Chatbots: Digital assistants for answering FAQs & so much more
By: Juliette Bouchut
Tags: FAQ, Chatbots, Knowledge Management, Smart Cities, Organization

Chatbots: Digital assistants for answering FAQs & so much more

What payment options do you have available? What are the different ways I can pay for your service?

Same intention, different time, same answer …

For organisations, repetitive questions like these come up a lot. It is essential to respond in order to maintain customer service standards, but often ignites frustration when asked numerous times a day for the same simple answer.

In most cases, customer service departments build a list of FAQs with answers designed to preempt these questions & provide the necessary information to the customer before it hits the inbox. Nowadays, many customer service teams automate these services by implementing chatbots & voicebots.

These applications enable users to undertake an automated conversation via text or voice to receive the right answer to their question. They are absolutely a good fit for this use case. But usually, organisations don’t take full benefit of it & leverage the communication opportunities they have.

Ok Google, what else can you do apart from answer my questions?

Use chatbots to automate your FAQs

Before explaining other chatbot use cases, let’s take some time to appreciate how FAQ automation through bots remains the primary use case.

Firstly, economic savings can be considerable when FAQs are handled by chatbots. According to Chatbots Magazine, businesses can reduce customer service costs by up to 30% by implementing conversational solutions like virtual agents and chatbots.

As a result, they can substantially improve the effectiveness & efficiency of the customer service department. By implementing bots, staff are able to focus on more complex queries & maintain elite customer service standards by responding to these quickly. In some cases, public organisations have decreased their number of texts, social media messages and emails by 70% after implementing a chatbot. Thanks to this productivity boost, team members & resources can be reallocated to improve customer service ROI.

Automation tools also make it easy to collect customer service data & optimise analytics. By configuring analytics correctly, it becomes easy to track customer service activity, common service inquiries & KPI’s so that business analysts, marketers & customer service representatives can do their jobs better.

Finally, bots can improve customer satisfaction and consequently, strengthen loyalty by integrating a creative, easy-to-use customer experience within the buying process. Questions are answered more quickly, more precisely & from anywhere at anytime. The customer service department is able to define common follow-up questions and anticipate customer needs in advance.

M ore than being active, your team is now proactive.

Yet, a bot is not only a digital tool that you feed with information but an autonomous artificial intelligence that can handle some services on its own.

Starting to regard bots as autonomous tools

Most of the time, organisations see chatbots & voicebots as tools that help them process repetitive tasks that don’t require deep skill & knowledge. They are subordinates that will support & accompany you through your workflow. But bots can be much more than that.

Robots, software, AI … all of these buzzword technologies have the potential to create enormous opportunity, but often the potential of their function can be frightening.

How can we make sure they don’t replace us? How can we find the right balance between taking full advantage of AI whilst staying independent from it?

In most cases, full automation & complete digitisation is not advisable and doesn’t make profit-sense for all stakeholders. Nonetheless, employees need to give these products a chance in order to maximise return on investment.

Autonomous doesn’t need to mean out of control.

AI is characterised by the principle of machine learning: just like any human-being, an artificially intelligent bot learns both from its successes & failures in order to progress & enhance the quality of the response. Throughout conversation, bots develop a greater capacity to understand, answer & advise the customer. At Hopstay, our bots use both specific intelligence related to the target audience as well as a collective intelligence driven by results from other bots & clients. The idea is to create a synergy between clients & ensure that our bots are sector-relevant.

As you can read, a bot is not too dissimilar to a child. You outline the basic rules, he experiences it by himself & make mistakes. But with every mistake, you provide learning & support so that his behavior changes in the future!

Our Knowledge Management platform

At Hopstay, you can keep track & train your bot through our knowledge management platform. Much more advanced than a regular database, this platform will help you organise & optimise your new digital assistant!

Modules for bots are like skills for humans

There are many more use cases for bots than simply responding to FAQs. At Hopstay, we call these ‘chatbot modules’ — let me introduce you to some examples!

Checking bin day is a constant matter for residents. Instead of searching through the city council website and landing on an outdated schedule, you can build a chatbot module. Residents ask to the bot when their bin is being collected. The bot asks them to specify their address and then returns with an up-to-date answer for every bin type. For this type of module, a bot is linked via API to a database that gathers the updated information. It fetches the correct information and delivers it in a friendly & practical way! Then, citizens can request notifications so that the bot will notify them every time their bins are being collected. Neat, huh?

As you can see, a module is a pre-templated autonomous bot function that usually connects to a live set of data. The aim is to enable self-service processes via conversational interfaces & propose new customer-centric services.

Through the lens of a customer success strategy, modules improve accessibility, add touchpoints & enhance customer experience.

There are infinite possibilities in this space based on client expectations & needs, through both chatbots & voicebots. At Hopstay, we just launched our new Smart Parking Module that helps drivers finding the nearest car park available to their location or destination.

How does it work? We connect the voice bot to live parking data, usually via an API. Many cities are collecting live parking availability data via sensors & cameras, so it’s relatively straightforward to implement. Then, we use localisation & geographic pinpointing to identify location. We then integrate this with our conversational templates & pre-existing AI modules to bring the voicebot to life. The driver then opens the Google Assistant app, invokes the relevant voicebot & tells conveys their desired location — nearest to them or nearest to another destination. The user is then guided to the best car park via Google Navigation. This technology can reduce traffic congestion and therefore carbon emissions, given that 30% of circulating cars in major urban areas are searching for a park.

If you are a smart city and want to stay in touch with our latest modules, don’t hesitate to subscribe to our newsletter here!

Content feeds getting the attention they deserve

Most organisations use content feeds to build websites & share content with users. This usually refers to list-based feeds of places or products. Via integrating your content feeds into your chatbots, you can target the user with the most relevant information based on their interests. This could be done through taking the user through different content types or simply providing this content as a response to a question from the user.