#16 How your business can benefit from AI chatbots - Part 1

Business efficiency is a hot topic right now, and no matter what sector your organization is in or what your specific business processes look like, there's always room for improvement. In today's episode of the Process and Automation Podcast with the Automation Guys, you will find out how your business can benefit from AI chatbots so you can become more efficient and to improve the customer experience. Hallo and welcome to our first chatbot episode, and I'm sure there will be plenty of more. Today we will dive into the best use cases for external and internal facing AI-powered chatbots. With me here as usual is Arno to discuss today's topic with me. Hello, Arno.

Hi, Sascha.

So why chatbots, Arno?

Well, chatbots, and particularly those that are powered by AI or artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms, are, you know, gaining a lot of popularity, you know, across a lot of industries, you know, obviously because of their power and their versatility. And, you know, they're the impacts of these chatbots being deployed and, you know, as they get adopted from industry to industry, I thought it's a really good time to dive deeper into, you know, what chatbots are and how can they help your business become more efficient. And I'm sure, you know, as, you know, our listeners out there knows, you know, chatbots has been something that has been around for a while. But what we've seen in the last year or so is really these chatbots that's powered by AI has become incredibly intelligent and incredibly versatile. And, you know, as it's true for many sort of mid to large scale organizations, inevitably or undoubtedly, you know, you have divisions in these organizations that face both outward So this is to your customers or your clients. And then also divisions that faces inwards, and these are divisions that particularly handle, for example, employee concerns. So I guess it doesn't matter who the customer is of the chatbot, so outward or inward, you know, these chatbots can provide, you know, a lot of assistance in streamlining your processes and cutting processes costs or process costs, you know, how much it costs to run these processes and also helping people to get back to intuitive people-centric, you know, aspects of their day-to-day roles with inside an organization.

Yeah, so it's, yeah, it is a very popular topic, especially where was the AI element of it. So I remember most of the chatbots, like with my online banking, if I have a question, it pops up. Sometimes with some websites. So nowadays, instead of the contact form, I think you see it as well. So you have this sometimes very, very basic chatbots. It's more like, actually, it's contact forms, but sort of it feels more conversational. But this is the— yeah, it's very still very basic in lots of cases. As you mentioned, yeah, we talk about— when we talk about chatbots, we talk about these, these two main areas: external-facing chatbots on the one side, and then the internal-facing chatbots on the other side. So let's dive into the external-facing ones, the use cases ones first. So yeah, so the external ones, yeah, we probably more familiar with. As I mentioned, we see this little icon there popping up in the right bottom corner a lot. So it's better known, these kind of scenarios like with the bank or so are very, very popular and So yeah, our shopping, shopping websites. So we were more familiar with this one. So we see it as well integrated, these chatbots integrated into sort of Facebook pages of companies. And yeah, so these are sort of the typical sort of low-hanging fruits for, for many businesses to be more, more customer-facing. And yeah, so it's like sometimes Yeah, so just sort of a, sort of a much-needed backup for external-facing teams like customer service, for example.

Yeah, and I think customer service is probably the first business area that people think about when they start using chatbots. And, you know, that's for a good reason because, you know, customer service chatbots are becoming, you know, very popular. If you have incoming customer service requests, you know, a lot of the simple queries can be handled by a chatbot, you know, before a human agent even sees them. So again, this frees up people to put a lot more time and energy into more complicated cases in their queue. So, you know, we can train a chatbot to, of course, pass the actual case, so to speak, onto a human agent should it need to do that, or that the human actually requests for that to be done. And, you know, in all that, this keeps customers very happy because, you know, they're getting a very good service with the intelligence that's behind these bots. I think people know they're talking to bots, but as long as the bots service their request and provide them with a very seamless journey, then, you know, why not use this? I think, you know, it's again that topic we touched on, you know, put the automation in the right place for the particular degree of human interaction you need. So if you have a sort of a tier 1 sort of customer service request, a change of address, there's no reason why you should speak to somebody on the phone to do that. You know, you can do that very quickly using a chatbot interface. Of course, there are security protocols. Some of the chatbots we built, before you actually get into the details of the chatbot loading your, your record or your file or, or the data that you wish to update, it will send you an OTP code to your phone and you need to verify that. So of course, you know, there are elements of security that needs to be considered. But these days, the chatbot platforms are so powerful. And of course, they're all low-code as well. You know, none of these chatbots needs to be coded by hand. It's, it's really just configuration, and all you need to determine is, is the sort of journeys, um, that you want to enable these chatbots to, to take your, your customers on. And for customer experience, I think that's the number one use case and the probably the lowest hanging fruit for chatbots.

Yeah, especially with a really good designed chatbots on your website, you can really cover all the customer needs 24/7, isn't it? So your main office hours are maybe from 9 to 5. I think with lots of insurances and banks, that's the case. But lots of things actually happening when people are back from work. Now with home offices and work, yeah, working from home is a bit different maybe, but very often it is the case that you only you have when it comes to online banking or that kind of stuff, it only happens, it all happens usually in the evening hours. And if you don't have a really good chatbot in place, that is very, very beneficial for the end customer, especially if like things like claims or whatever are immediately processed through. It's fantastic.

And it's a differentiator. I think that, you know, where do I want to go to get my queries resolved, a place where I can quickly speak online 24/7 whenever it's convenient for me, uh, to a mechanism or something that could resolve my query very fast, very interactive, or do I want to go to a place where I have to phone a number, end up in a queue, uh, speaking to various people just to do a very simple customer service request. So, so again, I think that's becoming a really good differentiator, you know, for businesses out there, you know, and this is not a nice to have, I think, sort of going into 2022. I think this is an absolute must-have for business that wants to, you know, promote good customer services, for example, and create good customer experience. Now, of course, you know, it doesn't end with chatbots. You know, chatbots is just a channel, but it's a very popular, convenient channel and, and very known because a lot of people, of course, are using peer-to-peer messaging. So it's a very familiar experience. And I think as long as the automation behind the chatbot, like the robotic process automation that the chatbot leverages to go and actually fetch that customer record from your backend, as long as all of those things are also plumbed into the design of the bots, you know, you can create really, really superior experiences for your customer, which is, you know, real time. I mean, I saw an example of a chatbot, and I know they say you shouldn't humanize it too much, but in this instance, when the customer record was loaded and it was also the customer's birthday, it did say in a friendly way with emoji, happy birthday. And it's the small things like this, the kind of quote unquote know your customer that actually makes these things actually more approachable, you know, make them more sort of acceptable to use, you know, not just for millennials out there that's kind of on their phones all the time, kind of chatting away to each other, but also, you know, other generation of people as well, which would traditionally would have picked up the phone. So it's such a powerful, powerful tool that you round off your hyperautomation journey with. And again, I would say to all our listeners out there that kind of is interested in this topic, I think in 2022 and beyond that this will become something really, really big.

Yeah, it seems like it pops up already on most websites in the very basic version. So this kind of stuff sort of commoditizes at the moment. So everyone is getting really, really used to the first level, but really combining it with the AI, or not even necessarily the AI, but with all the data, I think this is where then the next level really can can be very, very powerful for businesses connecting. Yeah, we had this last week as well. So there's so much data out there, just, you just need to connect it. And putting all that stuff now into the customer channel is extremely valuable.

Yep. And making it accessible. And I think know your customer, you know, that's such a golden mantra to take forward in your automation journey. You know, I think that should be a slogan that should be, you know, very prominent on your agenda because I think that once you, once your customer knows that you know them well and what they want, their preferences are, then that's a very, very good foundation to lay a very powerful customer service journey for your customer and also the retention of your customers. You know, you want to keep them, you want to make them feel like They're at a place where you do care, you do know about them, you do resolve queries very quickly. Do I want to go somewhere else? No, because I like these guys. And again, you know, I think, let's look at products and services, prices of products and services. I think people sometimes, because they're so busy these days, they are willing to sacrifice a higher price point for a better service and a better—

Absolutely.

And I think this is the enabler for that.

Yeah, and especially in difficult times, crisis times or so, I think every business should focus on really keeping the customers and making that sales process and customer process as easy as possible. Because winning a new customer, I think if someone is not really happy with maybe there's a very slow manual customer service, losing that customer can be quite expensive, or winning a new one is usually far, far more expensive. So I think it's very wise for business to adopt that, to bring that in, especially now we all sort of 100% more digital than we have been last year. So I think that needs to be spot on. And that brings us to the next point. I think the order processing is another really good use case for chatbots. So we talked about this, you're on a website and maybe that website has a few hiccups and maybe within processing something goes wrong and so on, you might lose the order and you get frustrated. But if there's immediately sort of a chatbot available for you on the site to maybe ask that question, what happened here? I was halfway through the order and the chatbot understands that and can then use the API connections and sort of that capability into sort of backend systems and order systems, inventory systems, payment systems, customer records. So if this is all available for the chatbot, so then you can really have that customer, keep that engaged and say, yeah, we're sorting this out and we found the order. So that's so much easier. And yeah, so as soon as we have something like that in place for our customers with all the sort of service requirements, the chatbot can handle all these things. And as you mentioned, this one was their birthday in between. At the same time, a chatbot can do very clever upselling as well. Say, oh, you ordered this technical equipment here, usually with this technical equipment we suggest these accessories, so why not putting them on the order? So all these kind of things, yeah, really make a difference.

And I think the art of the impossible is very, very small here. You know, the possibilities using this is vast. And you're talking about upselling. And I think that, you know, let's face it, everybody loves a bargain. And, you know, in my head, I can imagine a journey where I am actually interacting with a shopping cart. There's certain things that I want to purchase. You know, maybe a recommendation is made to purchase another add-on. If I say no, then actually you can train this chatbot to negotiate and say, well, okay, what about a 10% discount or a 20% discount? So these are the things that's a reality. These are the things you can build. And I think it's important to mention to our listeners out there, when we say chatbot, we don't just mean one digital bot that sits there. These things scale, so you could have an absolute army of these things that is extremely scalable, that could do thousands of concurrent engagements, you know. And like you said, with order processing, you know, that's a simple example. But with that scalability that's built into the technology, the reach, you know, to do some of these additional selling or additional offers for end customers are massive. And, you know, and that have a very, very big impact, you know, on your business's bottom line, for example, if you, for instance, do online selling, for example.

Yeah, I think, and there's a really, really good point you made there. I think there's so many use cases cases, and some of them, if it's come to upselling, if you think about the costs of a chatbot, for example, and putting this in place, so the costs are obviously, there are some costs, but they're very, very, yeah, it's not as crazy as you might think. But having those kind of use cases in place where you automatically upsell or generate 30-40% more business per sale. So this immediately pays off for, pays for this kind of implementation. Plus it has all sorts of other benefits, not just on the upselling side, but very often these technologies like RPA, the return of investment, the ROI is very, very early achieved. And this certainly applies here as well.

Well, think about the journey as well. So I am placing an order. I am not just getting very good service and guidance throughout the order, I've bagged myself a bargain. But it doesn't have to stop there because the engagement with the chatbot can also be asynchronous. And what, you know, what that means is that once your order is dispatched, the chatbot will actually engage you again and say, 'You know, we're excited to tell you your order is now being dispatched, and it will be delivered to you on this date.' And then once the order is delivered, you know, it will actually tell you that it's been delivered, you know, enjoy your product. So it's not just that kind of initial touchpoint with the customer, and then once the order goes down, the chatbot disappears. It's also just following through that whole journey, just to, I guess, give the customer really, really good experience up until the goods arrive. And again, you know, the chatbot is something that could proactively send out a ping as well to notify you, and you can talk back to it and, you know, request perhaps the delivery date being changed, for example, or it can offer you a set of delivery dates that allows you to choose one that's convenient for you. So again, the use cases for this is so broad and really it's so powerful if you think about it, all of these different types of experiences you can create.

Yeah, this is, this is why we probably not have just this one episode on chatbots. There will be plenty more because, yeah, the interest is really increasing as well for all of our customers. So we get plenty of inquiries in because, yeah, it becomes, becomes the next big thing really, or for many enterprises already, but for most businesses it is currently, yeah, really, really cool, cool stuff to adopt. So yeah, so the next one we have here is a use case supporting your employees, your technical staff, with sort of technical support. And you probably know, so most of the technical problems can be resolved by switching on and off the computer to get it working. Actually, that's still very true. Had a situation last week where I couldn't believe it, but I was just switching it on, off and on actually solved the problem. So that's indeed a very, very good use case for your technical staff if they just know what to do. Sometimes it's very simple, sometimes it's quite complex, but if your technical staff, your technicians out in the field can actually communicate with the chatbot and receive instructions, so then it can be You can resolve problems very, very easy. And sometimes these things can be automated, they can be then passed on to other systems to do stuff automatically. But yeah, you can chat with the bot, sometimes you get instructions, sometimes you can even do the reboot in the backend to solve these problems. And yeah, and then furthermore, yeah, for example, if it's a problem or so and you're talking to a chatbot, maybe that chatbot can do something in your router automatically. Basically, if it has the right way of doing things, the right permissions of doing things. But yeah, so this is really, really good. And then this only leaves what you mentioned earlier. You can free up people again, your staff again, to really concentrate on the really complicated issues. So what the majority can be potentially done by the bot, either helping your technicians or other people, customers solving the technical problems themselves with instructions, or even go deeper into the information. Infrastructure in the backend.

Yeah, I guess, you know, we talk about putting the right automation in front of the particular audience that would engage with it. And, you know, I think a lot of sort of technical support issues, especially tier 1 issues, can actually be resolved by just leading a person and coaching them how to do things. Like you say, you know, turn the computer off turn it on. Of course, you're on your mobile phone and when you chat with the chatbot, so it's really convenient, or the chatbot asks you a few questions. And again, you know, the sort of higher tier, tier 2 and 3 issues, these are the ones that we actually want to route to a human because they perhaps more of the complicated ones which need a—

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