Month: July 2021

Customer Experience expert, Dan Gingiss, says that you need to engage with your customers on the channels and platforms on which they are active. With 1.5 billion users across 180 countries, WhatsApp is a channel you can’t miss out on. Here’s how you need to leverage it.‍

Hint:Use a bot…a WhatsApp bot.‍

Why WhatsApp?

WhatsApp is now the Go-To messaging platform for most people. It’s come to the point where we’re sending 29 million messages every minute. That’s about 65 billion a day.

This means that people are now more comfortable using WhatsApp than any other platform. So, it makes much more sense for them to be able to interact with you over WhatsApp, rather than forcing them to download your app (let’s face it, we don’t have the storage space or the inclination to get another app).

And interacting with them on WhatsApp has another benefit. The engagement rates are through the roof. While you’d struggle to get a 15% open rate on your emails, WhatsApp messages have an engagement rate of around 70%.

WhatsApp does have certain strategic advantages in some countries. In India, for example, WhatsApp boasts a user base that’s 200 million strong.

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Great, but what would I use a WhatsApp chatbot for?

Glad you asked! Let’s say you launched a new product or offered a discount..basically, any major announcement. How do you plan on spreading the word to your customers?

Website announcements and social media posts can be effective, but not as much as WhatsApp.

1. WhatsApp Marketing

According to Harper Reed,
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If you get a WhatsApp message, you’re probably going to open it.‍

So, let’s address the question you have on your mind — “how do I use WhatsApp for marketing?”

Reminders

With WhatsApp, you can send your customers and prospects reminders about events, sales, etc.‍

Promotional offers

You can use WhatsApp to share discounts and other promotional offers with your customers. You can even personalize these offers to their preferences.‍

Broadcasts and campaign messages

You can use broadcasts to send a message to all your customers or a campaign message to target specific customer segments with WhatsApp automation.

WhatsApp would send your customers a notification whenever you broadcast an announcement to them. That’s much more effective than posting a simple announcement on social media or even your website. It’s a more powerful way to drive action.‍

Trending Bot Articles:

1. How Conversational AI can Automate Customer Service

2. Automated vs Live Chats: What will the Future of Customer Service Look Like?

3. Chatbots As Medical Assistants In COVID-19 Pandemic

4. Chatbot Vs. Intelligent Virtual Assistant — What’s the difference & Why Care?

Conducting market research

WhatsApp empowers you to collect feedback from customers and understand their preferences. It’s much more effective than a survey form because it involves less effort.

Customers can just send their thoughts directly over WhatsApp without needing to fill a form over even navigate to another application.‍

Permission marketing

WhatsApp Marketing could very well be the gold standard for permission marketing.

Your bot cannot send messages to anyone who hasn’t opted into them. Additionally, WhatsApp bots can only send messages to users who have chatted with your bot recently. There are time limits in place here.

This means that every WhatsApp message you send is going to a user who has recently demonstrated interest in your business and offerings. You won’t just be spraying and praying.

It’s also more effective than emails because customers are more comfortable with WhatsApp. People might put off reading an email, but we humans are pretty much conditioned to read WhatsApp messages as soon as we get them.

It’s practically Pavlovian Conditioning for us to open a WhatsApp message as soon as we get the notification.‍

Analyzing campaign effectiveness

You can measure the effectiveness of your WhatsApp messages, with rich analytics, right on the Engati portal. Our dashboards give you all the insights you need to step up your WhatsApp Marketing efforts.

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‍Now, you can do some of these things over email as well. So you might be wondering why WhatsApp marketing is essential.

Firstly, it’s because 2 billion people use the app globally. And they love it. People use WhatsApp much more than they use email.

Your customers have associated email with work and stress. They look at WhatsApp as a quicker way of communicating.

Instead of replying with a well-crafted email, they just need to shoot a quick text written in short-hand. Essentially, WhatsApp feels more convenient.

This means results in people checking WhatsApp multiple times throughout the day and only looking at their emails once in a while.

But let’s go back to something we already discussed. WhatsApp Marketing is important because of the way we are conditioned towards WhatsApp notifications.

While we might simply swipe an email notification away from our phones, we are far more likely to open a WhatsApp notification and read the message.‍

2. Customer Support over WhatsApp

Here’s another reason why you need it. When your customers need help, they don’t want to waste time calling someone up or navigating through your website to find a ‘Contact Us’ section. They want to have their issues resolved in the simplest way possible. If they’re on WhatsApp, you need to be there too.‍

‍3. Driving sales via WhatsApp bots

Simplifying sales processes has always been linked to higher amounts of sales generated.

Your customers want you to make it easier for them to buy your offerings. They want to buy your offerings; you’re just making it to hard for them to do it.

And how better to simplify the sales process than to empower your customers to make purchases over WhatsApp?

All you need to do is display your catalog over the bot and integrate your chatbot with Stripe or another payment gateway. Then as soon as they select the product, they’ll be taken to the payment page.

Customers are rapidly shifting towards conversational commerce. That leaves you a choice — adopt it now or get left behind.‍

4. Order tracking on WhatsApp

As soon as a customer places an order over an e-commerce portal, there’s one thought that constantly plagues their mind — “Will it be delivered on time?”.

Sure, they could track their orders by visiting your website or downloading your mobile app. But that involves too much effort. Besides, who has space for yet another app on their phones?

They’re already using WhatsApp…why don’t you just send them shipping updates right there?

It eases their anxiety with minimum effort on their behalf and creates a better experience for them. But that’s not all.

The transparency that you provide by doing this will even increase their trust in your business.‍

So, do you need to build a WhatsApp chatbot?

Even if you think you’re a smaller business and could handle your clients without a whatsapp chatbot, you do need to realize that customers today, are spoilt. We want what we want when we want it. We don’t wait for anybody.

So, if you’re unable to interact with customers at odd hours, you could lose out on their business. Besides, your time would be better spent doing something more productive than answering questions mechanically.

With Engati Live Chat, your bot can handle all the routine, monotonous queries and send only the complicated queries to the human agent. Essentially, your employees get to spend their time on more productive tasks that require an advanced, human intellect.‍

Making it even better

Engati even helps you create your WhatsApp chatbot at an unbelievable price! We’re providing amazing capabilities, detailed analytics, and smooth customer experiences at the lowest price.

Reach your customers on a platform they love and take your business to the next level, with the help of your very own WhatsApp bot.

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

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4 powerful ways your business can benefit from WhatsApp marketing was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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When Artificial Intelligence (AI) became viable for enterprises, it was only a matter of time before businesses turned to AI-powered IVAs and Chatbots as smarter conversational solutions to meet the ever-growing customer expectation.

Earlier, customers struggled to interact efficiently with brands. There were few pain points like long wait times, inefficient customer service, lack of personalization, etc. But now, the customer experience landscape tells a surprisingly different story. Innovations in artificial intelligence have changed the way businesses used to communicate with their customers.

According to Accenture’s Global Consumer Pulse survey, 23% of US consumers said that their expectations from customer service are now higher than a year ago, and they are expecting faster customer service with more digital options. In contrast to this evolution in digital communication, businesses are preferring to adopt cognitive AI technologies to uphold the transforming standards of customer service and engagements.

Today, many businesses seek to join the AI revolution. Genesys predicted that 60% of U.S. companies will be using AI by 2022.

Why? Because not only have they seen the results of a poor customer service experience, but the fear of losing the market to AI-enabled competitors is a critical factor for business survival.

But, before any business can adopt and implement AI-powered virtual assistants or AI chatbots, this is something to think about:

Why do you need an What can AI chatbots be used for? Or What problems will it solve for your business?What type of customers is your chatbot for?AI chatbot?

Once you know the requirements, feasibility, and your target customers for AI Chatbot, it’s time to start thinking about the best use-cases. Picking the right use-cases for an AI chatbot increases the efficiency of customer service teams and the overall success of AI-enabled customer experience.

In terms of AI chatbot methodology, a Use Case is an action that can be modeled, handled, and accomplished through a conversational interaction between the bot and the user.

Before we talk further about picking the best use cases for an AI chatbot, let’s recap the basics.

What is a Use Case?

Tracking the status of an order is a typical example of a use case for e-commerce.

While creating appropriate use cases, it is important to identify business aspects of the flow, exceptions, and technical limitations. This process requires the contribution of the whole project team including the project manager, business/product representatives, and developers.

Identifying & designing the first few Use Cases might take up some time for the project team initially, but once a process template is established, it doesn’t take more than 4–6 hours to design the whole set of best-suited use cases unique to a business.

We know that the use cases will vary for businesses and may require industry-specific extensive research. Therefore, a strategic approach to choosing the best use-cases for your AI chatbot is the first step.

Trending Bot Articles:

1. How Conversational AI can Automate Customer Service

2. Automated vs Live Chats: What will the Future of Customer Service Look Like?

3. Chatbots As Medical Assistants In COVID-19 Pandemic

4. Chatbot Vs. Intelligent Virtual Assistant — What’s the difference & Why Care?

Steps to choose the right use-case for an AI Chatbot

While choosing the best AI chatbot use cases for your business, assessment of your organization’s technical capabilities becomes of utmost importance. Once you analyze your requirement to adopt and implement an intelligent AI chatbot, you need to look out for these key steps that can help you decide on the best possible solutions.

For example:

Customer Service: “The average resolution time is reduced to 45 sec because customers now have access to the relevant information through AI chatbots”.

The first step in choosing the best use case is to determine what ROI means for your business. This calculation is based on the unique needs of your business in the context of both brand value and industry reputation. In simple terms, you should have a track of the returns of your AI Chatbot.

Financial Services: “Users struggling to find relevant information or perform specific tasks in their insurance portal. Improving the customer experience with an AI-powered conversational interface will save hours of work for businesses.

Hence, it makes sense to start automating the repetitive processes with an AI chatbot that drives higher ROI. Also, it is crucial to have clear KPIs to constantly monitor the performance of your AI chatbot from an investment perspective. Eventually, when you can describe your ROI in one sentence, you should know that your approach is working.

The next step is defining your target audience. However, you need to research the following W’s to identify your correct user persona:

• Who are they?
• What do they expect?
• What are their preferred languages?
• What are their pain points?
• How is their experience with AI chatbots?

By having clear answers to these questions, you will be able to build tailored use-cases for your AI chatbot that matches the expectations of your target audience.

It is important to keep in mind that we are building a chatbot for real users trying to accomplish concrete tasks. Depending on the user group that is targeted, the chatbot would have a very specific persona. For example, building a chatbot to help sales representatives in their daily tasks (e.g. updating meeting details, creating new opportunities in the CRM…) is not the same user persona as building a chatbot to help finance teams manage their cost centers.

Next, it’s time to decide how your AI chatbot will interact with your customers. In simple terms, the next step is to determine the personality of your chatbot.

For Example: Siri or Alexa, have a well-defined inbuilt personality to make the interaction user-friendly and engaging.

Similarly, to decide on the best chatbot personality while communicating to customers, here are some of the key aspects that need to be considered by businesses looking forward to adopting AI chatbots:

• Who is the name and character of your chatbot? (neutral, formal/informal).
• What is its avatar? (If any)
• What languages, tone, vocabularies, does it use?
• What capabilities would the user expect your chatbot to have?
• What are you trying to achieve with the help of AI chatbots?

The efficiency of an AI chatbot is directly related to the way it starts, transits, and closes a conversation. Although the use cases can be different across industries, your AI chatbot should be domain-independent when it comes to delivering a superior customer experience.

AI Chatbot Use Cases for Business

While we know how to pick the best AI chatbot use case, let’s take a look at these common chatbot use cases across different industries:

Customer Service:

• Instant answer to customer queries
• Handling common repetitive questions
• Guiding visitors through their journey
• Payment Processing
• Collect customer feedback

Healthcare:

• Collect patient information
• Book consultations
• Schedule tests and diagnosis
• Healthcare Tips and Safety Guidelines
• Report Generation

Retail:

• Lead generation
• Order management
• Product delivery
• FAQs
• Instant buy option

Finance:

• Answer finance-related queries
• Troubleshoot account related issues
• Process online payments
• Generate leads by engaging visitors
• Detect Fraudulent transactions

Key Capabilities AI Chatbots Should Have

1. Sentiment Analysis: An AI chatbot helps you peruse extensive datasets and continues to build its own knowledge base. Powered with the Sentiment Analysis feature, AI chatbots help businesses understand the behavioral patterns of their customers and detect customer sentiments while addressing their issues. This helps chatbots respond with empathy and keep the conversation more human.

2. Intent Prediction: One of the key significance of AI chatbots is to predict the intent of the user during the conversation. The NLP algorithms at the back end process the user’s query in addition to the underlying trained data which enables the chatbots to understand the user intent and sail the conversation accordingly.

3. Omnichannel Communication: To drive higher ROI, businesses can leverage AI chatbots to automate customer interactions across a wide range of customer-facing digital touchpoints and help divert queries seamlessly to live agents without any break-in the conversation experience.

4. ISAT Calculation Capability: Intelligence Satisfaction score is calculated by taking a deep dive into the conversations handled by an AI chatbot, identifying the ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ chats, and analyzing what use cases were efficiently handled by the chatbots. It helps businesses gather insights on the overall performance of an AI-powered customer journey and drive ROI at scale.

Wrap Up

To pick up the best use cases for an AI chatbot, businesses can adopt different strategic approaches when it comes to deploying AI-powered technologies. A simple, generic chatbot may not deliver superior CX due to limited capabilities; however, an AI-powered chatbot can help your business increase customer engagements significantly. Also, an efficient AI Chatbot should not be confined to a single use case but to expand and add more, in an attempt to deliver the best solutions for industry-wise business use cases. With the increasing adoption of powerful AI technologies and evolving customer expectations, finding and designing the best-tailored use cases for AI chatbots is now an imperative and essential element of the customer service strategy.

Interested to explore more or want to try out a chatbot of your own?

GET IN TOUCH

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

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Choosing Best Use-Cases For Your Chatbot was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Every year, nearly 20 million students enroll in universities across the United States. Given how important the choice of a college can be for a person’s academic and professional career, students understandably have a lotof questions about majors, eligibility, tuition, campus life, faculty, and more, while going through the process of selecting a university. And as universities compete to get on board students who are the right ‘fit’, it is important for them to not only provide the right answers to prospective students’ queries but also to effectively communicate precisely what they have to offer.

Colleges invest a lot of time and resources in engaging with prospective students — with US universities spending billions of dollars annually on admissions. But the COVID-19 pandemic has thrown open new challenges for universities, as they now have to find ways to engage with students at a time when in-person interactions, including visits to university campuses and college fairs, will likely not be possible.

The good news is that there’s a solution to this problem — a proven technology that has already helped organizations across the globe automate customer engagement at scale through personalized human-like interactions.

Two words. Conversational AI.

Here are four reasons why your university should implement a Conversational AI solution to give a much-needed boost to your admissions process during this challenging time.

Resolve Routine Queries End-to-End

“I want to know about majors”, “How do I get started with my application?”, “What are the tuition fees for this program?”– these are some of the common queries you will be getting on a daily basis. Your support staff and admissions officers will have to manually answer these questions over and over again on phone calls or over e-mail. And given the sheer volume of queries that you will be receiving on these mediums, especially in the absence of in-person discussions and events, it will be extremely difficult, if not impossible, for your staff to handle all of them properly.

This is where Conversational AI comes to the rescue. An AI-powered Intelligent Virtual Assistant can resolve these routine queries and FAQs end-to-end, with no human intervention required. And it does so in an engaging, conversational manner that simulates the experience of speaking to a human being and getting personalized attention.

As you can see in the examples above, the AI Assistant answers the student’s questions about majors, and can also direct him to relevant sections of the website or other additional resources if required. It also guides the student with regard to the university’s application process.

Conversational AI thus enables your university to scale up its ability to offer support to prospective students, while also freeing up your human staff and allowing them to focus on more complex tasks that require their attention.

This reduced dependency on your human support staff is also very helpful at a time when many of them will be unable to make it to work, or face logistical difficulties that may arise from working remotely.

Trending Bot Articles:

1. How Conversational AI can Automate Customer Service

2. Automated vs Live Chats: What will the Future of Customer Service Look Like?

3. Chatbots As Medical Assistants In COVID-19 Pandemic

4. Chatbot Vs. Intelligent Virtual Assistant — What’s the difference & Why Care?

Be Available Round-the-Clock

Conversational AI makes it possible for your university to engage with students 24/7.The AI Assistant instantly responds to their queries and offers them the support that they require at any time, day or night.

Being able to provide students with quick and timely answers is a great way to keep them engaged and ensure a positive experience, by preventing the frustration that could arise from not being able to get hold of a human agent in time. The 24/7 availability of an AI Assistant is particularly useful when it comes to engaging with international students across time-zones.

Offer a Virtual Campus Tour

Picking a college is of course, not just about majors or eligibility for a program. The campus plays a major role in this decision for any student — understandably so, given that they will be spending a major chunk of the next four lives of their lives there! The beauty and aesthetic appeal of college campuses is certainly a factor, as is the infrastructure and facilities available.

It is for this reason that many students visit campuses for a tour while in the process of selecting colleges. Unfortunately, such physical campus tours may not be possible in the near future due to COVID-19. But even under normal circumstances, there may be students (particularly international students) who will find it difficult to make the trip.

With an AI Assistant, you can offer a virtual campus tour to interested students. Through photos and videos, a student can explore the campus and get a feel for the place, as well as learn about its amenities and attractions. The assistant serves as a virtual ‘campus tour guide’, answering students’ questions about the campus and its facilities, interesting facts and trivia, and more.

It may not be quite the same as actually being there, but it’s certainly the next best thing you can offer your prospective students!

Facilitate Personal Interactions

While Conversational AI can do wonders, ultimately, a prospective student would, at some point in the process, like to speak to an admission counselor, an existing student, or even a faculty member.

Fortunately, an AI Assistant can help with that as well.

A good Conversational AI platform would include anAgent Chattool, which can seamlessly transfer a conversation from the AI Assistant to a human agent.

So, if a prospective student asks to speak to an admissions counselor, and a counselor is available, he/she can take over the conversation and have a ‘live chat’ with the student.

Similarly, a student can use the assistant to learn about the faculty members associated with various programs and majors of the university and request a ‘live chat’ with them to get a better understanding of the programs. They might also want to chat with existing students in order to get an insider’s perspective of life at your university and a ‘feel’ for the kind of peers they can expect to meet there.

Of course, it may not always be possible for these stakeholders to be available for a live chat. But you can offer students the option of scheduling a phone call or video call with a counselor, faculty member or student representative through the AI Assistant.

These conversations will not only help with your efforts to engage prospective students (particularly those who are seriously considering applying to your university) but will actually go a long way towards influencing their decision to apply to your university, as well as decide which programs or majors to apply to.

To sum up

Choosing a university is an important decision for any student, which makes it crucial for universities to be effective in showcasing what they can offer, and helping them with the information they need to make an informed choice. Conversational AI enables your university to do this at scale, instantly and round-the-clock, while also reducing your dependency on human support staff.

Apart from boosting your engagement efforts during a challenging time, there can be no better way to position yourself as a tech-savvy university of the future than by making an AI Assistant your virtual ambassador!

Want to develop an Intelligent Virtual Assistant solution for your brand?

GET IN TOUCH

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

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4 Ways Conversational AI Can Help Your University was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How to Build a Chatbot from a Chatbot Template — A detailed guide.

Software is not always hard to build. Chatbots are an example! This is why companies are increasingly adopting its use, and it is predicted that by 2021, $5 billion will be invested in chatbots. If you’re wondering how to build a chatbot, you’re at the right place. Building a chatbot is pretty straightforward with a no-code chatbot building platform, but that’s just the technical aspect of it. For chatbots to enhance customer engagement, you need creativity too.

So how to build a chatbot that is engaging with its text and bound to qualify your leads? Chatbots are marketing tools; hence, conversations on chatbots need to be strategic. You have to ensure a conversational outcome that will enhance your sales in the near run, and chatbot templates facilitate just that.

WotNot has numerous templates that you can use for different business scenarios. Let me guide you through the process of building a chatbot on WotNot using a template.

How to build a chatbot using a chatbot template?

Let’s get started!

First, go to the WotNot home page and click on ‘Try for free.’

Register for free on WotNot’s code-free bot builder. Once your account is created, you can go to the bot builder on the left side’s navigation panel, as shown below.

After going to the bot builder, you click on ‘build a bot.’ You will get two options; either to build a bot from scratch or to build using a template. Click on ‘build from a template’ as shown below:

You will further get an option on where you want to deploy your chatbot- on the web, on Facebook, or WhatsApp. Click on the channel you want to deploy your bot to. Here, for example, let’s build for Web.

Once clicked, you will be loaded to the range of free chatbot templates offered by WotNot!

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1. How Conversational AI can Automate Customer Service

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3. Chatbots As Medical Assistants In COVID-19 Pandemic

4. Chatbot Vs. Intelligent Virtual Assistant — What’s the difference & Why Care?

Now let me guide you through the process of how to build a chatbot with four simple steps!

Step 1: Choose your template

Firstly, determine the motive of your chatbot. Is it to generate leads? Is it to book appointments? Is it to provide customer support? It largely depends on the industry you’re in. WotNot offers a range of free chatbot templates. You can choose an insurance chatbot template, eCommerce chatbot template, real estate chatbot template, etc.

Once you have figured out what you wish you accomplish, you can select your template. For the sake of this example, let us take a look at a schedule visit template for a real estate developer.

Step 2: Edit the template

Once you click on ‘use this template,’ you will be directed to WotNot’s bot builder with in-built script blocks for scheduling property visits.

Using drag and drop and connecting nodes, you can create a chatbot conversational flow and customize the template. Don’t forget to add details of your company such as:

• Your company name
• Property information such as images/addresses/phone numbers etc.
• A brief introduction to your property
• Attaching company brochure

If you want to add few more blocks in between or even want to remove certain blocks, you are free to do so.

While editing, you can also edit the bot to create enticing conversations using WotNot’s carousels, buttons, messages, and collect input features.

Step 3: Preview your creation.

You’re almost there! After adding your desired features, you can click on ‘preview’ in the top right corner.

Preview will show you what your bot will look like to the visitors. So, go ahead and have fun with it. Look for errors and check whether your bot fulfills your purpose. Keep editing till you’re content with it.

Remember to end the conversations by initiating some kind of action from the visitor’s end. The preview will look as shown in the picture below:

Step 4:Ready to Deploy!

Once you are satisfied with your bot, you can click on the ‘deploy’ button, which is right next to the ‘preview’ button.

Deploying your bot to your website is simple. You click on ‘channel configuration’ on the navigation panel on the left side. By clicking on ‘appearance,’ you can also change your bot’s look, including the background colour, header logo, header text, and Chat interface position.

To deploy the bot, you click on ‘configuration’ in the Web drop-down bar. You can add the URL of the site you want to deploy your bot to in the Website URL bar and then copy the snippet circled below and paste it before the <body> tag on every page of your website.

The process is as easy as it can get. Just like how you made a chatbot for real estate, you can build an insurance chatbot using insurance using a free chatbot template for insurance which facilitates lead generation for insurance policies. You can also build a chatbot for an eCommerce site using an eCommerce chatbot template for customer support that helps with tracking online orders, returning products, and speaking with a human representative.

Like how you built a chatbot for the Web, you can also learn how to build a chatbot for other platforms on multiple platforms like Facebook and WhatsApp. Overall, remember to modify the template according to your brand image. It’s often not just the conversation that works but also matching sentiments to the brand and using a personalized tone. You need to aim at more value with a limited conversation.

Obviously, your bot will need to be updated with its use. It depends on what your visitors ask and what answers they need. But these free chatbot templates are an excellent introduction to all the benefits chatbots have to offer. Chatbot flow templates can save you time, give you an idea of developing scripts in the future, and increase your qualified leads. Now that you have a ready infrastructure with WotNot’s no-code chatbot building platform and the right chatbot conversation flow template, you really have no excuse not to try this out!

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

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How to Build a Chatbot from a Chatbot Template — A detailed guide — WotNot was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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If there is a silver lining somewhere with the COVID-19 pandemic engulfing the globe, it’s that we have been forced to introspect on the healthcare sector, both public and private, and whether it has the tools it needs — not only to deal with such crises, but to ensure the best possible healthcare outcomes even under normal circumstances.

There can be no substitute for the inspiring efforts of doctors, medics and other healthcare providers, as the current crisis has demonstrated. But technology can play a key complementary role, enabling them to focus their energies more effectively, and amplifying the impact of their work.

Conversational AI has proven to be highly beneficial to a number of sectors. Chatbots and virtual assistants offer a seamless and engaging conversational interface that boosts the speed, efficiency, and accuracy of key business functions, as well as significantly enhancing end-user experience. All of this can be tremendously beneficial to the healthcare industry as well.

Based on Haptik’s experience of designing and implementing Intelligent Virtual Assistant (IVA) solutions for a number of healthcare providers, we have identified two use cases in particular for which the technology can be implemented with relative ease, and help medical professionals treat their patients with even greater efficiency and care.

Information Dissemination

The COVID-19 pandemic has reinforced a lesson that we’ve always known but often forget — the only things that spread faster than infections during a healthcare crisis are misinformation and panic. But even during normal circumstances, inaccurate or false information about health or disease-related issues causes harm to individuals and communities. This either prevents them from making the right decisions or actively encourages them to make the wrong ones.

The need to educate people about the facts behind a particular health-related issue, and to undo the damage caused by misinformation, does place an additional burden on medical professionals. A powerful tool for disseminating accurate and essential information to those who need it would definitely be a great asset, and that’s where Conversational AI can help.

An AI Assistant can answer common queries and FAQs related to a particular disease, health condition or epidemic. It can raise awareness about a specific health-related concern or crisis by offering swift access to accurate, reliable and timely information. All this in an engaging, easy-to-use conversational manner, across a range of digital platforms including websites, social media, messaging apps etc.

At Haptik, we’ve already witnessed the success of this tech-driven conversational approach to raising public health awareness. We recently collaborated with the Government of India to develop the MyGov Corona Helpdesk — a WhatsApp chatbot to answer a wide range of queries about the COVID-19 pandemic, including symptoms and transmission, preventive measures, official government helplines, and more.

Within the first 48 hours of its implementation, the MyGov Corona Helpdesk processed over 5 million conversations from users across the country.

The choice of WhatsApp as a platform was a key factor in ensuring the wide reach of this solution, given that WhatsApp is the world’s largest messaging platform, with over 400 million users in India alone.

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1. How Conversational AI can Automate Customer Service

2. Automated vs Live Chats: What will the Future of Customer Service Look Like?

3. Chatbots As Medical Assistants In COVID-19 Pandemic

4. Chatbot Vs. Intelligent Virtual Assistant — What’s the difference & Why Care?

LEARN MORE:Haptik Develops WhatsApp Chatbot for Government of India to Raise COVID-19 Awareness

So it’s clear that an AI Assistant can be a force-multiplier to any awareness initiative, particularly when it is deployed on the right platform and easily accessible by its target audience (which, in the case of the COVID-19 pandemic, is everyone.)

In the long term, Conversational AI can serve as a virtual ‘healthcare consultants’ at any point in time — answering questions that millions of people across the globe have about major and minor health-related issues on a daily basis. It can also help them make more informed decisions about seeking further care. In this regard, a conversation with an AI Assistant would efficiently substitute the initial phone call you might make to your doctor to discuss your concerns, before making an in-person appointment.

Customer Care

When we talk about the healthcare sector, we aren’t referring solely to medical professionals such as doctors, nurses, medics etc. but also to administrative staff at hospitals, clinic and other healthcare facilities. They might be overtaxed at the best of times with the sheer volume of inquiries and questions they need to field on a daily basis. During a crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic, the situation can become almost unmanageable.

Enterprises have successfully leveraged AI Assistants to automate the response to FAQs and the resolution of routine, repetitive tasks. A well-designed conversational assistant can reduce the need for human intervention in such tasks by as much as 80%! This enables firms to significantly scale up their customer support capacity, be available to offer 24/7 assistance, and allow their human support staff to focus on more critical tasks.

The healthcare sector can certainly benefit tremendously from such AI-driven customer care automation. In fact, Haptik has worked with several healthcare brands to implement such solutions — one of the most successful examples being our work with a leading diagnostics chain, Dr. LalPathLabs.

Haptik’s AI Assistant, deployed on the Dr. LalPathLabs website, provided round-the-clock resolution to a range of patient queries. It facilitated a seamless booking experience by offering information about nearby test centers, and information on available tests and their pricing. It also provided instant responses to queries regarding the status of test reports. The latter was particularly important from a customer experience standpoint, given that there is understandably a lot of anxiety that surrounds an impending test report, which makes a swift response all the more appreciated.

The assistant we implemented for Dr. LalPathLabs interacted with over 400,000 customers within a few months of going live, and received an overwhelmingly positive response from users. Watch the video below to learn more about it:

Transforming Access to Healthcare

The two aforementioned examples highlight how healthcare providers can leverage Conversational AI as a powerful tool for information dissemination and customer care automation. But we’ve barely started to grasp the true transformative impact of this technology on the healthcare sector.

We’ve already discussed how AI Assistants can evolve into the first point of contact for patients seeking primary care, which would significantly reduce the burden on medical practitioners and allow them to focus their efforts towards patients with more serious concerns. This is a paradigm shift that would be particularly useful when human resources are spread thin during a healthcare crisis.

A concern that has been expressed when it comes to Conversational AI in healthcare is that it lacks one of the key attributes of a human healthcare provider — empathy. There is some truth in that, and no one can argue that AI Assistants should replace human doctors and nurses entirely!

LEARN MORE:How a Chatbot Can Help Your Healthcare Business

However, Conversational AI will get better at simulating empathy over time, encouraging individuals to speak freely about their health-related issues (sometimes more freely than they would with a human being). Woebot, a chatbot therapist developed by a team of Stanford researchers, is a successful example of this.

Accenture predicts that Conversational AI can save as much as $150 billion a year for the healthcare industry by 2026! So even from a purely dollars-and-cents standpoint, it makes sense for enterprises in this sector to invest in AI Assistants.

A time of crisis can also be a time of opportunity. In the midst of this unprecedented global pandemic, we now have a golden opportunity to appreciate the potential of new and emergent technologies to truly add value to our businesses, our health, and our lives.

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Conversational AI in Healthcare: 2 Key Use Cases was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Natural Language Processing(NLP) and Natural Language Understanding(NLU), along with other technologies like big data analytics form the core part for providing great Conversational experiences.

Though these technologies have been there for many years, it is only recently that they have obtained the level of accuracy for being adopted by people.

In this article, we will understand how important NLP and NLU are across all of your customer service channels. But first, let us have a basic discussion about the customer service channels and the technologies we are talking about: NLP and NLU.

Understanding the different Customer Service Channels

Different customer service channels refer to the different mediums in which your customers can engage with you to solve their problems.

Phone calls, live chats, and ticket systems are some of the basic examples. However, other forms of channels like Emails, Knowledge bases, forums too provide great help.

The knowledge bases and forums don’t necessarily need to be manually accessed by your customers though, you can use conversational bots that get content from then and serve to the customer (more on this later!)

Another channel that is getting popular lately is social media and also messaging apps like Whatsapp to stay in touch with customers! As you may have predicted, those use conversational experiences.

Trending Bot Articles:

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3. Chatbots As Medical Assistants In COVID-19 Pandemic

4. Chatbot Vs. Intelligent Virtual Assistant — What’s the difference & Why Care?

NLU and NLP Explained

Natural language understanding and natural language processing are very much related and have slight differences. If we talk about NLU vs NLP, one is concerned more about understanding the semantics and correcting the mistakes of natural languages while the other is concerned regarding understanding the entities in the language and splitting the sentences into tokens, etc…

While they might be rule-based initially, many recent versions of NLU and NLP technologies are increasingly being reliant on Machine learning, which are basically statistical models that learn to do all of the things by themselves without manually providing all the logic when large amounts of training data is given to them.

For once, let us think that you have no NLP & NLU across any customer service channels. Much of everything would have to be done manually by your customers. They need to solve their problem by themselves through Knowledge bases or by helping each other out through forums. When they are not able to solve the problem, you need to have dedicated staff personnel for live chat, forums and also answer raised tickets. This would be very costly and is also inefficient.

How NLP and NLU help to improve your Customer Service Channels

Rapid response

A customer service chatbot that is powered by NLP and NLU works really fast and can generate responses quickly! No more waiting for any customer service personnel to take up the request and solve it.

Localization

Today’s technology in NLP and NLU helps to provide conversational experiences in various languages. Not only a literal plain translation, but they would also translate the sentences in a way so that the original intent and tone of the statement do not change. With this, you can achieve a reasonable localization out of the box!

Sentiment analysis

Conversational experiences powered by NLP and NLU are not only able to understand the general meaning of what customers say but also their emotions. With sentiment analysis, your chatbots can clearly understand how the users feel about the service, and by analyzing many instances, they can provide general insights about the efficacy of the customer service.

Integrate knowledge from various sources

There are a lot of sources where useful knowledge exists for customers. Take knowledge bases and forums for instance. With your chatbot readily having access to them, it can easily fetch data that might be or might not be asked directly by the user.

Personalization

Chatbots do not only have immediate information regarding the customer but a pool of big data regarding you. With this information, it can easily determine what you need and tailor the entire experience in a way that suits you.

Less cost and low number of employees

Although you have to spend certain time and money on initial training, which is sometimes challenging, in the long run, virtual assistants cost fairly less than employing a high number of people for doing the same tasks.

Another main thing to consider is the varying volume of requests. In the traditional sense, if you hire employees, they are fixed and if an unusually high volume of requests come, they can’t handle and if a very low volume of requests come, they sit idle.

Virtual assistant software can easily work with any kind of volume: they scale up fastly when there is a huge need. With this, there would not be any kind of worrying about the volume!

Help customer service staff to perform better

Even Though the NLP and NLU enabled virtual conversational agents are very powerful, there would be some cases in which they cannot solve the whole issue. In that scenario too they would be useful.

The way they help is to present a complete picture of the problem to your customer service agent. That includes details of the conversation, sentiment analysis, and also, all of the appropriate data regarding the customer.

Along with them, there would be many other use cases for NLP in your customer service channels.

Final Words

Recent developments in NLP and NLU along with general artificial intelligence and machine learning have taken them to a level that is highly usable and economical.

Implementing AI-enabled conversational experiences in all your customer service channels provide a great advantage through rapid response, personalization and localization, integration of various sources of knowledge, and more.

In all senses, NLP and NLU provide great advantages in all customer service channels including Emails, Live Chat, Social media platforms, and others.

There are also a lot of platforms and NLP services that provide you out-of-the-box tools that you can easily use to develop your own conversational experiences that satisfy your needs.

Do this and improve customer service engagement and provide an overall positive customer service experience!

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

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Importance of NLP & NLU Across All Customer Service Channels was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.