By Aditya RoyEnterprise Chatbots are gaining significant importance in recent times due to their rising importance. They offer companies opportunities to tap new avenues to improve operational efficiencies and enhance customers’ experience without much human intervention. They even make the most boring business interactions interesting!
However, building an effective Chatbot can be challenging. Whether you outsource it to external developers or get it built through your in-house team, the following points are important to have a successful outcome:
1. Industry experience and domain knowledge: Make sure your chatbot platform providers have the required knowledge and expertise about your industry. Based on the industry, they will keep in mind the important factors required to build the right framework. Only the right framework will be able to provide the required speed, flexibility and functionalities to build the desired Chatbot in line with your business model.
2. Multiple functions: It is important to build chatbots, which are capable of performing multiple tasks be it answering questions, preparing reports, placing orders, updating records, providing support and so on. Enterprises deal with multiple customers at a time facing different issues. It is important that the Chatbots are able to address all these issues. In short, your chatbots should be a one-time solution for all customers’ queries.
3. Multiple supported channels: It is crucial that your enterprise chatbot is compatible with multiple channels and devices to cater to different users. It will enhance the user base of your chatbots.
4. Tools: The tools and techniques used to build the bots should be carefully applied while developing the chatbot. To be able to build a customized chatbot to cater to different needs, a web-based and intuitive tool must be used. Proper tools will help in developing a chatbot, which is compatible across different platforms and devices.
5. Testing of chatbots
Testing of bots before releasing them for public use is a must! A thorough testing procedure can help in identifying technical issues, bugs, and glitches. It will also help in identifying unwanted utterances for a successful implementation. These issues need to be addressed before the final product is released to the masses to avoid further complications.
6. Training and Development: Developing a Chatbot is a continuous process. It is important to periodically track its activities to determine the required steps for further improvements (if any). It is important to train it to gather information from its day-to-day user communication and improve its functionalities to be able to handle uncertainties or technical failure in a better way.
7. Privacy and Security: Data on the Internet are prone to cyber threats and malware attacks. Hence, privacy and security concerns of the information stored in chatbot should not be undermined. It is of utmost importance to take the required steps to secure your chatbots.
Some of the best steps to ensure the security of your enterprise chatbots are as under:
- User identification procedure should be done through two-factor identification i.e., user id and password along with an OTP verification process. This prevents forced login when someone accidentally learns other’s user id and password.
- Developers should provide end-to-end encryption to secure the flow of information between the sender and the recipient, which will reduce the chances of interception of the data.
- It should not allow prolonged access to the authenticated credentials and logged-in sessions should be made shorter
