#21 Top 5 Industry Chatbot Use Cases

Hallo und willkommen back to another episode of the Process and Automation Podcast with the Automation Guys. Today we will look at 5 of the most valuable chatbot use cases and we will look very specifically in a couple of industries.

Industries.

So yeah, with me here again is Arno, as usual. And Arno, do you, do you, do you like to go a little bit into the term of chatbots? What is a chatbot in general for our listeners as an explanation?

Yeah, sure. Thanks, Sascha. So the term chatbot really describes any intelligent software which has got an agent base, like a virtual agent that can communicate with users in a human-like fashion. So they handle queries in English or any other language for that matter, and, you know, they, they also respond intelligently. So, you know, there's a, there's a lot of chatbot technologies out there like Druitt and, you know, obviously Microsoft Virtual Assistant, and, you know, they've earned a lot of widespread attention you know, for their ability to be very realistic in conversations with human users. So, you know, chatbots can be more than just like a fun thing, you know, like a DevBot. They can really radically improve your organization's productivity and efficiency. And, you know, according to IBM, Chatbots can answer up to 80% of routine queries by themselves without needing the help, you know, from a, from a human agent. So that, and that's one of the, the reasons why there's a firm called Research and Markets. They looked at the, the global market for chatbots and it's more than tripled, you know, from $1.9 billion in, I think it was 2019, to just sort of short of $7 billion in 2024. Wow. So it's a major shift and there's lots of investment going into it. Of course, you know, these chatbots are easily configured, so it's easy to get started. Because it's all low-code-based configuration.

Yeah, I think because of that benefit, I think you just mentioned there 80% of routine queries could be covered by chatbots in organizations. So this is why we want to go over the benefits of using chatbots. As I mentioned earlier, so we have 5 of the big sectors identified and yeah, then let's get started with the actual benefits of chatbots. So, yeah, so although the other sort of the precise impact of chatbots might vary depending on the industry, so you probably can imagine, so for healthcare company or financial services company, these benefits are different. So, but pretty much every organization can really benefit from bringing in chatbots into the end-to-end processes. So, and some of these advantages So these are the very attractive ones for businesses are lowering the costs. I think that's a key one, especially now with— so we need to get more done with less. I think that's sort of what we have seen over the last 12 months. So by offloading these routine queries into or to chatbots instead of they are done by our human employees, by the agents. So business can really lower their customer services expenses. So really as much as 30% of the customer services tasks individually, and that can, if that's automated, they can, I think when we look at the US, I think one research came up with this, it can bring up a saving of $23 billion US dollars. So just alone in this country. And Yeah, I think the benefits are clear. So then, yeah, better customer service. I think this is probably where businesses should look first, because if you serve your customers better, then they will be loyal and yeah, they will stick with the business. So it's very often sort of the one of the most important reasons why you should look at it. Surely the lowering cost benefit is good, but the customer service ultimately is the reason why you should start with chatbots. So they can take over the simple queries immediately. And we are without really passing that on to a human. And it's available 24/7 if you're thinking about insurance claims and all that stuff. So you can immediately get stuff started. You don't have to wait until customer service is back on the phone. And yeah, and you can as well, yeah, have good conversations there to improve that overall experience. It's not just a glorified form or so. You have proper meaningful conversations there which lead to an outcome. And yeah, so that's one to really focus on and where we see the big benefits. And yeah, when we then look into these 5 use cases for these different industries, Arno, the first one we have picked is local government.

Yeah, so for, you know, local government is a very important use case, and that's why we, we highlight this. And, you know, there's a significant benefit that the local government entities will gain when, when they adopt chat, you know, chatbots into their workflow processes. So obviously with governments, you know, they've got hundreds of, of services that they offer to citizens. And, you know, they need a very sustainable and, you know, a programmatic way that's repeatable to meet these requirements for their constituencies. So I think, you know, the good news here is that lots of local governments that we see, you know, already plan to get on board with with chatbots and joining this chatbot revolution. In fact, I think there was another survey in 2020 where they looked at 33 councils within the UK, and, you know, 90% of those councils said they expect to have a chatbot strategy within the next 12 to 18 months, you know, which is great. And, you know, when you look into the details These councils estimate that they'll save around £180,000 or more, you know, over the next 12 months with this chatbot strategy. So very important, and this kind of touches on your point of lower costs. If we look at the softer benefits, again, you know, by looking at customer service, you know, there's another case study that North Hindsight did. And this local council used chatbots and RPA, which is robotic process automation, to improve the residents' access to revenues and benefit services. And, you know, after they implemented this program, the council saw a significant time reduction when they processed these new benefit claims. And, you know, this reduced from 36 days to just north of 20 days. And, you know, in the meantime, the customer satisfaction rate jumped up to around 85%. So, yeah, it's a cost reduction in a way, but it's also a massive increase in satisfaction and end-user satisfaction. And I think that, that, that's a very key benefit of this, right?

Yeah. And I think we, yeah, we discussed this recently, uh, again with some— so with the Loughborough University And yeah, they really come up with this chatbot concept as well for local government. And so young people, when they want to interact with local governments, so they really struggle with all this very rigid, formal kind of structure, these local government websites. Some of you probably have visited as well yourself. They are not very intuitive in general. So they're not— all these websites, they're not really, really usable. So if you then plug in a chatbot there, young people and everyone, not just young people, but they obviously, they would like those kind of things and jump on that kind of stuff very early. They can start engaging with the local council, with the local government, and get the information they need. Currently, they're struggling to get this information, and that is an issue. Then unemployment rises and all that stuff because they haven't been able to interact with the local government for asking for help in a meaningful way. So chatbots can actually do that. That's fantastic. And I'm very happy that they all sort of acknowledge the requirement for it, or 90% is huge.

I think when we talk about local government, I think it's not necessarily just restricted to actual government entities themselves. I think, you know, you look at universities, student well-being, you know, the way students communicate with each other or want to communicate with the university, you know, that's another good example of this as well. So I think that, you know, once governments sees the potential here not just cost savings but also customer satisfaction, then I think this will see widespread adoption, not just in the next year or so, but I think if you look into the future, 2023, 2024, I'll be surprised if councils don't have this this type of service to cater for that specific demographic of citizens that is used to, you know, using chatbot style or chat style peer-to-peer communication to do their business, right?

Absolutely.

So next one we can— obviously it's a nice little segue into the local government is healthcare. You know, and obviously with the pandemic out there, you know, the doctors and nurses are really kind of going beyond the call of duty and, you know, are quite overworked. And it is, you know, taking a toll on the quality of patient care. So, you know, again, if we bring chatbots into this equation, it can really help to shoulder this workload. Now again, you know, chatbots can't replace the expertise of a doctor, for example, but they can actually help with many common tasks that you don't necessarily want to give, you know, to, for a doctor to do. So for example, you know, providing more detailed information about a medical topic when a person is browsing a website, you know, it's just kind of FAQ style. Or offer common diagnosis based on the description of a patient's symptoms, for example, or, you know, helping a user improve their eating habits by offering recommendations about diet, nutrition, calorie intake, you know, exercise, and also, you know, sending reminders to patients to take their medication or to attend coming appointments. So this is all the art of the possible, which is not necessarily something that a human has to do. Chatbots are obviously very efficient in doing so, and, you know, it is that perfect use case for it. And again, if I can bring another study, you know, into this, I don't know who this study was conducted by, But it was done last year and, you know, they found that the user's view of these healthcare chatbots is as positive or even more positive than dealing with human agents. And, you know, providing they can actually provide that same quality of care. And, you know, it also suggested that the total sort of global cost savings from using chatbots in in the healthcare industry will reach about $3.6 billion in 2022. And that's a 10,000-fold increase from the figures in 2017, which was about $2.8 million. So in the space of 5 years, it has just absolutely exploded within telehealth. Yeah, and rightly so, you know, with these, those 4 examples I've used, you know, appointment notifications or appointment booking, kind of common health tips, FAQs, you know, providing more detailed information, common diagnosis. Those are all things that you can train a chatbot to do on your behalf 24/7.

Yeah, um, a chatbot for appointments is actually, uh, it's actually a big one for NHS. And when you, when you look at it, um, so there are lots of appointments scheduled and it goes back and forth. That usually once you have an appointment, um, and very often there's no-show and that kind of stuff because of the information is missing or, um, the mechanism to actually interact with them early enough to say, oh, I can't make it, that kind of stuff. And that, that obviously leaves too much, um, oh, basically capacity is gone, isn't it? So because tomorrow is another day with another set of capacity and, um, and patients are waiting, um, so it would be really good to make it much easier. So the appointment, um, yeah, setting is here and to make them much, much more streamlined. Yeah, yeah, I think, uh, yeah, the next one, uh, really big one is financial services. Um, so you're one of the in sort of mission-critical industries globally. So chatbots can help their territories again reduce the, yeah, sort of the human involvement and the strain on the human agents. So very typical, probably you're all appear seeing these chatbots appearing on banking websites. So yeah, it provides Customer support was really simple tasks. Some of that stuff you can do already very comfortably through your app. But yeah, now you can do that stuff via the chatbot as well. You can say, okay, lost my credit card, I need my account balance. And even with banks, you can do lots of insurance products as well. So you can use that customer service bot to purchase an insurance policy or to get your travel insurance in place for your summer holiday, that kind of stuff. Yeah, chatbots will also help with your financial, basic financial advice. So they will put, sort of direct you in the right places on the website to maybe read up on further information or asking you questions about investments and advising very basic because the proper advice has to come from a human, but they can do a lot of the legwork already. Chatbots, we notice there are fraudulent transactions, that kind of stuff. We get text messages and then we reply back. So chatbots can be used there as well very nicely to send questions back to the customer and to confirm suspicious transaction, that kind of stuff. Yeah, and also reminders, general notifications, which makes your life then easier as a customer of this financial services organization. Yeah, so with studies, we like studies. Yeah, these studies have shown $7.3 billion can be saved globally if that can be replaced or supported by chatbots, these kind of areas. So if you bring it down into man-hours, I think it's a bit more tangible, 862 million man-hours can be passed on sort of to chatbots to support the organization. So yeah, that's a massive increase, a growth of 3,400% from 2019. So we see, yeah, big numbers, very big numbers, really, really big numbers, very appealing.

Yeah, and I think that's, that's, that's why it's, it's, it's good to bring these studies into today's chat, really, because the numbers are just mind-blowing. And I think the adoption, you know, it's not tenfold or hundredfold, you know, it's thousands fold, you know, over a sort of a half a decade. And, you know, and I think it will, you know, just increase over the next next couple of years. But, you know, it's— if you look at financial services, it's the way I would like to transact with my financial service providers. You know, I don't want to speak on the phone to somebody because I'm quite busy. I know these chatbots are sophisticated, so they can deal with my queries very quickly. I don't want to fill out a form and wait for an email to come back because it's, it's all disjointed, disconnected, because I have to wait to come back to the response. You know, all of this is, it's all instant. And I think that's, that's, that's where the benefits comes into play, right? Because it's instant and providing your chatbot can resolve your query, you also get an outcome in that session. And I think, you know, when, when looking at these chatbots, that's what you want to achieve because that is what brings that customer satisfaction into the picture. It's one thread, it's like chatting to a friend, you know, you hash it out whether or not you're booking a, you know, now that the social calendars are filling up again, you're firming up a sort of a meetup date, you know, how frustrating it is if somebody tells, well, I have to consult my diary and I'll get back to you in 2 days. Now you kind of just want to just drive it now and get it booked, right? I think that's just how we are. And this is a great vehicle for us to exploit, you know, now and also in the future to get to that point. And, you know, talking about the social calendar filling out, you know, the fourth one on our list is hospitality. Of course, you know, the hospitality industry revolves around providing excellent customer service. Because if you have excellent customer service, you know, there's many advantages for hotels and restaurants to take it, you know, to exploit that really. And again, there's loads of potential use cases for chatbots in hospitality, and some of these include answering basic queries, about opening hours, amenities, menus, and, you know, helping address simple guest queries and issues, making reservation— reservation— reservations, um, or appointments, offering personalized recommendations, and obviously promotions based on a guest's behavior and also their preferences. Obviously streamlining the checking and checking out process by sending reminders and, you know, presenting guests with the final bill. So, you know, after your trip, requesting your feedback, you know, how was your trip? So again, all of these automations are what I would say that the right kind of use cases for that industry. And, you know, again, I'm going to bring another study in here, and this was done by HospitalityNet, and they said that by improving, you know, efficiency of customer services, hotels have seen up to 30% increase in direct bookings from the usage of chatbots, which is incredible.

Yeah, it's very important right now, isn't it, where the hospitality industry is quite quite restricted, so they need all the help they can get to actually to do more business or make sure they get the right business going forward. Yeah, indeed. So our fifth section, sector, industry is manufacturing and logistics. So yeah, while their most obvious uses for improving customer service, like we had with all the other use cases. Chatbots can also be implemented internally, I think, for these companies for the benefit of managers and employees. So we discussed this in another podcast episode about internal use cases in depth. But yeah, one important chatbot use case is the manufacturing industry. Where Chatbots can be used in different ways. One could be letting managers easily check the status of different parts and supplies. So very, very important in manufacturing and order new ones if necessary without going through complicated web applications and all that stuff. This is what they usually have, some very old version of of an ERP or Excel spreadsheets they have to fill out and upload somewhere. So this could make it much easier getting information about the current inventory and pending deliveries. So yeah, it's very good for managers to get that overview. And checking environmental conditions on the manufacturing line to ensure that the equipment is, yeah, it's operating normally and at maximum efficiency. And I think, yeah, I think really offering real-time updates on the manufacturing process so the sales departments and sales professionals and customers can better predict when new products will become available. I think these are very, yeah, very specific use cases. Not everyone is familiar with, but in manufacturing logistics internally, that's very important. And obviously in manufacturing logistics, we have the typical customer experience, customer services elements like, where is my parcel? My parcel didn't arrive. So all that kind of stuff, what you have to type in very often these days into forms when you contact DHL or others, and it's much easier for customers to use chatbots to get to that information.

Yeah, and I think in manufacturing as well, you know, just to have that early warning system where a chatbot can also practically ping you if there is a problem. Or you can just do before you, your shift start, do a quick health check and it just kind of sends you a bit of a summary of what's going on. So these are small, small little use cases, but it's just having that extra assistant ever-present that you just have that extra insight into your operations, whether or not it is manufacturing logistics, because you might wait for a very critical shipment of parts in the manufacturing process that you want to— that you require. you know, and you don't necessarily want to log on to a website to get to that, even though it is convenient and there's a lot of mobile interfaces. You just want to, you just want to ask this, this virtual assistant, where is this particular shipment? And it gets to the point and it tells you where it is and what the estimated delivery time is. Bang, outcome achieved, right? Absolutely.

Yeah, so that's, um, Yeah, I think, um, yeah, that's it for stuff with the 5 industries, industry use cases we collected. As always, this is just a really short snapshot of what is possible, and we will do a couple of more episodes on chatbots because it's such a hot topic and we get asked a lot of questions. So yeah, thank you for submitting these questions in general. So Much appreciated. So in sort of in summary of this session, from local governments and healthcare to financial services, hospitality, and manufacturing, we just mentioned that chatbots are really transforming how we do things these days. So yeah, looking to bring the benefits of chatbots into your organization, that's the question you can ask us, Arno and myself, online. And all the things we can help you with. And yeah, we're looking forward to next time. And yeah, let's automate it. Unfortunately, that's it again with this episode of the Process in Automation Podcast. If you like this episode, please give us a 5-star rating and don't forget to subscribe to this podcast so you don't miss any upcoming episode. We hope you will tune in next time, and until then, let's automate it!