In the third and (for the time being) last part of our chatbot series, we demonstrate how the bots can be used within a company. In the first two parts of our series on the chatbot trend, we looked at the AI app, Replika, and specific use cases in customer service.
As service employees or emotional support, chatbots can be in use around the clock – as our first two articles on the subject have already shown. Once set up, these undemanding little digital helpers can also be used as knowledge brokers within the company. They can be built directly into the company’s software, where they can take on a wide range of tasks in knowledge management, IT service and even business analysis. Based on a study by the chatbot provider Botcore, we have compiled some specific internal use cases in this article.
- Knowledge Management
Special cases, material overviews, customer files – no employee can always know all the data by heart. A chatbot that can be asked questions can therefore be useful for internal knowledge management. But the bots are more than just signposts for the intranet: simple commands can, for example, inquire about capacities in the warehouse or the inventory of materials. These simple tasks can easily be automated. Far more complex queries are possible: a chatbot could, for example, search for and provide certain sales or orders of a customer from a certain period in the archive. What were the sales of a certain product group last year? And the one before that? Two questions that a chatbot with the appropriate access rights to the entire system can answer on demand and in a matter of seconds. Combined with a voice control system, this is the ultimate in futurism: there’s no denying that the system is reminiscent of intelligent on-board computers on fictitious spaceships.
- IT-Support
Most IT service providers, whether internal or external, now work with a ticket system. This allows requests to be processed in a structured manner. A chatbot can easily collect and forward the requests to the IT help desk, possibly even pre-sorted. This prevents an employee from only being busy recording new problems without being able to help during this time. However, the bottleneck remains the human employee: after all, the requests are processed manually. Normally, this is done according to the time stamp: questions that are easy to answer thus clog up the queue because each ticket is processed with equal priority. An upstream chatbot can provide a remedy here. Simpler questions and problems can be solved with automated IT support, if necessary. For more difficult cases, however, human IT support remains indispensable.
- Business Analysis
Well-programmed bots with a strong database in the background can even provide assistance in analyzing transactions and commodity flows. Computer-aided business analysis is already standard in many companies; securities trading on the stock exchange is also becoming faster and faster due to the fact that high-performance computers and automated algorithms determine the pace of buying and selling – and have been doing so for more than a decade. Away from these extremes, there are good opportunities in standard operating companies to use chatbots in analysis. These can spit out information on statistics or key performance indicators (KPIs) on demand or automatically. Bots can also be used to control the graphical preparation of user-defined data sheets. However, the chatbots can not only be approached, but also take action themselves (if they have been taught to do so beforehand): they can send warnings or messages (alerts) to previously defined employees when certain parameters change or certain thresholds are exceeded.
As an AI-powered interface to pooled corporate knowledge, chatbots can easily earn the title of employee of the month – if you integrate them properly. A prerequisite for the meaningful integration of chatbots into one’s workflow is a structured enterprise resource planning (ERP) system or management information system (MIS). These systems in the background can not only collect existing knowledge, but also logically link and provide it. If these structures are in place, chatbots can be a useful addition and relief for employees.
