Bright Horse always looks for new innovations, tools, and services that can help our customers on their service maturity journey. However, can chatbots be truly useful in solving the problem of digital employee experience? Everywhere, the talk is of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and NLP (Natural language processing), and the rise of chatbots. Virtual agents are seen as core routes to improving the experience of IT support for today’s workforce.
Chatbots And Modernised IT Support
So where do you need to be on the maturity journey for chatbots to be appropriate? How do they improve and modernise IT support as we currently know it?
Nexthink recently published an article ‘Evolving Digital Employee Experience – The Next Generation of Chatbots is Powered with Actionable Insight’ which is relevant as we are currently running a series of events with Nexthink entitled – From Service To Experience, which charts the IT maturity path from ‘chaos’ to optimisation’ and all the steps in between.
The bigger reason this is so relevant, is that our customers ask “what must we have in place to make this a reality?”.
According to Gartner analysts:
“By 2021, more than 50 percent of enterprises will be spending more per annum on bots and chatbot creations than on traditional mobile app developers”.
How To Get A Return On Investment On Chatbots?
What abilities, capabilities, technologies and supporting processes should be embedded to ensure the adoption of new technologies? How to ensure that they deliver not only on ROI but on results and business objectives for improved productivity and experience?
At the most basic level, it is about the quality of the underlying data used to inform the chatbots. The integration of front-end communication channels can only satisfy user requests if they are able to access information that is accurate. Thus, there is a technical requirement to integrate chatbots into an existing ITSM tool (suite). Alternatively, a new toolset for any organisation can also be used. It is about having real-time information feeding it that provides the required level of service expected by users.
Service requests are primarily managed by the service desk. Therefore whichever chatbot technology is chosen, it must route users seamlessly if it cannot answer the question through the appropriate escalations to match their expectations. People don’t want to be ‘passed around’ from one support channel to another. For example, from self-service to email, to telephone.
Top 5 Chatbot Trends To Look Out For In 2022:
Chatbots For Payments
More bots will be connected with payment systems such as Paypal, digital wallets, and other payment gateways in 2022, allowing users to make payments without ever leaving the platform. By connecting with the payment infrastructure, you may provide your chatbot with enough data to support conversation-driven upselling to your consumers. The same may be utilised to deliver updates on a user’s transaction data, payment confirmation, expense records, and so on, resulting in a high level of user confidence and retention.
Voice Bots
According to a Forbes article, voice searches will account for more than half of all queries by 2022. Digital users prefer messaging solutions with voice and text-based interfaces, according to Accenture research. “Ok Google, what’s on my schedule today?” is a common way for users to start their days. It’s all about giving your customers a seamless experience with your company, and voice-driven chatbots can help you do that.
Artificial Intelligence-Driven Chatbots
Chatbots powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) will simulate human communication and recognise the purpose behind the language that users enter. They will then respond with an answer that closely resembles a human’s enquiry. This technology will train customer care professionals for high-impact encounters this year, thanks to AI integration with chatbots. By learning from client encounters, AI-powered chatbots will be able to detect trends in their behaviour.
Understanding Emotions
In 2022, emotional intelligence-based chatbots will play a critical role in the AI tech industry, which will disrupt numerous industries. Companies will design emotional intelligence bots to add soft skills to business, according to projections, which will have a significant influence on how customers contact and engage with organisations. To forecast your emotions, chatbots will look at punctuation and capitalization.
Analytics and Insights with Chatbot
Analytics are extremely useful in tracking, retrieving, and evaluating data for any firm. They assist you in comprehending client requirements so that you can continuously measure and enhance your techniques. You’ll be able to properly measure and assess important search phrases, preferences, and satisfaction using chatbot analytics and insights. It will allow you to establish deeper ties and rapport with your consumers.
How Can Nexthink Technology Help?
The beauty of Nexthink technologies is that it provides the ability to find and fix issues and incidents faster than ever possible with a traditional tool, because it views the infrastructure from the end points’ perspective; back in towards IT, rather from an IT perspective out. It informs the ITSM tool and the chatbots about the user’s equipment and devices, which applications and versions of the software are installed, as well as connectivity.
If it is possible to automate a higher percentage of low-level, manual repetitive tasks and queries, then perhaps staff can be freed up to focus on the higher value work, making everyone more productive and cost-effective! That would then be a very positive outcome for the overall employee experience.
If you want to talk to us about how we help you with any aspect of your IT service maturity journey (regardless of where you are) we would be delighted to help you identify which of our automation partners can help you to deliver your business outcomes for employee experience.