Enterprise chatbots are essentially developed to cater to the customer queries. What if your enterprise chatbot could have superpowers? RPA and AI capabilities offer just that! Read to know more.
Chatbot, RPA, and automation are the latest buzzwords in the AI enterprise ecosystem, and unless you’d been living under a rock, you’d have come across them by now.
Chatbots are common through cross-industries. Here’s a study to back our claim: A 2019 Gartner survey highlights that CIOs identify chatbots amongst the primary AI-based applications used in their enterprise.
But have you ever fathomed the magnitude of digital transformation by integrating chatbots, Robotic Process Automation (RPA), and AI together?
No? Don’t you worry!
In this article, we’d build up upon this concept further and explicate the relationship between chatbots, RPA, and AI. We’d also answer one fundamental question:
How can a combination of these AI technologies solve new-age digital problems, and help you have a competitive edge over your competitors?
Developing AI enterprise chatbots with added RPA abilities and ML, radically improves the interactions between your business and prospective customers.
In this article, you’d discover:
- Chatbots and their implication in cross-industries,
- RPA trend and benefits,
- Artificial Intelligence, and its advantages for RPA,
- Use cases for AI-powered RPA chatbots,
- And best industry practices for chatbot development and implementation.
This article is going to be a tad bit longer, so get comfortable, grab a cup of coffee, and then, let’s get started.
1. Chatbot Best Practices for designing a Conversational Experience
2. GUIDE: How to Create a (damn cool) Multi-Language Chatbot with Manychat
3. How to prevent chatbot attacks?
4. Adding a conversational interface to your app with Dialogflow
At any given time, there are multiple trends affecting, changing, and improving the chatbot ecosystem. However, the most significant, interesting, and the latest trend in the enterprise automation ecosystem is the integration of chatbots with RPA, and AI.
Here’s why.
Chatbots solve basic issues pertaining to customer service. When you integrate these chatbots with the cognitive abilities that RPA brings on-board, the entire customer experience is instantly improved tenfolds.
Before understanding the benefits of implementing RPA and AI in chatbots, let’s overview these terms real-quick:
Chatbots enable enterprises to proactively tend to their customers’ queries. Since these bots are pre-programmed, they can structure problems and respond with an optimal solution rather quickly.
This significantly reduces waiting time whilst improving the overall customer experience.
Robotic Process Automation RPA, use smart software bots to automate manual, repetitive, time-consuming tasks and processes.
An RPA bot can mimic the human interactions with the legacy systems, and perform them much faster, without incurring any mistakes.
RPA offers abound benefits to businesses; some key benefits are:
- Improved customer experience
- Reduced operational costs
- Increased productivity
- Competitive-Advantage
- Minimal-to-no clerical errors
Related Read: Top 11 Benefits of RPA Implementation in Business Processes
Artificial intelligence takes automation up a notch. In simpler terms, artificial intelligence incorporates a level of human intelligence in machines and software.
How, you ask?
By integrating Natural Language Processing (NLP) and machine learning.
Take AI as a clever robot that thinks like we do, works better than we do, and keeps on adapting to the changing times- all this whilst learning new things and improving upon itself in real-time.
RPA tools majorly rely on structured data and a predefined set of rules. To automate unstructured data, eliminate human interactions, and work in dynamic environments, clubbing RPA with AI becomes preeminent.
When integrated with AI tools (Natural language processing and ML), these bots bring cognitive abilities to the table.
‘RPA bots with Artificial Intelligence are like sport’s cars, but with a turbojet engine’.
RPA Bots brings the abilities of Cognitive AI to Chatbots
As we’ve discussed so far, the primary purpose of chatbots is to converse with the customers, or employees, to identify, capture, and answer their requests.
But the number and level of processes to obtain the desired information, depends upon the nature of the requests and queries.
Whatever be the task, chatbots need to integrate and access information from different legacy systems operating in an enterprise’ IT ecosystem.
If an enterprise has modern APIs in place, accessing information from different systems would be a no-brainer, and the tasks at hand could be accomplished in a snap.
But the problem arises in the absence of these modern APIs.
RPA integration, in the lack of APIs, could assist chatbots to easily access information from legacy enterprise software systems.
An RPA enabled chatbot can integrate with not one, but multiple back-end enterprise systems whilst dealing with complex requests and queries in real-time.
Also, since the to-and-fro of information is automated, RPA chatbots can help with scaling customer service operations.
Did you know?
‘By 2022, 70% of white-collar workers will interact with conversational platforms on a daily basis’.- Gartner
RPA Chatbot is a hot topic and many enterprises fall for the hype, instead of validating the need or identifying use cases.
The purpose of implementing automation in chatbots is to streamline data and accelerate operations on the front-end, but most people have a different opinion.
To put it simply, the primary focus should only be streamlining data. If you’re building a chatbot just to be ahead of the competition, your efforts are likely to fail.
Here’s a table highlighting the capabilities if your enterprise were to build (a) simple chatbot, (b) a chatbot intertwined with RPA tools, and/or © a full-fledged chatbot with RPA and AI functionality.
The entire digital ecosystem runs on data; that is to say, data is the real currency.
Just consider this number: Data brokering is a $200 billion dollar industry!
That figure is a testament to the fact of how important consumer data is/and should be to your business.
Chatbots that are coded with machine learning algorithms, recognize patterns and become smarter with every customer conversation.
Using these AI-powered chatbots, your enterprise can have a deeper understanding of your customers- enabling you to find answers for questions critical to your business operations.
These include questions like- what do your customers request for? What replies appeal more to them?, Why they drop?, How fulfilled they are?, and a lot more.
To grow your business, you need to build and nourish interpersonal relationships with your customers. Forget doin’ that with regular chatbots.
People have personalities, and personality has an attitude.
AI-powered RPA chatbots can benefit from Natural Language Processing to access, understand, and respond to humans (talking about us in third-person) in a real human language.
Imagine the conversions your business can achieve with personalized customer services?
The potential is untapped and nearly limitless.
Now that you know the difference between chatbot, RPA, and chatbots with RPA tools and AI functionalities, let’s direct our focus on the best practices for chatbot development.
With over 2000+ active chatbot service providers, choosing the best one for your business wouldn’t be an easy feat. Everything might appear good on paper, but real-world performance needn’t comply with the proclaimed numbers.
Finding a reliable chatbot service vendor is troublesome, but these key findings will help you choose the best RPA chatbot provider for your business:
1. Outsource RPA Development Services
Outsourcing RPA services isn’t only cheap, but even reduces the risk of failures.
Though you can absolutely attempt to create an RPA chatbot in-house, but without the right infrastructure and machine learning tools, you’re bound to encounter failure at different development stages.
2. Incorporate humane personality into your chatbots
As stated above, people have personality, and personality have attitude.
Ensure that your deployed RPA chatbot carries a pleasant tone, reflects the values of your company, and sticks to your brand’s tonality.
3. Avoid Automation solutions with poor performance
The automation sector is clamored by self-proclaimed enterprises. In other words, many vendors won’t be able to deliver enterprise-grade RPA chatbot solutions.
Conduct your due diligence, ask for the vendors’ case studies, study the use cases, and don’t forget to ensure that your prospective vendor’s chatbot guidelines are defined.
4. Be proactive to industry changes
Chatbots are improving dynamically, with new features being introduced every other day.
Be proactive to these changes, and inculcate them in the early stages- for these changes would only enhance your chatbot’s conversational abilities.
Chatbots, RPA, and even Artificial Intelligence are booming albeit slowly, these technologies collectively offer an intelligent conversational experience to both- customers and employees.
Related read: RPA Use Cases in Retail and CPG Industry
Having a fundamental understanding of these individual technologies, and how they relate to each other, is a benefit in itself.
Rest assured, Implementing chatbots with RPA and AI will give your business the competitive edge, help with streamlining operations, increase productivity, and reduce operational costs.
