Worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services in 2020 was $257.9 billion, an increase of 6.3% from 2019. The revenue is further projected to reach $304.9 billion in 2021, an increase of 18.4% from 2020.
– Gartner
The cloud has been at the forefront of human resilience against the pandemic. It has protected the wellbeing of societies and helped businesses not only adapt but innovate during these tough times. The on-demand, scalable cloud models have provided organizations with the impetus to rapidly accelerate their digital business transformation plans. The increased use of public cloud services has reinforced cloud adoption to be the ‘new normal’.
As the world’s leading productivity cloud, Microsoft 365 helped more than 258 million users across a range of industries build resilience, ensure productivity, reimagine work, and tackle unique challenges posed by the pandemic with confidence. Its innovative apps, intelligent cloud services, and world-class security empowered organizations and their employees to achieve more. According to a recent Forrester study, organizations were able to save 12,500 hours per year and derive a monetary benefit of $30 million with Microsoft 365.
Microsoft 365 Adoption Challenges
Despite delivering overarching business benefits, many organizations are struggling with Microsoft 365 adoption which is taking a toll on the investment made. Successful Microsoft 365 adoption is impacted by multiple reasons including the resistance of adopting a new technology among employees. While the IT team might be putting in its best efforts to ensure an error-free deployment, there seems to be an unnoticed gap building between the end-users and their adoption of new technology. Often IT teams fail to make the users realize the most promising benefits of Microsoft 365.
30% or less of end-users know how to use Microsoft 365 beyond Outlook and Microsoft Office.
– Microsoft
While Microsoft 365 delivers industry-leading apps combined with intelligent cloud services and world-class security to help teams do their best work, most users are still scratching the surface when it comes to realizing the platform’s true potential. The challenge is to get employees to move beyond the basic features and use the platform to achieve more every day.
Most organizations expect to notice appreciable improvements from day one after a successful implementation. But organizations fail to understand that just turning on an efficient technology switch does not guarantee adoption on the fly. To counterstrike employee resistance and get employees using Microsoft 365 in more meaningful ways, organizations need to prioritize adoption and change efforts.
With that in mind, how can organizations drive faster, sustainable, and effective Microsoft 365 adoption to improve ROI and gain transformative benefits?
Benefits of Including Chatbots for Microsoft 365 Adoption
AI-powered Chatbots have emerged as the most viable solution to Microsoft 365 adoption challenges. Chatbots for Microsoft 365 enable organizations to establish 24X7 self-service and an interactive way of answering employee queries. Such Chatbots can promptly answer any question regarding Microsoft 365 and deliver continuous learning enabling employees to become more proficient with the platform in a fun way! Today, Chatbots for Microsoft 365 is a popular concept and helping organizations to seamlessly improve adoption, establish governance, drive automation, reduce IT support costs, and improve service levels of IT helpdesk. Based on the market buzz, here are the top 5 reasons to integrate an AI-powered Chatbot for Microsoft 365 adoption.
1: Accelerate Change Management
According to a Gartner survey on Microsoft 365 implementation, for every dollar spent on Microsoft 365 licenses, organizations are spending between $6-9 on training and customizations. Based on Forrester’s estimates, organizations that invest in effective training and change management reach payback for Microsoft 365 deployments in 7 months. However, most organizations typically underestimate the effort to train their employees. This might be due to strained business budgets and a lack of resources to provide effective training. A Chatbot for Microsoft 365 can help in this scenario. The virtual assistant can not only deliver prompt answers for basic employee queries but also deliver guided learning. It can provide end-users with recommendations like tutorials they should look at for in-depth understanding.
2: Deliver Automated and 24X7 Support
When organizations implement Microsoft 365, they often underestimate its impact on the IT helpdesk. Often the agents lack the knowledge, skills, and bandwidth to provide efficient support to employees. As a result, the organizations find themselves building communities in Yammer. A Chatbot for Microsoft 365 allows organizations to establish round-the-clock, self-service helpdesk that is multilingual and connected to various sources of information to deliver a significant improvement in user experience and adoption. The Chatbots can be fed with a well-designed knowledge base for different workloads and integrated with various platforms or applications.
3: Reduce Support Costs
The economic uncertainty of 2020 has led most organizations to reduce their spending significantly. Consequently, organizations are looking for ways to achieve the best benefits from Microsoft 365 investments while not increasing support costs. Chatbots are enabling organizations to tackle more than 40% of basic Microsoft 365 user queries without any human intervention. It is automating the helpdesk support, thereby mitigating the need to recruit new human resources to bolster Microsoft 365 adoption. With Chatbots in the mix, organizations can quickly and easily scale support services to meet additional employee numbers or deliver prompt support across locations.
4: Empower Users with Anytime, Anywhere Support at Fingertips
In a conventional IT helpdesk set up, there is always a huge backlog of support requests. As a result, the employees have to wait for many days before their queries can be answered. This impounds upon user frustration; many employees lose interest and revert to the old ways of working. With a Chatbot, employees can get their queries addressed or re-routed for immediate support without any human intervention. It also allows the employees to ask for help and get their problems addressed during any time of the day or night. This round-the-clock availability of help can accelerate technology adoption significantly. It also delivers anytime, anywhere access to information on any device.
5: Unburden IT Helpdesk with Process Automation
According to a Zendesk study, IT helpdesks are currently managing 30% more tickets than they did before the pandemic, and it looks like higher ticket volumes will be here to stay. As a result, organizations are on the lookout for solutions that can automate mundane tasks addressed by the hard-pressed IT support team. One of the biggest advantages of integrating AI-powered Chatbot into the IT helpdesk process is that it can unburden the IT team from supporting a deluge of basic Microsoft 365 queries. The Bot can tackle most L1 queries with its rich knowledge base and AI-powered self-learning capabilities. Human agents have to tackle complex queries requiring human intelligence.
Maximize Microsoft 365 Adoption with AgreeYa Chatbot
AgreeYa’s AI-powered Chatbot, built on Azure AI, delivers an intelligent self-service helpdesk at any time (24×7), anywhere (web/desktop/mobile), and instant support for organizational users on various platforms. It enables organizations to confidently tackle various Microsoft 365 adoption roadblocks, by providing self-serve automation and personalized conversations. The AgreeYa Chatbot delivers up to 250% ROI in 5 years. If you’d like additional information about this topic, please feel free to get in touch with one of our experts for a personalized consultation.