Chatbots have arrived in business reality: they offer a simple but powerful self-service approach for customers to handle business transactions. Chatbots are available 24*7, are scalable and can reduce cost significantly.

However: a lot of today’s chatbots are not well trained (aka "dumb") and/or offer little benefit to the users. We discuss and demonstrate our approach to address these issues:

• Subject matter experts can train the bots themselves, using familiar tools
• Use separate bots for specific information domains and integrate them using a concierge service
• Have the chatbot handle real business transactions for the user – acting as the conversational interface to complex backend systems
• Hand over chats to human agents
• Provide an abstraction layer to integrate front end channels, multiple chatbot platforms as well as backend systems