DEV Community: mandeep2524

The Rise of Chatbots in Supply Management and Why You Should Care

mandeep2524 — Mon, 14 Oct 2019 09:24:56 +0000

AI chatbots have gained their foothold in the modern digital space as a majority of industries use a chatbot for enhanced, insightful, and efficient customer engagement. AI-based chatbots are available 24/7, they are intuitive and they do not make mistakes. Almost every internet user interacts with some type of chatbot every day. ‘Hi Siri!’, ‘Ok Google!’ and ‘Hey Alexa!’ are some common phrases that people are familiar with.

With such a wide global acceptance, the implementation of chatbots in supply management is inevitable and bot-developers have come up with solutions that can simplify or even revolutionize the supply chain management process.

Chatbots in supply management can be categorized as per specific parameters.

Chatbots in Supply Management: Consumer-Oriented Practices –

Chatbots are not industry-specific but they can be outfitted with industry-specific information so they can connect to the consumers and clients who are most familiar with industry jargon and variables. Nonetheless, chatbots are an easy way to communicate with consumers.

Here, a good example would be of UPS bots that can talk to customers via ‘Google Home’ and provide delivery-related information. The bot uses additional software for personalized planning and tracking. Chatbots can handle many low-level operations that would otherwise require customer support personnel. Some features of the modern chatbots in the overall supply management perspective are given here.

Delivery Requests
This is quite similar to shopping or booking a service. Customers can request deliveries through a logistical chatbot and it can also handle all the additional information such as pickup and delivery address, delivery schedule, insurance, and delivery speed. Additionally, the chatbot can also process the order and issue a receipt that contains the necessary details.

Tracking and Order Related Issues

In any case, the customers may require amending the order such as adding or removing some products, or even cancel the order. A supply-chain chatbot can process their requests by using the information such as tracking numbers in the database and integrating it into the unique customer ID.

In addition, chatbots can also provide assistance in shipment tracking which can be better than the tracking feature available on the websites. With a chatbot, the customers have to enter the tracking ID only once and they can refer to the details anytime they want.

Providing Information
Frequently asked questions will not be a problem anymore as the chatbots can respond to the common questions through pre-programmed answers and follow-up questions and answers. Thus, the need for human intervention is minimized as it is needed only in situations where information is needed in detail.

Feedback & Surveys
Another important aspect of customer-oriented operations is feedback and surveys. Businesses can ask for customer feedback regarding their services or delivery through the chatbot. The whole process remains automated where customers only have to rate the service and/or explain their thoughts in the comments.

In addition, brands often conduct surveys for categorizing their customer base and gain insights about their personal habits and knowledge of other brands. Chatbots can be extremely helpful in conducting surveys as the customers do not have to fill online forms and they can get involved in a voice chat with an AI or just tick mark the checklist.

Chatbots in Supply Management: Supply-Chain Practices –

Chatbots in logistics can assist with the operational aspect of a business where the data comes from multiple sources. Chatbots can help in collecting the data from multiple sources while simplifying and automating processes at the same time.

Managing Orders
Managing customers’ orders is a big task as a different state of orders can present a big challenge in collecting and managing all the data.

Managing new orders, orders in progress, canceled orders, delayed orders, unclaimed orders, and orders for replacement/change can be tiresome for managers but not for the chatbots. They can send the collected data directly to the databases that are again automated for classifying the information accordingly.

Warehouse Issues
Warehouse matters are another important aspect that requires adequate management. Using automation in warehouse management can be helpful in dealing with inventories, expected deliveries, floor plans, and tracking information.

Here, the chatbots can be deployed for potential and existing clients/suppliers who can check the warehouse location and additional details so that they can maintain clear communication.

Fleet Management
The information about delivery/supply fleet such as the number of vehicles, vehicles on the route, idle vehicles, vehicles under maintenance, and vehicles that are out of order can be updated on automated terminals that provide such information.

The company can also add a limited-access feature for security purposes. The Chatbot Development Services can fetch this information and offer assistance directly to the potential/existing clients and customers. Such an automated approach will also be helpful in managing and maintaining the company database for every single order.

Employee Management

In supply-chain management, companies rely heavily on drivers for delivering and bringing-in the products/goods. Here, an internal chatbot that can access driver information such as persons on sick leave/vacation, currently working, or standby can be vital as they can offer vital information to the managers who can then manage deliveries as per the available manpower and vehicles.

Chatbot comes with specific perks such as reduced costs, improved availability for customers along with better time-management and proactive responses. However, to achieve the desired results, chatbot development should incorporate advanced technologies such as AI, voice recognition and Natural Learning Process (NLP)

Chatbot for Banking: How it could Revolutionize the Finance Industry

mandeep2524 — Thu, 10 Oct 2019 09:10:18 +0000

Personalized banking or relationship banking is an aspect that focuses on effective customer engagement and Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a powerful tool that can help a business achieve results in this area. Due to its excellent customer engagement abilities, AI is being adopted by a majority of industries and the banking and finance industry is one with immense possibilities.

There are many processes in the banking industry that are not automated and thus, consume a lot of time. AI chatbots for banking can be deployed for such processes as they can deliver better results without the disadvantages of human downtime and fatigue.

Chatbot for Banking
Customer engagement is an integral part of any sales-driven industry and the banking sector is not an exception. Effective customer engagement can do wonders for an institution and here is how an AI chatbot can improve the customer service experience in the finance industry.

Personal Banking
It has AI-Powered Chatbots that becomes a highly popular phenomenon in 21st-century banking where financial institutions are providing personalized banking solutions. Financial products are unique and the same policy or service may offer different financial advantages or disadvantages to two different people.

Personal Banking

Therefore, institutions are focusing more on gathering wealth-related information about their potential and existing customers and offering products and services accordingly. AI chatbot for banking can be of great help in collecting crucial data and conducting surveys that are precise, relevant and brief.

Personalized Marketing
AI chatbots can be used for personalized marketing as well. Institutions can collect highly personalized information from existing and potential customers such as their income, income sources, investment habits, and preferences.

This information can be used for creating personalized marketing campaigns and ultimately personalized products. Such a marketing strategy can be implemented for customers that have similar informational databases.

Automated 24/7 Customer Service
AI chatbots are the primary step in revolutionizing customer services where there is virtually no need for a customer service department or call center. A 24/7 Customer support can be fully automated by integrating chatbot to the information database of the institution as they can fetch the information directly and manage queries.

24 7

This is a scenario where on-call support is provided only in situations that require the exchange of highly detailed information. This can be an ideal automated customer support scenario in which transferring calls to specific departments and delays in information transfer can be eliminated completely.

In addition, automated customer service is to-the-point and it ensures effective customer engagement as well. The reasons why customers refer to customer support are either for information or a dispute. In both situations, prompt response and precise information can guarantee effective communication and AI chatbots are specifically designed for that.

Eliminate Unnecessary Information and Feedback
The chatbot can help a business by improving the workflow and integrating processes with each other. However, these are not the only benefits as some additional perks follow automatically. Integrated processes do not require entering the same information over and over. This controls redundancy in both the processes and databases.

For instance, transactional disputes are common issues in the banking industry and these can be resolved with increased efficiency with the help of AI-enabled chatbots. When a customer enters the transaction number or receipt number through a chatbot, the information goes directly to the database and concerned authorities.

Transactional Fraud

Even when the bot refers to the customer to an on-call expert, they do not have to repeat the whole process. This eliminates both data redundancy and repetitive processes.

Improved Employee Productivity
AI chatbots can significantly improve employee productivity by allowing the business to utilize the full potential of the employees. In an organization, there are many tasks that are mundane and do not require the use of human intellect.

Employee Productivity

Therefore, automation enables the organization to use their workforce in areas where creative ideas and critical decision-making is required rather than for routine work.

Better Sentiment Analysis
AI-enabled chatbot for banking to follow Natural Learning Process (NLP) which allows them to gather information and learn as per their interaction with the customers. These can be highly beneficial in consumer sentiment analysis which is an automated process in itself. Sentiment analysis is a process that involves collection, analysis, and refinement of huge amounts of consumer data which is then utilized for gaining strategic insights.

Here, AI chatbots can be used for data collection that is a multidimensional process. Businesses engage their customers at various touchpoints such as website, mobile app and retail branches. This helps in the collection of excessive data about every single consumer which is then analyzed further. Both virtual and physical chatbots are seamlessly integrated with each other and the central data storage, therefore, they can be amazing data collection tools.

Quick Feedback
Honest customer feedback is crucial for improving the quality of products and services. Chatbot for banking can help in generating feedback from the customer through short and simple measures such as ratings to understand their views and overall purchasing experience.

In addition, the feedback is quick, and whether the consumers want to express their opinions in detail entirely depends on them. This way, the feedback can be directly transferred for analysis and the true consumer experience can be measured.

Reduced Survey Costs
AI chatbots can conduct automated surveys where consumers do not have to fill online forms or talk to customer support executives. Automated surveys are simple and quick, thanks to their bite-sized questions. Chatbots can conduct thousands of surveys every single day and collect vital consumer data.

This eliminates the need for conducting surveys separately as the institutions can make it a part of their purchasing activity. This is a highly cost-effective approach due to which manual surveys are rapidly becoming irrelevant.

Business organizations that aim for long-term benefits always think ahead of their time. Although AI chatbots are not a thing of the future anymore, they have a lot to offer in terms of effective customer engagement and automation.

How Retails are Solving Customer Experience Challenges through Digital Transformation?

mandeep2524 — Mon, 07 Oct 2019 08:37:49 +0000

With the Industrial Revolution 4.0, we are experiencing a wave of Digital Transformation. This wave of technology seeks to deliver greater value to processes across problems and solutions that confer positive outcomes as regards Business Efficiency, Customer Experience, and/or Business Innovation.

Various technologies, such as SMAC, deliver a functional view of the marketplace to various organizations, thus helping them glean crucial business perspectives. The disruptive nature of these technologies helps business record, process as well as deliberate and analyze data to reach important insights, which are essential to understanding customer sentiments as well as trends and chatbot.

All this, as you might imagine, goes in the service of creating more effective customer experiences and related peripheral processes.

When it comes to the retail market, retailers are looking not just for ways to enhance marginal parts of the customer experience, but are trying to reinvent the wheel, in a manner of speaking. The processes they are today seeking cover not just streamlining processes or improving efficiencies while reducing costs specific to certain transactional cycles.

These processes must also include within their ambit customer centricity, agility, data intelligence, innovation, as well as foresighted value propositions.

With specific regard to customer experiences and technology, it is important that retailers understand how to make the best use of the available as well as emerging technologies. Here are some of the ways to make it happen:

Personalization
Through the use of data, it becomes possible for retailers to provide a more personalized customer experience to their users. This includes a wide range of services within its ambit, whether it is ads that cater specifically to their taste, or recommending them new goods and services that they are likely to be interested in, based on their earlier purchases. This impacts the overall customer experience in multiple ways, as it leads the user to engage more with the offerings they find available for them. And as is known in all customer-driven industries, user engagement is key to long-lasting success.

Ease of Use
By leveraging the power of digital transformation, a lot of retailers have been able to make the process of buying things simpler for their customers. Whether it is due to a UI that’s more intuitive, or due to functional changes that make it simpler to navigate a maze of similarly-grouped products, at the end of the day, customer experience has been drastically shifted by today’s changing technology.

Post-Purchase Servicing
It is not only the presale journey that has been significantly altered for a customer but it also the journey that happens if anything goes wrong with a purchased product. The process of requesting for customer service as well as getting a response from the concerned team has been significantly improved due to technological advances like token systems, AI chatbot solutions, and more. As a result of these tech transformations, it is also easier for retailers to build loyal customers, as they feel more important if their queries are answered on time and dealt with in a competent manner.

We at Affle Enterprise grasp your business challenges & ideate a personalized user experience to solve complex business problems through our mobile app development services. Connect with our team for a quick digital transformation consultation.

Chatbot for HR: How a Bot can Replace your HR Department by 2020?

mandeep2524 — Fri, 04 Oct 2019 07:48:04 +0000

We are all increasingly aware of the reality that robots play a major role in our lives now. Whether it is in physical form – as a helper during surgeries – or in software, as in a chatbot solution, we are all surrounded by a bevy of machines that influence our lives in very significant ways. That’s why it should come as no surprise that even the HR department of various organizations are considering using bots to replace their actual human resources!

The irony is perhaps stark in this context, but it soon starts to make sense. Gartner, for instance, has predicted that 80% of all end-to-end customer interactions will be replaced by interaction with chatbots – and there will be no humans involved in it at all. The truth is that chatbots have already started to change the HR industry, and it is only in a strictly projective sense that their impact may be considered hypothetical. More realistically, though, they have already made their mark. If we consider the future, here are some of the ways in which they are likely to create further impact:

Mobile Apps will be Gone
It is predicted that the market for mobile apps will become quite saturated, given their current popularity. This leads to the prediction that numerous companies will put their money into chatbots solutions over mobile application development, as it will result in cost savings of around billion of hours by next 3 to 4 years, combining both the time savings of customers as well as businesses. Not only this, but it will also lead to monetary savings of billions of dollars. The global market insight for this is that the overall market value of chatbots is expected to reach $1.25 billion by 2025.

Recruitment bots will become more important
Some companies will seek to replace their HR function with bots completely – this is a practical decision as it will enable them to save time on manual tasks such as scheduling interviews, screening candidates, and answering miscellaneous queries. A chatbot can easily manage all of these tasks and do them in a much faster turnaround time than a human. This process also allows for all forms of discrimination to be addressed, since a bot has no favoritism. The only thing that remains to be seen is whether a recruitment bot will be sensitive enough to process all the nuances in an individual that it is screening.

Employee support will be given by therapy bots
Usually, there are no places for an employee to seek refuge if something goes wrong in the workplace – but therapy bots will seek to bridge this gap. The idea behind them is to make mental health accessible and to break down barriers to entry when it comes to communication. Dedicated chatbots to address emotional situations are already being created – and there is every reason to believe that these bots will receive positive reception in the future, considering the widespread de-stigmatization of mental health that is now being seen. These bots will either function independently or work as stepping stones to other mental health activities.

We at Affle Enterprise grasp your business challenges & ideate a personalized user experience to solve complex business problems. Connect with our team for a quick Chatbot Development Company consultation.