How Chatbots are Ushering in a New Revolution in

Enterprises

Chatbots are simple text based services powered with articial intelligence and designed to
interact via a chat interface. This can be used as for functional or fun purposes like virtual
assistant siri, Cortana etc.

Currently, chatbots are very popular in the consumer space. From the business perspective, e-
commerce, delivery and transportation businesses boost their business opportunities by letting
their end users order goods and services even more conveniently.

But if you look very closely, you will see that bots are slowly taking over the enterprise space as
well.

Industry observers say, momentum for chatbots is growing as companies seek to improve
services on top of the data thats available to them. Companies from KLM Airlines to Taco Bell,
Sephora, Expedia and Whole foods among others, have all rolled out chatbots to let users order
food, book ights, inquire about services and browse online stores.

How can Chatbots generate value and enhance the ROI

Chatbots would enormously improve the user experience for both your customers and your
team when it comes to CRM, for instance. An extension or third-party service could speed up and
automate data entry, preventing data leakage in the process. Slackbots like Troops connect CRM
software with Slack, easily pushing and pulling data with the goal of allowing Slack to become the
communications hub for your sales team, letting them interact with each other and the CRM
through the same chat interface quickly and eciently.

Chatbots and Digital Transformation

So what do you need in order to start being able to gain some of the competitive benets that
chatbots can oer?

There are numerous ways this can be approached and it does not have to mean all or
nothing.The increasing popularity of messaging and broad trend towards chat interfaces being
the user preference means that this is a signicant shift. However, savvy organisations looking to
increase their ROI are already engaged in wide-ranging digital transformation, representing the
growing importance of digital in enterprise and in the world in general. If you are in this category,
you are already building strong digital foundations and developing a exible digital strategy. This
will certainly encompass some of the prerequisites for taking advantage of the emerging chatbot
revolution.

Challenges

Companies should be able to make the interfaces work much better and that has huge
implications as it will help them to interact with customers. To succeed, however, theyll need to
overcome a number of challenges.

Natural language processing : Right now, chatbots require us to master their syntax. If you
ask them Whats the weather? youll usually get an answer. If you ask Could you check the
weather? you might not. To get around this problem, companies need to enable bots to
understand all the ways we say something and how context changes what we mean. This
is known as natural language processing, and its an object of considerable focus for
companies like Google, with SyntaxNet, and Facebook, with its DeepText A.I.

Machine learning: To get truly natural responses, companies need to improve machine
learning. With exposure to enough conversations, the computer on the other end of the line
should slowly learn what the correct response should be. Of course, the challenges involved
are far from simple, as illustrated by Microsofts short-lived experiment with its
unintentionally racist chatbot Tay.

Providing value: Companies have to gure out what they can oer through A.I. The
possibilities here are great. If Uber recognizes the right time to oer a taxi, why cant banks
recognize and facilitate money transfers between friends?

Human intelligence: The technologies themselves are only as capable as the programmers
who build them. This reects a larger trend in which digital players are shifting their focus
from traditional engineers to machine-learning experts. Rather than teaching humans to
understand machines, were now teaching machines to understand us.

Staying simple: It might seem like a natural chatbot needs to be innitely vast in order to
succeed. Thats not true. Most successful innovations, like iOS, are simple and easy to use.
For companies to succeed, theyll need to look for the least common denominator in their
services.

Preparing an exit: This means companies also need to hand the experience o at some
point. Currently, chat-like services such as Siri and Alexa have mixed track records when it
comes to solving this problem. Most of the time, when they dont understand you, they
simply take your text and turn it into a web search. With intelligent A.I., well need an elegant
way to send people to a system that can understand them when theyve exhausted our
possibilities.

The Future

Chatbots are like toddlers in the enterprise world who are trying to speak their rst words, but
businesses are condent that bots will be here to stay. With further developments in the bot
space and the use of technologies like articial intelligence, chatbots are expected to become
more intelligent. Right now, intelligent chat is still a little ways o. But with work moving forward
on all fronts, companies need to start thinking about what they can do with these new
technologies. Its time to keep an ear to the ground and start working on the future.

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