Enterprise chatbots: Delivering outstanding customer experiences at scale

Most customers expect an immediate response when they contact a company. Even with a large team of support staff, immediate responses from a human aren’t always possible.

Chatbots are one of the fastest ways to answer queries, popping up as soon as a customer enters your website. They’re great at giving immediate assistance and resolving simple requests. Enterprise chatbots do all of these things and more—at scale.

But exactly what is an enterprise chatbot? How can it help your business deliver outstanding customer experiences at scale?

What are enterprise chatbot solutions?

Much like regular chatbots, enterprise chatbot solutions are basically computer interfaces designed to converse with humans. While standard chatbots typically respond to simple customer FAQs, enterprise versions can handle complex queries and more varied use cases.

Besides helping customers, some enterprise chatbots can also empower front-line agents and employees by automatically searching knowledge sources and pulling information to help them answer customer questions. Modern chatbots typically use Ai technology to understand what users are asking, plus other automations to streamline business processes and workflows. The idea is to enhance efficiency and engagement across large, global organisations.

How do enterprise chatbots compare to other chatbots?

The principal difference is that enterprise chatbot support is designed for large, global companies with thousands of staff and huge customer bases.

To support this level of scale, the technology is more sophisticated and provides more customisation and integration options. Here are a few key ways enterprise chatbots stand out from regular chatbots.

Capable of dealing with a higher volume of requests at the same time

The bigger the business, the higher the volume of support requests—and enterprise chatbot platforms are able to handle a very large number of conversations simultaneously. Users don’t have to wait so long for their queries to be answered, and human agents don’t get overwhelmed.

Because these bots are trained on the company’s extensive datasets, they can retrieve the right answers and resolve issues quickly.

Flexible enough to be applied to diverse uses

Enterprise chatbots are highly flexible, and are typically more secure, which means they can be used in more regulated industries such as healthcare and finance. They might be multilingual, and they can do a lot more than just answer FAQs (although they’re great at that, too). For example, some enterprise chatbots can run security checks, help customers with returns, and even qualify sales leads.

Some agent-facing chatbots can also send reminders for things like appointments, subscription renewals, and order confirmations. They can help employees book meetings and business travel and act as personal shoppers on ecommerce websites.

Better integrated with other enterprise tools

A chatbot for enterprises can also integrate with your third-party software and systems, including CRMs, ERPs, HR tools, and knowledge bases. This means the bot can automatically pull customer details and past purchases or interactions so that live agents can easily find them if and when the conversation continues.

Enterprise chatbots can also use data to personalise their responses, such as product recommendations based on purchase history.

Use conversational Ai and machine learning

The best enterprise chatbot platforms feature conversational Ai, which means they’re able to respond in diverse ways to a huge variety of questions or inputs. We’ll explore this in more detail in the following section, but essentially, they can understand different prompts and respond accordingly instead of using pre-programmed responses.

These chatbots are also able to learn by themselves and get smarter over time, using data from past conversations and customer feedback. This is why 67% of CX leaders believe that bots can build a stronger emotional connection with customers.

Conversational Ai: Powering the new era of chatbots

Conversational Ai puts modern enterprise chatbots in a different league to older models, which could only understand specific keywords and provide predefined answers. Such rule-based chatbots worked on a decision-tree basis, offering multiple-choice options for the user.

For example, a chatbot trained on commonly asked questions might say: “Do you want to reset your password, check your account balance, make a payment, or something else?”

The customer would select an option, and the bot would follow automated rules to resolve the query—or pass it over to a live agent if the customer wanted to do something more complex.

But with conversational Ai, users can type in exactly what they want to do, and the enterprise chatbot software won’t default to “I’m sorry, I didn’t understand that.”

Conversational Ai is a subset of artificial intelligence that encompasses machine learning, Natural Language Programming (NLP), Natural Language Understanding (NLU), and smart response generation to provide a more natural conversational flow.

NLU is about processing and interpreting human language so that computers can understand it, while NLP allows chatbots to understand context and intent. Response generation involves parsing user input to extract relevant information and using NLP and NLU to give an appropriate response.

Depending on the quality of the Ai, some Ai chatbots can understand typos, acronyms, and slang, interpret user sentiment, and predict behaviour. With deep learning algorithms, they can improve themselves over time. Top enterprise chatbots are quickly becoming even more intuitive and capable of handling complex tasks.

Sounds complicated to set up? It needn’t be. For example, Dialpad Support lets you use drag-and-drop to create a conversational Ai workflow:

Enterprise chatbot use cases: Where your enterprise could employ chatbots

As we mentioned, enterprise chatbots are extremely versatile. Here are a few areas in which businesses can put them to use:

Customer service

Of all the enterprise chatbot use cases, this is probably the most common. You can deploy them for many aspects of customer service, from answering FAQs about opening hours or returns policies to making product recommendations and offering post-purchase support.

Since Ai-powered chatbots can handle increasingly complex queries, they free up even more time for human agents to focus on more sensitive conversations or higher-value work. Chatbots can lead customers to self-help articles and escalate the query to a human if necessary. They can also collect valuable insights about customer behaviour and segment the data.

Internal IT support

Enterprise chatbots are ideal for internal use, too—especially for IT support. In larger companies, the IT team often spends a lot of time answering simple questions for employees. Chatbots can reduce this workload, leaving IT staff free to handle more serious issues.

Chatbots can do things like resetting passwords or troubleshooting problems with routers and printers. It’s often much faster for employees to resolve IT issues by themselves.

Automation of business processes and workflows

Thanks to robotic process automation (RPA), enterprise chatbots can also help with all kinds of routine tasks in the workplace. For example, they can assist in automating data retrieval and entry or track inventory levels and alert staff when new stock arrives.

Employees can easily pull up company documents and training materials, while chatbots can assist with HR tasks like onboarding and expense reporting. By syncing with your calendar software, chatbots can schedule meetings with colleagues or clients and send reminders.

With chatbot support from a collaboration platform with wider conversational Ai functionality, too, you can also give your human agents a further helping hand.

Dialpad offers real-time transcription, sentiment analysis, and Ai Live Coach, which pops up relevant information for agents when it detects certain keywords being spoken:

Sales

In enterprise sales, chatbots can answer queries as well as offer proactive outreach. For example, they can automate elements of lead generation and segmentation. They can, for example, help qualify leads by asking strategic questions and gathering information, before setting up a demo or a meeting.

Key benefits of chatbots for enterprises

Whichever way you use chatbots in your enterprise, you’re likely to see a raft of advantages for customers, employees, and your bottom line:

Quicker customer service resolutions

When a customer wants to engage with a brand, they want it to happen instantly—and chatbots make this possible. They’ll pop up with a friendly greeting and an offer of help as soon as someone enters your website. Customers don’t have to track down your contact details and wait for a reply.

Modern chatbots are also getting better and better at providing accurate answers by recognising user intent and pulling in relevant data from other tools. They’re great as a self-service solution, but they also know when to involve a human. Either way, the customer’s issue gets resolved as quickly as possible.

Improved customer satisfaction

Chatbots for enterprises offer maximum convenience for customers who appreciate the speed of response and resolution. There’s no waiting in a queue because enterprise chatbots can handle multiple enquiries at the same time.

If human intervention is needed, chatbots are able to identify the most suitable agent and summarise key information for the agent so that customers don’t have to repeat it. Plus, they can analyse customer behaviours and preferences so that you can use the insights to create better experiences.

Enterprise chatbots are more engaging for customers, too, because they sound more human. They can converse in your business’s tone of voice, ensuring a consistent brand experience.

Better productivity

From an internal perspective, enterprise chatbot services have a positive impact on employee productivity. Support agents have more time to deal with highly complex or priority queries, while chatbots handle everything else. If the bot transfers the customer to a human, the agent receives the necessary information to resolve the issue swiftly.

For internal operations, chatbots also enhance enterprise collaboration and can save time by automating repetitive tasks. Employees can easily resolve minor IT issues or access HR-related information about annual leave, expenses, or benefits, for example.

Even sales teams are more productive with chatbots, which can accelerate your sales cycle and increase efficiency by automatically identifying and qualifying leads and sending the information to CRM systems via integration.

Lower operating costs

Enterprise chatbots operate 24/7 across time zones, which means there’s no need for human staff to work inconvenient hours (with the associated higher wages). And, because chatbots can handle such a high volume of queries simultaneously, you won’t have to take on extra agents when you’re expecting a big spike in requests.

The boost to efficiency and productivity saves money and makes employees happier in their work—which means lower staff turnover. Meanwhile, improved customer engagement and satisfaction leads to increased loyalty, which, in turn, means lower customer acquisition costs.

Improve customer satisfaction at scale with chatbot support and more from Dialpad

We’ve seen how enterprise chatbots increase customer happiness and optimise efficiency for large businesses. They work even better when they’re part of a complete enterprise communication solution like Dialpad.

Enterprise chatbots are a key feature of Dialpad Support, so you don’t need to find (and pay for) a chatbot tool that’s separate from your contact centre platform. It’s quick and simple to set up and customise a chatbot, with no coding knowledge needed. (But there’s 24/7 customer support if you need it.)

With Dialpad Connect, you can provide chatbot support with the industry-leading Ai, which can pull information from multiple sources (knowledge bases, PDF files, and even call transcripts) to provide instant answers for customers and employees. And because all your communications are all in one place, it’s easy for agents to access previous conversations on every channel.

Book a product demo with our team to see how it works, or take a self-guided interactive tour of the app!