Chatbots Point of View
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“By 2020, the average
person will have more
conversations a day with
bots than they do with
their spouse”
L. HEATHER PEMBERTON | GARTNER
Chatbots Point of View
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Value throughout your organization
Chatbots are key in your organization’s digital journey and in delivering next generation intelligent customer service.
Improve customer acquisition
Show your potential customers your advanced
digital capabilities and experience with cognitive
technologies.
Rapidly scale up and down, always being able to
serve new customers.
Chat interfaces are everywhere. customers are
ready for the next step: automated chatting.
Reduce churn
24/7 customer support
High degree of accuracy and high-throughput.
Provide high quality support, whenever the
customer demands it.
Increase customer satisfaction by eectively
solving their issues
Increase revenue per user
The supporting tasks will be performed by the
Chatbot. Use your people to do what they do
best; sell products and services.
Gather, analyze and act on the customer’s
preferences and irritations.
Minimize cost to serve
15 – 90% cost reduction opportunity depending
upon the characteristics of the functions selected
for automation.
Short payback period with low integration costs and
high potential ROI.
Mitigate security risks
Easily scale up and down depending on
customer’s demand.
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Intelligent
Advanced software learns from past
interactions, improving responses over
time
What is a Chatbot?
Chatbots oer a conversational experience
using articial intelligence and natural
language processing to mimic conversations
with real people.
Engaging
Enables human-like interaction
delivered through a channel that is
easily scalable
Eective
Let users perform tasks eciently and
accurately through conversational self-
service
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Rise of the Chatbot
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Computer power driving Enterprise Intelligence
Systems have evolved from mechanical computation & tabulation devices to intelligent systems that can emulate human cognition.
1900s
Tabulating system era
Mechanical devices assisted in
organizing data and e.g. making
calculations for employee sales
performances evaluation purposes. Ex.
Hollerith Tabulating Machine.
1950s
Programmable system era
Programmable systems enabled Space
Exploration and the development of
the internet. This era will continue
indenitely, and will underpin the era
of computing that we are in now. E.g.
Windows Desktops / ERP Systems.
2010s
Cognitive era systems
Cognitive systems are computer
systems that have capabilities to
emulate the human brain. Ex. Self-
driving cars, Chatbots, Virtual Agents...
2020s
Amplied Intelligence
Future systems will be able to mimic
human intelligence and entirely
replicate human interactions.
Welcome to the Cognitive Era!
Big data technologies in conjunction with cognitive computing enable us to
extract insight from data that was previously unused.
Key drivers
Exponential growth of Data Smarter algorithms
Faster processing speed
Chatbots Point of View
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Market forces driving Chatbot opportunities
Developments at both the side of supply and demand drive the added value of Chatbot technology.
Demand
Increasing pressure on contact centers
High turnover rates, increased need for training and
the necessity for reducing operating cost are putting
pressure on the traditional contact center.
Rising demand for self-service
Customers are demanding self-service. No longer
are they prepared to wait weeks, days, hours or even
minutes for an employee to help them. They need their
problem xed and they need it xed now!
Supply
Technological advances in AI and NLP
Chatbots are going beyond keyword matching.
Advancements in Natural Language Processing,
processing speed, machine learning models and data
availability have made this possible.
Chatbot platforms maturing
As Chatbot technology becomes more popular, their
development platforms become more mature. They
come with easy to grasp drag-and-drop interfaces,
allowing business users to build and manage Chatbots
themselves.
The Rise of the Chatbot
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Towards user acceptance
Due to improvements in Natural Language Processing, Chatbots are shifting from command-driven towards more intelligent, conversational driven
‘Virtual Assistants’, which are much better at determining context and user intent.
Technological advancementLow
High
User acceptance HighLow
Chatbots Point of View
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Chatbot Types
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Evolution of Conversational AI
Chatbots are like apps that users interact with in a conversational way, through text or speech. As technology advances, Chatbots are able to better understand
both written and spoken text.
A Chatbot may be as simple as basic pattern matching with a response, or it may be a sophisticated weaving of articial intelligence techniques with complex
conversational state tracking and integration into existing business services.
Scripted Chatbots
• Basic and scripted
• Looks for key phrases & give
pre-defined responses
Intent Recognizers
• Machine learning capabilities
• Greatly improved understanding
of user intent, relationships
between words are taken into
account to extract meaning
from a request
Virtual Agents
• Able to understand what a
human is trying to achieve
and can hold an end-to-end
conversation
• Connects to other systems to
leverage user data and insights
• Learns and improves over time
Human-like Advisor
• General AI, also known as
human-level AI or strong AI
• The type of Artificial Intelligence
that can understand and
reason its environment as a
human would
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Chatbots have diff erent levels of intelligence…
There is no clear separation between Chatbots and Virtual agents, as they operate within a large range of complexity in both dialog and processes. Both sides of
the spectrum have valuable applications. Below are two examples of applications of di erent complexity and intelligence.
The user’s intent is
recognized.
The user’s intent is
recognized.
The entities ‘amount’,
‘recipient’ and
‘description’ are
recognized.
The Virtual Agent
knows which
accounts exist and
asks the user from
which account the
money should be
transferred.
The chatbot
transfers money
from the user’s
checking account
using the integrated
back-end systems.
The chatbot
provides extra
information
to improve
the customer
experience.
The chatbot asks for
con rmation based
upon the recognized
entities.
In a FAQ knowledge
base, the question
is linked to a
standardized
answer.
Chatbots Point of View
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…and there is a large range of valuable solutions
Chatbots come in various degrees of intelligence and range from answering questions to having the full capabilities of a service employee. The right level of
intelligence should be picked depending on the use case.
FAQ Chatbot
FAQ Chatbots are perhaps the most simple form of
a Chatbot, which can already bring plenty of value. It
can understand questions and gives the user the most
relevant answer.
Virtual Assistant
With slightly higher intelligence we nd the Virtual
Assistant, which has more integration with enterprise
systems and therefore can perform basic actions, such
as looking up personal information.
Virtual Agent
The most intelligent Chatbots are Virtual Agents, which
can completely replace an employee. These bots can
handle the most complex dialogs, processes and
security protocols.
Self-learning Chatbots placed on a webpage can
decrease the amount of phone calls to a service
desk dramatically answering the most frequently
asked questions.
Virtual Assistants decrease service desk workload
by, for example, looking up vacation days of
an employee, or enabling an employee to buy
vacation days through the Chatbot.
Virtual Agents can handle complex processes,
such as walking a client through making a bank
transfer or making changes to their personal
information, eectively replacing an employee.
Chatbots Point of View
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Chatbot applications
Chatbots have a broad range of applications; they help users with information requests, reservations or personalized tasks like money transfer.
You are in a hurry to catch a train to bring you to the
concert of your favorite band. Quickly check if you are
going to make it!
You have just heard about an important meeting but
are not at the o ce. Use the Chatbot to quickly identify
free rooms and book it instantly.
Instantly transfer money. Use a familiar interface to
transfer money, request account information and
much more…
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Architecting a Chatbot
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Understanding Language & Context
Chatbots mimic dierent functions of the human brain.
Preceive
Understand
Interact
Reason
Learn
Intent Recognition
Ability to “guess” what the user is requesting,
even if phrased unexpectedly. Necessary to
enable natural conversation, reduce user
frustration and enable the virtual agent to
start a relevant dialog.
Q&A Pairs / Script
s
Is used to deliver facts, details or solution
s
to queries or requests. Benefits greatly from
good Intent Recognition
.
Dialog Management
Ability to follow conversation history, recal
l
and memorize over a single conversation
,
and across conversations. Necessary
for natural, human-like back and forth
conversation
.
Entity Recognition
Understand that some text refers to
informative abstract categories (entities
)
such as “February 2” = Date. Necessary
for more complex commands and analysis.
Natural Language Processing
Ability to “read” or parse human language text.
Pre-requisite for understanding natural sentenc
e
structures vs. simple keyword “triggers”.
Machine Learnin
g
Learn how to respond to the user by
analyzing human agent responses.
Necessary for qualitative intent recognition
.
Reinforcement Learning
Ability to accept user “corrections” over
time to improve suitability of responses.
Allows the Chatbot to improve and learn
off of user inputs
.
Chatbots Point of View
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Chatbot Characteristics
There is a big variety in Chatbot development platforms. Below are a number of characteristics that should be taken into account when choosing the suitable
platform to implement with your Chatbot.
Intent Recognition
Ability to “guess” what the user is requesting, even if phrased
unexpectedly. Good intent recognition is vital if you don’t want to annoy
your users.
Dialog Management
Go beyond simple Q&A and enable your Chatbot to have complex and
meaningful conversations with the user.
Humanization
Users get more engaged in conversation if a Chatbot acts more human-
like. Some Chatbots are able to detect and show emotions.
Interaction Channels
How will users interact with your Chatbot? Choose a platform that
connects easily with your webchat, app, social media platform or voice
interface.
Task Automation Capability
Does your Chatbot need to perform tasks for users? Make sure it has
enough dialog capabilities and that it can connect to your back-end
systems
Reporting & Monitoring
Are your customers being helped? Are they happy? Does your contact
center get less calls? Choose a Chatbot platform that tells you how it’s
performing.
Ease of Implementation
Some platforms require custom software development, while others allow
business users to congure the Chatbot themselves.
Security & Compliance
Do you have extra security requirements? Or do you need to be compliant
with audit regulations? Security and logging capabilities vary amongst
platforms.
Chatbots Point of View
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Understanding the vendor landscape
A Chatbot is often built up from di erent components. There is a large landscape of vendors of frameworks, capability enhancers and messaging platforms that
all provide slightly di erent functionalities. Some vendors provide all-in-one solutions.
General AI Agent Platforms
(Consumer)
Messaging Platforms
(Consumer) (Enterprise)
Virtual Agent
(Consumer & Enterprise)
The Virtual Agents are all-
in-one solutions. They have
built in capability enablers
and a development
framework. The maturity
level varies between Virtual
Agent platforms.
Capability Enablers
The capability enablers can be viewed as ‘plugins’ that add extra capabilities to existing bots, such
as intent recognition, emotion detection, image recognition and speech.
Bot Framework & Deployment Platforms
The Bot Framework & Deployment Platforms are applications where the bot’s infrastructure as
well as functionalities can be designed. This is essential for user-friendly development.
NLP & AI-as-a-Service Platforms
Build bots and integrate capabilities
Non-exhaustive
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Our approach
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When to use? How to use?
There are a lot of aspects to consider when implementing a Chatbot. The large variety of vendors complicates this process further. It is important to nd the
Chatbot that ts your particular needs, which means you need to do research before implementing.
Do your research Researching Chatbots before deciding to implement one will give
the highest return on your investment
Represent your organization Chatbots are often a customer facing application, so it is important
that it represents your organization in a proper manner.
Fit your needs Make sure the solution ts your needs. Don’t let a simple Chatbot
do complex tasks, don’t let a Virtual Agent do simple tasks.
It’s a journey A Chatbot changes the way you interact with customers. Make
sure they see the added value.
Connect A Chatbot increases in value when it is well connected to back-end
systems, so that it can make changes and request information.
Augmentation Use it to make your current services smarter and increase the
employee eciency.
Easy does it Start with a MVP to prove value, and add complexity in steps.
Know your customer Find out if your customers are ready for the change. If so, what are
their expectations?
Chatbots Point of View
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Train your chatbot
Training a Chatbot or Virtual Agent is not so dierent from training a human employee: it requires time and investment. Retraining is required when processes
or products change.
Untrained agent
• A new Chatbot or Virtual Agent is
not trained yet for your specic
customer service domain
• Initial training required in order
to understand customer requests
and to know how to solve them
Perform initial training
• Train your agent to understand
the subject matter
• Teach them how to answer
questions and process requests
• Instruct how to access your
knowledge and data systems
Evaluate and improve
• Periodically evaluate your agent’s
performance
• Determine which requests aren’t
handled properly
• Improve performance with
targeted additional training
Re-train
• When products, processes or
enterprise systems change,
additional training is required
Training many human agents with high turnover VS Training a single Virtual Agent
Chatbots Point of View
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We assist our clients all the way
integrated solution.
Explore
• Exploring the business value and technological
feasibility of applying Conversational AI.
• Understanding the vendor landscape.
Create a Vision
• Set a vision by dening the future channel
strategy & mix introducing automated chat
• (Re)design the customer journey across all
touchpoints to optimize the experience
Build an MVP
• Mobilize the right team to engage in building
a Minimal Viable Product solution to start
the learning experience together with all
stakeholders (customers, operations, IT,
organizational design, ...)
• Cognitive Value Assessment
• Vendor Landscape Analysis & Selection
Framework
• Chatbot Prototyping Bootcamp
• Channel strategy design
• Customer journey design
• AI solution architecture expertise
• Chatbot MVP Approach
• AI Engineering Capability
• AI Solution Architecture Expertise
• UX/UI design experts
Acumen provides support in different stages of implementing a bot within your organization: all the way from the exploration phase to a fully working and
Acumen Accelerators & Capabilities