Chatbots are the first-hand choice for everyone to satiate their queries and resolve a problem.

For every query you may have about a service or product, you aim to get an answer without much effort—and indeed, virtually, using a chatbot that fetches you the correct responses and satisfies your quest.

Imagine a scenario where you have a new EMI coming in a few days. A payment reminder message has an amount that is a mismatch of what you owe to the company.

Now, this has you looking for a way across social media, websites, emails, or apps to connect with a chatbot and get clarity.

Not just you but everyone finds a chatbot fast to deliver real-time responses.

Chatbots can help transfer a call to live agents for more critical or specific questions.

Understanding that chatbots can bridge a gap between a user and a company, businesses of all sizes want to take advantage of this computer program, help their users connect anytime and anywhere, and get answers to their queries.

Here’s a guide on how chatbots and their significance for your business.

A chatbot is a computer program designed to simulate conversations with human users. This means chatbots can allow humans to interact with digital devices to give answers to a single-line response or even complex answers.

Chatbots help customers or users in any business with their problems and get solutions instantly.

Usually, these digital devices can use rudimentary patterns to answer simple questions.

However, a chatbot can also learn over time by observing conversation flows and evolve to deliver the right messages using natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) techniques and even more sophisticated AI technology, Generative AI, or large language models.

Chatbots can be designed to handle a wide range of tasks, such as customer support, and are lead-generation tools on e-commerce platforms. Now, they can be an assistant to help write, code, and create new content.

With a wide variety of use cases, chatbots can easily used in messaging platforms, emails, websites, and mobile applications.

Chatbots have been around for years.

The first chatbot came in 1966. Eliza was a chatbot based on pre-written keyword-based dialog.

In 1988, a conversational AI chatbot called Jabberwacky appeared, designed to respond by understanding context and learning to create a new response.

ALICE was built using NLP and Artificial Intelligence supported by knowledge bases in 1995.

Modern-day chatbots that arrived in 2014, such as Siri, Echo, and Microsoft Cortana, are being used to improve search responses.

ChatGPT is built with Generative AI or large language models and has arrived at the end of 2022 to take everyone by storm with its competencies to create new content from scratch.

Chatbots often look similar as they solve one singular purpose— answering questions. But under the hood, it is a different game. They greatly vary by their capabilities. Let’s know how many types of chatbots are there.

Chatbots

It is a prevalent term for everyone who takes it as a technology device that simulates human language and provides answers.

A fundamental chatbot is built on a know-if condition tree or keyword-based predefined FAQs powered by knowledge bases to understand user queries and fetch answers.

These chatbots are often quite rudimentary and repetitive. They can’t learn from the interactions and only give canned responses.

AI Chatbots

These bots leverage more powerful AI technologies, such as ML, deep learning, or Generative AI, to follow the fundamental chatbot programs to answer.

Conversely, deep learning or Generative AI technologies help it interpret human languages faster and detect the right match based on input intent.

Let’s see how they differ in action.

If you ask a chatbot, tell me what tomorrow’s weather will be like. It will answer, it will rain.

With the AI chatbot, if you alter your question, ‘How will the day be tomorrow?’. The question is slightly different. But, it still interprets it and answers, it will rain.

The business supports its customers or users 24x7 with chatbots.

It aims to retain customers by providing instant help and solving their queries. So, it is evident that businesses rely on chatbots to strengthen customer relationships by aligning with their ever-evolving demands.

• Customers are impatient to wait for a response. Chatbots provide answers instantly and help them know what can be helpful to clear their doubts and resolve any issue.

• If a specific scenario calls for human intervention when a chatbot turns out to be rudimentary, it leads a user to a live agent for more clarification on a complicated matter and retains him for a longer time.

• Chatbots help businesses win customers’ trust by ensuring that they are always by their side when they need help in a crucial time. By reducing customers’ pain in real-time, businesses can improve advocacy, including Net Promoter Score (NPS), which brings more users to their portfolio.

• Chatbots can be a lead-generation tool for businesses to promote other product offerings and drive prospects for future avenues.

Chatbots can make an efficient tool for a wide array of business functions for companies and drive user satisfaction.

Oracle, for instance, uses Generative AI for its chatbot to improve user interaction by separating its chat use case by product and sales inquiries. Users can select their preferred category and continue talking to seek help for their queries.

GoTo, a software company that provides remote IT support and remote productivity tools, uses a straightforward FAQ-based chat support named GoTo Virtual Agent. If users have product-related queries, they can be redirected to a support site with all the necessary resources to help address their problems.

Internet payment service provider Stripe uses a simple strategy to simplify user searches for payment-related queries and help find answers to the enormous list of questionnaires.

Grocery giant Instacart uses a Generative AI-powered model from ChatGPT and its own AI model to personalize the shopping experience for shoppers. Several online delivery services make similar attempts, including food delivery partners like DoorDash.

There are many that you can think of. Businesses can provide support for health queries through their chatbots. GenZ can also find help for financial bits of advice from a chatbot.

On top of that, chatbots are essentially a significant tool for businesses to use as an analytics tool that provides insights into how customer sentiments and helps design services to improve customer satisfaction scores and experience.

Use Cases of Chatbots for Enterprise Operations

Businesses use chatbots for various use cases in an enterprise setting. Be it for internal or external processes, chatbots can automate end-to-end processes using machine learning or deep learning technologies.

Customer experience management

Knowing that a moment of delay in customer response can make or break your business, every business leader wants to provide a seamless experience to their customers by being available 24/7.

Even a small business wants to take advantage of a chatbot's automation and keep their customers engaged.

A chatbot is effective for online businesses to assist customers with various issues, such as shipping delays, returns, refunds, etc.

Chatbots can instantly fetch customers' shopping details and give accurate information about when they can expect their deliveries, or get refunds for returns.

With an AI-powered virtual assistant, customers can get more from a chatbot without human assistance. A chatbot works more as a self-service platform for them. Customers can directly place orders within a chatbot and make payments without leaving their apps.

More so, if a customer wants to cancel an order, a chatbot can quickly help.

However, it is a regular hassle for businesses when their bots can’t handle complicated user queries and cause user disengagement. In such a scenario, LLM or Generative AI-powered chatbots come in handy. They improve intent and context detection and provide better interpretation for customer queries.

This advancement augments comprehension of complex NLP queries, so conversational AI chatbots can instantly understand it and perform the request if an ongoing conversation involves a sudden context switching.

If a scenario demands a business to connect a user with an agent immediately, chatbots can be designed to support it in real time.

Employee Experience Management

A company’s biggest asset is its employees. At a time when businesses are struggling with an evolving landscape across work culture, they need to pay heed to employee experience management.

AI-powered chatbots are real problem solvers here. Whether day or night or anywhere in the world, companies can be on their toes to help their remote or hybrid employees.

For instance, if a remote employee wants to configure the VPN protocols for his system, he does not need to wait for an agent to assist him. An AI-powered virtual agent can guide and set him up to finish the configuration successfully in minutes.

In another scenario, if an employee needs access to new tools for increased productivity, he does not wait for a manager’s approval for days or weeks.

A chatbot designed to assist through a self-service platform can easily suggest various tools and give access to them through user provision automation.

Another fantastic instance of employee experience management is HR process automation through chatbots. Various HR requests can look overwhelming for employees. If a company can’t answer in real time, it can damage the employee experience.

For instance, tax matters can vary based on state rules. So, if employees want to know their tax liabilities, an HR department must provide the answers instantly. But, immense mundane administrative processes bog them down, and they cannot return to their employees on time.

Chatbot can effectively address this issue and improve coordination and communications between HR teams and employees, enhancing employee experience and engagement.

Agent Experience Management

Chatbots can be excellent co-workers for businesses to aid their customer support or employee support agents.

It is usual for agents to handle mundane work processes. This makes agents fatigued and make errors in even small and simple tasks. As a result, each ticket can take a long to resolve, adding to ticket handling costs.

It isn’t wrong to address an AI-powered or LLM-powered chatbot as an AI copilot for agents, which makes coordination and addressing user problems easier.

In the very first place, a chatbot can detect a user’s problems and their urge to connect with a human agent.

In another way, a chatbot that ingests Generative AI can suggest correct responses to share with users and reduce the response time.

It helps with MTTR reduction while providing deep insights to improve what’s not working for employee experience management.

Chatbots are essential for any business to improve its overall business functions and drive growth.

In the age of Generative AI, leveraging chatbot technologies and providing the flexibility your customers or employees seek is necessary.

There are specific necessary considerations for successfully implementing a chatbot in your organization.

• Understand your business objectives

Why do you need a chatbot? What purpose do you want to solve? Try to find answers to these questions. You can prefer a bot if you'll give your customers flexibility in connecting with your support team. Or, if you want to improve an internal process, a bot can be helpful. Identify your target audience

• Create a business use case

Identify what your customers may seek from your chatbot. You can also consider employee experience here. For example, if you want your chatbot to solve fundamental queries regarding your products, you can opt for a FAQ-based bot. On the other hand, if you wish your HR processes to be seamless, you can take many scenarios, such as onboarding, documentation, etc., to be automated through a chatbot. Design your case based on the pressing needs.

• Create a chatbot conversation experience

A conversation flow must align with what your users may ask your bot. Anticipate these scenarios and build your conversation to provide real-time assistance and problem-solving.

• Build your chatbot

You can build in-house if you have technical expertise and budget. With that, you must integrate your knowledge bases and integrate with a convenient channel for your employees or users to adopt.

• Test your bot

It is not unusual to have your bot working the other way. A bug can impact the bot experience for your users. Before you launch it in the live environment, test it. Check if it responds to user inputs and fetches the correct responses.

If everything works fine, launch your bot.

• Monitor bot performance

Keep an eye on how your chatbot performs. If you overlook the area for improvement, your bot can lie unused. Periodic monitoring can help you find inconsistencies in the chatbot and improve them for the ultimate user experience. Updating knowledge bases and allowing your bot to perform well is vital.

Chatbots are a critical digital transformation technology to help a business grow. But, SMBs or small-scale businesses often lack the budget to leverage the chatbot benefits.

Workativ makes it easy for everyone looking to embark on digital transformation through chatbot automation.

The benefit of a no-code platform is that it lets you build fast, irrespective of what you want to build—a mobile app or a chatbot.

With our no-code platform, you can start in weeks and not years. It also means fewer efforts on the development side and cost efficiency, yet a high-performing chatbot that aligns with your business objectives.

Workativ brings you that flexibility with its chatbot builder platform that harnesses large language models or Generative AI to give you a seamless experience, just as ChatGPT provides through its content generation capabilities.

As you build with Workativ, your bot will be exposed to Knowledge AI, which leverages a large language model and improves search performance for any employee query. It can also help with instant agent handover and boost agent efficiency.

Chatbots are a powerful digital device that aids in multiple use cases across various business functions. If your business needs to grow, a chatbot can help in many ways. To learn more about implementing an AI-powered chatbot fast, get in touch with Workativ for a demo.