You're exhausted.
You just had to finish off a late night proposal, and one of your engineers is out on vacation so your latest feature is going to miss a deadline, and you just got three new support requests in ten minutes.
We get it, we've been there.
As a small business owner, you have a lot going on, there's never enough time, and you need your team to do more with less.
We all know that it's hard to coordinate and manage people, but it's surprising how often your employees need to come to you to ask you something that (in theory) they should already know. Business owners and managers can spend a lot of time coordinating tasks, answering questions, looking up resources, and helping their team operate more efficiently, but sometimes, we wish they could just help themselves. That's where it can be helpful to implement automated tools to make everyone's lives easier.
Process inefficiencies can slow things down
You've probably seen it before — one of your sales people got an obscure question from a customer and now you have to go and track down the answer. Hopefully it doesn't take 15 minutes. Or maybe you're safe, but your head of customer success gets a question from a customer about their last invoice, and they need to go and ask the engineering team to pull up last month's usage report. Or maybe one of your marketers needs to find that product image that you used last season for a discount, but you can't find it in the thousands of images you have on Google Drive.
Businesses can waste a lot of time with process inefficiencies — things like having to ask for the answer to a question, or lookup some data, or find a file can all take time. And it all adds up, too.
Think of the last time you had to go find some hidden piece of information that you needed to accomplish a task. Chances are, it took you a minute. And chances also are, you had to go and find yet another piece of information later that week, or even that day. What if you had a single place that could answer all of your team's questions, find that random answer, and help you improve communication across your entire team or organization?
Well, the right chatbot can help you do just that.
Chatbots aren't just chatbots anymore
By now, you've probably seen all of the hype around generative AI and large language models. New systems like ChatGPT and Claude can chat with you just like a human, getting you the answers you need in real-time, letting you avoid searching through ten different search engine result pages, drafting your outlines, creating your emails, and helping you come up with content. But what they can't do, at least not by themselves, is help you find answers from your business data seamlessly.
That's where it helps to have a chatbot that's as smart as the latest generative AI technologies but is also connected to your data sources, third party tools, and internal resources. A chatbot like this can let your team easily communicate with each other by living in your existing chat app, waiting to answer any questions that are thrown its way. If a team member has a question about a product feature, it can ask the chatbot, which is hooked up to your FAQ guide, and it can then provide its answer in a public channel, letting everyone see or comment on the results. If one of your salespeople needs to answer a nuanced question from a particularly inquisitive customer, he can ask a chatbot that's connected to your product documentation, and other members of your team can then add in their own comments along the way.
The right chatbot, powered by AI, can provide a way for your team to answer their own questions without having to bog down others, or even themselves, with questions that they can get answered automatically. Chatbots like these can save your team many hours a week, and might even let you get by with fewer employees, as was the case with one of Locusive's earliest clients, PARCO.
Get Answers Instantly with an AI-Powered Chatbot
Implementing a smart chatbot can provide huge time savings by instantly answering your team's questions. Powered by large language models like ChatGPT, these bots understand natural language requests and can provide responses by interfacing with your business systems and data.
For example, an AI chatbot connected to your knowledge base and documentation can handle frequently asked questions from employees without escalation. It can also retrieve specifics like product specs, pricing, manuals, and more in seconds versus your team digging through files.
Beyond internal knowledge, a capable chatbot can interface with external tools and databases to serve up real-time data. Examples include:
- Pulling latest sales figures from your CRM
- Retrieving customer support ticket details
- Looking up order status and shipment tracking
- Getting web analytics for traffic and conversions
The chatbot acts as a virtual assistant for your team - understanding context, asking clarifying questions, and presenting relevant information.
Streamline Communication and Collaboration
An AI chatbot in your existing chat app like Slack also facilitates better communication and collaboration. Rather than fragmented, hard-to-find information locked in emails and DMs, your chatbot makes Q&A accessible to everyone.
With a company-wide view of conversations, your team gets more aligned. Searchable chat logs mean onboarding new employees is easier too. A chatbot allows scaling knowledge across the organization.
So how do you find a chatbot that fits your needs?
With the proliferation of chatbot options, how do you select the right one for your specific business needs? Here are key criteria to evaluate:
Smart and Flexible AI Engine
The chatbot's underlying AI engine should be powerful enough to handle nuanced, contextual conversations. Look for bots powered by large language models like GPT-3 or Claude for human-like comprehension abilities.
Customizable Training
Your chatbot needs training on your proprietary business data - documents, manuals, conversations, etc. Opt for a platform that enables easy uploading of your files and knowledge without coding requirements.
Integration with Data Sources
Choose a chatbot that can connect directly to your systems like CRM, analytics tools, databases, and communication platforms via API. This facilitates real-time data lookup vs just static files.
Security and Compliance
When dealing with company data, the platform must have enterprise-grade security, access controls, and compliance certifications. Don't compromise on your sensitive information.
Team-Based Collaboration
A chatbot embedded in your collaboration apps like Slack fosters seamless team communication. Consolidated conversations mean more alignment across the organization.
Locusive's chatbot can help
Locusive offers an AI chatbot purpose-built for unlocking the power of your business data with large language models like ChatGPT 3.5 and 4.
Our secure platform connects directly to your existing tools and databases via API while maintaining strict access controls. We make it simple to train our chatbot on your internal documents and data sources through easy upload and configuration.
The Locusive chatbot provides a host of advantages:
- Answers questions instantly using company knowledge
- Looks up data in real-time from integrated sources
- Enables self-service for customers and employees
- Boosts productivity and communication
- Is continually trainable as your data evolves
Data integrations
Locusive's chatbot lets you integrate the tool and data sources that you use in your business today. It can handle standard data sources, like Google Sheets and Google Drive, and even third party apps like Salesforce.
Chatting
Locusive's chatbot for Slack allows you to chat with your team and your tools all at once in a single, central location. You can query all your data, let your team chime in, and get cited and sourced answers back to your questions, linking back to your data sources so you can be sure you're always getting accurate information at any given time.
To get started, schedule a demo with us and we'll help hook up your datasets, install the Slackbot, and get you started. If you have to do a lot of research, searching, or lookup, you'll find yourself and your team will be able to save a lot of time and mental effort by offloading a lot of your search and retrieval tasks to the bot.
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