I’ll be honest – I’m dying to do an event about Conversational AI. But for now, I will have to make do with including conversational AI and chatbots content within our Intelligent Automation programs. But, armed with the knowledge that this is a technology under the IA umbrella that so many companies are either utilizing, or planning to utilize, I made sure to ask questions of those far more knowledgeable than I am, and listen carefully to experts leading sessions on this topic at our events.

At our most recent event, our Intelligent Automation for Banking, Financial Services and Insurance, my ears and eyes were buzzing as there was a ton of info being passed along about this topic. Here is a little of what I heard.

Chatbots should not be of the “one and done” variety:

We know that silos abound. But when you’re bringing on a new technology like conversational AI, if the thought is to utilize it for only one use case, then the organization is not going to come close to getting the ROI that they should be. I asked Sean Nicolello, an AVP of Digital Automation for Metlife about this and he put it far more eloquently than I ever could:

“A company should have an operating model that promotes use case discovery across the entire organization. A resource that liaises with multiple lines of business to identify their needs, turn those needs into use cases and support the promotion of these use cases is critical. This resource should also be scanning the organization to understand other Conversation AI pilots and tools that have been used in the past to learn why they were used, if they succeeded and what the roadmap looks like for the technology.”

Robotic Process Automation + Chatbots = Greater Success

Because our Intelligent Automation event series started off as a strict RPA event, and the fact that RPA is still a pretty significant topic even amongst executives utilizing multiple intelligent automation technologies, I always want to know about the combination of RPA and any other technology. So naturally my question became how connected RPA and chatbots are, or could be?

If you follow Gartner at all, you’ll already know that their 2019 survey results showed that chatbots are the #1 AI-based application used in enterprises. This surprised me as RPA is still so prevalent. The same survey also showed that RPA software grew 63% from 2018, so it’s still very hot as a standalone technology. But now, as we talk a little more about Integrated Process Automation, the conversation has been including the intersection of conversational AI and RPA. And that intersection is pretty exciting.

You can have the two living completely separate lives in any organization. But really, if you want your chatbots to be really effective and even a little bit mind-blowing to the end user, you need RPA to be able to grab all that data on the back end to inform how the chatbot interacts with the customer or employee. They can be far more detailed and complex than without RPA. This added detail and complexity can help prevent the need to bring a human customer service representative into the mix, which is always the goal. CX is hugely important, but keeping the tickets moving with automation is game changing. Which brings me to my final takeaway:

Customer Service needs to be paramount. The chatbot is secondary.

We all want the best customer service possible. Sometimes that can get derailed just by the knowledge that a customer or employee is interacting with a virtual assistant. So what should companies do? Well there are always a few options.

1. Be up front and make sure the end user knows that they are interfacing with a chatbot. This could infuriate them from the start, make them more patient if things are taking a while, or can blow their minds when they get their issues resolved perfectly and speedily. Hopefully it will be the latter.

2. Giver the bot big personality so they are difficult to discern as non-human. This can include anything from using regional phrases (meaning you need a pretty significant team to be able to get those nuances right) to utilizing real humor in the virtual conversation. Everyone loves to laugh!

At the end of the day, the most important thing is that conversational AI is worth the time it takes to set the strategy, send out the RFP, evaluate and choose the vendor and implement the technology. To make it worth all of that, the intelligent automation executives should have a plan for multiple use cases, and hopefully, the ability to scale.

I look forward to having all of these topics discussed one day at a conversational AI event that we create. But until then, we’ll just have to make sure to keep the discussion going within our Intelligent Automation series.