Conversational Chatbots for SMEs to continue business from home

3 minutes, 59 seconds read

Published on May 17, 2020

Updated on Aug 3, 2020

SMEs are acclaimed to be the backbone of the Indian economy. They are crucial to achieving the nation’s dream of a $5 trillion economy by 2025. But, the sudden outbreak of Covid-19 and the prolonged lockdown has brought about a very distressing time for small and medium enterprises in India and across the world.

On May 14th, 2020, the Government of India announced a Rs 20 lakh crore stimulus package, which includes 6 relief measures to bring India’s vast MSME sector back to life. Banks and NBFCs are also willing to offer up to 20% of the entire outstanding credit to MSMEs. However, the root cause of disruption in small & medium enterprises, which relies heavily on personal communication will remain unresolved unless the sector readily opts technology to drive their business amidst social distancing and staggered workforce.

“The economic stimulus will help many SMEs resume operations by providing access to credit to help overcome near term loss of income. This will help businesses..to also grow and maintain business continuity. The long term focus on enabling SMEs with technology also provides a great opportunity for our business.”
Saahil Goel, CEO and co-founder Shiprocket

Here’s how simple technology solutions like conversational chatbots can help SMEs to continue their businesses remotely.

The need of time

While running a small business can be challenging even in favourable times, productivity suffers a lot when such an unanticipated time stacks against the business. Because of the small size of the business, lack of resources and restraints on investing in workforce training are the biggest challenges with employers.

Moreover, most MSMEs rely on persuasion, for which communication is the key. The communication gap may lead to losing customers, which businesses certainly cannot afford at this time. In lines with the Government of India’s move towards self-reliance (Atma-nirbhar Bharat), reducing dependencies of any form can help startups and SMEs sustain their business.

A feasible solution to resolve communication-related concerns is deploying technologies for customer support, scheduling and reminders.

How can conversational chatbots help SMEs and consultants

Chatbots are a great medium to automate customer support and helpdesk conversations and release human resources for sophisticated tasks. Conversational chatbots have NLP (Natural Language Processing) capabilities that understand different forms of queries and deliver more human-like responses.

In this pandemic time, where social distancing will be the new normal and business travels will suffer a setback, chatbots can make contactless, global customer support a new reality. Key benefits:

24X7 communication support: with context-based automated replies, chatbots help in lead generation and nurturing.
Multiple language support: conversational chatbots support regional languages and many chatbots are trained for industry-specific jargon. This makes communication more realistic (human-like).
Platform integration: it is possible to integrate chatbots on WhatsApp, Facebook messenger, skype, and many other platforms where the consumers are most active. Enterprise chatbots also have the facility to integrate with CRMs.
Video conferencing: some chatbots like Hitee have video conferencing features along with chats to enable face to face and more personalized interaction.
Data collection: the chatbot platform maintains data records which can be utilized in the future for analyzing consumer intent and preferences.

SMEs that benefit the most by chatbots

1. Private clinics

Juniper research suggests that worldwide, the adoption of virtual assistants in healthcare will reach $3.6 billion by 2020.

Private medical practitioners can use chatbots to schedule appointments, share diagnosis results, video chat (telehealth) to understand the condition and provide instant support and prescribe medicines.

2. Legal consultation services

Clio reports that law practitioners spend only 2.3 hours of 8 working hours in actual practice every day. Their rest of the time is consumed in administration, marketing and business development activities.

work distribution of legal professionals

Law practitioners are already using chatbots to generate legal documents (e.g. AILira), privacy policy or a non-disclosure agreement (e.g. Lexi) and support customers with legal FAQs (e.g. Lawdroid).

Chatbots can also help the legal consultants to automate due diligence procedures, schedule meetings with clients, setting reminders, and answering firm related questions.

3. Career consultation & educational institutes

Chatbots can act as virtual teaching assistants for managing student queries, lesson plans, assignments and video FAQs.

Education institutes can also automate helpdesk queries related to admissions, fees, and curriculums.

4. Insurance companies

Amid this pandemic, health insurance and claims-related queries have skyrocketed. From making claims to browsing new plans, increasing one-on-one conversational efficiency and nurture leads into sales, chatbots can help insurance companies with customer query support.

Also read: Adoption of Chatbots across Insurance

AI in Insurance will value at $36B by 2026. Chatbots will occupy 40% of overall deployment, predominantly within customer service roles.
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5. Stock brokers & wealth managers

Stockbrokers can personalize the interaction and resolve queries irrespective of the client’s location. Wealth managers can continue their lending business from home using chatbots. Bots with video conferencing tools can help them understand the clients’ sentiments and improve conversation efficiency.

If you need customer support automation solutions, we’re here to help. We’ve made India’s leading industry-specific chatbot — Hitee to empower SMEs with AI-based chatbot solutions. For your specific requirements, please feel free to write to us at hello@mantralabsglobal.com.

Let’s take a trip back in time—2008. Netflix was nothing like the media juggernaut it is today. Back then, they were a DVD-rental-by-mail service trying to go digital. But here’s the kicker: they hit a major pitfall. The internet was booming, and people were binge-watching shows like never before, but Netflix’s infrastructure couldn’t handle the load. Their single, massive system—what techies call a “monolith”—was creaking under pressure. Slow load times and buffering wheels plagued the experience, a nightmare for any platform or app development company trying to scale

That’s when Netflix decided to do something wild—they broke their monolith into smaller pieces. It was microservices, the tech equivalent of turning one giant pizza into bite-sized slices. Instead of one colossal system doing everything from streaming to recommendations, each piece of Netflix’s architecture became a specialist—one service handled streaming, another handled recommendations, another managed user data, and so on.

But microservices alone weren’t enough. What if one slice of pizza burns? Would the rest of the meal be ruined? Netflix wasn’t about to let a burnt crust take down the whole operation. That’s when they introduced the Circuit Breaker Pattern—just like a home electrical circuit that prevents a total blackout when one fuse blows. Their famous Hystrix tool allowed services to fail without taking down the entire platform.

Fast-forward to today: Netflix isn’t just serving you movie marathons, it’s a digital powerhouse, an icon in platform engineering; it’s deploying new code thousands of times per day without breaking a sweat. They handle 208 million subscribers streaming over 1 billion hours of content every week. Trends in Platform engineering transformed Netflix into an application dev platform with self-service capabilities, supporting app developers and fostering a culture of continuous deployment.

Did Netflix bring order to chaos?

Netflix didn’t just solve its own problem. They blazed the trail for a movement: platform engineering. Now, every company wants a piece of that action. What Netflix did was essentially build an internal platform that developers could innovate without dealing with infrastructure headaches, a dream scenario for any application developer or app development company seeking seamless workflows.

And it’s not just for the big players like Netflix anymore. Across industries, companies are using platform engineering to create Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs)—one-stop shops for mobile application developers to create, test, and deploy apps without waiting on traditional IT. According to Gartner, 80% of organizations will adopt platform engineering by 2025 because it makes everything faster and more efficient, a game-changer for any mobile app developer or development software firm.

All anybody has to do is to make sure the tools are actually connected and working together. To make the most of it. That’s where modern trends like self-service platforms and composable architectures come in. You build, you scale, you innovate.achieving what mobile app dev and web-based development needs And all without breaking a sweat.

Is Mantra Labs Redefining Platform Engineering?

We didn’t just learn from Netflix’s playbook; we’re writing our own chapters in platform engineering. One example of this? Our work with one of India’s leading private-sector general insurance companies.

Their existing DevOps system was like Netflix’s old monolith: complex, clunky, and slowing them down. Multiple teams, diverse workflows, and a lack of standardization were crippling their ability to innovate. Worse yet, they were stuck in a ticket-driven approach, which led to reactive fixes rather than proactive growth. Observability gaps meant they were often solving the wrong problems, without any real insight into what was happening under the hood.

That’s where Mantra Labs stepped in. Mantra Labs brought in the pillars of platform engineering:

Standardization: We unified their workflows, creating a single source of truth for teams across the board.

Customization: Our tailored platform engineering approach addressed the unique demands of their various application development teams.

Traceability: With better observability tools, they could now track their workflows, giving them real-time insights into system health and potential bottlenecks—an essential feature for web and app development and agile software development.

We didn’t just slap a band-aid on the problem; we overhauled their entire infrastructure. By centralizing infrastructure management and removing the ticket-driven chaos, we gave them a self-service platform—where teams could deploy new code without waiting in line. The results? Faster workflows, better adoption of tools, and an infrastructure ready for future growth.

But we didn’t stop there. We solved the critical observability gaps—providing real-time data that helped the insurance giant avoid potential pitfalls before they happened. With our approach, they no longer had to “hope” that things would go right. They could see it happening in real-time which is a major advantage in cross-platform mobile application development and cloud-based web hosting.

The Future of Platform Engineering: What’s Next?

As we look forward, platform engineering will continue to drive innovation, enabling companies to build scalable, resilient systems that adapt to future challenges—whether it’s AI-driven automation or self-healing platforms.

If you’re ready to make the leap into platform engineering, Mantra Labs is here to guide you. Whether you’re aiming for smoother workflows, enhanced observability, or scalable infrastructure, we’ve got the tools and expertise to get you there.

Conversational Chatbots for SMEs to continue business from home

The need of time

How can conversational chatbots help SMEs and consultants