How to make the most of chatbots

United Kingdom, Jun 23, 2022

By Neil Thurston, Chief Technologist, Logicalis UKI

Chatbots are all around us. Visit any eCommerce website today and the chances are it’ll instantly present you with a ‘How can I help you today?’ pop-up. The global market for intelligent virtual assistants is expected to grow at a CAGR of 28.5% from 2021 to 2028, and social media is full of amusing stories of parrots and small children wreaking havoc via Alexa.   

Chatbots are emphatically mainstream technology, and an important component of any automation strategy. The question for any digital business is how to derive maximum value from them.   

This blog considers the benefits of chatbots, along with factors that need to be taken account to implement in ways that deliver the greatest business value.   

Chatbot basics        

A chatbot is a computer program that can simulate one side of a conversation between two human beings. Just as human conversations vary from the very simple to the highly complex, chatbots can range from basic, deterministic automated flowcharts to sophisticated, artificial intelligence driven tools capable of learning individual preferences and behaviours and interpreting language and tone.  

Widely available chatbot templates and other tools mean chatbots can be created quickly and without specialised programming capabilities.  

Direct and indirect benefits of using chatbots  

Key direct benefits of using chatbots include cost efficiency, instant 24/7 availability and service consistency.  

Using chatbots instead of humans for repetitive, mechanical functions, such as password resets or simple ordering, can free staff for higher value tasks and greatly increase efficiency for customer-facing departments. 

Chatbots offer an ‘always on’ capability that takes pressure off call centres and improves customer experience by virtually eliminating call waiting times. 

A chatbot will respond consistently every time, something that is hard to guarantee with a human interaction. 

Intelligent chatbot technology creates a foundation for delivering a range of indirect benefits, from the actionable insights it creates by capturing and building understanding of individual customer behaviours to its ability to enact changes and innovations in customer service without the need for extensive staff training.            

Image
Download our eBook

 

Considerations for chatbot implementation 

As with any automation technology implementation, it is important to understand and map the processes and outcomes in scope for a chatbot before it is deployed.  

Expecting chatbot technology to resolve issues with, for example, a troublesome customer process, is unrealistic and counter-productive, if the reasons why the process is troublesome are not understood.  

While chatbots have been part of everyday life for some time, there is still some cultural resistance, particularly and understandably in older demographic groups. One article cites an independent survey where over half of correspondents said they found chatbots were at best only partly effective, or complained about still having to talk to an agent after using one.  

Failing to understand and map the underlying process and potential outcomes therefore risks further disaffecting customers and users who may already have some distrust of chatbots.  

For the same reason, the chatbot interaction needs to be as natural as possible. There is a strong argument that the person interacting with the chatbot should ideally be unaware they are talking to a computer.  

These factors support an approach to chatbot implementation that starts from simple, repetitive, low-value tasks and develops from there. 

Password reset requests have been shown to be a productive starting point for deploying chatbots in an IT service desk setting. This can provide a foundation for automating more complex but still repetitive requirements such as new laptop requests, as long as those complexities are fully understood and mapped.  

Giving due weight to these considerations can help minimise risk and deliver maximum return on investment in chatbots.  

What next? 

Logicalis UKI have the track record and expertise to help organisations deliver effective chatbot deployments as part of a wider automation strategy.   

Download our eBook here to find out more about the critical role of BPM in automation, or get in touch with our AI and automation experts: info.uki@logicalis.com

Topic

Related Insights

United Kingdom, Nov 23, 2022

Blogs

How to Continue Transforming During a Recession

With the current economic slowdown, it looks like another recession could be on the cards in 2023. This usually heralds a period of consolidation within IT and the closing of the purse strings with regards to planned investments. In previous decades this was standard practice, but now that we’re in a digital age, many businesses can’t afford to slow down their digital transformations if they want to survive.

Learn more

United Kingdom, Nov 23, 2022

Blogs

Reducing Digital Waste

Sustainability is imperative to all our futures and is directly impacted by every device we use that consumes power. This includes the on-premises and cloud infrastructures that power our digital work lives. To be as sustainable as possible we need to ensure that we are consuming the least amount of infrastructure to host our workloads and services, without impacting their availability, performance or governance.

Learn more

United Kingdom, Jun 20, 2022

Blogs

A brief guide to Business Process Management (BPM)

Effective Business Process Management (BPM) is an essential foundation for any successful business digitalisation and automation strategy. In summary, you can’t successfully automate a process unless you understand it fully, and BPM provides this understanding.

Learn more

United Kingdom, Jun 10, 2022

Blogs

Breaking down the great global data challenge

There are plenty of statistics around the staggering amount of data being created and consumed globally every day. 2.5 quintillion (million million million) bytes created daily by internet users, a 5000% increase in data interactions between 2010 and 2020, and so on.

Learn more

United Kingdom, Jun 3, 2022

Blogs

Explaining some important data management concepts and terms

Recent Logicalis UKI eBooks and articles have focused on the critical role of data in digital business, from unstructured data and the role of Information Lifecycle Management to the importance of robust, business-driven data storage strategy.

Learn more

United Kingdom, Jun 1, 2022

Blogs

How multi cloud data fabrics maximise data value

As data becomes an increasingly valuable asset, organisations have to adapt, to manage and protect their data to ensure it delivers maximum value to the business.

Learn more

United Kingdom, May 30, 2022

Blogs

Why data storage trends are about more than just technology

There are plenty of informative and valuable articles on the web about trends in data storage technology, discussing everything from reducing last byte latency to the wonders of consumption-based pricing. Data and storage are hot topics, unsurprisingly in an age where, as Mckinsey puts it, ‘“digital” and “data” have become the talk of the town.’

Learn more

United Kingdom, May 25, 2022

Blogs

Is it time to stop talking about the death of tape storage?

Heritage technologies - mainframe, Unix and magnetic tape in particular – have long been a rich source for the ‘is x technology dead?’ debate. Technical pundits fill the web with head scratching over why they haven’t disappeared, or defences for their survival.

Learn more

United Kingdom, May 20, 2022

Blogs

How to avoid the pitfalls of ‘good enough’ IT

In challenging economic times, organisations naturally look to cut back or defer non-essential investment. IT spend has traditionally been one of the areas businesses look to first when the need arises to cut budgets or delay projects, sometimes creating a ‘good enough IT’ mindset, where any IT asset that is doing the job reasonably effectively today is maintained beyond the last responsible moment for replacement.

Learn more

United Kingdom, May 16, 2022

Blogs

Should we stop being ageist about Unix?

"Unix is dead, long live Unix" – a headline that is still as topical today as it was in 2009, when a blog with that title was published to mark Unix’s 40th birthday.

Learn more

United Kingdom, May 13, 2022

Blogs

Where next for Virtualisation?

In its broadest sense, virtualisation can be seen as the progressive freeing up of any computing function – compute, storage, network – from the constraints of its physical infrastructure. So far, virtualisation has been a continuous evolution, from the first virtual machines (VMs) to the world of hybrid cloud, and there is no sign yet of this evolution losing momentum.

Learn more
Advisory Services von Logicalis

Global, Mar 21, 2022

News

Only a third of CIO's cite cyber-risk mitigation as a performance measure

London, 21 March 2022: While 94% of CIOs acknowledged some form of serious threat over the next 12 months, only 27% listed business continuity and resilience as a top-three priority during the next 12 months and barely a third cited risk mitigation as a measure of performance. These findings come from the fourth section of the 2021 Global CIO Survey from Logicalis, a global provider of IT solutions.
Learn more

United Kingdom, Feb 21, 2022

News

The Changing Threat Landscape

The range and impact of Information Security (IS) threats has grown and changed continually over the last 40 years or more, along with the motivations and drivers for such attacks. From when the Morris Worm launched the first, apparently inadvertent, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on the internet, the realm of cybercrime has expanded from hackers often driven by little more than curiosity, to organised crime and state sponsorship.
Learn more