The New Era of Hiring – Recruitment through Chatbots

Chatbots are revolutionizing the online communication in different industries. More and more companies are starting to realize its potential and are looking for ways in which Chatbots could help their business. This brings us to the impact of Chatbots in the Human Resource department, predominantly the hiring process. We’ve already seen the drastic shift in the recruitment industry from classifieds, newspaper ads to Linkedin. Everything has moved to digital. And due to this, chatbots can prove to be extremely useful in this particular process.

Here are a certain reasons why chatbots can help a company’s recruitment procedure :

  • Help recruiters with their operational/administrative tasks

The job of a recruiter can be a tiresome one. They have to go through hundreds of profiles everyday to make sure they choose the right talent for their company. The chatbots can help reduce this burden by sorting the different profiles based on qualifications, requirements, experience and eliminate irrelevant profiles. The bots can even answer FAQs asked by the candidates. This helps the recruiter to focus on the actual interview and spend more time to assess the candidate with the right questions.

  • Saves time and money

Companies shell out a lot of money in their hiring process that involves screening applicants, group discussions etc. Chatbots can help perform more than 50% of the initial interactions thus saving money on labour. And the most important part is that it can help eliminate underqualified profiles easily. This process usually takes up the maximum manpower in the HR department.

  • Speedy process for applicants

The traditional method of hiring has different levels of interviews and the gap between each round is quite a lot. The candidates are often clueless about their progress. This lack of information can often hinder the job process for both the recruiters and the candidates. With the help of chatbots, information can be sent out to the applicants instantly regarding their selection or rejection. This is a positive trait for the company because it makes them more responsive to the candidates.

Seeing that the incorporation of chatbots brings some massive advantages to the business, it is time for companies to innovate their hiring procedures to make it a satisfactory experience for everybody involved.

Why does your business need a Chatbot?

Businesses are realising the need for Chatbots and are constantly looking for ways to incorporate them to improve their sales or customer service or even help with their marketing strategy. A few major brands have already leveraged Chatbots and have made a huge impact on their users.

This leads us to the big question, why does my business need a chatbot. These few points below can help you answer this question.

Lot of queries about product/service

This is one of the major reasons to develop a bot for your business. If your particular business receives a lot of online queries regarding your products/services, it might be difficult for a person to respond to these queries especially if its on a large scale. This is where the chatbots come in. They can even be customized to provide personalized solutions to the user.

Your business operates in different time zones

The biggest advantage of a chatbot is the convenience. It is always available to answer queries 24×7. For a business that is operating in different countries, this is the best way to ensure that communication with the customer is not delayed.

You want to increase online engagement

If you are a business that predominantly operates online and you’re looking for ways to engage with your customers, then chatbots can be an effective medium to achieve this. They can be integrated in your website or your Facebook page and doesn’t require any extra effort by the user to download a separate application. Through this, you can provide a satisfying shopping experience to your customer and also enable them make a purchase with you again.

Cost effective customer care service

By installing a chatbot, the costs incurred in the customer care team can be cut down. The team can focus on critical queries while leaving out the repetitive and basic queries to the bot. The business only has to incur the cost of developing the Chatbot. With the innovations in technology, even the creation of a chatbot has become economical.

If any of the above criteria fits your business then creating a Chatbot will definitely help grow it. It is the perfect fit for any business that wants to expand and venture into new channels.

What makes a successful Chatbot?

Chatbots are proving to be really effective of late. It has become an universal tool for businesses from different industries. It is a viewed as a method for companies to engage with their customers at a minimized cost. With the rise of Chatbots, there are multiple apps, softwares and tech companies that have started developing the same.

So with the influx of different chatbots, what are the traits of a successful chatbot? Here are a few points that might help answer this question.

Chatbots that engage in conversations

It is no secret that Chatbots are viewed as a way to answer customer queries or mechanise any operational tasks. But it is also important for these bots to be chatty and truly engage in a conversation with the user rather than simply answer the question the point. The personalisation abilities of the bot is what truly sets it apart from the others.

Value added services

Over and above answering queries, the chatbots must also offer some extended support or value added services. For example –  A bot created by an online fashion can regularly update the previously engaged users with the latest fashion trends, discounts or any other event that might be of interest to the consumer.

Accumulation of data

Your chatbots must also be built to gather useful information about your customers so predictions can be made about your untapped audience and new methods can be discovered to reach out to them. It is the true indicator of whether your chatbot is helping your business or not.

User-friendly Bot

The design of the bot must not be overlooked. The chabot must be simple, straightforward and user-friendly. This allows the user to have a good experience and enables him/her to make use of the bots again. Even though you have the latest softwares and technology incorporated in your chatbot, at the end of the day, it boils down to whether it is easy to use or not.

So do ensure that the above features are taken into consideration before you develop a chatbot for your business. Do you know any other traits of a successful chatbot? Let us know in the comments below!

Chatbots in Financial Services

With the growing popularity of Chatbots, more and more industries are looking to incorporate this feature in their business. Chatbots have already been incorporated in the retail, E-commerce and FMCG industries with brilliant results. Due to this, a lot of banks and financial companies have started to realize the true potential of Chatbots to the growth and development of their business.

Here are a few advantages of leveraging Chatbots in Financial services through Mobile Apps or Facebook Messenger:-

Address simple customer queries

The Chatbots can help address simple queries of customers that come in large quantities. These queries can be addressed instantly, leading to increased customer satisfaction. Due to this, the manual labour can focus on queries and customers grievances that need personalization.

Improved customer satisfaction

In the era where you can do anything with almost a click of a button, it is important for companies to be respond quickly and efficiently. Gone are the days where customers would wait 48 hours to get their queries addressed. Businesses must be quick to respond to the customer queries before it escalates into a bigger issue. Chatbots are the perfect solution to this problem. Since they respond to messages 24×7, customers feel that their queries are being acknowledged.

Personalization

With the help of Artificial intelligence, Chatbots can be customized to suit your financial service. They can offer personalized solutions based on the behavioural patterns and demographics of the consumer. This enables the brand to go the extra mile and provide the best service to their customers. This can also give useful insights to the company about their customers and help reach out to more prospective customers.

In conclusion, Chatbots will surely revolutionize the online customer service and other aspects of companies in the Financial sector in the coming years.

How Chatbots can Improve Customer Experience

With the rising popularity of the internet and digital marketing, it becomes necessary for businesses to ensure that they provide strong customer service on different platforms.
Chatbots can be integrated into popular applications like Facebook Messenger or Whatsapp where a majority of customers reach out to the businesses for various queries. This simple integration can drastically improve the customer relationship online.

Usually, consumers reach out to the companies regarding any queries about their products/services, discounts/sales, complaints etc. Time is of the essence and users want their queries answered almost immediately. With the help of Chatbots, businesses can reply to these queries instantly irrespective of the time and can even provide some additional information that the customer might find useful.

The biggest advantage is that the bots can be customized to suit the needs and requirements of your business so you can provide the best service to your customers. Many renowned brands like Spotify, Mastercard, Starbucks have already started using Chatbots to delight their customers! These bots can also help accumulate relevant data about your customers which might provide useful
insights for the business.

Have you incorporated a chatbot for your business yet? Let us know in the comments below!

Chatbots in Business Development

Last week, the launch of Oracle’s new artificial intelligence marked a turning point. The company, which was rewarded last year by Forrester Research, is using AIs in the mobile phone market, which has nearly 5 billion users worldwide.

According to Amit Zavery, to continue to strengthen customer relationships, companies must move away from traditional websites and applications to new trends, such as instant messaging and the Oracle Cloud Platform.

“As consumer behavior has changed, businesses need to adapt to what their stakeholders prefer. ”

By integrating channels like Facebook Messenger, Kik, Skype, Slack, and digital voice assistance like Amazon Echo, Amazon Dot and GoogleHome, AIs enable automation of large-scale conversations.

“All the new abilities allowed by the Bots open up new horizons. It allows us to interact with our customers in a more humane way, “says Ryan Klose, General Manager of Technology and Innovation at National Pharmacies.

Businesses will be able to improve their conversational agent over time, by combining automatic cognitive learning with a wealth of knowledge – a system that learns natural language to understand end user intent.

“We are developing a benchmark artificial intelligence that will allow us to build new ones for any industry,” said Michael Menendez, Vice President, IT, BGE and Exelon Utilities.

“Not only does artificial intelligence enable us to offer fast solutions for emerging channels, but it also provides an unforgettable interaction between the customer and the company.

Bots for Industrial Decisions

The Chatbot revolution is here and every day we see brands giant techs release information that makes the technology wiser and its use in business, industries, art and conversations.

Last year Microsoft launches the ‘Microsoft Bot Framework’, it was to encourage developers to create a conversational bot interface. They were designed to work on Skype and Slack and communicate with Microsoft’s assistant Cortana.

If you look at the possibility of using Chatbots, they are quite endless for the consumer market. You can book tickets, order food, clear your doubts instantaneously with a Chatbot. But the uses of it can span much larger on to industries as well as medical fields.

Recently, an article was published by MIT Technology review that talks about an American construction worker that works using an application that helps them review 3D models of architectural projects. During a review, he discovered that the steel frames that they had planned to order were too big to fit the design. Having gotten an overview with this they were able to save lots of money and time. This intelligent AI can help workers make many decisions.

Imagine a situation where a Bot can diagnose multiple people in a hospital with accuracy whereas the doctor has human disadvantages when it comes to time and being at one place at a time. With the increase in the technology the possibility of using Bots to our advantage will only increase!

What Are The Best Tactics To Develop A ChatBot?

If you like keeping abreast of the latest technology trends and your business is growing, the notion of ChatBot or even Bot should not be unknown to you. Since the Bots’ arrival on Facebook and their growing popularity by Microsoft users, using Bots is no longer just a game, but has become an e-commerce technique enabling consumer engagement. However, a question comes up again and again – What are the best tactics for developing a ChatBot?

Here are some tips for successful Bot development:

Define the target:

First, you have to know and identify your audience. Does my community really need my Bot?

There are several types of Bots:

The game
A Bot for commercial purposes
The News Bot
The Utility Bot
The Bot of Consumer Assistance

It’s up to you to survey your community to understand what type of Bot it needs.

Identify the most appropriate situation:

The more technology has developed, the more companies have sought a way to limit human action. Today most Bot are used to simplify this action, and make automatic what can be.
Using Bots, productivity and performance can be increased. Their ability to speak and their artificial intelligence allow them to be better than the man who has to deal with several tasks at the same time, and to retain thousands of information. Bot is able to listen and understand the needs of the consumer, and to better refer them to their requests and the questions that arise.

Developing the right Bot:

There are a multitude of companies of creations of Bot, each having their specialty to offer you a Bot adapted. But we must first choose the framework of this one:

Facebook bot engine
Microsoft bot framework
API.ai
Kik
chatscript
Pandorabots

To be perfectly adapted to the internal system:

An effective ChatBot must be able to ease the daily tasks of an employee. It must understand the internal logic of the company and must also be able to communicate the information of its results to the service concerned. The Bot must therefore be able to communicate in Trello and Slack language. And if it’s a commercial bot, brought to show the breadth of your product range, make sure to connect it to the updated database.

Natural Conversation:

Although the Bot does not replace a human conversation, it is necessary to make as much possible as possible that it is fluid and natural for the user. Bot must be able to understand the history of the conversation in order to provide a coherent and clear answer. It must also be able to start and conduct a conversation with the user.

Preparing for failure:

It is not possible to prepare a Bot to answer all the user’s questions. However, it is possible to prepare it for failure. The agency that will develop your Bot must be able to set up a backup plan, if your Bot is in an unknown case. It must be set up so that it can:

Return to previous step
Repeat the conversation

Request a reformulation to the user and clarification of the user’s comments allows, by keywords, for the Bot to resume the current request. If this is not the case and the reformulation fails, the dialog is saved in the Bot database in order to be one of the axes of improvements during the next Bot update. The data gathering during the dialogues (Facebook or email address) also allows to build statistics on Bot users.

ChatBots promise a faster and smarter online experience. Our new virtual assistants will always be ready, able to listen to our questions and respond intelligently.

Should a Chatbot Understand Human Sentiment?

Chatbots are now an important digital revolution and every day brands are jumping into the bandwagon to create a unique experience for its users. An important thing to note when you shift to Chatbots is the tone of voice. Interacting with a human is so much different that with a Chatbot and there are certain rules we have as a society.

As an example, let’s say a user is frustrated with a business and their delivery. The Chatbot starts off with, “Hello David, how may I help you today! :)” The customer expresses his issue with payment and registers his complaint. The tone of voice then for the Chatbot cannot be “Have a great day ahead Mr David! :)” The user may get more frustrated that he has not been shown any understanding. The Chatbot must switch to a more sensitive language. This is important not just for human responses but must be developed for Chatbots as well.

This can provide a much more genuine interaction with the user. The objective is to create a safe and trusted relationship with the Chatbot and user in order to establish effective communication. Failure to do so may result in the user becoming more angry than before and feel like the brand does not care to provide their apologies or sympathies for this negative experience. This can result in a poor impression of the brand.

Therefore, all Chatbots must improvise and change the tone of voice when necessary while interacting with users. A sentiment analysis can be done to determine the nature of the customer’s query and by default all complaints must be addressed with sensitivity and caution!

The Use of Chatbots in Meetings and Special Events

Let’s face it, like them or hate them, Chatbots are an important force in the digital marketing era. It is fascinating to see how different markets are using these to their advantage to make the customer experience much more effective and fruitful for both parties.

Imagine a scenario of a tech event. The event has multiple speakers multiple activities scheduled and different groups of people attending the event. Now imagine, the amount of queries that the front desk would get to the days leading up to the event. Chaos is probably a word that would best describe this situation. Instead, now we actually have a solution. Chatbots can be extremely effective in providing this information to users who are confused or unsure of certain details of an event.

An example of this is, South by Southwest’s bot “Abby” answered more than 56,000 questions asked by the attendees at the SXSW Go event app. This shows you what a Chatbot can do in this area of clean communication with the attendees. Multiple answers are provided instantaneously with no wait time, and the Chatbot can talk to hundreds of attendees at the same time. The investment to build this Chatbot will be extremely fruitful if you take these aspects into consideration.

This is true, not just for huge events where a Chatbot can seamlessly manage human interactions and queries, but also for daily life in meetings at the workplace. Chatbots can easily set calendars and dates with your employees even block meeting rooms and give you an insight into your colleague’s calendar instantly without having to manually check it. A simple question like, ‘Is Susan’s calendar free on 15th Sep 5 pm for 30 mins’ may prompt the Chatbot to respond with yes or no and suggest a next best time for your consideration.

Menial daily work tasks can be handled by the Chatbot which can cause productivity to increase in terms of scheduling meetings and pushing them if one or the other is unavailable. There is no arguing the Chatbots are here to stay. Only time will tell how brands adopt this in their business in the most effective manner.