Today, companies embarking on a Virtual Agent project have three choices: they can build their own corporate chatbot, opt for a generalist chatbot technology or choose a packaged solution designed for existing uses cases. Among these possibilities, how to find the perfect match with your business goals?
“Build” versus “buy” a corporate Chatbot: the pro and cons
If your organization has started a virtual agent project, you may soon encounter the decisive question of the implementation strategy. In fact, the three choices listed above have a very different impact in terms of risk management, required resources, skills, project schedule and user experience.
Even if you use the various frameworks available on the market, building a corporate Chatbot isn’t easy. Many obstacles will arise across the road, such as natural language understanding or change management.
Thus, any project manager who tackles a Corporate Chatbot initiative must understand that it will involve multiple components, depending on the complexity of the targeted business cases:
- A Natural Language Processing (NLP) engine, able to interact with end-users, understand and answer questions ;
- Deep Learning or Machine Learning thanks to artificial intelligence ;
- Management of a linguistic corpus, sometimes multilingual;
- Cybersecurity, especially for authentication, user management and data protection
- Knowledge management bases
- A full set of APIs and connectors, to manage the integration with business applications and cognitive services
If the project aims to solve existing business issues, managing all these technological and linguistic components represents a high level of complexity. Is it really justified regarding the expected benefits?
Before choosing to develop your own Bot , ensure that all business needs have been properly identified. Take also some time to assess existing suppliers.
Benefits of choosing an out-of-the box virtual agent
Packaged Chatbots solutions can be a valuable alternative to building a conversational platform from scratch. Choosing a dedicated virtual agent allows you to have a ready-to-use solution, so that you can quickly show tangible benefits to the company’s employees.
Many support processes within organizations and Shared Services Centers are very similar. IT Service Desk processes, for example, often involve receiving end-users’ requests, analyzing and categorizing them, then looking for solutions inside knowledge databases and answer questions.
A pre-trained solution, with a focus on this specific use case and a clear roadmap, maximizes the chances of project success and adoption by users and internal teams.
An example: Konverso solution for IT Service Desk
Konverso has chosen to offer its customers specialized corporate Chatbots by functional areas. In particular, we believe that in the company, a certain number of recurring, time-consuming and basic activities will be delegated to a virtual agent.
Our IT Service Desk Chatbot is entirely designed to enable businesses to achieve their goals: reducing processing time, automating resolutions, accelerating the onboarding of new teams, spur collaboration and ameliorate customer experience. In addition, our solution can be trained by our customers to fulfil the needs specific to their context.
- The intelligent Chatbot is delivered with a pre-built IT linguistic corpus, so it can understand immediately common issues reported to IT Service Desks, and manage these incidents and requests for assistance automatically.
- Our pre-trained virtual assistant uses algorithms to carry out categorizations specific to the IT service desk. It helps employees find appropriate solutions in Self-Service portals.
- The intuitive Chatbot is already integrated with leading IT Service Management (ITSM) solutions, such as Servicenow, Serena, GLPI. It can leverage corporate communication channels, such as Skype for Business or Microsoft Teams.
- In addition, the corporate chatbot is connected to existing knowledge bases such as Sharepoint or Jira.
- Finally, it integrates a ready-to-use catalog of contents around office collaboration and productivity tools.
All these capabilities allow us to secure the project delivery and to deliver the ROI expected by our customers.
