Enterprise chatbots: Scaling customer service with conversational AI

Most customers expect an immediate response when they contact a company. Even with a large team of support staff, immediate responses from a human aren’t always possible, especially during call surges.

Chatbots are one of the fastest ways to answer queries, popping up as soon as a customer enters your website. They’re great at giving immediate assistance and resolving simple requests. Enterprise chatbots do all of these things and more—at scale.

But exactly what is an enterprise chatbot? How can it help your business deliver outstanding customer experiences at scale?

What are enterprise chatbot solutions?

Much like regular chatbots, enterprise chatbot solutions are basically computer interfaces designed to converse with humans. While standard chatbots typically respond to simple customer FAQs, enterprise versions can handle complex queries and more varied use cases.

An enterprise chatbot is an advanced conversational tool that can automate different business processes and help employees perform tasks more efficiently. Many enterprise chatbots can seamlessly integrate with your existing tools like help desk and learn to improve.

Chatbots can be used for customer service, employee training, IT or sales support. Conversational AI platforms that power chatbots can operate 24/7, instantly respond to multiple inquiries at once, and automate repetitive tasks.

Besides helping customers, some enterprise chatbots can also empower front-line agents and employees by automatically searching knowledge sources and pulling information to help them answer customer questions. Modern chatbots typically use AI technology to understand what users are asking, plus other automations to streamline business processes and workflows. The idea is to enhance efficiency and engagement across large, global organizations.

How do enterprise chatbots compare to other chatbots?

The principal difference is that enterprise chatbot support is designed for large, global companies with thousands of staff and huge customer bases.

To support this level of scale, the technology is more sophisticated and provides more customization and integration options. Here are a few key ways enterprise chatbots stand out from regular chatbots:

• Capable of dealing with a higher volume of requests at the same time: The bigger the business, the higher the volume of support requests—and enterprise chatbot platforms are able to handle a very large number of conversations simultaneously. Users don’t have to wait so long for their queries to be answered, and human agents don’t get overwhelmed. Because these bots are trained on the company’s extensive datasets, they can retrieve the right answers and resolve issues quickly.

• Flexible enough to be applied to diverse uses: Enterprise chatbots are highly flexible, and are typically more secure, which means they can be used in more regulated industries such as healthcare and finance. They might be multilingual, and they can do a lot more than just answer FAQs (although they’re great at that, too). For example, some enterprise chatbots can run security checks, help customers with returns, and even qualify sales leads. Some agent-facing chatbots can also send reminders for things like appointments, subscription renewals, and order confirmations. They can help employees book meetings and business travel and act as personal shoppers on eCommerce websites.

• Better integrated with other enterprise tools: A chatbot for enterprises can also integrate with your third-party software and systems, including CRMs, ERPs, HR tools, and knowledge bases. This means the bot can automatically pull customer details and past purchases or interactions so that live agents can easily find them if and when the conversation continues. Enterprise chatbots can also use data to personalize their responses, such as product recommendations based on purchase history.

• Use conversational AI and machine learning: The best enterprise chatbot platforms feature conversational AI, which means they’re able to respond in diverse ways to a huge variety of questions or inputs. We’ll explore this in more detail in the following section, but essentially, they can understand different prompts and respond accordingly instead of using pre-programmed responses. These chatbots are also able to learn by themselves and get smarter over time, using data from past conversations and customer feedback.

Conversational AI: Powering the new era of chatbots

Conversational AI puts modern enterprise chatbots in a different league to older models, which could only understand specific keywords and provide predefined answers. Such rule-based chatbots worked on a decision-tree basis, offering multiple-choice options for the user.

For example, a chatbot trained on commonly asked questions might say: “Do you want to reset your password, check your account balance, make a payment, or something else?”

The customer would select an option, and the bot would follow automated rules to resolve the query—or pass it over to a live agent if the customer wanted to do something more complex.

But with conversational AI, users can type in exactly what they want to do, and the enterprise chatbot software won’t default to “I’m sorry, I didn’t understand that.”

Conversational AI is a subset of artificial intelligence that encompasses machine learning, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Natural Language Understanding (NLU), and smart response generation to provide a more natural conversational flow.

NLU is about processing and interpreting human language so that computers can understand it, while NLP allows chatbots to understand context and intent. Response generation involves parsing user input to extract relevant information and using NLP and NLU to give an appropriate response.

Depending on the quality of the AI, some AI chatbots can understand typos, acronyms, and slang, interpret user sentiment, and predict behavior. With deep learning algorithms, they can improve themselves over time. Top enterprise chatbots are quickly becoming even more intuitive and capable of handling complex tasks.

Sounds complicated to set up? It doesn't have to be. For example, Dialpad Support lets you use drag-and-drop to create a conversational AI workflow:

Enterprise chatbot use cases

As we mentioned, enterprise chatbots are extremely versatile. Here are a few areas in which businesses can put them to use:

Customer service

Of all the enterprise chatbot use cases, this is probably the most common. You can deploy them for many aspects of customer service, from answering FAQs about opening hours or returns policies to making product recommendations and offering post-purchase support.

When customers have questions, the enterprise chatbot can search both a company’s internal and external knowledge bases for the right answer, in conjunction with an enterprise communication solution. Not only that, conversational AI for enterprise enables chatbots to escalate or route a customer to the right live agent, cutting down on customer frustration with multiple transferred calls.

Since AI-powered chatbots can handle increasingly complex queries, they free up even more time for human agents to focus on more sensitive conversations or higher-value work. They can also collect valuable insights about customer behavior and segment the data. Some even automate some customer service interactions, such as updating account details directly.

Enterprise IT support

Enterprise chatbots are ideal for internal use, too, especially for IT support. In larger companies, the IT team often spends a lot of time answering simple questions for employees. Chatbots can reduce this workload, leaving IT staff free to handle more serious issues.

For example, employees can query the enterprise chatbot for IT support solutions, which the chatbot can respond to after searching the organization’s informational resources. The chatbot can also route company employees to the right IT support agent or department, saving time and confusion.

Chatbots can do things like resetting passwords or troubleshooting problems with routers and printers. It’s often much faster for employees to resolve IT issues by themselves. All of these enterprise IT support capabilities save valuable human time and labor when performed by a chatbot instead.

Sales

Chatbots can play a major role in accelerating the enterprise sales cycle and improving lead quality. They can engage website visitors proactively, answer product-related questions in real time, and guide potential customers toward the right solution based on their needs.

By asking pre-set qualifying questions, chatbots can automatically capture key information such as company size, industry, and purchasing intent. Once a lead meets specific criteria, the chatbot can book product demos or schedule meetings directly with a sales representative. Some advanced chatbots can even prioritize leads using AI-driven scoring models, ensuring sales teams focus their time on the most promising opportunities.

Chatbots can also nurture leads over time by sharing relevant content, reminders, or promotions. When integrated with CRM systems, they automatically update records, track engagement, and trigger personalized follow-ups. This seamless process increases conversion rates, shortens response times, and ensures that no opportunity falls through the cracks.

Enterprise chatbot benefits

• 24/7 availability: Offer always-on support, no matter the time zone.

• Increased efficiency: Automate repetitive inquiries and internal tasks.

• Personalized interactions: Use data to deliver customized recommendations.

• Scalable service: Handle thousands of simultaneous conversations.

• Regulatory compliance: Ensure security and privacy for industries like healthcare and finance.

• Lower costs: Reduce staffing needs for repetitive tasks and improve ROI.

What comes after enterprise chatbots: agentic AI

As powerful as enterprise chatbots are today, they represent just one stage in the evolution of AI-driven communication. The next major leap forward is agentic AI, AI systems that can act autonomously to achieve goals, make decisions, and collaborate across platforms.

Agentic AI combines conversational intelligence with decision-making, planning, and real-time adaptation. Instead of simply responding to user queries, agentic AI agents can:

• Take actions across multiple systems (for example, updating CRM records or managing workflows automatically)

• Learn and adapt based on outcomes and context

• Coordinate with other AI agents to achieve complex objectives

In an enterprise setting, agentic AI could move beyond scripted interactions to manage entire workflows, such as resolving customer issues end to end or orchestrating sales processes without human intervention. As organizations continue to integrate conversational AI, agentic AI represents the next frontier, driving not only communication but autonomous execution.

Conversational AI for enterprise needs

From chatbots to full-fledged AI agents, employing conversational AI enables enterprises to gain efficiency and free up employees for complex tasks, or interactions that require human empathy, such as dealing with a difficult customer service call.

Here’s what Dialpad’s chatbot functionality can do, for example:

• Search databases and FAQ pages for answers to customer questions

• Search unstructured sources of data, like PDF documents and past customer conversations

• Create intricate dialogues on your website, and even integrate rich media and video content

• Let you build automations and workflows in minutes—no coding needed

Enterprise chatbots are a key feature of Dialpad Support, so you don’t need to find (and pay for) a chatbot tool that’s separate from your contact center platform. It’s quick and simple to set up and customize a chatbot, with no coding knowledge needed. (But there’s 24/7 customer support if you need it.)

Book a product demo with our team to see how it works!