A New Frontier for Businesses to Win Big: Chatbots

Chatbots in Business

Gartner Anticipates that by 2020, customers will oversee 85% of their interaction with the enterprise without requiring human intervention.

Rising Google trend charts around chatbots in other words, embody increasing interest in chatbot applications. Chatbots, also known as Chatterbots, already cater to billions of customer queries on various internet-based services. The real-time functioning of Chatbots is helping these consumer-facing businesses to cut down on response time greatly. Chatbots give users a personalized experience. This is proving to be a crucial factor in exponential and, most importantly, positive adoption by users.

Be it flight booking, train booking, or providing help about banking services on banking websites, businesses are leveraging chatbots. Looking around, it seems a prophecy by Gartner might come true even before 2020.

While it is proven that Chatbots are competent to handle customer service very well, it needs to be explored to see if they can solve other diverse business and operational problems as well.

Training resource woes: Chatbots to rescue

On this exploratory quest, we at Ellicium came across some unique use cases. Just to mention one, we replaced a resource-intensive corporate training program with an exclusive Chatbot. This business had to shell out a huge amount to get this corporate training done for new recruits. This incurred cost did not yield the expected result as a trainee would still need to refer to huge amounts of printed material later to seek answers.

All these issues are dusted after incorporating Chatbot. Above all, the knowledge base is available to everyone 24/7 with a personalized experience. Training support center workforce cost is now reduced by almost 30%. All thanks to chatbots!

This one use-case proves that Chatbots can solve unique problems. Business executives might be skeptical, and indeed, some challenges can be show-stoppers to adopting Chatbots.

These are some critical challenges as listed below:

  • Linking the crucial applications and syncing them with the Chatbot
  • Having layers of conversation without asking too many cross-questions to the user
  • Uplifting brand image and bringing a personalized approach
  • Managing and Holding Chatbot applications
  • Make the conversation secure and private
  • Keeping up with incremental training in knowledgebase
  • Cost

Chatbots can help to overcome these challenges! Below are some of the features.

Overcoming all these challenges to build robust Chatbots at a rapid pace is something we do at Ellicium. We have predefined templates and frameworks to make this happen. We also empower chatbots with Data Science and Artificial Intelligence to tramp over these challenges successfully.

Finding the right problem to solve for Chatbots

Chatbots can be used for a wide variety of applications, but they can be very effective with ‘knowledge-driven business use cases. This also holds true for those tasks that are repetitive in nature or tasks that require business users to dabble through tons of information to find an answer. Chatbots can effectively do regular tasks that are resource-intensive and transactional in nature.

Chatbots are major efficiency boosters. Even a simple task of fetching reports may require dedicated human resources. Such humdrum tasks can prove to be fatal for overall organizational efficiency. Chatbots can be real saviors here!

Organizations on the verge of scaling up need to ramp up their capabilities with respect to everything. You can always put chatbots in the lead to scale operational tasks like human resource policy dispensation/ training for your recruits. An essential aspect of Chatbot is that it can handle multiple users at one go!

Once you find a task worthy of deploying Chatbots, starting small and capitalizing on the success is always better. Create a small ‘power’ user group who will test Chatbot thoroughly before rolling it out to everyone. Their feedback is crucial. Incorporating this feedback will certainly enrich your Chatbot to serve you better.

The chatbot ecosystem is ever-evolving! Hence, this is just the beginning. To reiterate, businesses need to start looking at creative solutions like Chatbots to scale, to compete in global markets, and to win!