Relevance of Chatbots for Improving Business Efficiency

With a huge rise in IT infrastructure, there is an immense amount of workload in the IT service sector. Using older manual methods, the administrators have to keep on doing repetitive tasks which makes it challenging for the IT teams to respond and find resolutions faster, impacting operational efficiency. Chatbots help the communication and service delivery process of the IT service desk to be very efficient.

With that let’s discuss scenarios of how IT support chatbots help businesses improve effectiveness.

Chatbots

1. Used for customer engagement is more interactive and the whole interaction is driven by user data. The engagement is consistent and irrelevant information is completely avoided. With relevant and instant information, customers or users can make informed decisions and help in positive feedback. Users are also more likely to connect frequently.

2. Helps generate and improve leads with relevant information and questionnaires, Chatbots can guide and persuade users or visitors for lead generation and ensure higher conversion rates. Data generated is then sent to the sales team for sales conversion.

3. Support reducing service costs is an investment to help optimize service-related customer interaction. Salaries, training and infrastructure are some examples where costs can be cut or reduced significantly. Chatbot interaction can be scaled up when required and routine business processes can be automated.

4. Enables gaining insights and monitoring of consumer data to track purchase patterns, and analyze consumer behavior. Bots can be used to collect feedback and improve and / or optimize websites. Chatbots are used to collect customer profiles, send push notifications, and also suggest relevant content.

5. Help deliver uninterrupted service delivery. They help automate repetitive tasks like creating tickets, onboarding, and certain troubleshooting operations and offer 24/7 help to employees.

6. Supports reducing the time taken for resolution with smart self-service. Most of the service requests are repetitive and engaging service teams for this is time-consuming and costly. Bots can be integrated with knowledge base systems, and powering it up with Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Natural Language Processing (NLP). This can help bots identify issue types and access appropriate knowledge-based articles to resolve service issues.

7. Ticket management involves three steps reporting, managing and resolution. An IT service chatbot can be used to completely automate the entire ticketing process. A user reports the issue by messaging or engaging with it on the web or even on the smartphone. The bot identifies the issue, identifies its category and then assigns it to the relevant team or authority. Updates are sent to the user via notifications.

8. Bots help in managing assets efficiently. Frequent asset requests like laptops and mobile phones are raised by employees. Requirements and exchanges need to be tracked precisely. Here, the service bot can play an important role. It can accept, modify, resolve and close various requests raised with accuracy and data can be integrated with inventory systems. IT teams can be notified and updated and asset management databases can also be updated. As all chatbot interactions are recorded, loss of data or information is not likely and helps in improving the IT asset management process.

9. IT help desks are mostly handling issues related to service outages and other related concerns. Such issues constantly disrupt the IT teams and can reduce productivity. Chatbots can track such issues, generate reports, and also notify the service team through notifications. AI-powered chatbots can use predictive intelligence and run vulnerability reports, and provide proactive issue resolution.

10. Chatbots offer personalized experiences by studying employee interactions. This saves the IT service team time and effort by allowing them to focus on priority tasks. These chatbots respond immediately to users to update employees on issue requests, policy updates, security practices, maintenance etc.

11. Scalability of support is essential. In a way, this is an area of priority for any customer-centric business. Chatbots ensure that conversations are managed during peak hours without additional support.

12. Almost all customers want to be guided. Despite tutorials and content manuals or guides, customers want to be hand-held and prefer brands that can show them the way. Chatbots can help educate customers and help ease the onboarding process.

13. Chatbots can make customers' journeys smoother and reduce customer churn, by making chatbots answer queries along the way. Chatbots can help provide discount codes and offers. Chatbots can use interactive content such as videos to provide better insights and build trust with customers.

The process of IT Helpdesk chatbot development starts with the businesses identifying the goals and customer needs first. The next step is to choose a chatbot platform or vendor and design the chatbot conversation flow. Integrations are listed, along with the channels and languages. The chatbot is to be tested and data and messages collection is done to get further insights. This data along with the feedback is then used to train the bot.