Almost every enterprise is now deploying chatbots, and this adoption wave is fueled by the advantages they bring to the table – understanding customer context, reducing costs and 24/7 availability to the customer.
And if you belong to the group of people who haven’t adopted bots as a solution yet, then I assure you, the time for Conversational AI is now ripe; owing to the advancements in AI, NLP, Machine Learning and many more – we say this ourselves, because we are currently in the business of designing and deploying Voice & Chat bots.
So, before you embark on deploying a bot, for your business, you should seek answers to 5 critical questions, which are:
1.What will the Chatbot do?
2.Where will the Chatbot live?
3.What information sources will the Chatbot use?
4.Will the bot know when to escalate to a human?
5.How will I choose the right vendor for my bot?
These questions will help you crystallize on the scope of chatbots for your business, and how they can be drivers for your business.
1. What will the Chatbot do?
The answer to this question is easy – handling your customer service (inbound sales and requests) and aiding your IT helpdesk. But this question will lead you to another one which is “what is the actual and instant benefit that a chatbot can give me?”
The answer will be interesting since I will talk about savings and a statistic cited by Microsoft that is:
"nine out of 10 consumers expect every company to offer 24/7 online self-service"
With this stat in mind, you may understand that every customer expects the customer service wing to be available 24/7. Even I do so.
However, while considering the economics in running a 24-hour customer care, you will incur a daily recurring cost of estimated 1500$ (inclusive of salaries being paid to customer care execs). Furthermore, calculating this figure for an entire year yields a staggering expense of $500K; an expense that can be invested on other initiatives. Which is why here, in this scenario bots can prove real-time money savers.
So as a holistic answer, a chatbot can save you a ton of money, aid your contact centres and make your business more available to the customer. This is what the Chatbot will do, essentially.
2. Where will the Chatbot live?
Well, the bot will sit on the most preferred channel of your customer. And in most of the cases – Facebook Messenger since Forrester cites it to be as the most used channel. Other channels that can be considered are
- Your website
- Mobile messengers-Whatsapp,kik,Wechat etc
On these media your bot can thrive and address your customer's queries.
3. What information sources will the Chatbot use?
To be honest a Chatbot isn’t a chatbot unless you give it data. And this data can be derived from anywhere - your website, KB, CRS’s, inventories and many more.
As part of your adoption strategy, you’ll need to decide what sources of information to make available to your bot. This decision again depends a on your answer to the first question (#1. What do you want the chatbot to do?).
To assist you further in answering the question, I’ll show you an example of what we’ve done for Skoda; We’ve built a bot for the international car maker, with an intention to boost sales for the auto-brand. The bot sits on Skoda’s website and interacts with the visitors; eventually guiding the visitor to Skoda’s catalogue of products.
You can also try the bot for yourself by visiting - http://www.skoda-auto.co.in/
So as a holistic answer, a chatbot can save you a ton of money, aid your contact centres and make your business more available to the customer. This is what the Chatbot will do, essentially.
Now, the Skoda Bot usually takes information from the visitors, most of Skoda’s inventories, billing systems and CRMs. And this has been made possible owing to integration via the API route.
Note: When you are adopting a bot for your business, there is always a possibility of a custom integration. In the sense that, not every system can be instantly integrated with your desired bot. You may have to define/develop a custom API that enables a smooth integration between the system and the Chatbot.
What I’ve said about integrations may sound difficult, however later when the bot starts to outperform itself, you will thank yourself.
You can also find out more about Skoda’s Bot here: Skoda case study
4. Will the bot know when to escalate to a human?
Well not in all the cases. In our experience designing Chatbots and Voicebots for businesses we’ve encountered situations where the bot didn’t transfer the call almost instantly.
However, owing to advancements in Sentiment Analysis, NLP and ML, and their infusion into our bot platform we’ve accomplished agent transfer/escalation seamlessly whenever the bot doesn’t understand what the user is saying or, when the user requests for an escalation.
Other broad scenarios that trigger an escalation are:
- Use of a language that indicates frustration or anger.
- A user asking the same question multiple times or Asks a question the bot doesn’t know how to answer
- Citing or elaborates about a potentially sensitive or dangerous issue, that requires instant human intervention.
5. How will I choose the right vendor for my bot?
Some of the brands today are leveraging internal resources to build a homegrown bot. However, the others are teaming up with external vendors to get their chatbots up and running. As you embark on adopting a Chatbot for your business, you should look for vendors who can:
- Design your customer journey, after understanding your line of business thoroughly.
- Provide robust customization options for your business.
- Understand the industry you are working with an inherent expertise for the same.
- Easily implement bots across multiple channels with hassle free integration capabilities
- Build a Chatbot with strong NLP, machine learning, and sentiment analysis capabilities
We at ServiceNext have built such bots using our bot platform. The pricing model too is flexible, which enables our customers to pay only for the bot sessions incurred/handled, rather than billing them a lumpsum!
To know more about Chatbots, what we do and how we can be of help to you write to us at hello@servicenext.ai
We’ll then hook you up to our free Proof-Of-Value Program; which will allow you to try a production ready Chatbot for free.
So on a closing note I’d like to say welcome to the world of Chatbots, I hope you keep the aforementioned questions in mind and embark on a Chatbot-enabled transformational journey.
