For the past year, chatbots have been a huge topic of conversation across the globe. As both businesses and brands put them to the test. Today, chatbots exist to help us track our credit score, order pizza, receive medical diagnosis and even ask for fashion advice. But as the technology matures and chat interfaces such as Facebook announce significant strategic changes, how are chatbots moving from the consumer space to the enterprise? And what opportunities do chatbots in the enterprise bring?
It’s taken some experimentation to really understand a chatbot’s purpose. To understand exactly how users want to interact with a chatbot and find out how they bring value. However, it’s within the enterprise where the true value of chatbots can be realized.
Today’s biggest driver for new software and applications in the enterprise is to improve productivity and efficiency. Chatbots are the ultimate time savers. Enterprise chatbots can provide you or your employees with an answer to a question or response to a query within seconds. It provides your workforce with a central place to source information. For instance, management can quickly gather employee insights ahead of an employee review. Field staff can request help whilst out the office and customer service teams can aggregate all customer information.
However, in order for your company chatbot to work seamlessly, it needs to connect and gather information from all of your enterprise applications. Such as your CRM, Support Ticket Systems or even ERP through secure APIs. Developing custom enterprise chatbots that integrate into all the relevant applications, databases and systems means all you or your employees need to do is type in a few commands, and you’ll get all the information as you press enter.
So what makes chatbots in the enterprise successful…
Understand your Users, don’t pretend to be human & don’t overcomplicate things.
Successful enterprise chatbots rely on deep user understanding. What specific tasks do your employees need to do, and how could a chatbot speed this process up? It’s important to create a chatbot that fully supports your employees. It’s also important to understand how users are using apps.
As Ted Livingston, founder of KIK explains, “Natural language processing and artificial intelligence are not yet accomplished at managing human-like conversations”. They aren’t yet completely conversational, it’s often disjointed. Users are aware they are talking to a bot and don’t pretend to be a human. By doing this, your users are less likely to get frustrated if it doesn’t understand their request the first time around. Or when the chatbot can’t provide the answer they are looking for.
We mentioned earlier about Facebook changing their Bots strategy. The reason being that 70% of Facebook Bots are failing to meet user demand because they are too complex. “So instead of building a large ecosystem of chatbots. Facebook will train Messenger bots to handle a narrower set of cases, so users aren’t disappointed by the limitations of automation.”
The technology to support complex conversations is still maturing, so keep things simple. When a user opens a chatbot they have a specific task to achieve, a question to ask or an action to complete. Keep your focus specific to that task. What will help your users do what they need to do as quickly as possible? For example, if your sales team regularly spend time looking through multiple reports and systems to find their latest sales figures. How about a company chatbot that gathers this data on request and presents specific numbers dependent on the question?
The opportunities for chatbots in the enterprise are unlimited. From improving data exchange across departments, to supporting the sales team and streamlining business processes. Particularly when key business objectives are focused on improved efficiency and productivity. Enterprise chatbots provide results quickly and efficiently.
If you’re looking to integrate enterprise chatbots into your marketing campaign or develop one for internal use we can help. Drop us a message on Live Chat at the bottom right of the screen, we promise a human is there waiting to talk to you!