Enterprise Chatbots in 2023: Features, Benefits, and Best Practices

A modern enterprise is a complex entity.

While managing the external scale of operations that uplift consumer engagement, they also need to manage and run the workplace with thousands of employees who work to their fullest potential.

Owing to the nature of enterprises, 67% of them are using business automation tools like chatbots to improve their end-to-end visibility across different systems.

Enterprises are already integrating chatbots that automate a handful of processes. But just embracing the basics of chatbot automation is not enough to conceive a strategic vision of an enterprise. They need advanced bots that can meticulously integrate into their existing systems and manage their scale. 

And that’s where enterprise bots step in. 

What Are Enterprise Chatbots?

An enterprise chatbot is an automated conversational interface that is built to match the scale of operations in large organizations. It can streamline workflows, automate mundane tasks, raise productivity, and act as a knowledge base for employees and customers alike.

So what makes enterprise bots different from regular chatbots and how do they aid enterprises?

The following guide will give a complete picture of what chatbots for enterprises are, their key features, key benefits, and things to consider before implementing them.

Key Features of Enterprise Chatbots

1. Extensive Customization

How enterprises function is unique since it's a combination of their value, their products, their services, and their goals. Not every enterprise will have the same requirements from their chatbots since they want to accomplish different things.

Enterprise chatbots offer a range of customizations that help the bot reflect the enterprise value. It makes chatbots tailor-made for enterprise business processes. Companies can choose how many bots they want to deploy, where they want to deploy, what channels they prefer, human handover and integration options, etc. They get the decision-making power to build a chatbot suitable for their business needs. 

2. Omni-channel Capabilities

If you think of big organizations today, they all have one thing in common — multiple points of communication on different channels. It’s because their customer support would go for a toss without it.

Research suggests that organizations with an optimized and sustained omnichannel engagement strategy can retain an average of 89% of their customers.

Enterprise chatbots have omnichannel capabilities that you can deploy on multiple platforms like Facebook, websites, WhatsApp, SMS, mobile apps, etc. For example, on WotNot, once you build a bot on the bot-builder, it can simply be cloned for different channels.

Deploying omnichannel bots also helps enterprises ensure communication and support consistency across all channels. It helps enterprises function seamlessly in the digital space. Moreover, this also gives real-time data and customer insights from across platforms.

3. Easy Human Handover

Since many businesses are venturing into conversational marketing, they realize that the power of customer support is in real-time conversations and not the method through which they happen.

Yes, automated bot conversations are necessary for first-level support, but you also need a live chat to provide agent assistance for the next level.

Enterprise chat can be easily integrated into an enterprise’s live chat system.

A human handover essentially means that the bot can transfer the conversation to a live agent whenever the user asks for it. This feature allows enterprises to provide real-time hybrid support where the human steps in only if the query is too complicated to be solved by a bot. 

4. Third-party Integrations

Bots perform to their best potential once they’re integrated with other support tools. It also helps to connect conversation details to customer profiles on other tools. For enterprise chatbots, integrations are not an option. They need to have them for consolidating bot data onto their existing systems.

With enterprise chatbots, you not only get native integrations but also get to choose from a list of third-party solutions and systems such as CRM, accounting systems, payment gateways, HR portals, etc.

Enterprise chatbot plans often have no limit as to how many or what type of third-party integrations you want to implement. 

5. End-to-end Solution

Enterprises usually don’t go through the hassle of learning the technology and implementing and motoring the same by themselves. There are simply too many things on their plate, so they outsource the entire solution. Besides, enterprises usually need multiple chatbots that perform multiple tasks.

Enterprise chatbot plans come with an end-to-end offering where the chatbot development companies determine the use case, design the script, add integrations, and deploy and monitor the solution.

The chatbot providers further test your bot, make revisions to the scripts to make it more accurate, and gather the necessary feedback required to enhance user engagement. This takes away the burden from enterprises for doing so, helping them focus on strategic tasks. 

6. Custom Pricing

Most chatbot providers offer freemium pricing models where they offer a set of chatbot features in different plans. For example, WotNot offers a free plan, a basic plan, a starter plan, a premium plan, and a custom plan. Apart from the custom plan, all other pricing models have limitations in terms of features and integrations.

Also Read: How Much Does it Costs to Build a Chatbot in 2023?

But enterprise chatbots perform a range of functions for which custom pricing is the most suitable. Custom pricing allows an enterprise to tweak the features and integrations according to their requirements and leverage premium support facilities that are not accessible in other plans.

For example, WotNot’s enterprise plan offers a Single Sign On (SSO), Setup Assistance, 24/7 Prioritized Support, and Technical Support.

Things to Consider Before Deploying Enterprise Chatbot 

1. What is Your Business Objective?

Knowing your business objectives help you set the right expectations for your chatbot and guide you in deciding the KPIs to measure chatbot performance. So think of what you want the chatbot to do. 

• Is it to streamline internal processes? 

• Is it to provide 24*7 support? 

• Is it to provide employee support? 

• Is it to aid recruitment? Or generate leads? 

As an enterprise, you can have multiple objectives at once which means you will be dealing with multiple KPIs. But laying out clear objectives can help you communicate the same to employees who will be using the tool and gauging its success and to the chatbot providers who will build your solution. 

2. How Do You Want to Execute the Project?

There are various ways you can build an enterprise chatbot. 

Building from Scratch

In case you decide on building the solution from scratch, you should know that it will require a lot of money and time commitment from you. Your chatbot costs would include the cost of hiring developers, marketers, and testers who will work in sync to deploy the solution for the company. You will have control but you also need to maintain the software and update it with time. 

Leveraging a Platform 

A chatbot-building platform offers the infrastructure needed to build a chatbot. You can leverage the features, platform, integrations, and live chat. However, the service offering depends on the pricing. On an enterprise level, it works best only when you want to experience the technology and figure out its use cases for the organization. 

Experienced Agency Provider

As we discussed, an enterprise will never have just a single use case. Companies need expert aid in designing and deploying multiple custom chatbot solutions. That’s where the service of an experienced agency provider comes in. If you decide to opt for an experienced agency provider, you can be assured of having an end-to-end solution that is fit for an enterprise framework. 

3. What Are the Functions the Enterprise Chatbot Will Perform?

You get the answer to this question as soon as you’re clear about your objectives. Say, your goal is to streamline the recruitment process, automate customer support, and generate leads.

In that case, you’ll need to deploy three chatbot solutions, the first one is for providing customer service round the clock, the second is for aiding the recruitment process, and the third is for generating leads.

Once the chatbot objectives are clearly defined, you can expect these bots to generate qualified leads, generate support tickets, handle queries from start to finish, source recruitment candidates, and screen them based on company criteria, etc. 

4. Which Teams Will Provide the Live Support?

Since you’re deploying a chatbot, you should know that only your level one support is completely automated. Many customers prefer speaking to humans for complex queries or just because of their presumptions of speaking with a bot. To provide hybrid support, your bot can transfer the conversation to an agent at any point in time on the chat.

Once this happens, you need to have a backend support team that knows how to or is trained to use the live chat system. You need to know who will take this responsibility and how they can be trained to provide adequate support. 

5. What Systems Will Integrate With the Chatbot?

Since an enterprise already has a lot of systems in place, you need to integrate your chatbot with the same to sync the data and ensure its seamless flow across various tools.

For example, if your bot is recruiting candidates, it needs to have integration with the HR software. If not, your HR teams will have to look at two separate tools to keep track of the candidate list.

Enterprise chatbots provide custom integration options that help you decide what system will integrate with the chatbot and what won’t. Even if it’s a customized system, enterprise chat has the benefit of getting integration with just about any system.

Key Benefits of Enterprise Chatbots

1. Implementation Assistance

By now, you’d know how enterprise setups are. They’re full of customized systems, processes, and use cases that are unique to their goals and objectives. Often, there’s also a knowledge gap about the product and if you’re integrating multilingual chatbots, it is challenging since they’re not as simple as the rule-based ones.

You need to have an understanding of the intents, training phrases, and machine learning abilities, to build a bot that provides accurate responses.

Owing to this, the implementation process would be anything but straightforward. Fortunately, enterprise chatbot providers are service-oriented where they take care of the entire implementation process.

They can determine your use case, design the bot script, integrate your bot with your current systems, and deploy the bot on your required channel. This saves you a lot of time in gauging the requirements and learning how to incorporate them into the chatbot. 

2. Prioritized & Global Support

Chatbots are representing your brand everywhere at all times. Even if there’s a minor glitch, you’d want a hands-on support team that can look into the issues and get the bot up and running.

Even when AI bots are concerned, they need to be frequently updated, tweaked, and trained for accurate responses.

And after your bot is deployed, you’ll have a better understanding of what integrations you require, what script changes are needed, and so on. All this calls for the continuous quality support that enterprise chatbot platforms provide.

Enterprises get prioritized support, regardless of what the issue is and where the enterprise is located. 

3. Maintain Consistency Across Channels

As an enterprise with multiple touchpoints, consistency is of utmost importance. You cannot have stellar support on one channel and poor support on another. A consistent omnichannel experience is known to increase key metrics like customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, and customer lifetime value.

Enterprise chatbots offer the benefit of building and deploying similar chatbots across channels simply by cloning. Apart from the channel-specific integrations and support, everything else remains the same and your customers get a seamless experience on all platforms. 

4. Handle Enterprise-level Support Volume

Large organizations are familiar with a high volume. A chatbot’s activity volume means evaluating the number of interactions that a chatbot handles, from the time a user asks a question until a valuable dialogue takes place.

The volume can also witness a sudden spike due to an influx of traffic caused by ad campaigns or festive seasons. Basic chatbots don’t have the bandwidth to cater to the thousands of users who’d want to speak to a chatbot at once.

But enterprises have the liberty to raise the bandwidth to handle the large support volume. They can scale the conversation system so that it can handle more requests in real time. 

5. Enterprise Grade Security

It should come as no surprise that organizations take security very seriously, and rightfully so. They cannot risk any security leaks or regulatory requirements. Enterprises already have a bunch of regulatory procedures in place that the bot has to comply with.

Enterprise chatbot providers are highly dedicated to providing enterprise chatbot security in the form of information security, practicing rigorous testing, and following strict rules of global privacy standards. The focus is on saving time by eliminating security breaches and avoiding all regulatory penalties through:

• End-to-end Encryption

• Authentication and Authorization

• Placing Protocols

• Spreading Awareness

6. Enhance Customer Experience

Ultimately, an enterprise just wants to improve the customer experience, regardless of the time, platform, and volume. Chatbots for enterprises are designed to automate and interact at scale across platforms. They meet the customers' expectations by giving them quick answers, providing personalized experiences, and making it easier for them to get in touch with enterprises at their convenience.

Chatbots for enterprises also offer the multilingual benefit. They can speak the customers' language, thereby removing the locational and regional barriers and uplifting the customers’ experience with the brand. 

7. On-premise Installation

On-premise installation means the bot is installed within the premises of an enterprise, making it the company’s data center as opposed to cloud servers. Why is this a benefit?

Firstly, it offers security. Chatbot-hosted on premises aren’t entirely invulnerable but it does give enterprises the authority to allow and restrict access. Companies have the entire code-control and data control. Moreover, on-premise solutions can also assist them in keeping even the maintenance and assistance in-house.

On-premise installation is also cost-effective in the long run. The cost of ownership may end up much lesser since you eliminate the direct costs and only pay the maintenance costs later on. 

8. Custom-built Integrations

An enterprise plan gives you the decision-making power to decide what integrations you want to purchase and what you want to build. Most bot providers already have big disposal of third-party integrations such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM), accounting systems, NLP platforms, payment gateways, scheduling integrations, marketing analytics, live chat, etc.

Chatbots for enterprises can also integrate with native integrations. It can integrate with a custom CRM or live chat software and adjust the bot to your existing system instead of the other way around. 

Conclusion 

As an enterprise, if you’re looking to integrate an enterprise bot, you’re on the right track to uplift your customer experience and optimize internal processes.

As for the rest of it, you can rely on chatbot providers like WotNot that can take over the reins and build the entire solution for you that fetches you unmatched ROI.

If you have any questions on how you can get started, you can get in touch with us. We take a knowledge-first approach where we’ll guide you through the process of building the perfect chatbot solution that your enterprise needs.