Chatbots for Business: A Tool To Improve Processes

The pandemic and digitalization have changed many areas of society. Among them, is customer service. The physical separations imposed during the worst moments of confinement and the development of new technologies have popularized remote services.

Tools such as chatbots, which are already applied in many sectors such as education, can offer companies a service similar to what they had provided in a more ‘analog’ period. And the situation will get worse over the years: according to market researcher Brandessence Market Research, the global conversational AI market will be worth $32.3 billion (over €30.7 billion) by 2028, when by 2021 it was expected to be worth $8240 million (over €7850 million).

What are Chatbots?

A bot or chatbot is a conversational software for companies and customers to interact with each other. Thanks to Artificial Intelligence, users ‘chat’ with it to perform actions or get some information.

In the case of companies, these bots are deployed on a corporate website, on a social network profile, or in messaging applications.

Benefits of Chatbots for Businesses

Among the benefits of chatbots for companies are:

• Attending the customer 24 hours a day and seven hours a week in replacement of a call center, as well as providing service in several languages instantly.
• Instant response, which results in greater customer satisfaction.
• Thus, improving brand image by providing a rapid response throughout the year.
• Naturally capture leads (as customer data), which can then be converted into new sales.
• Adapt in the future to new business needs or to the level of demand desired by each company: more in-depth responses, more generic ones…
• Optimize the human team. The members of the call center can dedicate themselves to other tasks and only answer more specific or complicated questions that the chatbot cannot reach.

How To Use Chatbots for Business

There are several functions that a chatbot can perform on a company’s website, social networks or messaging applications:

• Answer the most common frequently asked questions, as if it were a FAQ section, but with more dynamism.
• Start conversations before the user takes any action.
• Guide as an instruction manual through a purchase process or to resolve doubts.
• Make online reservations or sales.

The versatility of chatbots reaches many industrial sectors, which can adapt this technology to their particularities.

Real Estate

Un chatbot puede ayudar a un cliente a filtrar los diferentes tipos de casas o precios de su interés en tan solo un instante.

Beauty & Fashion

The chatbot can ‘decide’ which cream, lotion, or make-up best suits the customer’s needs when they mention their skin type, allergies, or other information. Also, give them a choice of clothing items so they can choose the ones they like the most and from there learn their preferences.

Hospitality

Chains such as Domino’s Pizza have chatbots that allow you to select the size of a pizza or the topping to go with the dough with a few clicks. Restaurants can replace phone orders with these tools to speed up order taking. No more waiting on the phone or needing to register on a website.

Call Centers

We already mentioned it among the benefits of chatbots for companies. Virtual assistants can solve the simpler questions that are traditionally answered by the members of a switchboard, and leave the more complex ones to them.

Information

The weather forecast in a town, the stock market evolution of a company or the traffic situation on a road are some of the requests to which a bot can respond faster on websites of the media and official organizations.

Chatbots at Plain Concepts

Chatbots are one of the solutions we develop at Plain Concepts, for clients in many different sectors:

• For the main website of a retail company, with a potential audience of 200,00 users, we created a customer service chatbot.
• For the human resources environment, we designed a conversational bot that analyzes users’ resumes to help them find a job.
• To help understand a company’s documents, we produced a chatbot that analyzed the protocols and workflows that appeared in those documents. This chatbot could serve up to 10,000 users.

How We Create Chatbots

For the creation of chatbots, we follow the following process with the client:

1. Problem definition. We agree on the chatbot’s objective, its level of depth, and how much natural language it processes. This is the moment to know the databases with which to train it and how to integrate it with the client’s platforms.
2. Design of the conversation flow. Capacity for natural conversation, to react to interruptions, or to change the subject. By means of a flowchart, we organize the conversation (greetings, dialogues…) and how the chatbot and the users relate to each other. Also, it is the moment to evaluate if we connect it with external services to improve the chat.
3. Development of the dialogs with the prediction of the user’s intentions.
4. Definition of the chatbot knowledge sources. Databases, FAQs, documents, previous questions, search intentions, etc.
5. Deployment of the chatbot. This is the moment to link the chatbot with communication apps (Microsoft Teams, Skype, Telegram…). Code changes are made automatically from Azure.
6. Bot training.
7. Testing. We log bugs and classify and correct them. Also, to check if there are new questions from users, of which we notify customers to add them to the bot if they wish.

Modern Workplace and Chatbots Creation

At Plain Concepts, we are specialists in creating these chatbots thanks to our Modern Workplace approach. We provide training in low-code tools with which companies can create this software in a simple way, but we also help them to produce them.

We also create them using Microsoft 365 tools, which we deploy in companies that ask us to do so. With Power Apps, it is easy to design and manage this conversational software.

Do you want to know all the possibilities of chatbots?

From the creation to the training in the tools to design them, at Plain Concepts, we help companies in the implementation of these important conversational assistants for a new era. Write to us and we will provide you with all the information you need.