All you need to know about bots role in today’s world
Crunching numbers for balance sheets, promoting a new product or service or responding to customer queries – these repetitive yet essential tasks have always been entrusted to the most meticulous of personnel. That’s changing fast and it’s happening all around the world. In bots (also known as internet bots), mankind has discovered tireless, trustworthy employees that can take care of some of the most cumbersome day to day tasks without ever losing focus or getting bored. What’s more, they don’t even need to be paid! Welcome to the era of bots!
Understanding the value of bots
Excellence, they say, is derived from repetition. But so is production and almost every enterprise, no matter how different their M.O. and objectives, is bound to involve the repetition of a certain set of actions.
Think of a bank teller. He/she is responsible for monetary deposits and withdrawals, transfers, collecting and logging in payments, updating the systems, batching cheques and counter slips, answering customer queries and at least half a dozen more tasks. What if you could take away some of the simple and repetitive, also, the most time-consuming tasks like updating system records and find a way to answer customer queries, that will drastically reduce the teller’s workload, right? And that’s not all, it will cut down on the queue and allow the teller to assist more people in the day than he/she would otherwise have been able to. Bots can handle such repetitive tasks in a highly efficient manner, and work round the clock with zero chance of an error.
Recent developments in Robotic process automation (RPA) have left application specific scripting far behind. Modern bots are uncanny when it comes to mimicking the communication between humans and software and fully capable of handling complex tasks that go beyond the scope of simple scripting.
Bots promise the utmost accuracy and enhanced work speeds and, most importantly, they take the pressure off the human employees, leaving them free to engage in the kind of tasks that involve creativity and ingenuity. Use of bots can lower the employees’ work load and stress levels, boost their mood, eliminate human errors and improve the overall efficiency of the unit. It also improves customer experience and service satisfaction. Big wins all around!
The most widespread applications of bots in modern world
Bots are a rapidly growing presence on the business scene. Whether it’s client-customer communications or everyday workplace activities, they’ve made a mark in almost every area. To individuals, bots are revolutionizing the way they use technology for work and recreational pursuits. Let’s look at some of the most popular applications of bots in today’s world.
Chatbots for customer service
Now, what is a Chatbot? Chatbots is a common term for bots that are created for conversation. These AI powered programs are capable of carrying out both text-based and auditory conversations and are widely used for simulating humans in an interaction. Modern day chatbots come with high end natural language systems and use either keyword identification or databases (or both) to process a revert for the queries put to them.
Chatbots have become quite common. If you’ve recently ordered a pizza or chatted at a service provider’s app or website in relation to their product, chances are you’ve already had conversations with a chatbot. Perhaps the only way for you to check whether you’re interacting with a chatbot or a real person is to look for delays in responses. Bots are almost always on the ready and respond with little to no delays as compared to human customer service executives who might take time to revert due to high traffic or because it’s taking them time to gather information for replying to your queries.
While chatbots save the customers’ time with their prompt support, they also help improve their impression of the service provider.
To the businesses, chatbots are a highly economical alternative to round the clock human based customer service and a wonderful way to improve customer experience.
Workplace assistant bots
Bots as workplace assistants aren’t the same thing as virtual assistants. A virtual assistant is a software that helps employees carry out functions like setting alarms, scheduling meetings, checking directions, flight status and other activities that a human assistant would be tasked with.
A bot for providing workplace assistance, on the other hand, is more of a data acquisition tool. Office workers can gather product, service and company policies related information from these bots, saving them the time and the effort of seeking out other officials for the same information.
With office assistant bots, employees can get accounts, leave and meeting schedule related information without getting up from their desks. Today, creating bots that act as workplace assistants has become pretty economical and the time they save is invaluable to the employees as well as the company!
Bots as app managers
Present day office workers have to rely on a number of different apps for carrying out their daily activities. A bulk of their time is devoted to searching and gathering information across different apps. Modern businesses have realized how even simple, light-weight bots with minimalist UIs can take away the employees’ need to use so many apps. With a bot in place to manage multiple apps, the employees can use simple written messages to tell the bot of the information they require. The bot will search all apps in relation to the query and retrieve the desired information in no time.
Predicting the future of bots
According to Gartner, the global market for Robotic process automation (RPA) is expected to generate a revenue of $1.3 billion in 2019. These figures indicate a jump of about 63 percent from 2018, and experts believe RPA implementations like business bots are nowhere close to being used to their peak potential. A great many things are expected of bots in the coming days. These are a few of them –
Bots will infiltrate the workspace in a big way
In his book “Invisible Robots in the Quiet of the Night”, Craig Le Clair, Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research predicted that the future workplaces will have a robot for every employee. The world has just started waking up to the incredible utility of bots and our current bot-engagement is merely 1 percent of what bots can do for us. That is expected to change in a major way in the days to come.
Bots will lead to redesign of established organizational processes
With the usefulness of bots becoming common knowledge, we’re bound to see some radical changes in the way business processes are carried out in different industries. From saving thousands of hours’ worth of time annually to tackling operations beyond the capabilities of available human resources, automating processes that are handled solely by humans promises great rewards.
Along with redesigning the conventional processes for including bots, the way humans interact with bots is also going to play a big part going forward. Modern bots have gotten better at mimicking humans, understanding behavioral patterns and emotions than their predecessors. This has opened up newer avenues, and functions previously deemed too ‘human’ for bots have fallen in bots territory.
Experts expect organizations to start implementing RPA to every sphere of operations in the near future. Work processes will be redesigned based on the concept of bots and humans working hand in hand. This is also likely to change the structure of human jobs in every organization.
Bots will rise to challenge mobile apps
While the mobile app market is flourishing, a thing that experts call ‘app fatigue’ is also settling in. Just look at your own app usage. While you likely experimented with and used a number of different apps even a year back, you’ll realize how you’ve become reliant on just a handful of mobile apps today. Chatbots can carry out the role of text based mobile apps in a more efficient, faster and more engaging manner taking up much less device space.
According to TechCrunch, bots have the potential to replace apps. The future could see a single messaging-based bot become a unified interface that serves the functions of multiple apps. One area where mobile apps hold advantage over bots is visual based functions. Shopping, managing photographs and videos are all tasks where mobile apps are expected to be held in favor over bots.
Wrapping up
Bots are still a mostly untapped resource to humankind. We’ve become aware of their scope but are yet to discover all the ways we can use them to our advantage. But given the rate at which the AI that powers bots is evolving, we can expect the bots of tomorrow to be better at emoting, detecting and responding to moods and behavioral changes and provide a satisfyingly seamless solution to all our technological needs.
Author Profile –
Naiya Sharma is associated as a Content Strategist with Apptunix – a leading Web and Mobile App Development Company. Her write-ups are usually based on technology, mobile apps, and mobile development platforms to help people utilize the mobile world in an efficient way. Along with writing, she also has a keen interest in managing social media marketing campaigns.
