acuvate which had delivered 100+ intranets to companies across the globe. Jagan has been working with global CIOs and other business heads and consulted them on Intranet evolution and current trends.
Jagan Jami