How AI Will Improve the Way You Do Business

03/26/2019 by Steve Sunshine

AI (Artificial Intelligence) is poised to revolutionize many segments of the business world, but most of these are nebulous promises whose fulfillment will come at some unknown point in the future. But there's one area where AI is already creating novel ways for businesses to interact with prospects, customers, and their own employees. It’s allowing 24/7, meaningful contact whenever people want it, and giving businesses new tools to keep their employees engaged. And it’s a technology that you can take advantage of right now.

We’re talking about chatbots. This is a segment that has been growing for a number of years but now, with TruCHAT’s latest offerings, the technology has finally realized its full potential.

Chatbots can be called into service anywhere you might normally require human interaction. These intelligent chatbots can answer customer questions, serve as an internal resource for employees, function as an AI virtual assistant, and perform many other useful functions. The utility of AI chatbots is really only limited by our imaginations.

Automate Your Customer Care

Chatbots allow on-demand customer interactions. Imagine having an unlimited number of customer care representatives that can engage with your prospects, answer their questions, provide useful information, and capture leads 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And imagine how happy your customers would be knowing that they don’t need to wait until the next day to get an answer if they happen to require it after business hours.

Chatbots can be easily programmed to carry on sophisticated conversations, and TruCHAT chatbots enable a true artificial intelligence assistant with their natural language processing. This lets prospects ask "off-script" questions and get the answers they’re looking for. Allowing your customers to ask questions as they would to a person, and getting the appropriate answers improves their customer experience.

In many cases, a robust chatbot is sufficient to satisfy a customer’s needs in a given chat session, which means that a person will never need to speak with an actual human. Over time this can translate to significant labor cost savings as fewer human agents are necessary. But this just scratches the surface.

Chatbots aren't just passive data collectors. They can actively serve unique information to customers. Customers could use a chatbot on your website, Facebook Messenger or a number of other messenger services and social platforms to check their account status, get order status updates, track shipments and make payments. All without a single human interaction.

Chatbots can go anywhere online a human agent can. You could have them reach out to current customers to collect satisfaction data or ask them for feedback on your products or services. Chatbot AI can offer customers special promotions, take orders, and relay sales information back to you. They can also simply engage customers occasionally, checking in to see if they have any questions and offer assistance. They can help you unobtrusively stay in front of your customers and provide helpful touch points for communication.

Provide Useful Internal Resources to Your Employees

An AI chatbot is most commonly used for customer-facing interactions, but there’s absolutely no reason they can’t be used internally as an automated information resource for your employees.

Automated Virtual Assistant

The most obvious internal use of a chatbot is as a virtual assistant artificial intelligence. One could imagine making a chatbot AI assistant available to all of your employees. Using natural language processing, it could schedule meetings and alert employees when their presence is required. It could retrieve client contact information from a central database as well as make it easy to input new contacts.

It could provide all sorts of useful alerts. It could tell you when important emails arrive, when scheduled meetings are imminent, and remind you of project deadlines. Depending on the complexity of the programming there’s almost nothing that a chatbot can’t do. And when you get hungry, and it can even place your lunch order!

Internal Information Resource

Imagine a chatbot that knows everything about your internal HR policies, standard operating procedures, and corporate regulations. At any moment employees could ask their chatbot to clarify the company’s policy on sick days or ask whether the office is closed on a given holiday. A chatbot could take care of many internal questions that would otherwise fall to your HR, IT or other internal support staff.

Additionally, a chatbot could be programmed as an AI virtual assistant news service, delivering useful articles and news alerts based on preferences employees choose ahead of time. Your graphic designers might get alerts whenever Adobe releases a new version of their software. Your salespeople might get breaking news stories related to the industries they focus on, served to them the moment they become available.

In general, a robust enough chatbot could serve as an automated, central repository and information server, keeping all of your employees connected and knowledgeable about what matters most to them.

Chatbots are Powerful Because They Automate Interactions

Human interaction is at the core of everything businesses do, and until now it was one of the few areas where automation couldn't do what it does best — improve efficiency, expand access, and control cost. With the introduction of intelligent chatbots, businesses can now interact with customers, prospects, and employees in unprecedented ways. And this will only continue to accelerate and spread as companies adopt chatbots more and more. Your business and chatbots have a bright future together.

TruCHAT by TruVisibility gives designers, developers, programmers, software companies and digital agencies the best platform to build engaging and effective conversational marketing solutions for their clients. TruCHAT provides a single system to control customer conversations across all major messenger platforms, company mobile app, and websites.