Can AI chatbots enhance agency operations and services?

Beerud Sheth, CEO of AI chatbot platform Gupshup, agrees. “Many companies looking to keep up with the trend are implementing chatbots across all aspects of their operations, including interactions with customers and employees,” Sheth said. Gupshap operates AI chatbots for companies such as Google and Citibank, and the company says three out of five chats between businesses and consumers use its technology. It is said that there is

“On the customer-facing side, chatbots are seamlessly integrated across the entire customer lifecycle, from acquisition to marketing, merchandising to support,” Sheth said. “Dynamic interactions driven by bots can drive higher conversion rates, optimize revenue growth, improve customer satisfaction, and even reduce support costs.”

Data access, cost and flexibility

Anne-Marie Turpin, chief technology officer at Ocean Media, said clients are open to piloting chatbots, and one of the benefits is faster access to tracking and reporting data. Compared to configuring standard dashboards for data access, trained chatbots are more flexible and can accomplish more work for clients with fewer resources and budgets, Turpin said. explained.

“Dashboard reporting requires anticipating the client’s questions and configuring it to meet anticipated needs,” Turpin said. “With a chatbot, clients can ask any question they want without any additional configuration or development work.”

In other words, with the help of AI, users (for example, clients) can simply ask a chatbot a question and get the information they need. Dashboards, on the other hand, require parameters to be set for questions, which require additional steps and fine-tuning to find the data and search for answers.

“Chatbots make it easier for users to access information,” Turpin said. “Agencies don’t have to anticipate user questions or spend time on business intelligence to build dashboards. They can use that time to train their chatbots.”

Similarly, Septeni is incorporating various generative AI tools into its business processes. Suefzi said AI automation can reduce costly tasks such as generating reports, visualizing data, and setting up alerts.

In April, Septeni collaborated with Soundraw, an AI music generation service, to develop a service that uses AI to automatically generate background music that increases the click-through rate of video ads. Based on content, product, and distribution media information, it is possible to analyze factors that contribute to advertising effectiveness. The tool allows human staff to focus on “more strategic, high-value work” and streamline client service, Suefzi added.

Septeni also incorporates various other forms of robotic process automation (RPA) tools into its operations. RPA tools are software bots used to automate various processes, and when combined with AI tools, they learn on their own over time. Suefzi said, “Such solutions that link internal chat and AI will likely increase in the future.AI bots with self-learning ability will be able to answer various questions without referring to internal documents. “It will become,” he explains.

Human resources, project management, internal efficiency

With the growth of messaging apps and ChatGPT, chatbots are only becoming more popular. In a sense, it makes sense that more and more companies are introducing chatbots to meet consumer demands. However, Gupshap’s Sheth points out that “bots can also be used to help companies improve the employee experience, for example by automating routine routine tasks common in human resources, IT, and facilities management departments.” .

Red Door Interactive also started implementing its own prototype chatbot, CMore, this year. The goal is to develop an interactive AI assistant that can be used for new employee onboarding and human resources and labor affairs. To date, CMore has learned employee handbooks, benefits information, security procedures, employee referral programs, educational support programs, and more, according to Red Door.

Dennis Gonzalez, Chief Operating Officer of Red Door, plans to expand the use of CMore to include human resource recruitment and project management in the future, allowing employees to focus on creating external content and eliminating routine work. He says he wants to move from reporting to an interactive format. Gonzalez said he implemented AI this quarter but did not make any layoffs in the human resources department. In fact, the use of bots appears to be an opportunity to free up staff resources for “more progressive work.”

Red Door’s chatbot can continue to grow and learn more content by updating and deleting information. Since piloting C4, the company has saved 100 hours of time, about one hour per employee task performed using the bot.

What risks are there?

Gonzalez points out that one of the challenges with using chatbots and AI software is balancing innovation with responsibility. “These are internal documents. We needed to provide information that was relevant to our employees and only to them,” he said. “We implemented the chatbot on the intranet. Access is limited to employees who have access privileges.”

Septeni’s Suefzi also points out the obstacles that impede AI demonstration experiments. In particular, issues such as data ownership, whether it can be shared, and how it can be shared can limit AI learning.

“Each stakeholder – advertisers, media companies, agencies – each owns their own data,” Souefuzi said. “Without open data sharing between parties, it will be difficult to train AI systems in a way that benefits all parties. Overcoming this obstacle will further advance AI automation and its effectiveness.” It will accelerate.”

However, brand strategy expert Shea Honorio points out that “AI and chatbots are not always the right tools from a marketing perspective.” There are still limits to AI’s ability to understand brands or explain why it created something.

“AI will probably be able to answer any question you ask,” Honorio said. “But you can’t explain the context or reasoning behind why you wrote that sentence or why you used that word. Nor can you explain the ‘why’ of your brand, which is the backbone of every company.”

While AI has certainly come a long way in a short period of time, there still seems to be a bit of learning curve to incorporate it into the internal and external structures of agencies and clients.