The power of chatbot solutions: sparking business efficiency

Intelligent chatbot solutions for efficiency gains

We are all familiar with the common chatbot. We have stumbled across its small pop-up box when exploring e-commerce sites, raising orders and even scheduling healthcare appointments. It has improved the lives of the everyday consumer, by streamlining communications, fast-tracking resolution and removing tedious time spent searching for answers to basic questions. Organisations alike are no strangers to the benefits that chatbot solutions provide. That is, greater efficiency, productivity, cost-savings and customer satisfaction. According to the Digital Leadership Report 2023 by Nash Squared, business efficiency is at the top of 66% of organisation's priorities and chatbots are just one of the many ways they are attaining it.

In this article, we explore how chatbots are pivotal in driving business efficiency and discuss how NashTech's intelligent AI virtual assistant unlocks a new tier of opportunities for organisations.

An evolution in capability

The market for AI chatbots is expected to reach a significant $9.4 billion by the end of 2024 alone.

Chatbots have grown in both popularity and capability over recent years. Traditional rule-based chatbot solutions have led the way to more sophisticated intelligent AI-powered chatbot solutions that further their already impressive capabilities. Where traditional chatbots rely on rule-based interactions and predefined sets of parameters assigned by their owner for its outputs, intelligent chatbots are AI powered and possess advanced natural language understanding (NLU), as well as machine learning capabilities. As such, it does not rely on a set of predefined written rules and is able to understand sentiment, user intent and context. Let's dive into how intelligent chatbots are able to drive efficiency for organisations.

How chatbots enhance organisational efficiency

When exploring whether a chatbot solution is right for your business, you should first understand how it can be applied. We dive into the ways that AI-powered chatbots can impact your business.

1. Automating repetitive tasks and reducing human error

Did you know that organisations waste an average of $1.8 trillion a year on repetitive tasks? A significant cost that could be easily offloaded by automation. Chatbots allow organisations to automate repetitive and mundane tasks in order to optimise business workflows, and they can do so faster and with greater accuracy than a human. Thus, this drives productivity by saving employees time and allowing them to focus on higher value activities and decision making, rather than unproductive and monotonous tasks.

Take for example, HR processes. Chatbots can streamline HR onboarding activities, by automatically processing new-joiner documents, delivering training, teaching about company products, services and policies - a significant time-saver.

Now think of your organisation, how much time do your employees spend sourcing files, moving data or answering basic customer queries? Can a chatbot take these tasks off your hands?

2. Transforming the customer experience landscape

Customer experience is the bread and butter of organisations. 96% of consumers say that customer service is important in choosing loyalty to a brand and this is reflected as 73% of companies with above-average customer experience perform better financially than their competitors. Intelligent chatbots are the obvious choice for improving customer service, since it offers personalisation, 24/7 availability and real-time resolution. What's more, it can do this without the need for human intervention or human agents altogether.

Personalisation in customer experience

Personalisation in customer experience is gaining momentum. It's reported that 80% of customers are more likely to do business with a company that offers personalisation across its touchpoints. Using the Large Language Model (LLM) and cognitive search the chatbot helps to improve customer satisfaction by leveraging data from unique users for personalised and curated experiences.

Let's think about the future of education as an example. By analysing a student's historical performance against differing teaching styles, the chatbot can offer customised learning courses, documents and teaching recommendations tailored to their optimal learning style and behaviours.

In NashTech's panel discussion - 'generative AI, not just a chatbot' - George Lynch, Head of Technology Advisory at NashTech, even alluded to the possibility that intelligent chatbot solutions can open a new world of personalised wellbeing for students. The Large Language Model (LLM) will have the potential to understand tones and cues from its conversations and apply contextual understanding to these. For example, the chatbot may think 'why is this student asking for an extension?', 'are they feeling overwhelmed?', and so on.

3. 24/7 availability and instant resolution

90%?of customers rate an immediate response as essential or very important when facing queries.? Besides resolving queries instantly, intelligent chatbots will also learn from a customer's previous data, adapt to their preferences and thus better anticipate their future needs. Unlike its human counterpart, these technologies do not feel tired, nor do they need to switch off after a long day at work. They are operational and accessible twenty-four hours a day.

Read about how chatbots are impacting the retail sector: https://www.nashtechglobal.com/our-thinking/insights/generative-ai-in-retail/

3. Enabling cost-savings

It may not win points for popularity, but chatbots are less costly than human employees. When taking into consideration training, yearly salaries, turnover rates and absenteeism, chatbots are an efficient alternative for driving down business costs. This is because organisations can reduce headcount across their call-centres and task repetitive domains.

What's more, chatbots are able to answer multiple customer queries at the same time and at faster pace, reducing waiting times of customers and as a result, abandoned items in the cart.

Employees are also catching onto the automation trend to make their lives easier. Reports show that employees who embed automation in their daily work are less likely to quit their jobs when compared to those who do not, since it reduces burnout and enables them to work on the tasks they truly enjoy.

An intelligent chatbot solution that goes above all: an example of an efficiency supercharger

NashTech's intelligent virtual assistant, named BonBon, is a great example of an intelligent chatbot solution. Blending advanced cognitive technologies such as intelligent automation, API integration, generative AI and Robotic Process Automation (RPA), its unique architecture is what enables a new level of efficiency yet to be attained by organisations. Let's dive into this in more detail.

Doing more with less - assuming multiple roles for a super workforce

Employee productivity and turnover is a cumbersome yet hot discussion among organisations today. The economic recession coupled with multi-disciplinary talent shortages mean that businesses are trying to achieve more results with less. In 2023 alone, we saw a shocking 200% increase in layoffs across industries due to cost-cutting measures - a risky position for organisations that are trying to maintain the same level of business outputs with fewer employees.

NashTech's intelligent chatbot solution is not just a simple and unidimensional virtual assistant, but rather its architectural design enables it to be both self-serving and cloneable for utilisation across differing domain functions. Imagine for example, that you need to streamline multiple areas of your business, such as product research, data synthesis or contract risk analysis. NashTech's intelligent chatbot can execute multiple complex requests at the same time, where humans would ultimately fail to do so. Now, you have the capability of tens to hundreds of human workers across multi-disciplinary roles like marketing, sales, data and so forth - you can only begin to imagine this potential and its scalability for your organisation.

A self-serve platform

We lightly touched on its self-serve ability. But what does this mean? The reality is that the strong majority of employees are software and tech-illiterate, meaning that when it comes to making even the smallest of changes to existing technology models, organisations must rely on the likes of software engineers. The difference in NashTech's virtual assistant is that it comes with a self-serve and easy-to-navigate admin portal. Thus, those without technical expertise are able to easily manage permissions of their chatbot, create new chatbot domain roles, manage documents, and more, without relying solely on technically adept employees. And what's more, these changes require little effort.

First-line user support

Providing around-the-clock business support to internal stakeholders and external customers is important for upholding quality customer service and answering internal business queries. NashTech's intelligent virtual assistant works around the clock to assist users by raising IT tickets, answering questions and solving problems. Therefore, saving time of helpdesk agents and increasing customer satisfaction. It's not to say that it will completely remove the human from their domain, rather it improves the efficiency of every employee, leading to faster delivery, task completion and more valuable outputs.

Security and ethics - where does NashTech stand?

As soon as we hear about generative AI models like ChatGPT we tend to worry about its security implications. As the saying goes, 'if something is free, it means you are the product', and this certainly rings true for internet-facing conversational AI models like ChatGPT. The worry is that the data a user feeds into these models is used as part of its training data and therefore is prone legal and security risks (as witnessed by Samsung where an employee mistakenly leaked company sensitive data).

Yet, NashTech's virtual assistant does not face this problem. Secured by private Azure infrastructure, the architecture complies with client-specific security standards and maintains the confidentiality of its data. It is also customisable towards a client's particular security platform, for example, Microsoft Entra ID can be changed to Google Authentication.

Maintaining ethics of the application

As with all AI-based technologies, its output derives from its training and maintenance. Thus, at NashTech our experts recommend regular monitoring of AI generated output to ensure ethical practice and true representation across geographies. This is taken a step further with BonBon where organisations can implement specific controls while employees use their systems.

An employee, for example, might request the chatbot to help create a legal document. Because this falls outside the chatbot's ethical remit, it will only provide guidance and tips on how to optimise its content, while requiring users to create the legal document themselves. Thus, keeping in line with ethical practices and safe usage.

The success of your intelligent chatbot relies on its data

At the end of the day, the success of your chatbot application relies mainly on one thing: the data its fed. The controversy of Microsoft's chatbot 'Tay' in 2016 demonstrated how important it is to ensure that data inputs are accurate. In just hours after the bot launched, it had absorbed millions of public Twitter data points, leading to racist and sexist babbling, and finally, its deactivation within the same day.

NashTech's intelligent chatbot uses your organisation's data for its training output to meet business demands. Thus, as long as your data is accurate, its outputs will also be.

Times have changed and we must all embrace it

We are at the precipice of substantial technological change. As the rate of chatbot adoption increases, we will witness a change in the way that consumers interact with organisations and how businesses are fast-tracking efficiency. To keep up with the landscape, organisations must adapt to the changing times and do what they can to enhance their organisation's efficiency and therefore, output and revenue.

To find out more about NashTech's intelligent virtual assistant and how it can help to take your business to new levels of efficiency, you can request your free demo here: https://www.nashtechglobal.com/campaign/bonbon/