Chatbots for manufacturing industry | Benefits & Use Cases

For the past few years, the world of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and smart algorithms has been constantly evolving and changing, with its main goal to make people’s lives better. With many virtual assistants buzzing such as Siri by Apple and Alexa by Amazon, AI-powered chatbots are making their way up across different sectors and activities, including the manufacturing industry.

Chatbots or virtual assistants stimulate and mimic a human conversation by asking questions and giving relevant recommendations and solutions. Thanks to machine learning, Digital Employees constantly learn and improve, which improves the efficiency of the workers and results in greater customer satisfaction.

In the manufacturing industry, a chatbot has a dual role. The first role is to aid employees in getting accurate information regarding some processes of different levels of production without wasting time and to help out customer care representatives. The second role is to assist customers or clients in their questions and queries.

Chatbots use cases in manufacturing industry

1. Supplies and inventory check

One of the most important aspects of manufacturing is the regular supplies of parts and materials. Companies in the manufacturing sector need to keep track of their supply and existing inventory in order to avoid waste and make sure that orders are fulfilled. Thanks to manufacturing NLP chatbots, employees can access the status of supplies and any relevant information whenever they need it.

They can also integrate ERP solutions or other systems in order to access information even faster. Businesses can also train the algorithm to analyze how supplies are used and prevent any extra wastage. By doing that, managers and employees can follow up on orders via the same interface and hassle free.

2. Automating customer support

Many companies are implementing AI chatbots because they make it possible to automate routine support queries, service tickets and complaints and make the customer care process much smoother and proactive. A manufacturing chatbot can also intervene by making recalling procedures easier.

When a customer faces an issue with delivery, a virtual assistant acts like a human agent and helps customers by answering all of their concerns, questions and providing relevant information on the product bought. The chatbot is also able to give recommendations and solutions to the customer of what to do next and how to solve his/her issue.

The presence of a chatbot in these situations is critical because it saves the company from bad press and rumors that could spread very easily if a customer is not happy with a product and the customer support line is too busy. However, if the manufacturing chatbot is unable to answer the customer’s query, a human assistant should be able to jump right in through a swift chatbot to human handover.

3. Handling floor queries

Manufacturing plants are known to be quite hectic and factories are spread over several floors. This can result in some confusion and delays especially if employees have to shift between different floors to complete a task. A chatbot can handle floor queries and help you avoid unwanted surprises. This is sometimes referred to as knowledge management

You can use it to check the distribution of workload on different floors, check the production capability at a certain time, and know what kind of maintenance issues are recorded. These requests normally take a lot of time to address, but with a chatbot, you’ll be able to get the information quicker than with standard monitoring systems. These AI-powered assistants will also become a crucial part in quality control by providing the manager with in-depth insights about procedures and the amount of attention they need.

4. Updates and delivery notifications

As a manufacturing company, you will have to deal with a lot of demand and deliveries. With a chatbot, everyone from your employees to your buyers can be notified and informed about updates. The chatbot will be able to give information about the status; time and condition of the delivery, saving your buyers and your customer support team a lot of time. All in all, intelligent assistants can automate key business processes and ensure that tasks are being handled more efficiently.

5. Product recommendation

With many products to offer, manufacturing companies can use their chatbots to assist in short listing and make purchasing decisions. Thanks to its smart algorithm, a chatbot can rely on historical data and machine learning to understand the customers’ persona and recommend the right product based on his/her preferences.

Best chatbot use cases

Chatbots for manufacturing industry: Benefits

Implementing a chatbot for your manufacturing business provides a lot of advantages on multiple levels, including:

1. Improving operations

The biggest benefit of implementing a chatbot is its availability. In fact, a chatbot is always available at any given hour and any day, unlike a human representative. Moreover, a chatbot can answer an endless number of questions without any hassle or waiting time. This availability makes operations and processes run smoothly while avoiding friction between major stakeholders, which overall, directly affects the business and improves its performance.

2. Handling customer service efficiently

Chatbots bridge the gap between organizations and their vendors or customers. By employing a manufacturing chatbot, you will make the life of your customer care representatives easier and they will thank you for it. Customer support assistants are constantly flooded with calls and inquiries. So, implementing a smart chatbot will distribute the workload more efficiently. Chatbots will be able to answer all your customer’s questions swiftly and the complex queries will be redirected automatically to human representatives. This helps improve the productivity of your sales team to deliver better results.

3. Providing an interactive platform

Chatbots are an effective way of communicating because they do not deliver a passive experience to the user but rather an engaging interactive conversation that helps them in their queries and makes them feel cared for. Chatbots make it possible to increase engagement rates and attract more and more potential customers.

4. Market content through online channels

The interactional character of a chatbot leads to more customer engagement, and in return, engagement leads to business. The more customers get engaged with your manufacturing chatbot, the more you can get to know their buying preferences and suggest products that fit their needs.

Let’s suppose that you have two products that are very similar but target different customer categories. Without any guidance, your customers might get confused regarding which of the two products is more suitable for them and give up on purchasing the product. However, with a chatbot in place, your customers will be able to select the right product or services for them.

5. Improving organization efficiency

Intelligent virtual assistants help companies in many ways; one way is improving its overall efficiency and productivity. With a chatbot ready to take over standard and redundant tasks, the company finds itself with more resources human-wise and financially.

Additionally, a chatbot can keep track of various metrics by integrating it with existing systems ensuring optimal efficiency and a better supply chain management. There is no need to hire more staff; all you need is a chatbot to cut down your charges but also to focus on operations with an important added-value that contributes to the success of your business.

6. Easy access to knowledge and databases

Employing a chatbot solution gives your employees an instant and complete access to databases and your customers all the knowledge they need on products instantly and without any hassle.

7. Perform HR-related tasks

Running a manufacturing company is not an easy thing, especially considering the number of employees that work at factories. There are seasonal holidays, recruitment, sickness leaves and more. Thankfully, chatbots simplify human resources-related tasks. With their programmable algorithms, you can train your chatbots to handle some simple HR tasks such as acting as a communication bridge between management and employees, helping out the HR manager with the recruitment process, scheduling workloads, requesting time off, etc.

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