5 Practical, Effective Use Cases for Chatbots in an Enterprise

Chatbots are the future and there is no denying that fact. But are we using them correctly? How do we decide where to deploy chatbots? What are the ideal conditions for ensuring a successful implementation of a chatbot? Companies are now pondering over these questions.

We have the technology , We have the skills. Then why are we witnessing so many failed chatbots?

1) Travel Desk

The answer is simple and straightforward. Any interaction which does not necessarily need a GUI and where Conversational Interface can provide a better experience, is ideal for a Chatbot. We should always remember that Chatbots are made to make life simpler for the users. Hence the focus should be on short and simple interactions, mostly driven by the Bot.

Let us now see some practical use cases for chatbots for an organization.

Planning the business trips for employees is one of the most repetitive, time consuming and monotonous task for any HR or Travel desk department of an organization.

2) Concierge Desk

Although the process of travel booking is seemingly straight forward, there are lot of unnecessary delays because of the number of conversations between the employee and the travel desk executive. A typical scenario would involve, first a request mail from the employee telling the dates and destination of travel. The travel desk then responds by suggesting the available flights, based on the cost and time considerations (manual intervention). The employee selects the option which suits best and confirms. The Travel desk then checks for the accommodation, verifies if there is a room available, and then sends a mail again to the employee for confirmation. In addition, there may be request for other services like breakfast, early check in etc.

This makes an excellent use case for Chatbot implementation. All these conversations can be easily replaced by Chatbots, hence completely changing the travel planning experience for employees. The conversation can be simple, efficient and fluid thus enabling the user to provide all the necessary information.

Many organizations today, provide a concierge desk for employees, for helping with their personal tasks. These facilities can be used by employees for a myriad of services like sending couriers, renewing licenses, delivering flowers, planning for parties etc.

The process here involves a set of basic, simple queries , example: “I need to send this courier from Bangalore to Mumbai”. The responses are also straightforward, example “Do you want an urgent delivery or regular delivery?”.

3) Customer Support Desk

A Chatbot implementation in such a scenario, would prove to be highly effective. It could save employees’ time, by interacting with a Bot instead of walking up to the Concierge counter and providing information. The employer can benefit by reducing the task force employed for serving all these requests.

As with any good chatbot design, it should also be supported by Human intervention, if the conversation or request is too complex for the Bot to handle.

4) Personal assistant

The Customer Support team is often expected to respond to same queries repeatedly. This is an apt condition for implementing Chatbots. Chatbots can be made to learn and answer similar questions. This can drastically reduce the workload of the Support staff.

If the bot is unable to answer some specific queries, it can escalate to a human. This again will serve as a learning for the Bot. So over time, the Bot becomes more intelligent and efficient.

5) Hiring and On Boarding

This is by far the most obvious and useful scenario for a chatbot implementation. However this also is one of the most complex use case to achieve.

The chatbot should be able to understand and respond to a variety of user requests. Hence such bots take a long time to mature. Some typical user requests could be to book a meeting with a colleague, book a lunch appointment, reminders for meetings etc. A lot of teams have tried to implement this, considering its usefulness, and failed. So the correct approach here would be to keep the scope limited to start with, and then expand the scenarios.

Currently the hiring teams in any organization spend crazy amounts of time in managing the applications for multiple requirements. This includes scanning the applications for the required skills, managing some screening interview rounds and then communicating with the applicants to respond to their queries about a job opening.

A chatbot can take care of all of this. It can be trained to talk to applicants ,screen them based on their responses and inform the recruiters. The recruiters can then focus their time on actual interviews.

The bot can also provide additional information to the recruitment teams, like ratings for the applicants, based on their skills. Also, it can tell the applicants about their application progress.

The above mentioned scenarios are from my recent experiences with chatbots and also various interactions with different teams. I would love to hear from you about your chatbot experiences.

You can learn more about the reasons for failures of a chatbot in my recent article Why Do Chatbots Fail To Deliver. If you are looking for some easy tips to make your successful chatbot, check this article Chatbots: Designing the Right Conversations.

Senior Apps Developer (UX) at VMware

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com on November 27, 2017.