07 Feb
Different Ways Your Business Can Use Chatbots
‘80% of businesses want chatbots by 2020’ is projected by Oracle. While there are some are rule-based chatbots built for simpler tasks, the story is treading towards AI powered chatbots for intelligent and complex tasks.
Businesses have created personas that are ubiquitous and have multiplied presence. Chatbots come with the privilege of responding without bias and with a consistent behaviour. A Business Insider survey in 2017 has reported that ‘48% of consumers prefer a chatbot that solves issues over a chatbot that has personality.’ The saturation of the app market and increase in usage of messenger apps led to the rise of bots.
Businesses have discovered many different ways to use these programmed personalities to solve business problems. Their functionality can be divided based on type of audience and business segment.
CHATBOTS IN THE BUSINESS TO CONSUMER (B2C)
B2C Chatbot success stories over Facebook platform and Kik have gained popularity for their versatility. Here are a few ways you can use chatbots in a B2C scenario
Many customer service automation bots like Flow XO, IMI bot are growing in number. A survey by Oracle claims that, ‘65% of consumers prefer using a messaging app when contacting a business’. The demand is rising because these bots are able to personalize customer service for each business
Bots also help in initiating an expression of gratitude to customers. Kudos bot lets you say thank you and organizes delivery. .
Gamification stitched with an altruistic objective. Karma collector bot that collects your karma and encourages people to help others in a gamified way.
Financial markets are not left out of the radar of chatbots. There are bots that monitor stocks as well as track simple domestic savings. My Kai is one such bot that helps manage your savings.
Freelancers, especially content marketing and writing professionals bet big time of content writing bots. Grammar correction bot, Grammarly in one such solution.
Giphy is an interesting search bot that sieves the entire web to find the type of GIFs you are looking for.
There are bots that work on lifestyle and behavioural issues too. Wysa is one of the robo-healers among many out there that help people in dealing with depression, break-ups and laziness.
Woebot uses chat conversations, sentiment and tone analysis and word games to help people who are looking for inexpensive therapy.
There is also a bot that helps people stay mindful all through the day, which happens to be a proven health enhancement technique. It is called Meditate Bot.
X, Amy and a few hundreds of bots out there are programmed to be a personal assistant. They help in scheduling meetings, sending reminders and drafting emails, setting auto-responders all through the day. This eliminates the hassle of training and attrition.
Hello Era, Sephora and 1800 are some chatbots that are directed towards influencing purchase for their respective brands. They are designed to offer personalized information for those trying to make respective purchase decisions.
Some of these bots are also applicable to a B2B scenario. Chatbots for customer support and engagement are used by B2B businesses too.
CHATBOTS IN THE BUSINESS TO BUSINESS (B2B)
For B2B, chatbot solutions are fewer in comparison to B2C. However, it is not too far to see this number growing. Bots are supporting companies in majority of the functions starting from marketing, finance, workforce management and recruitment. A survey by Hubspot has revealed that 57% of consumers are interested in chatbots for their instantaneity.
Interview process management bot. Helps you to organize and manage interview person for a candidate. Gecko is an AI powered interview bot that uses video to help you screen candidates.
Meet Alex and Mya are few other AI powered bots that can help a recruiter with screening candidates and job interview scheduling. Some bots are also created to help you with interviewer feedback and job advertisements.
Marketing is now about being personalized and targeting to only those who matter to the business. Bixtext offers personalized marketing using artificial intelligence.
Tata Capital has achieved 600% increase in lead generation with the help of chatbot. There is another bot called Drift that helps in generating qualified leads using conversations.
CHATBOTS IN THE BUSINESS TO ENTERPRISE (B2E)
Organizations are more concerned now about being future-ready than ever before. Chatbots have proven their productivity is delivering high ROI in other spheres of business. To empower different elements of an Enterprise, organizations are building their own bots using bot builder platforms. To grow internally organizations face many behavioural and adoption challenges. Chatbots help in filling these gaps and improving productivity.
Gartner’s research points that almost 40% of intranets fail due to low adoption rates. Once deployed on organizational messaging apps like Skype for Business Skype Slack etc Chatbots extract info from intranet and present it to employees via QnA interface. At Acuvate, chatbots can resolve this situation for Sharepoint Intranet initiatives. We call this MeshBOT. It is agile and helps in mitigating intranet adoption. It empowers employees to optimally utilize intranet. As employees interact with MeshBOT it gathers information and patterns, which enables it to provide a personalised experience.
Every company has ideal and aspirational SLAs for its IT team. However, either due to under resourced teams, lack of time or decision making bottlenecks, the IT helpdesk team fails to fulfil the criteria. The self-service IT helpdesk bot not only empowers the IT team, but with fast response, it also helps the entire organization by rendering information in time. Bots for IT helpdesk increase support staff and employee productivity. They answer simple and basic questions of employees such as password reset etc. and thereby reduce ticket costs.
There is a high demand for business intelligence bots. Bots eliminate the need for users to visit multiple BI systems and can boost BI user adoption. Our Sales Intelligent Assistant (SIA), an AI powered chatbot integrates with Data Warehouse/ Line of Business systems or your CRM and enables the sales teams to chat and quickly obtain relevant information regarding key metrics.
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Company financial performance monitoring bot. This is an internal tool that could be run by the CFO and her team.
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Chatbots are changing the face of how HR is conducted. They help in automating several HR tasks like onboarding employees. This onboarding bot helps a person to find the right things, complete tasks in the best order etc. Donut is an onboarding and pairing bot that helps a new employee complete all the necessary tasks in the designated time. Such bots also track with the progress of an employee’s essential tasks.
Strategically implemented bots offer a lot of use cases for enterprises. At Acuvate, we conduct workshops for enterprise business and IT leaders to recognize use cases with the organization. Our free e-book helps you discover how to develop resources, get started with a chatbot program and how to choose an enterprise bot builder platform . If you are eager to build your own chatbot, get started at www.botcore.ai.
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