When companies are confronted with the subject of chatbots, the first keyword is social bots and elections. Chatbots can be much more than you first suppose. The little helpers can become one of your assistants for everyday routine tasks to save time and costs while taking on unpleasant tasks such as travel expense reporting.

Chatbots can be integrated into various enterprise applications and tasks can be automated efficiently. So there are good reasons to consider the introduction of chatbots.

#1 Customers and employees love simple and intuitive operation

The use of instant messengers such as Facebook Messenger, Telegram, Slack or Skype for Business has become an everyday communication tool. You probably didn’t have to read a manual to understand how to communicate with your colleagues and clients on different topics. That’s exactly what chat bots offer, by following the necessary steps in a dialog with your assistant.

When making your travel expenses, the chatbot will ask you for the necessary information and, for example, request you to send a photo of the train ticket to initiate the transfer to your bank account.

#2 Chatbots save time and costs

During a journey, you usually get additional receipts such as hotel and taxi in addition to the train ticket. The manual input of receipts is usually time-consuming and, evenif it’s the same scheme over and over again, nasty mistakes such as swapped digits happen quickly, which are mostly detected during checking in accounting department. The travel expense report must then be revised again by you. Chatbots can reduce these error sources through integrated scanning and text recognition functions and give you back valuable time for other tasks. Regardless of location and time, employees benefit because the chatbot never sleeps and is therefore always available.

#3 Use the experience of the employees for the company success

Chatbots can handle the base workload of generic tasks in the organization, while employees can be called in to handle complex issues. By eliminating stupid repeating tasks, employees’ experience and creativity can be leveraged to create real business value. As soon as there are discrepancies in a travel expense report, these are checked and corrected by the employee.

#4 Chatbots are a disruptive technology

While smartphones and tablets have already changed people’s usage habits for many years, the way people communicate is already in transformation. Smart speakers like Alexa and Siri are an option of various modern communication channels. The dialogues with Chatbots will be in the future a matter of course, if it concerns to settle basic tasks.

#5 Integration of chatbots in processes and enterprise applications

The primary challenge of chatbots is not the frontend or the dialogue with the user, but the integration into different business processes. Chatbots must be able to look beyond their own horizons to perform different tasks instead of just being experts in a single activity. In the example above, the chatbot would not only do the travel expense report, but also book the hotel and train tickets. This is then a so-called hybrid chatbot.

Would you like to know more about this topic or use the Business Bot Platform in your company? Contact us, we are looking forward to support you around the subject chatbots in the corporate environment.