As the pandemic continues, making a large segment of the Indian workforce operate remotely, the reliance on technology for all sectors is at its zenith. In a nation like India where 66% of the GDP is constituted by the Service sector, the COVID-19 crisis has hugely impacted the economy. Most thriving industries in India (which are said to be IT/ITES, Healthcare, e-commerce, Insurance, Travel, Logistics) have all suffered due to the imposed lockdown and the consequent days of remote working.
With the pandemic prepared to be dragged on for some time in the future, the understaffed or remote staffed organizations are struggling to deliver customer service and support operations like the post-pandemic era. Customers are struggling to receive adequate support and required information on time. Today, most organizations face a huge backlog of support requests leading to a delayed response to customer queries, stacks of unanswered calls and emails. This is where AI-powered intelligent chatbots can come to the rescue. There has been a lot of buzz around these software applications aided by voice or messaging which can simplify communication between organizations and their customers or internal staff.
How does an Intelligent Chatbot help?
While chatbots are not a recent technology breakthrough, the market for chatbots has certainly skyrocketed due to the COVID-19 crisis. Soon after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic IBM recorded a 40% spike in traffic to its conversational AI platform Watson Assistant. Similarly, in April 2020 Google launched its Rapid Response Virtual Agent, a version of Contact Center AI, in response to the COVID-19 situation. A series of other organizations also started implementing Coronavirus-specific chatbots for answering questions coming in from their concerned customers and employees. There has been a phenomenal rise in the adoption of chatbots and a recent MarketsandMarkets study predicts that the worldwide Conversational AI market size is expected to rise from USD 4.8 billion in 2020 to USD 13.9 billion by 2025.
Once adopted, intelligent chatbots can enable Indian organizations across all industries take their customer or employee experience to the next level. A chatbot can promptly address the basic customer support requests while re-routing more complicated queries to a human executive. It serves a buffet service for employees leveraging which they can obtain answers to their questions easily and drive value at the workplace. Standing in the present times, intelligent chatbots have become quintessential for an organization’s digital journey and in delivering next-generation intelligent customer or employee service.
How Intelligent Chatbots are Driving Enterprise Value?
1: Amplifies Customer Satisfaction
One of the important benefits of chatbot implementation is towards customer support. According to Opus Research, 35% of customers want to see more companies using chatbots. Additionally, recent Cognizant research found that 69% of customers prefer chatbots for receiving instant responses, and the same percent said they’re most likely to use chatbots for service-related inquiries. Chatbots are improving customer support operations by delivering the customers with 24-hour service and quick responses to support questions. Most customers today don’t have time for chit-chat, they just want quick problem resolution. And the chatbot delivers exactly that. Insights from the MIT Technology Review study suggest that 80% of organizations gain measurable improvements in customer satisfaction, service delivery, and contact center performance with Chatbot implementation.
2: Enhances Employee Satisfaction
Chatbots are helping the customer and IT support employees stay happy with the work at hand. By taking on the transactional level of service, chatbots free up human agents for higher-value activities that are more interesting and carry more business value. With chatbots, organizations can automate up to 80% of their routine support tickets. As a result, the customer support roles become less repetitive which leads to happier customer service agents. And happier customer service agents inevitably provide better customer service leading to brand loyalty and revenue growth.
3: Simplifies Internal Communications
Chatbots can play a huge role in facilitating better internal communications for employees. It can access an organization’s internal data and knowledge base to provide employees with prompt responses. As an example, the HR portal or the corporate intranet can have a live chat option wherein the employees send in their queries regarding leave policies to the HR department and receive instant responses. During the initial days of the pandemic, many organizations had implemented chatbots to communicate remote working norms and ensure employee wellbeing. Various other organizations deploy self-service chatbots to ensure high adoption of new technologies.
4: Boosts Productivity
According to McKinsey Global Institute research, the adoption of robotics, A.I., and machine learning – the foundations of automation – could raise annual productivity growth by 1.4% over the next 50 years. Much like all other intelligent automation technologies, chatbots yield high productivity. Apart from streamlining internal communications, chatbots can deliver relevant information to employee’s fingertips without searches and the time involved in that. Chatbots have the potential to deliver clear insights to employees and equip them to manage multiple tasks at the same time. This will ensure that everyone within an organization is delivering their productive best. According to industry experts, Chatbot’s ability to manage multiple tasks helps organizations to enhance 40% productivity within the organization.
5: Reduces Operational Costs
A study by Juniper Research predicts that by 2023 chatbots will save about $11 billion for businesses. Similarly, IBM mentioned in their blog that chatbots can help organizations save up to 30% of their customer support costs by speeding up response times, freeing up agents for more challenging work, and answering up to 80% of routine questions. Chatbots allow organizations to reduce the number of human operators by assigning low-level tasks to chatbots. Staffing a 24x7x365 contact center with human agents can be a costly proposition, as can be contracting a BPO contact center provider. When you add the resources required to support multiple lines of business and languages, it increases the headcount and skill sets required to serve customers around the clock. With Chatbots, organizations can set up round-the-clock support which acts as the first line of defense, and only more complex inquiries can be escalated to human agents. Chatbots can easily support an increased volume of support requests without any additional costs.
6: Analyzes & Secures Data
In this data-driven world, most organizations have to deal with an enormous volume of data daily, and to keep a track of all such data can be very challenging. Data security becomes a priority especially when an organization leverages a CRM system to manage customers’ data. Chatbots can enable organizations to overcome such challenges. AI-powered chatbots can customize interactions based on the learnings from past and initial interactions. It possesses the capability to automatically analyze organizational data and deliver resolutions within rapid time. As an example, HR teams can leverage a chatbot to make bulk changes and update employee’s contact details across an organization. The chatbot cross-verifies the details and makes the appropriate changes. Consequently, a chatbot can enable organizations to have well-organized and clean data.
Once considered to be a fun addition to a website, the application of chatbots to automate enterprise processes has undergone a massive change in the last year. They’ve moved into an essential customer or support service role for organizations that want to stay competitive. AgreeYa’s AI-based Chatbot delivers an intelligent self-service helpdesk with anytime (24×7), anywhere (web/desktop/mobile), and instant support for organizational users on various platforms.