When coupled with Khoros Care, chat bots enable you to provide a quick, consistent, and automated customer experience to your customers. This includes timely answers, standard service messages, and links to additional resources that may exist in your FAQ or Khoros Community. For businesses working with a large customer base, this provides a useful buffer between your customers and live agents while also ensuring a great customer experience.
In the past, chat bots were often tied to a specific channel (e.g., Facebook PM). While this solution certainly works for smaller businesses or proofs-of-concept, Khoros Automation Framework provides a path to channel-agnostic bot solutions by abstracting the automation interface (the way a service connects to Khoros) from the actual automation (a chat bot, or payment agent, etc.) In plain language, it means it's easier for you to offer your automated solution across all of the channels that matter to your customers.
Additionally, modern automated solutions aren't limited to just chat bots. Payment agents, CMS integration, and other external systems are capable of providing exceptional customer experiences directly within channels. And again, Khoros Automation Framework makes this easier to implement. Automation Framework is a bot-agnostic framework that provides businesses with the freedom to implement a bot solution of their choice with Khoros Care.
In this post, we will examine what the Automation Framework is, and some of the benefits and advantages it offers companies using Khoros Care and Khoros Community.
What is the Automation Framework?
The Automation Framework is an expansion of work that began with the chat bot integrations for Facebook/Twitter and similar efforts.
Where these integrations offer functionality within the scope of the channel, we wanted to provide a solution that empowers brands to utilize a variety of external automated tools, including topic discovery (e.g., a bot that assists agents in finding the best answers to customers' questions), interfaces to payment gateways (think T-mobile and the payment process that an agent can initiate to collect plan upgrade charges, etc.) and of course chat bots.
Unlike the current chat bot integration that relies on the channel (e.g., Facebook PM), the Automation Framework abstracts this entire process so that any messaging channel can be used with an external bot. Additional plans to include Khoros Community support are in the works.
To put it another way, a channel-specific chat bot is like a hammer while the Automation Framework is like a toolbox. It doesn't do the same job as the hammer, but it holds a variety of tools that make more things possible.
Advantages of the Automation Framework
The Automation Framework gives your business additional flexibility in two key ways.
Agnostic Automation Interface
First, by abstracting the automation interface (the way a service connects to Khoros) from the actual automation (a chat bot, or payment agent, or...) it means that our customers can implement any compliant automation rather than a more limited set if we were to choose the "top five" requests. Think about the impact of app stores and the opening up of the mobile platform.
Considering messaging specifically, this means that our customers can place their single, preferred automation process ahead of Facebook PM, Twitter DM, WhatsApp, Khoros Brand Messenger, etc., enabling both a consistent end-customer experience regardless of entry channel, and, on the backside enabling a single, consistent agent experience.
The latter is huge for the enterprise brands we serve with hundreds of agents: the training costs saved are a significant value.
Customized Solutions
Second, it means that our customers can choose automation service providers based on their specific needs rather than the capability of the automation provider we choose.
As Google, Amazon, Watson...gain in the marketplace the ability to pick, choose, and evolve automation providers will matter greatly to our customers.
This approach is consistent with our CRM and Data API service integrations: in all of these cases, we provide the hooks so that the customer is free to choose the service.
Summary
The Automation Framework takes the existing chat bot integration and adds an abundance of capabilities to it. This is especially useful for enterprises with a range of automation needs that go well beyond what a channel-specific chat bot can provide.
Automation Framework is currently in Early Adopter phase (limited access, approved customers only), with GA (General Availability) plans in the works following a successful EA phase.
The Automation Framework provides choice where choice is needed most. It empowers companies to create consistent end-customer experiences and reduced pressure (e.g. costs) on live agent resources.
A special thanks goes to DaveEv for providing a lot of the important details and base content that made this blog post possible.
