Chatbots augmenting/replacing more internal business tasks in 2019

As budgets tighten in 2019, small businesses and departments within larger organisations are being asked to do more with less. One of the more useful and easily accessible technologies to help out is the humble chatbot, fast becoming an essential tool in many markets and areas of the office.

We’ve already seen the chatbot start to dominate in customer service, they are fast becoming a mainstay of banks, airlines and hotels when it comes to helping people deal with simple, and increasingly complex, problems. But with chatbot technology firmly bedded in for customer-facing features, businesses are looking for other use cases where bots will prove useful in saving time and costs, and generating revenue.

Form Filling Bots

Hopefully, your business has got form-filling down to a minimum by now. But there are still many industries; health, legal, travel and finance etc where forms are part of the daily ritual. We already see plenty of bots helping consumers fill in forms. Some bots are disrupting markets, like the DoNotPay chatbot and app that can auto-fill forms or make robot phone calls to help people contest parking tickets, reclaim college fees and much more.

Now companies can use bots, tied into back-end services, for their own internal processes to speed things up when it comes to longwinded forms or digital processes that can be sped up by answering a few simple questions.

Human resources departments are already using bots to deal with onboarding and common questions. Logistics and other areas are all prone to log jams, that would be so much easier if a bot took the details and did the paperwork automatically for the workers. That frees up their time, helps put data on the dashboards faster than any paper-based or digital document equivalent, and gives the business a better handle on deliveries of production.

Internal Communications Are Better By Bot

Many companies and departments have all-hands calls, town hall meetings and similar. While its fine for the executives or team leaders to drive home key messages and focus on key sectors, only a few minutes of each meeting might be useful to each worker. Other companies drown staff in constant emails or design intranets that no one uses.

Instead, how about office chatbots that enables the business to personalise and send any relevant content or messages to the right employee at the right time via Messenger, Skype or another office app. Bots can also use push notifications to alert them on key issues and focusing on brevity due to the short nature of bot messages.

Bots can also send polls, surveys and other key questions to staff, bringing about a higher response rate than those endless emails, helping build and share internal knowledge. That brings success with Dubai’s RakBank recently awarded a Best Internal Use of Digital for its RakBankLive ChatBot from the Gulf Customer Experience Awards.

RakBank introduced a cognitive chatbot that allows employees to interact with an AI-powered platform to help them answer questions, find solutions or quickly route pending requests to human advisors.

Saving Time and Making Money

The usual bot benefits are time saved, that can be spent on more productive tasks, and less money spent on more costly options. They can also help a company save and make more money, pushing reorders, alerting teams to cost savings and other useful reminders to internal customers.

Juniper Research reckons that chatbots will save health and banking businesses over $8 billion annually by 2022. Through productivity improvements and the provision of faster answers, costs will come down, and bots work 24/7 with large numbers of people at once. For organisations that manage large volumes of internal or external customer interaction, the benefits will be massive, but any business can make savings.

And the arrival of AI chatbots, as discussed by specialist vendor SnatchBot, will change the way bots and people interact more in the coming years. “Smart use of natural language processing allows for the creation of sophisticated chatbots that can engage customers. For customers, this means they end with subscriptions to topics that genuinely interest them. For businesses, this means being able to communicate — in person — far more effectively via chatbot broadcasts than via a traditional advertisement aimed at an anonymous crowd.” All of which will help in creating smarter solutions that make them even more useful.