Take Your Chatbot to Work, or Anywhere
From airlines to supermarkets to food delivery, it is not a question that chatbots are disrupting the way companies and brands interact with customers. One area in the corporate world, however, where they haven’t received so much publicity is in the enterprise space. Similar to how chatbots have changed consumer-facing businesses, chatbots can greatly impact how enterprises operate, where they can help employees more easily communicate with each other as well as allow organizations to streamline operations by making employee interactions with departments, systems, customers, and managers more efficient.
Chatbots are already making their mark on enterprise. Communications platform Slack has embraced chatbots, supplying developers with a robust API that provides tools to build a chatbot for almost any kind of communication. Scheduling, for example, is an important function in corporate environments and often one of the most frustrating, with people playing telephone or e-mail tag to set up their meetings. Meekan, a popular Slack chatbot, matches everyone’s calendars, and quickly finds common free times. So, if John asks to meet with Mary at 1:00 pm on Wednesday, the chatbot might respond that “Mary is not available, can I suggest another time?”
Another popular artificial intelligence-based scheduling chatbot, X.ai (aka Amy) gets more “intelligent” as it makes more appointments, enabling it to streamline the enterprise calendar and more efficiently utilize everyone’s time. Additional, AI-based chatbots that handle important administrative tasks in organizations are Howdy (which parses information from coworkers and delivers a report) and Growbot (a feedback tool for teams).
But chatbots go far beyond just scheduling and feedback. Kore’s chatbot store, for example, is full of applications for CRM, management and issue tracking, revisions, project management, analytics, and much more. Additionally, Assembla connects collaborators on a project and handles the work of project revision updates — normally a tedious and time-consuming task. Both Zoho and Salesforce, backbones of enterprise CRM, have Kore-based applications. And GoSquared for Kore provides users with analytics and insights about their web traffic. Troops, also on slack, lets users talk to salesforce. That chatbots have made enterprise prime-time is clear from the fact that Microsoft, which has one of the biggest enterprise sales networks of any company, has its own open-source cross-platform bot SDKs, which will let users build a bot that can work with Slack, Kore, Skype, or any of the platforms touting enterprise-level bots.
Besides all this, however, the greatest benefit for enterprise is likely to be providing workers with the ability to interact easily via their mobile device and unprecedented options for maximizing efficiency.
