The better and best chatbots
When chatbots were first introduced, the business world knew they had potential. There were implications early on for improved customer service and increased productivity but few could have predicted just how much chatbots would change the business world over time.
Here are just five of the ways.
A personal assistant for everyone
Most businesses don’t have the resources to give every employee a personal assistant. But thanks to chatbots, every employee, not just the higher ups can have a personal assistant that can manage their calendar, schedule, edit, or cancel meetings, book travel, handle any other secretarial work that they might need.
Better customer service
While chatbots may not be as effective at resolving customers’ problems as humans, they can work 24/7 with zero breaks and can assist limitless customers simultaneously.
Businesses can use chatbots to provide limited customer service during hours when there might not be a human customer service representative to help and even during the day, a customer service chatbot can help by pulling customer information, asking a few questions to get a sense of their problem, resolving simpler issues without needing to involve a human agent, and directly more complex issues to the appropriate person that can best help.
Shopping assistance
One reason people still prefer to shop for certain items in-store instead of online is because of the experience of asking questions of a salesperson as they decide to buy. But salespeople can’t be everywhere at once and they can’t know everything about every product. Chatbots can.
Businesses can design a chatbot designed for customers to use in-store in order to ask information about products that may not be printed on the label. That same chatbot would even be able to ask questions of shoppers to narrow in on products that are most likely to appeal to them.
Empowered IT departments
When it comes to IT problems, some are harder than others. A chatbot can serve as a kind of automated IT service to help diagnose and resolve the more common tech-related issues that might arise from day-to-day. Not only can chatbots resolve simpler issues without any help, they can also access vast amounts of data on a per-user basis much faster than a human would be able to in order to find the source of an IT problem.
Increased productivity all around
All of these and other ways that chatbots can and will be used by businesses have one thing in common: they increase productivity. Personal assistants for every employee allows them to focus on more important things; customer service chatbots mean that customer service representatives can spend more time on the more difficult problems and customers get faster service; shopping assistant chatbots free up salespeople to close sales and ring up customers without being sidetracked answering simple questions; finally, IT chatbots free up IT professionals to devote more time to resolving more challenging problems.