Slack’s paid users spend 90 minutes per day, on average, actively using their platform.
Assuming your employees behave similarly—regardless of the business communications platform they use—, it’d be in your organization’s best interest to bring the data and actions from 3rd-party applications to your business communications platform.
We’ll show you how chatbot automations can help you do just that by covering several examples. But first, let’s align on the definition of chatbot automation.
Ready to start implementing chatbot automations?
Whether you’re looking to automate lead routing, incident management or employee onboarding, Workbot®, our customizable platform bot, can help.
What is chatbot automation?
It’s any automation that involves a chatbot. More specifically, the chatbot can trigger a workflow automation and perform any subsequent actions in the workflow, all while keeping employees from leaving your business communications platform.
Chatbot automation examples
To help make this definition more tangible, let’s cover some powerful use cases.
Streamline employee referrals with Referral Bot
To uncover the best candidates quickly and at scale, you should motivate your employees to provide referrals. And while there are a variety of approaches that can help, you can
start by making the process of submitting any quick and easy.
Here’s a chatbot automation that can help:
1. An employee accesses “Referral Bot” in a business communications platform like Slack and clicks “Refer Candidate.”
2. Referral Bot opens a pop-up where the referrer can fill out key information on the candidate.
3. Once filled out and submitted, a candidate profile gets created for them in an ATS like Greenhouse, where all of the relevant fields are populated based on the information provided by the referrer.
4. The recruiter for the role receives a message from Referral Bot, where they can review the candidate’s information and decide whether to forward them to your hiring manager.
5. As the candidate moves along each stage of the interview process, the referrer gets notified by Referral Bot, all but ensuring that they’re kept in the loop throughout the process.
Related: What is an HR chatbot? Plus 7 examples
Identify suitable customer references with ProductIQ Bot
One of the last steps a prospect might take before finalizing their purchasing decision is speaking with an existing customer about their experiences with your product and team.
You can enable your reps to find the best client referral for any situation with the help of chatbot automation. Here’s more on how it can work in the context of helping one of our own reps at Workato:
1. A sales rep accesses “ProductIQ Bot” in a business communications platform and types in something along the lines of “help.”
2. ProductIQ Bot responds by asking if the employee would like to either “Get metric chart” or “Connector usage data”.
3. If, say, the rep wants to look up clients that use our Salesforce connector, they would click on Connector usage data and type in “Salesforce” under Connector and “Domains” under Option.
4. The bot responds by providing high-level information on the clients that use the connector. It also provides a link to a “Usage Report” document where the rep can find the individual accounts that use the connector, along with additional usage information on those accounts.
Related: A guide to sales chatbots
Empower employees to request the equipment they need with Assistant Bot
Your employees will inevitably need new equipment and devices over time. Whenever they do, you can make the provisioning process simple and fast on their end by leveraging chatbot automation.
Here’s how it can work:
1. An employee accesses “Assistant Bot” in a business communications platform and clicks on “Equipment Provisioning.”
2. The employee can then select the specific items they need via a dropdown menu. Once they finish making their selections, they click “Request Approval.”
3. A ticket automatically gets created in an ITSM tool like ServiceNow, which includes the requested items and information on the requestor; all the while, Assistant Bot messages the designated approver all of the relevant information, and it allows them to either accept or reject the request with the click of a button.
4. Once the approver either accepts or rejects the request, the associated ticket gets updated and the chatbot notifies the requester of the ticket’s status.
Related: The benefits of using an IT service desk chatbot
Chatbot automation benefits
Here are just a few of the top benefits that come with implementing chatbot automations:
Enables your employees to focus on high-impact work
The average employee moves between applications more than 1,000 times per day, which translates to nearly 4 hours of wasted time on a weekly basis.
Chatbot automations allow your team to significantly cut back on app-hopping, as employees can perform more of their work within their business communications platform. Moreover, they can use their newfound time savings to focus on more strategic tasks that they’re more likely to value and that’s more likely to benefit the business.
Allows you to act on data in near real-time
In many cases, data’s utility depends on how quickly it’s recognized and acted upon. For instance, once a new lead comes in, you’ll want the newly-assigned rep to become aware of it quickly and respond as soon as possible. Any delays only increase the chances that the lead goes on to contact and buy from a rival.
Chatbot automation lets you address almost any time-sensitive business event effectively (in the example above, you can use “Lead Bot”), as it provides the relevant data and actions to the appropriate employees in near real-time.
Delivers a better customer experience
Many chatbot automations can be geared towards improving customer satisfaction. For example, you can leverage one that notifies reps when a clients’ level of product usage drops below a predefined threshold—thereby enabling customer-facing employees to provide personalized, prompt support. And even when the automations are employee-focused, they’re likely to benefit customers indirectly, as happier employees will likely help you develop and foster a happier customer base over time.
Requires little-to-no technical expertise to implement
While implementing chatbot automations that work across business-critical workflows can seem daunting, you can now use a low-code/no-code platform to build and modify any.
This enables your citizen automators (i.e. employees who have more business skills than technical expertise) to utilize their unrivaled knowledge of specific processes and applications when building chatbot automations, all but ensuring that they’re impactful. In addition, since you’re adding additional builders to the effort, you’ll be better positioned to scale and optimize your automations over time.
Implement any chatbot automation with Workbot
Workbot®, our customizable platform bot for Slack, Microsoft Teams, or Workplace from Meta, offers all of the use cases and benefits highlighted above, and much more. In addition, by building Workbot in Workato, the leader in enterprise automation, you get access to all of the benefits offered by our platform: a low-code/no-code UX, hundreds and thousands of automation templates, machine learning and AI-based features (e.g. Recipe IQ), and so on.
