Enterprise Chatbots Platforms and the Future of Work Enterprise Chatbots Platforms are making changes to the future of work and conversational business.
By Murray Newlands Edited by Dan Bova
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
There has been a lot of hype surrounding consumer-based chatbots over the past 12 months. They're now being adopted by a multitude of brands for customer care, marketing and sales purposes. However, with most businesses focused on consumer chatbots, many are missing the various other ways bots can be adopted. New conversational business platforms are making it easy for enterprises to adapt and change with enterprise chatbots.
Chatbots for internal enterprise and business-to-business (B2B) applications are currently making strides to improve productivity and efficiency for numerous company activities. So that you don't miss out, I've highlighted some of the most prominent ways enterprise chatbots could change the future of work for the better.
Related: How to Create a Facebook Messenger Chatbot For Free Without Coding
Automating Tasks
Automating tasks is what the future of work is all about. Businesses of all kinds are looking for ways to automate their processes in order to better use their resources, thus increasing their return on investment (ROI).
This new wave of automation is expected to take over certain tasks that many thought to be immune to technological advancements, such as administrative or office work. Enterprise chatbots will help streamline various projects by automating routine and repetitive tasks.
Related: Top 10 Best Chatbot Platform Tools to Build Chatbots for Your Business
Interacting with suppliers.
Aside from helping automate certain internal and external tasks, enterprise chatbots have now been used to communicate directly with, and help suppliers and vendors. Organizations can train their new virtual assistants to do things like:
- Answer basic queries
- Give information about invoices
- Share payment details, such as dates, amounts, etc.
Instead of investing time and money into training a separate customer care team, companies can allocate their human resources to other, more important tasks, leaving their chatbot to provide assistance to vendors, suppliers, as well as third parties.
Related: 7 Ways Chatbots Can Benefit Your Marketing Strategy
Engaging recruits
Enterprise chatbots are also proving to be a formidable tool for increasing recruitment opportunities. Using a combination of artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP), you can:
- Vet job applicants based on qualifications and job criteria
- Answer applicant questions
- Free up your human resources to complete projects, close deals, and finalize contracts
- Automate your overall recruitment processes
While complete automation will be challenging, as recruits do need to be examined by authoritative figures within your company, the help with this initial screening process will most likely significantly cut labor costs.
Related: Top 7 Chatbot Monetization Strategies You Need to Know
Serving internal users with HR needs.
Human resources (HR) is an important department within every company, but some of your HR team's processes could easily be automated with the help of a chatbot. Creating a virtual HR agent will help with answering employee questions regarding various HR programs, pay, and other benefits.
Aside from answering questions, an enterprise chatbot could be a more productive way to distribute work schedules. You could also make it so employees are able to schedule time off as well as inform managers about sick leave or other unplanned days off.
Related: 10 Metrics Your Chatbot Should Track to Optimize User Experience
Empowering financial departments.
The amount of data that a chatbot can gather is still something most cannot comprehend. While analyzing said data is proving to still be challenging, enterprise chatbots are able to provide financial departments with algorithms that offer deeper insight into how the company is performing, from sales to expenses, and virtually everything in between.
Not only this, the automation process is making financial reporting and accounting statement preparation increasingly easier, freeing up time to focus on more strategic progress in specific areas in accordance with the various algorithms created by the chatbot itself.
Related: How Chatbots Will Evolve In One Simple Flowchart (Infographic)
Changing the traditional eight-hour work day.
In addition to the above, enterprise chatbots are slowly redefining people's jobs as a whole. The traditional eight-hour workday is expected to go through some serious changes. With the help of these machines, employees and company executives will no longer be confined to their cubicles and usual working hours.
Enterprise chatbots are creating a new hyper-connected network whereby job descriptions are becoming more specific, and as a business leader, you need to be prepared to invest more into your learning programs in order to upskill your employees for maximum efficiency. I believe this new wave of work is likely to enable many to pursue various projects simultaneously, thus opening up new opportunities for entrepreneurship.
Related: Pretty Soon, Chatbots Will Be Able to Understand How You're Feeling
Serving as digital virtual assistants to employees.
As we've now established, chatbots can be used for much more than improving communications with our customers. We can now use them to help our employees, which will, in turn, have a positive impact on company morale.
Enterprise chatbots can be used as digital virtual assistants to help teams excel. Aside from being able to take on some of their workloads, the chatbot can use the data it gathers to evaluate productivity levels. These chatbots will bring individual contextualization to each team member which is likely to bring forward positive change by:
- Evaluating how each member's time is spent
- Making recommendations to improve productivity in specific areas of work
- Suggesting best practices for improving the quality of their work
Choose the right enterprise chatbot-building platform.
For an enterprise chatbot to be successful, it needs to be available across a multitude of channels and integrate with various business systems, for example, customer relationship management (CRM) and supply chain management (SCM) systems.
Luckily, today, you no longer have to have extensive coding or programming knowledge. Instead, you need to have a clear vision of the employee, vendor, supplier, and customer needs you want to address. From there, you can use a chatbot-building platform, to do all the groundwork.
Finally…
Enterprise chatbots are expected to have a significant impact on the future of work. While many are concerned about their jobs, chatbots are not here to take over the world. On the contrary, they're here to make tasks easier. Businesses are embracing chatbots, and not just for customer care purposes. With this, I expect companies of all kinds to become more efficient, productive, and successful while enabling employees to thrive in ways we never knew possible...until now.
