Intelligent Chatbots & Virtual Assistants

Chatbots, also known as conversational bots, are experiencing increasing popularity, especially when communicating with customers. They are often used when recurring questions and concerns arise. Whether in customer service or even in internal business processes: Chatbots automate your processes and make everyday work easier for you and your employees.

„Virtual assistants in the form of chatbots and voicebots are taking on a central role in future communication. They relieve the service and staff departments and inspire employees and customers. In the coming years, completely new business models will emerge through their use."

Michael Fritz. Senior Consultant by CONET

• Automated response to recurring questions
• Multilingualism
• Natural language understanding through integrated Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Natural Language Processing (NLP)
• Relieving the burden on customer service, for example by absorbing peak loads in times of crisis, disruptions or the introduction of new services
• Pre-qualification of questions in order to distribute them accurately to qualified employees
• Support with the onboarding of new employees
• Automated process integration by creating tickets, requests and room bookings
• Integration with different channels such as messaging platforms, web environments and social networks
• Integration with third-party systems, external data sources and AI services
• Monitoring / analysis of requests with automatic or semi-automatic learning mode

Virtual assistants are used in a wide variety of application areas. In order to stand out as a company in service and optimize the dialog with the customer, chatbots are the ideal solution. They allow users to access information easily and whenever they need it. On the company side, they thereby facilitate the work of customer service representatives. Recurring concerns and questions can be answered quickly and automatically.

Customer service representatives often receive general questions about products or services that are often repetitive and unrelated to an acute customer problem. This results in less time for more important requests. In addition, customer service representatives are occupied by recurring questions. Since the number of daily inquiries is unpredictable, bottlenecks occur more often because staff cannot be increased in time.

The use of chatbots provides a remedy at this point. Recurring requests can be answered automatically and important concerns can be pre-sorted and forwarded to the responsible employees. This ultimately leaves them more time to deal with individual inquiries. Customers also benefit from these digital assistants: they receive quick answers to their questions and can reach the chatbots at any time.

Although many people initially think of chatbots in terms of customer service, the digital assistants are just as suitable for use in internal communications. Examples include the use in HR tasks such as creating vacation requests or booking business trips. It is possible to integrate the chatbot into the company's internal network (intranet) to enable employees to ask specific questions about applications or processes. "Where do I enter my travel expenses?" or "How do I submit a vacation request?": A chatbot can answer these and many other questions automatically. Employees from the HR department are thus relieved of recurring questions and can devote themselves to their core tasks.

• Increase employee satisfaction
  Users can access relevant information quickly, easily and at any time
• Work more efficiently
  Recurring tasks can be performed in a time-saving manner
• Relieve employees
  Employees have more time to deal with more complex issues

In many companies, virtual assistants are already considered valuable and indispensable components of service – they use them in customer service or internally in IT hotline or in personnel processes, for instance. They play to their strengths wherever recurring inquiries or workflows need to be supported.

Along with the numerous advantages, however, these virtual assistanrs also bring challenges with them: chatbots work more effectively in simple communication situations and processes rather than in complex and ambiguous tasks. In order to generate reliable answers, chatbots should be specialized in one task area. The smaller the use case, the more precise the answers. With the additional use of artificial intelligence, virtual assistants learn on their own, work more accurately overall, and can thus reach their goal more quickly in the case of queries. However, the majority of their knowledge comes from human expertise.

Bots are therefore specialists in predefined areas. If a virtual assistant has been developed to suit its purpose, then ideally it will understand its users' queries and formulate a suitable response. The interface is always a database from which a chatbot generates its answers. Beyond that, however, chatbots should be implemented in such a way that, in the case of complex and individual inquiries, they connect to a physical employee who takes over as soon as the virtual assistant can no longer help with a concern.

1. Define clear tasks and goals: Chatbots work most effectively when you limit yourself to one topic area.
2. Support your virtual assistant: If a chatbot has difficulty generating answers or a communication situation escalates, then it should be able to automatically hand over the conversation to a real human from the responsible department.
3. Test and train: For optimal results, a virtual assistant should always continue to be tested, trained and optimized even after it goes live.
4. Benefits: For sustained acceptance, users should be able to see why the chatbot offers added value. For example, through quick, helpful answers and the possibility to communicate at any desired time.
5. Transparency: To strengthen customer loyalty, users should be able to recognize when they are communicating with a chatbot and when they are communicating with a real person.

Would you like to try out a chatbot implemented by CONET for yourself? Then simply visit the homepage of ARAG Versicherung. There you can test the chatbot in detail in the form of the ARAG Assistant. You can also find more information about the project on our blog (German version only).