As Enterprises are embracing digitization showing advancements in mobility and IoT, exciting new trends are emerging in the technology space waiting to be harnessed to provide an impeccable user experience. One such trend is Chatbots, a mechanism to perform specific tasks using simple voice or text commands.

Having gained a threshold in the social ecosystem, Chatbots are paving way to be the next big thing in the enterprise counterpart.

The advent of Chatbots has brought to light the emergence of bot extensions of enterprise software which is now offering users a way out of putting themselves through the process of data entry. Bots could automate a number of routine tasks, remove inefficiencies, enhance human abilities, and help employees focus on accomplishing their goals and enhancing job satisfaction.

While developing Plant Maintenance and Service Management apps using SAP Fiori guidelines, we took a step further to introduce the concept of Chatbot extensions into the solution. We built a Chatbot for Plant Maintenance and Service Management with a purpose of providing an interactive experience over Chat, to plant Technicians and Supervisors. We evaluated KORE BOTS Framework, Microsoft Bot Builder and SAP Co-Pilot to build and integrate the business process with the Chat Platforms/Messengers for real time use.

Technicians who are responsible for Inspections do not have to go through complex data entry processes to report issues or create tickets. A ticket can be logged with detailed attributes of the finding with simple text commands. The Chatbot interacts with the backend and carries out all the functions required to create a ticket without the user’s intervention.

·        The Chatbot interacts with the user by asking a set of simple questions comprehended by anyone. No formal training necessary.

·        The App has the ability to identify the functional location by triangulation.

·        Users can upload images into the app.

·        Spare parts can be selected.

·        A ticket is created within the conversation.

The end user has a more personal experience while creating a ticket. As Chatbots are usually text-driven, with images and unified widgets, therefore shows to the end-user only the required at a time, and can advance the interaction with a user based on user input at each specific point. Further the Chatbot prompts the technician with a set of questions in a certain sequence. This makes the process of notification/ticket creation more efficient as missing essential details is avoided. That’s finally when we can call an interaction between a machine and a human communication.

Using Machine Learning concepts a Chatbot also can be further enhanced to learn from the user’s behavioral pattern thereby making the application more intuitive and intelligent. Since the Chatbot can be integrated into Chat Platforms/messengers using a browser-based application a standalone app on the device is not always mandatory.

This addresses a very important question how do I train users?

Interestingly users of chat based applications need very less or no training to use them.

Based on a study by PWE Research Center in 2015 36% of smartphone owners report using messaging apps such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Twitter or iMessage apps, provides a very good reinforcing statement to this question.

It’s time for organizations to leverage technology offerings now! Go ahead…humanize your IT investments.

We would like to share our experience and love to hear your challenges. Feel free to contact us if you require any further information at info@vaspp.com or call on +33 688 337 375