Chatbots: Messengers of Robotic Transformation
Chatbots are not just a trend in the digital economy. They have been proven to boost businesses. Chatbots make business processes more efficient by automating tasks and assisting human employees. This leads to happier customers and improved performance in sales, marketing, and support departments.
Many businesses with the diverse structure of products and services are having difficulties to build smooth end-to-end customer journeys. Starting from the proper presentation of products to focus groups of visitors and ending with customer support.
Based on experience that our teams accumulated from chatbot solutions development we would like to summarize and share our thoughts regarding role of chatbots for modern businesses.
Our Vision
Continuously growing and changing product portfolios may have a significant impact on staff that have to build, promote, sell and support products and services. It’s hard to ensure great experience for new customers as well as loyalty of existing ones. The complexity of such processes, huge amounts of data, and growing number of routine tasks greatly demotivate personnel. And this leads to frequent staff turnover and a negative impact on efficiency and budget.
There were many attempts in the last decade to solve problems of such scale using online chat widgets on websites and mobile apps with built-in support tools. Such solutions were based on a predefined set of rules dealing with a limited number of cases. But for companies with large product portfolios this approach was ineffective, and for many customers even frustrating. What’s more, it was quite a challenge to design such rules on the business side.
With the adoption of Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and other AI/ML techniques chatbots have changed dramatically. It enabled intent and context recognition from text and speech and eliminated a need to build complex multi-level menus. Properly designed chatbots with finely-crafted identity may behave almost like humans. Although it’s a good practice to avoid giving customers a false feeling that they chat with human staff.
Machine learning can be extremely helpful in analysis of Big Data. In particular in analyzing unstructured sources like chat logs, e-mail conversation threads, support requests, and more. These instruments not only classify previously accumulated data, but detect new tendencies. This enables faster response of business to such factors.
The implementation of chatbots using the latest technology can change the role of staff. In support it can release employees from routines, in sales – it can also serve as an interlink between engaged customer and representative.
There are many scenarios where chatbots can help eliminate gaps and bottlenecks or add more value to the customer journey. But still, adding chatbots to processes is not like adding another plug-in or page. It should be an integral part of the long-term strategy with a proper understanding of benefits, risks and alignment with objectives. So, before integrating chatbots, make sure to assess every aspect.
Our Approach to Chatbot Development
Whether seeking for opportunity or facing a challenge – we are ready to dive deeper into your processes. We help you build a strategy of incorporating smart chatbots focused around your needs, business model, and audience.
Having knowledge and experience in chatbots, we provide business consulting and optimization. We assist our clients till they see benefits from integrating smart chatbots into their daily workflows.
Many companies on the chatbot market offer commercial, pre-built solutions. We believe that integrating AI/ML into chatbot solutions is what delivers real business benefits. In particular, with the growing number of customer support cases it becomes quite complicated for personnel to upkeep the complete and up-to-date set of dialogue flows. This way, AI/ML integration is far more efficient, and the initial investment in adopting AI/ML-augmented processes can bring long-term benefits.
What’s more, each company has its own infrastructure. That includes ERP and CRM systems and other integral solutions that enable everyday operations. That’s why it’s hard to create an out-of-box, business-specific product to cover every process. We prefer to use proven components but finely craft chatbots for your specific needs and objectives.
Considering Multi-Channel and Multi-Media Aspects
Variety of modern communication channels and significant difference between generations in using these channels makes communication with customer rather complicated for businesses. Furthermore, younger generations more and more prefer self-service instead of phone calls or having to wait for human assistant to join conversation, and this makes conversational chatbots far more important. We have experience of establishing multi-channel customer approach combining web chat widget, mobile apps and messengers. Chatbot availability in 24/7 mode combined with efficient implementation and multi-channel presence can greatly increase customer satisfaction.
Excellent user experience is another key ingredient of customer satisfaction, so we combine multiple ways of user interaction – text inputs is augmented with button-based choices, input dialogues for formatted data and multimedia objects such as images or map fragments. Combination of these interactions ensure smooth and natural conversation flow, allowing users to reach their goals with minimum time and maximum pleasure.
Summary
In the forthcoming decade chatbots will undoubtedly become quite a standard feature for most medium- and large-scale businesses, covering more and more aspects of business activities, especially routine and repetitive tasks. While not aiming to replace humans completely, chatbots will significantly change role of human staff and their skill requirements. Artificial intelligence techniques will allow chatbots to evolve along with business and respond promptly to changes in business processes and environment.
So, we believe that mid- and long-term business strategies should definitely include a chapter about incorporating chatbots in IT ecosystem, especially for businesses willing to expand quickly in the next years and focused on new generations of customers.
