A big part of the rising AI wave is enterprise chatbots – AI chatbots that assist internal and external operations at companies across industries.
Part of their popularity is that chatbots for enterprise can be used across use cases. They expedite customer service, HR, IT, e-commerce, and a host of other uses.
In this article, we’ll explain:
- What enterprise chatbots entail
- Common use cases
- How to get the most of an enterprise chatbot
- How to build your own
We’ve spent years deploying chatbots for enterprises – we’ve picked up a few insights along the way.
So if you’re new to the concept of enterprise chatbots, or you’re looking to deploy one yourself, you’re in the right place.
What are enterprise chatbots?
An enterprise chatbot is a conversational AI software that automates and streamlines tasks across different departments at a company. They’re commonly used for customer service, HR, and IT support.
Unlike a simple chatbot, enterprise chatbots are more versatile and scalable, capable of handling complex tasks: integrating with CRMs and ERPs, automating workflows, providing personalized customer experiences, and assisting with internal processes.
They can be deployed across multiple departments, from HR and IT support to sales and marketing.
What's the difference between enterprise chatbots and regular chatbots?
Because enterprise chatbots are often deployed at a larger scale than typical chatbots, there are a few differences:
1) Security
Enterprise chatbots often have more stringent security requirements. When they’re integrated into daily-use systems, or they participate in high stakes processes, an enterprise chatbot needs high-level security standards.
This typically means picking a chatbot platform that abides by compliance frameworks like SOC 2, HIPAA, or the GDPR.
If an enterprise chatbot will be handling customer data – like payment details, full names, or addresses – it must be built fully in-house or on a secure platform.
2) Multiple use cases
The most effective enterprise chatbots are deployed across use cases, not limited to one purpose.
If a customer support chatbot is a success, why not use the same AI technology to qualify leads or train new employees?
While many chatbot platforms specialize in singular use cases, we’ve found that our enterprise clients are far more satisfied when they make the most of their enterprise chatbot platform by extending the scope of their AI deployment.
3) Synced to internal sources
Enterprise chatbots need to be synced up with a company’s internal data (like product stock or HR policies), as well as the most useful systems (like a CRM) in order to maximize their efficiency.
If a chatbot isn’t properly integrated with existing systems, it becomes an extra step for customers or employees, rather than an automation of existing workflows.
Enterprise chatbots almost always use retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to ensure that their output is grounded in a company's information. Using RAG reduces the risk of hallucinations (i.e. a chatbot sharing inaccurate or misleading information).
Common use cases for enterprise chatbots
Use cases for enterprises are endless – as long as your platform is extendable, you can configure an AI chatbot to do anything.
But there are a few common use cases of enterprise chatbots:
Customer support
The most common use case for an enterprise chatbot is a customer-facing support bot. Why?
- Customers expect 24/7 support.
- Customers are more satisfied by personalized customer service.
- Enterprises need to offer multilingual services.
They bolster behind-the-scenes work on your customer support team, too. Enterprise chatbots act as additional customer service agents – even making changes directly in a CRM – allowing your customer service team to spend more time on high-level tasks.
Human resources
Internal chatbots are equally as common for enterprises. Larger workforces have increased need for bespoke digital communications.
An enterprise AI chatbot for HR can:
- Explain policies and procedures
- Process vacation requests
- Schedule employees for shift work, like retail and hospitality
- Facilitate training
- Log complaints
- Book meetings
HR chatbots are able to reduce the repetitive tasks required by HR representatives. Beyond repetitive tasks, an enterprise chatbot can even recall previous conversations and provide tailored advice for specific employees.
For example, one of our partner organizations deployed a chatbot that was put in charge of vacations and scheduling. The AI chatbot learned to predict when employees would call in sick or request the most days off, and was able to plan accordingly in advance.
IT support
Unlike customer service and HR, IT bots can be either customer- or employee-facing.
They’re a natural use case of enterprise chatbots, largely because they’re connected to a company’s internal knowledge bases.
An enterprise chatbot for IT support can:
- Reset passwords
- Verify a user’s identity
- Share videos about specific problems
- Explain step-by-step troubleshooting
- Manage support tickets (particularly when integrated with CRM tools)
One of our clients was able to reduce the number of calls going to their call center by 30%. They sought out an enterprise chatbot solution to manage their 24/7 technical support for their SaaS product.
High-quality IT support needs to be available at all hours, and for multinational enterprises, it needs to be multilingual. Enterprise chatbots are a natural extension of strong IT infrastructure.
Sales and Marketing
As enterprise chatbots expand across use cases, sales chatbots are becoming increasingly common.
It’s not uncommon for enterprises to use chatbots for lead generation. But if your organization is already deploying a chatbot, you should be using it for every step of the sales funnel.
Sales and marketing chatbots can:
- Distribute lead magnets
- Collect contact information
- Qualify leads
- Recommend content
- Provide demos
- Send emails
- Schedule meetings
A sales team is freed up to spend their time on more valuable tasks when a chatbot can take over the repetitive tasks on their behalf. Since the sales pipeline is digital by nature, conversational AI can handle every stage of the sales process.
Once a user lands on your website, enterprise chatbots can provide customers and leads with engaging content personalized to their profile. When chatting back and forth, they can qualify leads and set up meetings for qualified prospects.
Enterprise chatbots can even enhance your company’s method of qualifying leads. They can analyze website user behavior and existing customer behavior to identify patterns that suggest a high-value prospect.
E-commerce
If you’ve ever bought something online – be it shoes, office supplies, or camping gear – you probably had the chance to interact with an enterprise AI chatbot.
Chatbots are a natural aid to customer experience in digital commerce. It’s a space where customers expect full self service options, from finding the right item to checkout.
These kinds of chatbots can facilitate the customer experience on a website, social media channel, or in-app messaging. They can suggest similar products to the ones that users have bought before, or even suggest items that will pair with other purchases – like H&M’s styling chatbot.
5 reasons to use an enterprise chatbot
Enterprise chatbots are on the rise, and for good reason. The structure and needs of companies – particularly companies that span across countries – are ideal for chatbot solutions.
We’ve deployed chatbots and AI agents to enterprises for years. Here are 5 key benefits that we’ve seen enterprises value the most:
1) Scaling
When you’re managing operations across countries, it can be time-consuming and difficult to build and scale new processes.
That’s why one of the main reasons enterprises use chatbots is to scale their operations.
A key part of scaling is identifying technology that can automate repetitive tasks and ensure a consistent experience for users (whether they’re customers, employees, or leads).
Ideally, your customer journey remains consistent, no matter how many customer interactions your company sees each day. Chatbots are an ideal way to ensure standard practice as processes scale up.
2) Consistent quality
One of the overlooked benefits of using chatbots for enterprises is their ability to deliver reliable, high-quality services.
Unlike human agents, conversational AI software never has a bad day. Enterprise chatbots can handle any type of customer inquiries without a reduction in morale – advanced natural processing understanding allows a chatbot to detect certain emotions, but it will only improve the quality of service.
Deploying a strong enterprise chatbot will improve customer satisfaction, as long as you keep human agents in the loop for high-level calls.
There will always be customers who need a human touch or face a brand-new problem – your customer service teams will be able to spend more of their time on high-level customer satisfaction.
3) Integration with legacy systems
Most enterprises are built on solid foundations – it can feel near-impossible to change technology infrastructure.
AI chatbots don’t disrupt enterprise tech stacks. They can be integrated with existing systems in order to enhance workflows, rather than make employees transition from one system to another.
Internal processes can remain on the same touchpoints, just streamlined or, in some cases, fully automated.
If integration with legacy systems is a key need for your chatbot, then ensure you select an enterprise chatbot platform with open standards.
4) Cost-efficiency
Automation means savings. When your employees are freed up to work on higher-level tasks, your company’s ROI soars.
Any conversational AI software can handle basic customer issues, and well-built chatbots can even process complex queries.
Your sales teams and customer service teams can reduce their overall spend while increasing levels of customer engagement with an AI chatbot. Enterprise systems rely on cost-efficiency, and chatbots are a proven way to meet demand without breaking the bank.
5) User analytics
Plenty of tools collect valuable data from your customers – an enterprise chatbot not only collects valuable data, but provides comprehensive customer insights.
The best enterprise chatbot platforms will analyze customer insights, like which products have the user inquiries, what services result in the most support requests, levels of customer satisfaction, or direct customer feedback.
The direct customer information gleaned by enterprise chatbots – combined with their integration to your company’s other performance metrics and enterprise data – means they offer a streamlined, accurate view of what your customers like, want, and expect.
While it’s not often their direct purpose, an enterprise chatbot provides valuable insights about your customers. If improving customer engagement with data is on your radar, gaining customer insights from a chatbot is a direct method of data collection.
How to ensure secure enterprise chatbot deployment
Holdouts to the AI wave often point to security as the reason for their hesitation.
Since artificial intelligence has only seen widespread commercial use in recent years, there have been plenty of mismanaged deployments.
Decision-makers should be especially cautious when deploying enterprise chatbots that will process personal data, like last names, passwords, or credit card information.
Synchronized systems
Enterprise chatbot platforms will provide security standards that safeguard how your chatbot uses sensitive information, as well as the type of information it can dispense.
When a chatbot is synced with internal data, it’s able to provide accurate responses to the tee. And when security systems are built into your platform, your chatbot is unable to use information beyond the scope of your usage.
You can read more about the Botpress security suite here.
How to build an enterprise chatbot
Step 1: Pick a platform
We’ve seen plenty of enterprises that decided to build their own chatbot from scratch. It can be an appealing choice: full reigns, ensured security, no monthly subscription fee. But few undertake this path for long.
Building from scratch is time- and labor-intensive – and it ensures your chatbot will either take far longer or be of a much lower quality.
As you pick a platform, keep in mind your company’s unique needs. If you want a platform that doesn’t limit the possibilities of your chatbot, look for an enterprise chatbot platform that has open standards and an extensible stack.
If data privacy is your biggest concern, look for a platform that boasts high security standards. If you have a beginner developer team, look for a platform with a user-friendly interface.
If you need some inspiration, you can browse our list of the 9 best chatbot platforms. And if you’re interested in taking a call tomorrow, you can reach out to our sales team.
Step 2: Collect your data
If you’re looking to train your chatbot on company information – like HR policies, or customer support transcripts – you’ll need to collect the information you want your chatbot to train on.
Not every enterprise uses original data to train a chatbot. Often, advanced prompting is sufficient to design your chatbot’s flows.
But if you want a chatbot that takes an extra step to customize your company’s offering, then collecting data and using it to train your chatbot is one way to do so.
Step 3: Build your chatbot
When you pick your chatbot platform, make sure you choose one that comes with enough educational materials to assist your team throughout the build process.
For example, we offer academy courses, daily livestreams, and an extensive collection of YouTube tutorials. Bot building can be a difficult task when you’re facing the learning curve – having resources at your fingertips makes the process go far smoother than without.
And if your team is new to bot building, most enterprise chatbot platforms have a drag-and-drop visual flow builder that allows for easy visualization of your workflows.
Step 4: Integrate and customize
Chatbots don’t exist in a vacuum. Their purpose isn’t just customer interactions or explaining one set of policies.
The most useful chatbots for enterprise are integrated across your company’s systems and platforms.
This might mean tables and documents, your website, or other third-party services – think platforms like Hubspot, AWS, Google Analytics, Intercom, Calendly, Microsoft Teams, Slack, Stripe, Mixpanel, Telegram, WhatsApp, or Zendesk.
If you use an enterprise chatbot platform, most of your team’s building time will be spent on perfecting your bot’s integrations, rather than building the chatbot itself.
And if you pick a strong platform, it will allow you to customize your chatbot in tone and personality. You won’t need to select specific words, but you can direct when your chatbot should speak apologetically, or what type of language it should use to describe your products.
Step 6: Deploy
One of the best aspects of a chatbot is that it can easily be deployed across any platform or messaging channel.
Many enterprises choose to deploy a chatbot not just on their website, but on their social media channels or internal messaging platforms.
Enterprise chatbots are a streamlined way to action a successful omnichannel strategy. Your users can experience the same service across multiple channels, and receive platform-specific help.
For example, a customer communication coming from WhatsApp can ask to change their password on your internal system. A chatbot facilitates a seamless integration between your users and systems.
Deploy an enterprise chatbot next month
AI chatbots are quickly reaching mass adoption rates amongst enterprises – in customer service, internal operations, and e-commerce. The companies that are slow to adopt will feel the consequences of missing the AI wave.
Botpress is an endlessly extensible bot-building platform built for enterprises. Our stack allows developers to build chatbots and AI agents with any capabilities you could need.
Our enhanced security suite ensures that customer data is always protected, and fully controlled by your development team.
Start building today. It's free.
Or contact our sales team to learn more.
FAQ
How do enterprise chatbots work?
Enterprise chatbots use artificial intelligence and machine learning to automate processes across business use cases, like customer service, HR, and sales.
How can my business get AI-powered customer support?
AI-powered customer support is the use of artificial intelligence to enhance different aspects of customer experience, like answering user queries or processing purchases.
Will chatbots replace my job?
Enterprise chatbots aren’t designed to replace live agents; they’re designed to automate repetitive tasks and enhance employees’ existing workflows.
What’s an AI-powered enterprise?
An AI-powered enterprise is a company that uses artificial intelligence technologies to enhance multiple business processes across departments, both internally and externally.
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