5 ms·

Out of genuine curiosity, what real business problems do chatbots solve? The only ones I encounter are "customer support" bots, but I'm wondering if there are o

by darzu 8y ago

Out of genuine curiosity, what real business problems do chatbots solve? The only ones I encounter are "customer support" bots, but I'm wondering if there are other uses that businesses and customers find value in.

jasonmaydie 8y ago
that's probably the industry where the original poster works in. If 80% of interactions are mundane and repetitive and can be done by a bot businesses will go for it to cut down on costs. The other 20% can be dealt with by a human if need be. I don't think 100% is/was the goal at all.
conradfr 8y ago
I worked at an ISP years ago and they had a chatbot which prevented a lot of support calls, therefore saved a lot of money. And there was no AI, ML or anything, just basic database fulltext searches and tree-based questions and answers.
olavgg 8y ago
Good question! Some things a chatbot excels at: Finding information quickly: no menus, no clicking around, no more searching. Customer facing chatbots are one alternative, but many of our clients also have internal chatbots for either HR stuff, or for finding internal information. One good example we see is onboarding new employees who benefit from a chatbot as they ask a lot of questions. Also they are not afraid of asking too many questions as they no longer fear that they are nagging nor asking "dumb questions". Automating processes: for example filling out the insurance form. Or filling out tax returns. Placing an order, getting status of an order. There are also a lot of HR tasks that gets automated. How many days of vacation there is left, business travel, arranging meetings, company benefits and so on. Think about it this way, a chatbot is a very advanced full text search engine that excels at filtering out most of the noise. That is also why they have another name, virtual assistants.

5 ms·

Out of genuine curiosity, what real business problems do chatbots solve? The only ones I encounter are "customer support" bots, but I'm wondering if there are o

by darzu 8y ago

jasonmaydie 8y ago
that's probably the industry where the original poster works in. If 80% of interactions are mundane and repetitive and can be done by a bot businesses will go for it to cut down on costs. The other 20% can be dealt with by a human if need be. I don't think 100% is/was the goal at all.
conradfr 8y ago
I worked at an ISP years ago and they had a chatbot which prevented a lot of support calls, therefore saved a lot of money. And there was no AI, ML or anything, just basic database fulltext searches and tree-based questions and answers.
olavgg 8y ago
Good question! Some things a chatbot excels at: Finding information quickly: no menus, no clicking around, no more searching. Customer facing chatbots are one alternative, but many of our clients also have internal chatbots for either HR stuff, or for finding internal information. One good example we see is onboarding new employees who benefit from a chatbot as they ask a lot of questions. Also they are not afraid of asking too many questions as they no longer fear that they are nagging nor asking "dumb questions". Automating processes: for example filling out the insurance form. Or filling out tax returns. Placing an order, getting status of an order. There are also a lot of HR tasks that gets automated. How many days of vacation there is left, business travel, arranging meetings, company benefits and so on. Think about it this way, a chatbot is a very advanced full text search engine that excels at filtering out most of the noise. That is also why they have another name, virtual assistants.