When you visit a website you may have noticed a chat window pop up offering assistance on what you are looking for. Did it ever strike you that it may not be a human that you are communicating with? Welcome to the world of chatbots. It is clearly one the finest inventions of today’s time. With this new concept of conversational marketing through text or voice, chatbots have set up new dimensions and introduced new ways of doing business. The advent of chatbots has sophisticated the entire customer engagement process. It is one of the most useful technologies that businesses can rely on and one of the finest ways to directly reach out to individual customers.
What is a chatbot?
A chatbot is a computer program designed to simulate human conversations either through texts or voice. This conversation is done in natural format using artificial intelligence techniques such as Natural Language Processing (NLP), image and video processing, and audio analysis. A chatbot can converse with human users via an app or online service like Facebook Messenger,WhatsApp, Slack and so on. Chatbots function in two different ways:
Rule based chatbot – In this scenario, chatbots pick up responses from database history by identifying the keywords of the search.
Smart machine based chatbot – Here chatbots learn from artificial intelligence and machine learning. They study the pattern of customer interactions and adapt their behaviour accordingly
Chatbots can respond to questions posed by the user by understanding human speech, texts as well as by judging the intent. The most interesting feature of the bots is that they learn from the past interactions and become intelligent and smarter over the time.
Whats is ERP?
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) is a business management software that helps optimize the business process of an organisation. It uses a centralised database allowing different departments to communicate with each other seamlessly, without having to maintain data at multiple locations. All the applications of ERP are interwoven and can talk to each other. By providing real-time information, the software helps streamline the entire operations and take better business decisions. Additionally, it is beneficial in future forecast of the supply chain inventory that can help an organization increase its profitability.
How does the chatbot integrated ERP system work?
Chatbot is a user interface (UI) that all of us are familiar with. Hence, instead of going through a complicated UI, an ERP system integrated with a chatbot is preferred. The chatbot platform processes the users query. Once interpreted, the chatbot enquires about it in a common language with the ERP software. Chatbot then passes this information to the user in a way that he/she understands.
How chatbot integrated ERP can enhance your business productivity?
Chatbots integrated ERPs can change the way you have been doing business. Below are a few ways by which this technology can help improve user experience.
Increases your process efficiency: There are multiple tasks within an organization which are crucial but at the same time mundane. For instance, there are many tasks like processing work order, data entry of rates, quantity, name of the customer and so on. While all these information are relevant for any business, none of you would disagree that it takes majority of your productive time. This is when chatbot integrated ERP comes into picture. The software is programmed in such a fashion that it can help you with all these day-to-day repetitive tasks. Thus, allowing employees to invest their time into some more productive work. Additionally, manual data entry can cause fatigue, lack of interest as well as increase chances of error whereas with chatbots there are minimized chances of error.
Improves supply chain management: A chatbot integrated ERP system can improve your supply chain visibility. It can quickly identify if there is any error in the supply chain and help handle the recall process efficiently. It can reduce the manual tracking of data and save time by automating the same. Additionally, your chatbot-ERP system can be programmed to interpret and understand the delivery order. They can analyze which products need to be shipped and thus, create labels for shipping accordingly. This is very useful in bulk shipments. The tool will continue to do the task just like an employee as per the defined process. By assigning these kind of tasks to a tool, you can save time and enhance your supply chain management.
Enhances customer experience: With chatbot-ERP system, customers no longer need to wait to get their queries answered. They get real time response to their queries 24*7. In fact, customers can get accurate, personalized and detailed analysis of the sought information in a cost-efficient way. For instance, you are working on an important report after office hours that needs to submitted the very next day. To make the matters worse, there is a new version of the account management app in the ERP system which you are not familiar with. With chatbots you need not worry about getting connected to a support team member. Chatbots are there to help you with your query without any delay.