03 Jun
The Aggregator Bot: Unify Multiple Chatbots Into A Single Bot
As the adoption of chatbots continues to increase, organizations are building and deploying specialized chatbots for each function or department. With the growing demand for chatbots for different use cases, more and more chatbots need to be implemented within the organization.
Users will be consequently interacting with multiple chatbots and have to understand and adjust to the diverse capabilities and conversation styles of different chatbots.
Providing a consistent chatbot experience with a centralized chatbot, also known as an Aggregator Bot, that links individual bots together, can counter the problems that arise due to fragmentation of chatbots across functions.
Once the aggregator bot gets an input from the employee, it checks their permission levels and then identifies the area of query and passes it on to the specialized bot. This specialized bot quickly checks the access level of the employee for the query posed and responds accordingly.
This eliminates the need for users to interact with multiple bots to get their job done and provides a consistent user experience. An aggregator bot enhances employee satisfaction while improving the overall productivity.
For instance, let’s say you have deployed different chatbots for HR, ITSM, and intranet. By unifying these 3 bots into one aggregator bot, employees apply for leaves, raise an IT ticket and access intranet documents within a single interface.
The Aggregator Bot & The Rise of Chatbots in the Enterprise
As a part of our Build-A-Bot Workshop where we empower different IT and business leaders to kickstart their enterprise chatbot journey, we hear these common challenges:
- There is an increased demand from different internal business functions for chatbots of unique use cases. Each function wants to deploy and control their own chatbot.
- Should we deploy multiple bots or limit to a select few?
- The chatbot market is flooded with multiple vendors and solutions. We can’t evaluate all of them.
- How to choose the best solution that keeps up with the new innovations that are constantly happening in this space
- Most bot platforms are generic, but they don’t take care of all our scenarios.
Here are some of our recommendations to these above challenges and how organizations can map their chatbot journey:
- Allow business functions to try out prototypes and PoCs of their own
- Move the successful products to the pilot stage
- Analyze which pilot projects are delivering value and move those chatbots to the live stage
- Since there are multiple bots to interact with, employees might complain about confusion and there will also be a need for bot-to-bot interaction
- Overtime analyze the performance of the different chatbot platforms and choose a few for future deployments
- Create a bot directory to enable easy access for humans
- Create protocols for bot to bot communication
- Unify multiple bots into a single aggregator bot and provide an integrated Virtual Employee Assistant experience to employees
Advantages Of Aggregator Bots
Following are some of the well acknowledged advantages of an aggregator bot:
- A central and unified conversational interface and chatbot persona
- Reduced costs and efforts in building, deploying and expanding the chatbot ecosystem
- You can easily add or remove a linked bot without having any impact on the performance of the aggregator bot
- Minimal maintenance requirements for developers
- An aggregator bot can recognise user intent and relevantly engage a linked bot to perform the task
- They can provide users with suggestions of the best suited bots, their tasks, or suggestions for ambiguous and unrecognized requests in order to effectively handle users requests and serve them better.
- Developers can also analyze user interactions with the aggregator bot and conduct batch tests to understand single matched intents, multiple matches and unmatched intents which are useful in improving the bot capabilities.
- By training an aggregator bot, all linked bots can be automatically trained as well. Developers can train an aggregator bots to accurately match with the linked bots and hand off tasks to them appropriately.
Conclusion
As organizations expand their chatbot ecosystem, they should look into unifying multiple bots into a single aggregator bot to ensure consistent employee experience and improve productivity. An aggregator bot acts as a single point of contact for employees to complete their tasks across functions. Unifying multiple chatbots into a single bot can also reduce costs in building, deploying, training and maintaining chatbots. If you’d like to learn more about this topic, please feel free to get in touch with one of our chatbot consultants for a personalized consultation. You might also be interested in exploring our chatbot builder platform (BotCore) which can be used to build an aggregator bot
Abhishek is the AI & Automation Practice Head at Acuvate and brings with him 17+ years of strong expertise across the Microsoft stack. He has consulted with clients globally to provide solutions on technologies such as Cognitive Services, Azure, RPA, SharePoint & Office 365. He has worked with clients across multiple industry domains including Retail & FMCG, Government, BFSI, Manufacturing and Telecom.
Abhishek Shanbhag