#48 Welcome to 2022. Make Chatbots work for your business

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Process and Automation Podcast. My name is Sascha Kottura, and with me here today is, as usual, Arno van Rooyen, and together we are the Automation Guys. Yeah, every episode we have done so far is somewhat related to our four main areas of intelligent automation. So you know, we have talked about process mining, digital process automation, robotic process automation, and artificial intelligence in general. So yeah, and today we would like to jump back into one of our very popular topics, chatbots. Arno, shall we get to kick off with the first one?

Yeah, sure. So for our listeners out there, Chatbots are these conversational agents that use artificial intelligence to handle many routine queries and issues in your business. You know, and this is, of course, it includes marketing, order management, customer service. So those are usual sort of use cases for chatbots. You know, and with the definition of a chatbot, although it's quite accurate, it only really scratches the surfaces of what's possible, you know, when you bring these chatbots into your organization. And, and really today, like you did in the introduction, Sasha, we, we really want to sort of discuss some of the, I guess, the biggest myths and surprises about chatbots. And the first one is you don't need to code to create the chatbot. Now that sounds very strange, but reality is that Chatbots are actually quite highly complicated entities, and they simulate natural languages like English in a very realistic manner. And what's more, you know, chatbots need to be robust to, you know, accept a wide range of potential user input. You know, so if you chat different things, you might have different ways of conversing with a chatbot. So all of these factors might lead you to believe that you need a sort of a very advanced technical skill set to build a chatbot. The good news is that this is far from the case. You know, these days there's a variety of low-code and no-code chatbot solutions on the market. And, you know, by using these chatbot platforms, you could drastically improve your business agility. And decrease the time to market. And of course, you know, slash your software development costs. You don't need to go out there and hire very expensive full-time technical developers to create the chatbots. You know, the actual creation is a low-code journey, which is incredible. And you can build very, very complex, sophisticated chatbot solutions. So I think that's, that's one of our first top 5 things you, you probably didn't know about chatbots. And so should we move on to the next one then?

Yeah, absolutely. So, so the next one, um, we discussed a couple of times here on the podcast already, uh, a bit wider, um, when we talked about use cases. So yeah, just make sure you, you go back a little bit on, on all our episodes, um, we covered, covered a couple of use cases, um, uh, for chatbots. So, so that might be interesting as well. So yeah, chatbots aren't only for customers. So nowadays it seems when you go on a website, there is a chatbot already in the, in the right bottom corner, just popping up, ready to answer any questions you have and connect you with a human agent if necessary. So, so, so, and this, this seems like it is only there for that use case. So if you have a question about your order or you want to find out about the business, so that kind of stuff's like more FAQ kind of stuff. Yeah, I'm with this impression. It's easy to assume that chatbots are really meant to interact with customers. However, chatbots have a wider variety of use cases and not all of them are really customer-facing. For example, sales and marketing teams can use chatbots to assist with the lead generation efforts. And yeah, for example, as soon as the sales rep identifies a new prospect or have a new conversation with a customer, So you, you can have a conversation with the chatbot to input these details. So you internally, you have a conversation with that chatbot, not, not any, anyone externally. So this information is then immediately saved by integration into a CRM or any other kind of software you have in your backend.

Yes.

And other internal chatbot use cases might be human resources, operations. Management and use cases for the finance department.

Yes. So the third one that I want to touch on today is, believe it or not, but we're seeing that customers increasingly prefer chatbots and prefer to interact with chatbots. Now, you know, there are plenty of internal use cases for chatbots, like you rightly said, in HR, You know, chatbots itself are very highly successful at customer-facing roles. And, you know, there are a variety of factors that plays into, you know, customers' increasing acceptance of chatbots. So, for instance, unlike human support agents, chatbots can be available 24/7, 365 days a year to resolve routine customer service issues. Chatbots are, for instance, available to start helping customers immediately rather than making them wait in very long queues to speak to a human agent. And, you know, we're seeing, you know, by deploying these chatbots to work on easily solvable issues, human agents can then spend more time with, you know, customers who's got more complicated problems, for example. And of course, the factors above assume that, you know, chatbots are well implemented, you know, and effective at their job. So that's why it's very important to choose, you know, the right chatbot technology and also the right chatbot implementation partner.

Yeah, so if you have a question, reach out to myself and Arno and we can really give you a deep dive on, on chatbots, additionally to the content we already provide here in the podcast. Yeah, the next one we have: chatbots can be used for purchases. We have mainly focused on support use cases, customer-facing chatbots, that kind of stuff. But customers are growing increasingly comfortable with using chatbots to actually make purchases, complete signups, registrations, subscriptions, all that kind of stuff. Yeah. So according to a survey, more than 20% of consumers here in the UK would consider making a purchase through a chatbot. And yeah, what's more, that this demographic would be willing to spend an average of £315 on their chatbot-enabled purchase. So that's, yeah, so all sorts of purchases. You can, can visit their normal, normal websites, clothing or insurances, even if it's sort of what, maybe the travel insurance or so. It's likely that these figures, yeah, have only increased in the years since then. Yeah, as customers, yeah, are getting really more and more comfortable with chatbots, and we are generally as a generation, I think we are so comfortable with chatting, isn't it? WhatsApp, Telegram, everywhere is chat, Teams, Microsoft Teams, Slack. So everything is going towards that. And so this is no surprise then that we actually getting more and more comfortable doing these purchases as well.

Yeah, and I think it is driving the adoption of chatbots. It's easier to engage with a chatbot. Chatbots are very sophisticated because they've got really good artificial intelligence and natural language processing engines behind them. So people are a lot more confident and feel a lot more comfortable actually using chatbot to do these purchases. And, you know, once a purchase is really easy and it's seamless and it's good service that sort of underpins it, you know, it is interesting that you that you mentioned the stat that on average people will be willing to spend about £315, so that's almost $400 in a single transaction. So if you make that easier, then of course you can actually increase the sales that comes through this channel. So that kind of brings us to our fifth point, that chatbots are on the rise and, you know, the adoption of chatbots is soaring, you know, as more and more businesses come to realize their benefits. And, you know, and I'm just going to sort of share with our listeners a sort of a few facts and figures that sort of backs this up. So in the last year, 67% of consumers worldwide have interacted with a chatbot for customer support. That's an incredible stat. And again, you know, customer service is not the only use case for it, but the fact that such a large percentage of a demographic actually use the chatbot really tells us that, you know, the adoption and people's, you know, sort of usage of these chatbots are sort of increasing, and, you know, people are feeling confident using these chatbots. There's another stat where, by Gartner, which is of course the IT research and advisory firm, that by next year, 70% of white-collar workers will interact with conversational platforms on a daily basis. So this is where the chatbot is actually internal-facing, you know, and again, 70% of, of a workforce, that, that's quite incredible. And when you look at the global chatbot market, um, in 2015, it was only worth about $100 million. And, you know, by the end of 2024, they reckon it's, it's gonna be worth round about a, a billion dollars. So, so, so there's clearly evidence that the adoption is on the rise. And I guess, you know, it's Getting started with chatbots is quite easy. It plugs quite easily into your existing IT infrastructure. Of course, you have to build the bot in a way that it, you know, does the job correctly. And so there are certain, you know, sequences that you need to build. But with the tools available out there, it's all graphical. It's all, you know, very, very easy to assemble the chatbot, to create the sort of rules and to train it to, you know, to do these sort of functions that, you know, you could push out to the different channels.

Yeah, absolutely. So it's very easy to get started. And we just covered sort of on high level what chatbots can do, what you probably didn't know about before. And we have a list of hundreds of use cases we can share with you. So yeah, just get in touch with Arno and myself and we can share that directly with you in an individual session. Or so, yeah, just reach out via social channels. And yeah, and hopefully so this short introduction or overview on chatbots was useful and we would obviously welcome your feedback and, and new ideas for maybe other episodes around chatbots or intelligent automation. On our website, theautomationguys.net, you will find lots of resources and access to all the other episodes of our podcast. That's chatbots and that's the end of our podcast today. And yeah, if you have any questions, reach out. And until then, 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.