An innovative business case calculator has been created by
technology company Daden Limited to help organisations understand
the potential savings that using an interactive virtual agent - or
chatbot - can deliver.
Chatbots are computer applications that can act as a first line
of support providing instant responses to questions, without the
need for staff intervention, reducing pressure on resources.
Available 24 hours a day, seven days a week they can also collect
information, provide links to pages and answer queries using
natural language conversation, whilst allowing human staff to focus
on more complex queries.
Research has shown that the average cost-per-contact using a
chatbot is under 60p, compared to over £3.50 for live
text-chat or over £4 for a telephone contact - almost 84%
reduction in costs. But clients often want to know what the actual
benefits and savings would be for their own business.
David Burden, Daden's MD said "We developed the calculator to
let businesses rapidly see what the costs would be for a chatbot
within their business, and what the potential savings would be by
diverting calls that would otherwise be handled by the contact
centre - whether as voice calls or live chat."
The chatbot business case calculator allows users to enter a
number of different parameters about their business and the
chatbot, from the number of staff currently handling enquires and
the number of FAQ's to be handled, to the amount of authoring and
testing the client wishes to undertake themselves. The calculator
also captures the level of integration needed into back-end
systems, so that the chatbot can provide answers from existing
sources such as RSS feeds, web services or corporate applications
and databases.
David ends "With organisations such as CCM Benchmark predicting
that "virtual agent implementations will be a critical component in
customer services and even the main point of contact in 2014" our
aim is to help companies use virtual agents to improve their
services and reduce their costs. We believe that the chatbot
business calculator will help companies to quickly work out not
only the typical costs involved in a chatbot project but also see
the potential savings that can result within their
organisation."