Enterprise Chatbots: How to Use Them in Customer Service

What are enterprise chatbots?

Enterprise chatbots are conversational platforms that enable large businesses to answer customer questions, automate tasks and improve the overall customer experience (CX). Their integration, security and data management and retrieval capacity is much enhanced than regular chatbots, which makes them a valuable customer support tool for enterprises.

Moreover, enterprise chatbots render themselves to extreme customization per the brand's unique business needs and tech stack. They can be integrated with third-party applications for ERP, CRM, knowledge sharing and email marketing.

Much like standard chatbots, enterprise bots are either AI-powered, rule-based or a hybrid of AI and rules. They can solve complex business issues and handle larger audience volumes than basic chatbots.

How do enterprise chatbots differ from standard chatbots?

Though the underlying technology in enterprise and standard chatbots is the same, they differ in their complexity and applications. Let's discuss all the differences below -

Dig Deeper: 15 Chatbot Examples from Ground-breaking Brands

5 Best use cases of enterprise chatbots

Enterprise chatbots can be leveraged in many ways to add agility and security to interactions and optimize user experience. Here are five top applications:

1. Customer query and complaint resolution

One of the benefits of enterprise chatbots is providing uninterrupted customer support. A single enterprise chatbot can juggle multiple customer conversations with ease, across geographies, languages and products. This enables brands to resolve more complaints and issues without adding to the agent headcount and service costs.

At the enterprise scale, chatbots can handle massive customer data and retrieve it without missing a beat. They can answer multiple conversations concurrently, answering technical questions, troubleshooting product issues and seeking feedback.

Enterprise chatbots can detect the user's intent and don't get frazzled when the user switches intent. They can maintain context, picking conversations from where they left off, which results in a satisfying experience for the user.

What else?

Complex cases are handed off to live agents for human intervention. This happened seamlessly and contextually, so the user isn't expected to repeat their case history over and over.

2. Lead generation and nurture

Being multi-functional, enterprise Chatbots can handle sales and lead generation on various digital touchpoints like website, social media and messaging platforms.

Using artificial intelligence and natural language processing, these super-smart bots are able to gauge a user's purchase intent during conversations and score their buying potential based on preconfigured criteria.

Thereafter, enterprise chatbots help sales and marketing teams with:

• Lead qualification: They gauge user intent and specific needs, benchmarking them as marketing-qualified and sales-qualified leads. They pass this intel to the concerned teams to guide the user down the sales funnel.

• Lead capture: Bots can capture preliminary user information like email addresses and contact numbers, facilitating retargeting campaigns and nurturing.

• Upselling/cross-selling: Chatbots on e-commerce websites drive upselling and cross-selling by sharing relevant product recommendations. They also spread the word about offers and loyalty programs, which help drive impulse buying.

 3. Internal helpdesk support

There are two major ways enterprise chatbots help internal teams with their day-to-day jobs. One, bots can source and surface relevant knowledge base articles to frequently asked staff questions. By keyword spotting and matching, bots are able to scour voluminous databases for the right content within seconds.

Two, they can give new hires quick access to company policies, product information, leave calendars and other important information. To answer typical new joiner questions, there are FAQ chatbots that can resolve queries independently without agent intervention.

Need a relatable example?

Human Resources (HR) bots can help with mundane activities like leave approval, benefits enrollment and employee onboarding, allowing your team to focus on cognitive tasks that demand human touch and caliber.

4. Customer onboarding and implementation

New customers may need help configuring and using your product/service optimally. It's not always feasible to have 24/7 customer support in all languages and time zones. That's where enterprise chatbots enter the picture. Using integrated explainer videos, they can troubleshoot technical issues and get your new customers up and running easily.

Chatbots can redirect users to relevant product manuals or provide step-by-step instructions to complete the setup. Providing early positive experiences helps enterprises build customer loyalty and retention in a cut-throat business ecosystem where customers are spoilt for choice.

If the issues are beyond the bot's scope and agent intervention is unavoidable, the bot can schedule a callback at preferred times or return to the conversation later. In short, enterprise chatbots are designed to keep users engaged at all times.

5. Data retrieval and insights

Enterprise chatbots can deliver business-related data and insights fresh from the rack. For example, if a financial enterprise director needs stock market updates to guide investment decisions, a bot can be implemented to number-crunch at scheduled times.

Likewise, in business intelligence, chatbots can make dashboards, KPIs, metrics and other performance measurement data accessible in real time.

To understand this enterprise chatbot use case better, consider this example. A logistics company is keen to schedule consignment deliveries in traffic-ridden areas like New York based on real time insights on traffic movement. A chatbot designed to compare traffic on different timestamps can help with the task.

How to implement enterprise chatbots

As stated, enterprise chatbot implementation is slightly tricky owing to its deep integration, customizability and compliance requirements. Here are some steps to guide you along the way:

Step 1. Identify the business workflows/units that need chatbot(s)

If you aim to improve customer engagement on your website, the chatbot should be incorporated as one of the customer touchpoints. Subsequently, based on success rates, it can be scaled to other customer-facing properties like social media.

Clearly define the goals you hope to attain using an enterprise chatbot and the workflows/units where the chatbot will live. Design flows and intents the chatbot will follow and ensure you cover all use cases.

Step 2. Select pertinent chatbot features

Make a list of the chatbot features that you want. You can classify the features as ‘must-have’ and ‘good-to-have’.  Some features you should look for include integration with CRM and other systems, high conversational maturity, omnichannel capability and self-learning.

Step 3. Choose between home-grown or outsourced

One of the biggest decisions companies must make is whether to build a chatbot in-house or purchase a customizable solution from third-party vendors. With many easy-to-build chatbot solutions available, several small and mid-size businesses tend to build simple chatbots in-house. Third-party solutions also save you the hassle of having to upgrade chatbot features and back-end data models regularly.

Step 4. Integrate the chatbot with other business applications

Chatbots collect valuable data such as common product challenges, customer contact details, customer sentiment and frequent customer complaints. Integrating chatbots with your existing tech stack (CRM, ERP and BI tools) helps generate holistic insights and data sharing.

Step 5. Test the chatbot and launch it

Before you make the enterprise chatbot available to customers or employees, conduct a usability test on a select sample group to detect bugs. Check for issues with integrations, data sharing and security and fix everything before going into production. Post going live, evaluate the chatbot performance and make adjustments to improve CX.

Success stories of enterprise chatbots

Enterprise chatbots are available as both standalone solutions as well as an element within customer service software. In this section, we look at examples of brands using enterprise chatbots in varied ways.

Aramex uses AI chatbots to transform global customer service

Aramex, the Dubai-based provider of transportation and logistics, wanted to improve the efficiency and scale of its digital customer service. As the business grew, managing its global customer service operations got tedious with the limited number of agents.

Aramex implemented Sprinklr’s Conversational AI and Bots to manage customer inquiries in multiple languages across various digital channels. The chatbot supported 400+ Aramex customer agents and improved their productivity.

AkzoNobel improved CX and reduced response times with chatbots

In early 2015, AkzoNobel faced challenges managing customer interactions over multiple social channels. While they had their presence on multiple channels, it was never managed well and the staff strength was also low. This led to slow response times and customer dissatisfaction.

With Sprinklr Service, AkzoNobel streamlined customer conversations. The team was able to answer 47% of the customer queries in under five minutes. Customer engagement increased by 172%.

Domino's uses chatbot to improve sales and customer satisfaction

Domino's delivers over 1.5 million pizzas every day. Managing such a huge volume of orders manually is tedious.

Domino's uses a restaurant chatbot on Facebook Messenger to collect orders. This enables customers to order pizza from anywhere. The bot also drives up-selling by sharing suggestions on side dishes, cool drinks and desserts. It also allows customers to customize their order (e.g. adding extra toppings). Automation of customer service helps Domino's offer a seamless CX while driving up revenues for the company.

Build omnichannel Enterprise chatbots with Sprinklr

In an age when instant responses are expected from brands, businesses can’t do without enterprise chatbots to serve customers. Chatbots improve employee productivity, enhance customer experience and support troubleshooting tasks anytime.

Conversational tools enable customers and employees to engage freely, raise issues and concerns without feeling embarrassed and sort out mundane issues via self-service.

Sprinklr Service offers both live chat and conversational AI platforms. Sprinklr’s Conversational AI chatbot supports contextual conversations, omni-channel and multilingual conversations and improves resolution rates.

Some of its key features include:

• Customized brand voice: This enables you to customize the voice of the chatbot to mimic the human voice and your brand tone/guidelines.

• Seamless integrations: Connects with your CRM and knowledge base systems to get relevant information and share/store customer details collected via conversations.

• Integrated self-service:  FAQs, knowledge articles, automated workflows and conversational AI bots help customers handle basic queries themselves, thus saving time for agents.

Contact Sprinklr today for a free demo.