Chatbots assisting German business management applications

Abstract

In most companies Business-Management software has become omnipresent in recent years. These systems have been introduced to streamline productivity and handle data in a more centralized fashion. Yet, these systems are often modelled by complex processes which makes navigating through them a challenging task. In this work, we introduce a text-based chatbot to a mid-sized Austrian company to facilitate the interaction with these software solutions and thus support them in managing their customer relationships. To learn more about positive as well as negative effects the chatbot has on the employees, we conduct a technical as well as an empirical evaluation. We, for instance, hypothesize that younger staff, who grew up with computers and smart phones, are more open to the conversational system than older employees. We implement a customized solution which integrates seamlessly into the company’s system. The implementation process is informed by related work on Customer-Relationship-Management software, structures of a conversation as well as the typical architecture of a chatbot. In the technical evaluation, objective metrics such as average response time were measured. For the empirical evaluation, a questionnaire was sent out to 15 participating employees asking about subjective metrics such as task ease or user experience. In sum, employees were satisfied with Usage, Interaction Pace and System Response.