In 2018, I-Sys Labs released a product “Chatbot for solving business problems”to the market. This product has become a landmark for us in many ways because it has raised our own efficiency and mobility.

At the end of 2017, we, the software development team, switched from Slack solution to Teams. Having understood in practice the huge potential which this product carries. We began to think how to further improve the efficiency of communications in the company or with customers.

The world is changing, and employees of almost all business sectors have become more mobile, spend more time on business trips, meetings and negotiations. The familiar environment of using the company's software products and services creates a huge number of restrictions to be effective.

So it was in our company, where 40 % of employees are constantly “”in the fields.” So there was an idea to create a chatbot in order to increase the speed of information exchange and most importantly - to give the user a single interface for the operational solution of its business tasks:

• Book a car and a meeting room

• Schedule a meeting with partners or customers

• Record the results of the meeting and arrange the follow up

• Create a business trip or vacation request

• Get information from the knowledge base

• Get up-to-date status on project progress and responsible employees

• Get the status of the movement of documents along the chain of approval and certification

These are just a few scenarios of using the bot to solve the tasks of employees.

After that, we went further and made a replicable product from our experience.

The product can be adapted depending on the needs of a particular business, for example, to add the ability to make transactions in the CRM-system, create and send a new document for approval and certification, etc., i.e. to perform any repetitive routine operations of varying degrees of complexity.

The virtual assistant not only sends notifications, but also actively interacts with the user by executing his commands. The bot is proactive and is able to inform the user about important events that have occurred in the ecosystem of business processes, reducing the risks associated with late adoption of important decisions.

The product is of particular importance for employees who spend most of their working time outside the office or for those who often travel on business trips – the chatbot provides remote access to various systems of the IT landscape in one familiar Teams window.

As part of the product development, it is planned to integrate chatbots with IoT solutions, which will allow on-line (upon the occurrence of an event) to notify managers of various levels of the corporate structure of critical changes in the operation of equipment and reduce the speed of decision-making by dozens of times, reducing risks and possible financial losses of the company.

Thanks to the bot, we and our customers already note that the speed of the document approval process through popular messengers has increased by more than 30% compared to the speed of coordination via mail and by 300 % compared to the speed of coordination through the interfaces of internal systems.

A special synergistic effect is achieved when using the bot together with voice assistants. Now the chat-bot integrated with the voice assistant on the basis of Yandex.Alice, in the near future it is planned to integrate with other well-known voice assistants (for example, Microsoft Cortana).

This approach makes the solution even more inclusive.

“On average, I spend 14 days a month on business trips and on average I have 4 meetings with customers and partners. And the key to the success of the meeting is a quick response, processing the results of the meeting, a reminder, writing follow up, setting instructions, reflecting the results of the meeting in CRM. I used to do it at night or wait for the weekend to come to the office and process the results of the meeting. But the analysis showed that the long reaction significantly affects the conversion. I realized that I need a tool that will help in terms of the pace of my life and the limitations that I face, as quickly as possible to process a huge amount of information. This solution was a chatbot combined with a voice assistant, which while I'm going from one meeting to another will fix the result, send follow up, create orders to subordinates at least 5 times faster than I would do myself. The interface doesn't matter. It is important that you write or say” - said Arkady Zolotovitsky, CEO of SystemZ

Our bot is focused on Microsoft Teams technology, the architecture is based on Microsoft Bot Framework. Processes are configured in the graphical editor of zflow business processes for SharePoint Online, which, on the one hand, imposes product specifics on the solution, on the other – creates a huge potential for sales of bots to companies where the ecosystem of Microsoft products is already built, and to those who are just stepping on this road.