If you are involved in social media marketing as part of your company’s ad campaigns, you will know that bots that provide automated answers and directions are part of the landscape. One of coolest corollaries to this phenomena is that instead of building an infrastructure that favors those who have stockpiled coders, the bot industry has actually moved towards open source in a large way.
Open source bot creation is usually something that starts with a toolkit that provides a framework and a lot of coding examples so that marketing gurus and programming professionals can build an AI conversation or menu that works for campaigns or chat sessions. Because the code base is so strong, even enterprise companies are encouraged to find out more and use open source bot creation systems. Here are some of the most popular ways for enterprise businesses to use bots in their work:
Client interaction for sales:
A decade ago, the chat bots that were being programmed on dating sites were legendary for fooling people into thinking they were actual women or men that were interested in them. And although most people didn’t like that dynamic, there were plenty of corporations that noticed that the tools that were used were something that could help them.
So it was no surprise when companies started using bots as part of their sales staff to help lead in to live chat sessions with sales reps that could see the data that had been gathered so far in the chat session. The bots never complained and ended up helping qualify thousands of leads for the companies that used them.
Business decision making:
Another area that has cost companies a lot of money in the past has been the adjusting process in insurance. On average, it takes a lot of human input in order to create a solid reputation in the insurance industry for helping customers. Recently, however, one company, Lymon, decided to leverage AI and bots and put them together on their website in order to help customers. After two years of working with claims’ adjustments and building out a script, they went live with an automated claim process that saves them millions of dollars a year. So, chances are that if you have a claim with that company, you will be taken care of by an automated process that was programmed sometime in the past two years.
Technical support:
Like the sales experience, technical support agents are frequently busy. Fortunately for companies that work with bot technology, because a lot of customer requests to the technical support team are common types of requests, it is possible to create a series of answers using a bot. By using a bot to take customers through a solution to its very end, companies can allow their staff to focus on providing resources for those that have questions that are a little more difficult to resolve. The end result is that more clients are happy.
Using an open source bot platform for your company’s support teams is a very cost-effective idea. It is no longer difficult to program bots and the cost savings that you generate can be used to improve the budget of the sales and support people that you are augmenting.
