With chatbots empowered by artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, they are more than just Q&A systems with predefined responses based on keywords. Chatbots are intelligent applications that can predict user requirements and proactively serve users in a more personalized way. The implementation of these chatbots is now more relevant in business than ever before. Here are the 5 important signs your business should adopt an AI chatbot solution.

1. Time Consuming IT Service Management Process

The current service desk process for ticket creation requires users to log in to their service portal and create a ticket by filling in a list of details, such as description, type of service, who to assign, and so on. Based on the details, the ticket is routed to the respective resource team or resource person. Though this is doable, the process lacks a user-friendly approach. ServiceNow research states that front-line staff is wasting 12 percent of the time due to miss categorization of tasks. Some other issues users face with service web portals are:

• Consuming a lot of time to navigate through the vast list of options
• Difficulty locating the required catalog items
• Hard to trace previously reported problems and their solutions
• Difficulty identifying a knowledge-base article from a huge knowledge database

By integrating a chatbot application with an IT service management platform or ticketing platform like ServiceNow, users can ask the chatbot to raise the ticket without having to worry about tasks, like creating, classifying, prioritizing and assigning the request. The ServiceNow chatbot application can be integrated with various chat interfaces (i.e. Slack, Skype, etc.) that are external to the ServiceNow platform. These send push notifications if any change to the state of the request is recognized. This optimizes the complex workflows involved in the IT service management process.

2. Laborious Project Management Tasks 

In project management, managers spend most of their time verifying the status of tasks, either through emails or portal dashboards. Though project management dashboards enable us to monitor the team's task status, even accessing the dashboard is time-consuming as managers need to log in to the portal to check.

Integrating a chatbot with the project management portal will allow managers to directly ask the chatbot about any query and the chatbot application will retrieve information without having to traverse through catalog items of the portal. A chatbot integrated into a mobile app allows further access to data from anywhere. Using a chatbot, project managers can perform the following actions:

• Getting a list of approvals
• Approving or rejecting change or service requests
• Creating an incident
• Retrieving knowledge-base articles
• Displaying dashboard data or analytics

Powered by AI capabilities, chatbots study employee interactions and generate behavior analytics, which helps managers to analyze service delivery trends and fix issues hindering the service delivery process.

3. Current HR Portal Not Serving Employees Effectively 

As a part of HR automation, many businesses have integrated an HR portal system. Despite having a self-assisting HR portal, email communication is still often used by employees to get information from HR, as going through a vast list of HR portal options is time-consuming and demands some knowledge about portal usage. So, despite having an HR portal, HR's time is consumed in solving repetitive employee requests. These repetitive communications also delay the issue resolution process and reduce overall employee satisfaction.

An AI-powered HR chatbot can communicate with multiple employees at once  to solve requests quickly. As the chatbot can respond in natural language and offers a tailored communication experience for employees, employee engagement and satisfaction is increased, resulting in reduced employee turnover.

4. Inefficient Recruitment Process

With increasing hiring volume, finding the right talent in a limited time frame and budget is a challenge many staffing and recruiting teams face. Despite having all the automation tools to source candidates, bad hires are costing companies very heavily. It's estimated that approximately 60 percent of a candidate's annual salary is what it costs to replace an employee. 

Enterprise chatbots can be of great assistance in providing compelling use cases to improve the recruitment process while also reducing the time-to-hire and cost-to-hire. Here are some ways chatbots offer recruiting and staffing solutions:

• Provide great candidate experiences
• Source resumes and schedule interviews to reduce time-to-hire and cost-to-hire
• Use candidate personas to understand candidate skills to generate better engagement, avoiding bad-hire costs
• Build a talent pool by analyzing all available sources, both external and internal

(Learn more about how chatbots are delivering smart recruitment solutions)

5. Prolonged Wait and Resolution Times in Customer Service

In a world of consumerization, customer experience matters the most. A single bad experience could result in a brand losing a relationship with a customer. Most of the time, customers are kept in IVR (Interactive Voice Response) or a chat volume waiting queue to connect to a human customer service representative. A single human customer service representative can't handle multiple calls at a given point of time. To solve this problem, customer service chatbots can be an easy solution. 

By implementing chatbots to automate the customer service management process, businesses can handle any number of customer requests with a single chatbot application at any given point of time. Based on the customer chat historical data, AI chatbots develop behavioral analytics to personalize communication with the user. This can save your business costs in the customer service department and also reduces customer service representatives' overhead.