Author: Franz Malten Buemann

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Does adding customers to your business matter to you?

Pop Quiz, which company on the planet has the most number of customers? It’s everywhere. Yeah, that’s the Ad pitch/slogan for the company. Its Visa. With 302 million customers, it’s towering above the next largest one which is Apple iTunes with 225 million customers.

Does business growth, revenue, and brand depend on the number of customers an organization has? Of course, it does. The more customers you reach the more robust is the moat you build for your business. So if your organization has to grow large and accumulate a lot of customers and build a moat that is impenetrable around your business, you need to start acquiring more customers.

The top dollar every company spends on is customer acquisition. That’s because business survival, growth, stakeholder satisfaction, and market influence are all dependent on the number of customers who use your products or services.

What do Visa and iTunes have to do with automation and your company? I’m sure you are always focused on growing your business and acquiring new customers. So how do you grow your customer base? Where do you find customers in large numbers?

As even the most traditional of businesses go digital due to the pandemic and the lockdowns, creating an interactive digital presence and getting on board with the digital economy is a do-or-die task for businesses.

How would you create amazing experiences while you move your business online, grow it to have a primary digital presence, or just expand it limitless on the digital superhighway?

Imagine having a storefront in a mall that billions of people visit and spend 38 mins in on a daily basis. Wouldn’t you like to capture that traffic by having a brand presence there?‍

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?

Accessing a third of humanity

There is an accessible set of almost a third of humanity on one platform that is used by 2 billion+ people and has users in 180 countries.

Here is why WhatsApp represents an opportunity for businesses to grow exponentially and leverage a platform that is used globally

• 100 billion messages are sent daily
• An average user uses WhatsApp for 38 mins a day
• 600 million users downloaded it last year itself
• WhatsApp supports 60 languages
• The pandemic has seen usage increase by 40%

How do you leverage your business on this ubiquitous platform to acquire new customers, scale your operations and serve more customers for less? Going digital is imperative and opening your storefront on WhatsApp, leveraging automation with the WhatsApp Business API will be a very powerful way to get started on adopting digital in your business mix and you will be surprised to see Customer Acquisition Costs and Service Costs drop by 98% over traditional costs when you do so.‍

What can I do with my business on WhatsApp?

The short answer? Almost everything. When you use Engati and the WhatsApp Business API to deploy a WhatsApp bot, you can get leads, run a store, let customers order and pay for their purchases, answer customer queries, provide customer support, and much more. And guess what’s the best part?

If you sell digital products then it’s truly based on automation and absolutely no human intervention is required, artificial intelligence and machine learning would pretty much take care of everything. If you are selling non-digital products, only the fulfillment aspect of the order would need to be handled by humans.

WhatsApp for Business enables you to run your business on WhatsApp, automation platforms like Engati let you build, grow and support your store using chatbot automation with WhatsApp business tools.

If you really need to scale your store, make your presence global, and be on 24×7 not just for orders but also for queries, service requests, and customer engagement, a WhatsApp chatbot from Engati is the silver bullet you’re looking for.

What is WhatsApp automation?

WhatsApp automation is all about using intelligent WhatsApp chatbots to send automated messages to your customers and even have entire conversations with them. Companies use WhatsApp bots to interact with customers at scale, making sure that all their customers get instant replies, even outside of office hours.

It’s all about reaching your customers on the messaging apps that they prefer using, and since they open WhatsApp 23 times a day, it’s the perfect messaging app to engage your customers over.

You can even use live chat along with WhatsApp automation so that your agents can handle the complex queries that come in and your customers don’t have to shift from the bot to call your customer support team or even write an email. They can get in touch with your customer support agents right over WhatsApp without needing to change platforms, which means that you are creating a seamless experience for your customers.Instead of having to write an entire email, get on a call, or even have to load up your website and navigate through it, your customers can get all their queries answered in just a few clicks and a couple of messages when you use WhatsApp chatbot automation and live chat.‍

Can I scale my business without limits?

Yes, you can. It is automation technology so set it up once, (it comes pre-connected with the WhatsApp Business API and integrated with standard software for CRM, billing, payments, etc for you to get going quickly) and use it again and again. The most exciting part of the solution, you don’t have to ramp up hiring to manage a growing business, the platform scales as your business evolves, allowing you to automate your business processes with WhatsApp bots.

To be continued…

Now that we have gotten you interested in how organizations around the world are expanding rapidly into the WhatsApp automation space, stay tuned for our Part 2 in the series of how do you exploit a WhatsApp chatbot to your benefit at a cost factor that is peanuts compared to what you spend today.

This article about “How can WhatsApp automation help grow your business for $5 per day?” was originally published in Engati blogs.

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

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How can WhatsApp automation help grow your business for $5 per day? was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Making Patient Experience Better and Helping Healthcare have PSAT Patient Satisfaction Using Conversational AI

Evolving Omnipresence Of AI Chatbots In Healthcare

Industry insiders have predicted exponential growth in the Healthcare AI Market, which is expected to reach USD 45.2 Billion by 2026 from USD 4.9 Billion recorded in 2020. The evolving omnipresence of intelligent medical AI Chatbots is only a reflection of this rather speedy progress.

Highlights:

• Role of Healthcare Conversational AI…What Do They Do?
• How Medical AI Chatbots Improve Patient Experience
• Anonymity
• 24/7 Availability
• Personalized Experience and Symptom Reading
• Booking Appointments
• Connecting with Healthcare Providers on Emergencies
• Managing and Tracking Insurance
• Offering Mental Health Assistance
• Reduced Wait Time and Saving Money
• Feedbacks

So, what exactly are AI Chatbots? Going by the simplest definition, they are little chat bubbles that pop up on the screen of your computers / mobile devices when you visit a website for information. Mimicking human conversations, these bots are designed to offer essential information on commonly asked questions and connect users to relevant personnel in case of emergencies.

AI chatbots in healthcare, however, do much more than answer basic queries. With improving sophistication in AI technology, they have become critically essential components in saving time and resources on part of healthcare providers and more importantly, maximizing patient experience in their interaction with the former.

“Fact Check: Did you know, Health care is among the top 5 industries that derive maximum benefits from Chatbots. Statistically stable at 75% usage, it is preceded by E-Commerce and Insurance; and followed by retail and hospitality.”

Role of Healthcare Conversational AI…What Do They Do?

The key role of chatbot technology in healthcare is to connect healthcare providers, patients, and insurance companies seamlessly with minimum human interventions. An idea is to automate repetitive processes while saving time and revenues without compromising on the overall provider-patient experience.

Making essential information available anytime, anywhere though, is the primary function of conversational AI in healthcare. These intelligent chatbots are programmed to maximize patient engagement (like, remember/scheduling appointments, booking consultations, follow-up with insurance providers, etc.), a service that is expected to save USD 2–5 million annually in favor of medium to large emergency departments.

“Fact Check: Did you know; Healthcare industry can save about USD 150 billion with medical AI chatbots?”

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?

How Medical AI Chatbots Improve Patient Experience

Statistically speaking, healthcare conversational AI has a satisfaction rate of 73%… a figure that is expected to soar with more sophisticated personalization features waiting to be implemented in future applications.

Existing chatbot solutions for healthcare, however, have been very successful in enhancing patient experience in many different ways…

Anonymity

Patients are observed to be more open with chatbots while revealing their symptoms and other critical information than with their human counterparts. The advantage of anonymity helps tremendously when it comes to getting help for sensitive cases.

24/7 Availability

Healthcare chatbots are available round clock for just about any informational and scheduling services that patients may require. Minimized dependence on human intervention/communication for routine services has been a big plus-point for later.

Personalized Experience and Symptom Reading

Chatbots in healthcare are programmed to remember and store patient details and provide critical health information instantly. They can read and understand symptoms, tally the same with medical records as entered by respective patients, and offer accurate next-step guidance.

“Fact Check: Did you know, ELIZA was the first healthcare chatbot that was used in 1966!”

Booking Appointments

Booking appointments or making alterations to existing schedules is often a one-click affair with chatbots. It saves ample time, energy, and funds on the part of patients, especially for those who are semi or non-ambulatory.

Connecting with Healthcare Providers on Emergencies

Days of dialing numbers and waiting for someone to answer from the other end during emergencies are practically over with AI chatbot technology in healthcare. These intelligent bots can connect users with the right healthcare providers quickly and efficiently. Peripheral requirements for admission etc. can also be addressed by chatbots.

Managing and Tracking Insurance

Accessing health covers, premium payment management, filing claims, and tracking status of the same are included among core features of advanced healthcare and conversational AI solutions. Timely reminders and updates on existing health insurance policies have contributed to maximizing the self-responsibility of patients while enhancing their app usage experience phenomenally.

Offering Mental Health Assistance

Conversational AI in healthcare has been instrumental in offering dependable mental health assistance to thousands of patients globally. Programmed to mimic human conversations, these bots can understand and read anxiety levels in patients and offer humanized experiences through empathetic conversations.

Reduced Wait Time and Saving Money

This is one of the best-liked features of AI medical chatbots, in the opinion of users worldwide. No queues, no uncertainties, no traveling all the way to healthcare centers to schedule appointments, no manual follow-ups for treatments, insurance, etc.; the amount of time and money saved by patients through healthcare chatbots is rather exemplary.

Feedbacks

Feedbacks are important when it comes to helping healthcare facilities improve their services. More often than not, manual feedback solutions through paper or e-forms become a hassle for patients. Chatbots, however, can help patients offer valuable feedback by asking highly relevant questions that can be answered with a click.

Final Thoughts

There is no end to patient-friendly features of healthcare conversational AI. In fact, many have used these bots for effective weight management assistance, dental care assistance, and critical prescription refilling as well without having to communicate with live agents.

Global COVID-19 Pandemic has fueled the surge of AI in healthcare in order to reduce human contact as much as possible. Everything from reading symptoms to answering frequently asked questions in seconds has been handled very efficiently by these technological wonders.

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

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Making Patient Experience Better and Helping Healthcare have PSAT Patient Satisfaction Using… was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What are Customer Journey Maps?

Customer journey maps are a visualization method to investigate user experiences. They consist of user personas, user flows, and scenarios based on qualitative and quantitative data. This data can help stakeholders and conversation designers develop empathy for the virtual assistant’s end users.

The practice of mapping creates a deep insight into the industry, brand, competitors, services, products, and users. These dynamic documents need to be updated regularly by engaging stakeholders across the entire enterprise to provide many perspectives. The act of journey mapping demands a shift from multichannel to omnichannel in order for customers to move freely.

By leveraging these journey maps organizations can understand how customers interact with various touchpoints within their customer-facing channels, from websites to apps to conversational solutions. With better understanding comes opportunities to further optimize lead generation, sales funnels, and increased revenue and customer satisfaction. These documents become a prompt for designers to ensure that every step of a journey needs to flow in a natural, frictionless, and efficient way.

The Importance of Journey Mapping in Conversational AI

Customer journey mapping is critical when designing conversational AI experiences. When businesses invest in AI, it’s often added to new conversational channels, becoming the new, more efficient home for existing use cases that may currently require interactions with multiple websites or GUIs. These use cases need to go beyond reducing wait times and automating FAQs to providing adequate support to ensure convenience and meet customer needs. How can we make sure this new solution is better than the current state? By mapping out all steps that customers take along with identifying their goals, motivations, and challenges. This map will become the reference point a conversation designer will use to ensure that whatever they design for the new conversational experience must offer more value, efficiency, fewer steps, and a better customer experience than how users are completing tasks or converting today.

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?

Tips to Utilize When Building Out a Customer Journey Map

The following list is our recommended steps conversation designers should follow when building out your customer journey map:

• Align on project goals before map development.
• Interview a large, diverse set of customers (not just the loyal ones) to understand goals, motivations, pain points, and all steps within the journey.
• Involve internal and external stakeholders to drive changes from journey map analysis and promote buy-in from management.
• The mapping process should result in a list of actionable to drive accountability.
• Leverage collaborative customer journey mapping platforms or templates to add your qualitative and quantitative data. We like UXpressia and Miro.
• Use a prioritization matrix to distribute your resources smartly; start with the most problematic steps in the journey to reduce friction.
• Focus on all stages of interaction (awareness, comparison, purchase, etc.)
• Add key performance indicators to ease the process of decision-making that will inform a conversation designer’s design.
• If optimizing an existing conversational solution, showcase chatbot analytics such as the Net Promoter Score and Customer Satisfaction Scores to identify opportunities for optimization at different stages of each journey.
• Regularly update the journey map with new data.

Example of a customer’s journey ordering a burrito for lunch using an SMS chatbot.

Personalization in Conversational AI

Journey maps also lend themselves well as artifacts used to identify areas for additional personalization in a user experience. Customer data can be captured at different points including personal details, product preferences, questions asked, shopping behavior, and contextual cues from conversations. Everything from utilizing a customer’s name, relaying previous order information, giving real-time updates about account information, or presenting content based on past purchases are all areas where personalization can be leveraged and identified in developing a journey map.

Leveraging Data in Conversational AI

Qualitative research such as user interviews, diary studies, and usability testing deepen understanding of users whereas quantitative research such as data found in analytics and dashboards can help understand customer behavior on existing channels that can be used to inform the design of virtual assistants. Where customers spend their time, on what product or service pages, along with points of dropoff or exits can all inform a journey map and then be used to prioritize use cases for conversational flows. Once a conversational solution is launched, journey mapping must be continued to highlight optimization opportunities.

Final Thoughts

Conversational solutions offer intelligent, personalized, asynchronous experiences that are continuing to gain traction and popularity by consumers. In order for businesses to successfully invest, design, and develop conversational AI experiences, customer journey mapping must be part of the process. It is these artifacts that will ensure user needs are understood and their experiences are optimized and more efficient than how they interact with the brand today. Reach out to us about your project here.

Looking to explore how journey mapping can help your organization?

Let’s connect

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

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The Role of Customer Journey Mapping in Conversational AI 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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How to build AI Chatbot for your business

Understanding the latest technology and how it can help your business goals

The AI Chatbot is no longer a stranger in most sectors. The adoption of this technology accelerated massively since 2016. By 2020, 80 percent of businesses intend to build a chatbot to serve their customers, more so for brands with customer-facing products.

Let’s take a look at some popular benefits of AI Chatbot for businesses:

Always-On
Instead of relying on a large group of 24/7 customer support agents, AI Chatbot is a fantastic way to provide around the clock support if you are serving customers across the globe. This technology allows us to automate repetitive tasks so live agents can assist more complex cases rather than spending most of the time addressing time consuming simple tasks.

“Call centers, websites, and mobile apps are no longer the only means of interaction with brands. Chatbots are fast becoming a business imperative for businesses that want to engage with their customers. Online chat through chatbots has grown faster than any prior channel.”
— Eileen Brown, ZDNet

Higher Conversion
AI Chatbot serves as a great addition to a website, especially for e-commerce. Customers can get quick facts from you in the decision-making process, making the overall buying experience much easier than before. With automation, AI Chatbot helps us to make orders or transactions possible without any human assistance.

“Ironically, a lot of people think that they’ve never used a chatbot, they’ve never experienced it, when in fact they have. Because Siri and Google and Alexa and all those voice-activated speaking bots, if you will, those are actually audio chatbots.”
 — Kelly Noble Mirabella, Spiderworking

High Handling Capacity
From 10 to 100 questions at a time, an AI chatbot can answer them in fast and accurate manner. On top of that, customers who prefer to take their time in the evaluation process can freely ask as many questions as they want without feeling unwelcome.

Data & Insights
A huge advantage of using AI Chatbot is its ability to capture customer behaviour insights accurately. Data gives insights into how consumers interact with brands and products throughout the consumer decision journey. On top of that, other possible information such as demographic data and personal interests help companies learn who their customers are. Successful businesses use these inputs and respond by providing unconventional digital experiences to their customers.

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?

So, how exactly should businesses leverage AI chatbot technology?

There is no shortcut in developing a successful AI Chatbot. Much evaluation and internal engagement are required to determine the success of its implementation.

With the experiences we have gathered as a team, we discovered that the following must be considered ahead:

Set your priorities right
Be goal-oriented in your approach by identifying your business pain points and opportunities. Here’s the most important question businesses should ask themselves before getting started:

“What are you trying to solve?”

Whether it is managing product enquiries or assisting customers to check account balance, a good AI Chatbot focuses on its key tasks. This helps businesses to improve productivity by responding to pain points or opportunities more effectively.

Form realistic expectations
Most businesses expect AI Chatbot to know as much as Wikipedia, and more. That is not what it should be. An AI Chatbot is only as good as what it is trained to do and its knowledge base should be designed around your business and your customer needs. This helps to increase response accuracy on what truly matters. Focus on your user journey flow and keep the conversation within what is relevant. When your AI Chatbot is able to solve 80% of your customers’ needs, it is a winner.

Build one-to-many AI Chatbot
Customers tend to reach out to businesses through various channels from websites to social media platforms. These channels hold different strengths and challenges, which makes building one AI chatbot to fit all an incredibly challenging some time ago. With Meta owning most of the popular platforms such as Whatsapp, Facebook and Instagram, you can now build one that works for most if not all of them. While it is not without limitations imposed by each platform, an attempt at such unified approach can make training and performance tracking much more effective and cohesive for business in the long term.

Expect iteration and training
AI Chatbot can only improve when it gets more unsupervised conversations to learn what is important in serving your customers hence businesses should anticipate the need to train and iterate in the initial stage of the launch. The sooner your AI Chatbot is made available to the public, the faster it can achieve its best performance. Adopting this agile method allows you to identify the market opportunities and respond to it faster than your competitors.

Understand the technology limitations
One of the biggest misconceptions about AI Chatbot is that it can self-learn and improve without human intervention. That is not the case. For most businesses, intelligent and hybrid chatbots need to be developed and trained by humans. Such supervised learning is still essential for accuracy because true machine learning currently requires large amounts data and very few businesses have enough of data to use machine learning meaningfully. Instead of fully relying on your AI Chatbot to run on its own, businesses should always run regular reviews of what it has learned.

“To the user, chatbots seem to be “intelligent” due to their informative skills. However, chatbots are only as intelligent as the underlying database.”
 — Peter Gentsch

Moving beyond customer service

As a small business or large enterprise, AI Chatbot has a role to assist businesses in many ways beyond customer experience. The technology is seen to manage HR matters, business process automation as well as website concierge and assistance.

Throughout the years, we see promising technological advancements in Artificial Intelligence. Chatbot has moved beyond its conventional keyword-based approach to fully relying on Natural Language Processing (NLP) in building conversations.

With AI Chatbots becoming more intelligent, we will see new opportunities where the technology will bring seamless customer communication in small businesses as well as enterprises.

Well, what do you think?

If you are interested to read more about AI Chabot for businesses, here are some write-ups which we find useful:

1. Top 5 Chatbot Misconceptions: What You Should Know
2. 11 Myths You Must Know About Chatbot Implementation and Its Usage
3. 80% of Businesses Want Chatbots By 2020
4. Chatbot Use Cases
5. How NLP plays a role in deciding if your AI Chatbot is good or great

XIMNET is a digital solutions provider with two decades of track records specialising in web application development, AI Chatbot and system integration.

XIMNET is introducing a brand new way of building AI Chatbot with XYAN. Get in touch with us to find out more.

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

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How to build an AI Chatbot for your business was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Creating a chatbot using the free open source Bot Libre chatbot platform

Businesses in today’s world thrive by serving their customers and making sure their clients are satisfied. When it comes to customer service, customers value their time and expect quick responses. Chatbots provide the ideal solution in today 24×7 world to service your customer service on the web, mobile, and social media.

There are many ways to create a chatbot, from using a chatbot platform, to hand coding your own solution. In this article we create a bot using Bot Libre, which is a free open source chatbot platform. Bot Libre makes creating a chatbot and connecting it to the web, mobile, and social media easy. No programming is required, and you can train the bot using natural language.

Here you can learn on how to create your own chat bot in 10 easy steps:

Click 1 — Bot Libre

First go to the Bot Libre website.

Click 2 — Sign Up

You can browse and chat with public bots anonymously, but to create your own bot you must create an account by clicking Sign Up. Creating an account is free and easy. To create an account, one only need to enter a unique user ID and a password. Your name and email are optional, if you wish to remain anonymous, you may do so.

Click 3 — Create Account

Click ‘Sign Up’ to create your account.

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?

Click 4 — Create Bot

To create a new bot click New Bot from browse. You can give your bot a name and description.

The bots you create on Bot Libre belong to you. When you create a bot you can specify the license you wish to share it under.

You can create a bot from the default template, or select one of the other predefined templates. Your bot will start as a clone of the template bot, and replicate its entire memory (brain). You can also fork your own bot, using it as a template to create other bots.

You can add tags to your bot, to help classify it, and help other users find it. Some relevant tags include ‘fun’, ‘business’, ‘help’, and ‘avatar’. The tags are entered as a comma separated list.

You can create either a public bot that will be accessible by other users, or a private bot that will be accessible only by you. You can control the users that can access and administer your bot.

You can choose if you want your bot to learn as it interacts with other users. If you disable learning, then your bot will only learn from its administrator when you ‘correct’ it, from chat logs you upload from the ‘Training & Chat Logs’ page in its ‘Admin Console’, or from AIML and Self scripts you add from the ‘Scripts’ page. Caution should be used in allowing learning, as other users may teach your bot offensive responses. Bot Libre provides a profanity filter, but it cannot catch everything. If you are creating a bot for business, such as for customer service, then you should disable learning.

Click 5 — Create

Click ‘Create’ to create your bot.

That’s it, your done, and we still have 5 clicks left.

You can now chat with you bot by clicking ‘Chat’. To find your bot again click ‘Search’ and search for it in ‘my bots’ (be sure to sign in first).

When you select your bot, you can click ‘Edit Details’ it to change any of its information. You can change your bot’s picture or choose an animated avatar from the ‘Avatars’ page under ‘Admin’. You can also connect your bot to Twitter, Facebook, Telegram, Skype, Slack, Kik, WeChat, email, SMS, Alexa, or Google Assistant.

You can import response lists or chat logs. You can import data from the web and WikiData. You can browse your bot’s knowledge base. If your are technical, you can script your bot using AIML or the Self scripting language.

To link to your bot you can select it and copy its URL from your browser, this is its unique URL, or you can give it its own subdomain. You can also embed your bot on your website or blog, just click on ‘Embed’ and copy the code to your website.

You can also view this video on “How to create your own chat bot in 10 clicks” on YouTube.

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

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How to create a chatbot without any programming 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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