– Forbes 2020 HR Sentiment Survey

While Employee Experience (EX) was not a new concept that emerged in 2020, the need for delivering an effective EX was expediated by the COVID-19 crisis and its resulting remote/hybrid working scenarios. In this era of social isolation, a large population of the workforce feels more stressed, disconnected, and disengaged than ever before. Consequently, Forbes predicts EX to be the next competitive frontier for organizations worldwide.

Organizations that take a shaping approach to employee experience are able to satisfy and empower 32% more employees than their counterparts and at a 32% lower cost.

– Gartner

The research firm further states: organizations operate at their optimum level when employees are empowered to put in their best efforts. EX enables employees to learn, grow, and do their best work. It helps employees feel supported and delivers the right knowledge at the right time. According to a Gallup survey, businesses that invest in building effective EX at all levels of the organization can outperform their peers by 147% in earnings.

Rewire Employee Experience with AI Chatbots

However, most business and technology leaders are still grappling with how to succeed with EX. AI Chatbots which have already proved their mettle in the customer service space is now making significant inroads into the world of work. Intelligent Chatbots with their Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities are enabling organizations to reimagine the employee-employer relationship by automating tasks that were earlier cumbersome and highly repetitive. Chatbots are transforming how employees interact and access the information needed to help increase their productivity and satisfaction. The more accessible, seamless, and personalized these interactions are, the better the experience for employees.

The beauty of AI Chatbots is that they can deliver much more than answering simple questions. A good Chatbot can automate repetitive tasks and workflows based on its understanding of the employee’s intent. According to research by ServiceNow, over 30% of employees today, expect a “Google-like” option to access the information they need at work. AI-powered chatbots are the perfect solution to meet such wishes of your employees. Some discernable benefits of AI Chatbots towards EX are:

• Enables organizations to establish a mechanism for prompt support of employee queries and provide self-service to employees 24/7.
• Allows more natural, frictionless interactions via conversations, with an option for human handover when needed. This is critical in deflecting simple requests to busy IT or HR staff and increases employee self-service rates.
• Engages with employees across multiple channels, wherever the employee is, whether it’s on SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, a website, a mobile app, or a voice assistant.
• Provides a single convenient point of access for all IT or HR self-help needs so that an employee can get all the help they need from a single access point.
• Handles multiple different use cases across all types of functions and can be proactive as well as reactive. This is a game-changer for employees that get frustrated trying to retrieve information from multiple portals and tools.
• Automates various EX-oriented HR tasks and workflows, reducing human involvement and costs.
• Reduces human errors and enables swift handling of employee requests. This helps organizations keep their employee gratified and engaged.

5 Ways Conversational AI is Transforming Employee Experience

Equipped with AI, ML, and NLP, Chatbots can answer basic employee queries, ensure quick resolutions for complex requests, help employees raise support tickets in real-time, and inject speed into various workflows. With push features, AI Chatbots strengthen internal communications by sending out announcements and notifications. It can also be used to send out training modules and updates to the employees’ inboxes. These conversational assistants can be leveraged for various use cases to transform EX.

1: Strengthens Recruitment

The cycle of EX initiates with the recruitment process and Chatbots help organizations create a great first impression. Most parts of the recruitment process rely on frequent employer-candidate communication across various channels – emails, text messages, social media, and even career sites. AI-enabled Chatbots can mimic human conversational abilities to interact with candidates and provide them with immediate feedback helping strengthen the employer-candidate relationship throughout the recruitment lifecycle. Chatbots also help screen and match candidates to their job profiles. In addition to candidate screening, assessment, and engagement, AI-powered Chatbots can also be a potent tool for diversity recruitment. When trained using appropriate data, chatbots eliminate human bias from the recruiting process.

2: Simplifies Employee Onboarding

Chatbots can ease the induction and onboarding processes of new employees. It can be deployed to gather necessary information from the recruit and automate essential onboarding processes, such as document submission, signing up for employee insurance, informing them of their upcoming schedule, and aligning them to company values. Chatbots can smartly transform the long and tiring onboarding process into a self-service task, thereby creating a great benchmark for EX. Moreover, they can automatically resolve all the policy-related and generic queries that new employees usually face.

3: Enables Continuous Skills Development

A recent LinkedIn report found that 94% of employees would stay at an organization longer if it invests in their learning and development. Employees want to be more competitive and seek more training for the same reason. However, when employees don’t get support from their employers they are quick to jump onto another ship. Chatbots can deliver highly personalized training while also helping employees upskill on the job. Also referred to as Virtual Coaches, Chatbots can design and massively impact employee development and that too in real-time. If and when employees come across a problem or have doubts with regards to something they’re working on, they can immediately text their virtual coach to get access to links and answers to the right training resources to help them improve.

4: Facilitates Real-Time Support Ticketing

While AI Chatbots can interact with employees and answer most of their queries instantly. It can also route complex requests to the concerned department. Whenever the chatbot faces complex issues, it enables employees to raise tickets that automatically get assigned to the right agent or department. Furthermore, Chatbots keep employees updated about their ticket status throughout the resolution process. Popular AI-driven Chatbots through their easy integration with popular support ticketing systems such as ServiceNow, ZenDesk, Freshservice, etc. make support ticketing simple and resolutions quick.

5: Streamlines HR Service Delivery

Let’s face it – complex processes, policies, and frameworks are an unpleasant but crucial part of the HR function. AI-powered chatbots can simplify HR operations by delivering notifications and alerts about company policies, incentives, upcoming holidays, vacation policies, and more. Chatbots provide quick and personalized responses to common process- or policy-related questions such as clarifications about PTO, employee benefits, and leave policies, etc. Chatbots can eliminate the need for needless paper forms and digitize them to ease HR service delivery while also ensuring a great EX.

It is quite evident that chatbots can significantly improve the EX. If you are seeking a Chatbot solution to alleviate your Employee Experience, look no further.

Transform Employee Experience with AgreeYa Chatbot

AgreeYa’s AI-powered Chatbot, built on Azure AI, delivers an intelligent self-service helpdesk for any time (24×7), anywhere (web/desktop/mobile), and instant support. It enables organizations to do away with cumbersome processes while also providing a repertoire of information to employees whenever and wherever they might need it. The AgreeYa Chatbot leverages AI and ML to improve the experience of employees as they go through the recruitment process, interact with human resources, continue to improve their skillset through learning initiatives, and provides optimized support ticketing to ensure optimum employee efficiency at the workplace. Please feel free to get in touch with us for further information on this topic.

The post How AI Chatbots can Redefine Employee Experience? appeared first on AgreeYa Solutions.

– MetricNet-DeepCoding study

The global pandemic has upended various business processes and has established hybrid working as the new world order. With maximum employees working from home, the volumes of IT helpdesk support queries are soaring putting support agents across both the public and private sector under enormous strain. Even with a highly committed service desk team, most organizations are struggling to meet users’ expectations for speedy resolutions and more interactive engagements.

As the pressure to scale up the support process and deliver prompt issue resolutions mounts, many IT support departments are witnessing high attrition and agent turnover rates. Hence, to be truly successful in providing exceptional IT support, an organization needs to embrace new technologies that empower an agent to stay efficient and highly productive, and enables better IT support.

How AI-powered Chatbots can be the Gamechangers?

“26% of organizations have listed AI as the number one change they would like to make in IT helpdesk process.”

-MetricNet- DeepCoding study

Today, AI-driven technologies are helping organizations not only sustain but thrive in a fast-changing world. It is enabling organizations to automate processes, catalyze productivity, improve efficiency and augment human capabilities. In an IT helpdesk scenario, an AI-powered Chatbot is protecting service desk teams from facing burnout and enabling organizations to deliver better agent satisfaction. Additionally, chatbots are helping organizations to establish an automated process for prompt support and maximize the adoption of new technologies. It is liberating the service desk team from tackling the basic and mundane queries, and focus on other high-value interactions.

But the benefits of AI-powered Chatbots for IT helpdesk do not stop at automating incident resolution and offering self-service to users. It provides the IT teams with insights to detect patterns and determine the root cause of an issue, to address it sooner and prevent it from affecting more users. It enables the IT helpdesk to stay proactive and ensure business continuity.

How AI-powered Chatbots can Improve Support Agent Productivity & Efficiency

1: Simplifies Information Scouting

A major portion of an IT helpdesk agent’s workday is spent searching through heaps of FAQs, documents, spreadsheets, blogs, and other sources of information in search of the right answers to resolve an issue. Moreover, traditional keyword-based searches mostly lack context and often generate results that might not be in sync with the resolution sought. This leads to a longer average handle time (AHT), a key performance metric for any support agent.

An AI-powered Chatbot can understand the context and deliver very meaningful search results rapidly. The chatbot searches through tons of structured and unstructured data and delivers the most relevant content to the agents. With an AI-powered Chatbot, human agents can significantly reduce the time spent in locating the relevant information and thereby deliver faster resolutions, improving their AHT.

2: Delivers Contextual Data

In a digital-first world, every user demands instant resolutions and expects first contact resolutions. However, on encountering a new support query, agents need time to review the user’s account and evaluate potential solutions. AI-powered Chatbots can look into a user’s profile, details, history, usage, preferences, and other information, and quickly provide a list of customized resolutions to assist the agents. Armed with contextual information and the right recommendations, IT support agents can deliver better and quicker resolutions.

3: Detects User Intent

A vital metric involved in evaluating any support agent’s performance is the number of tickets closed. As an enterprise policy (and in most instances), a support ticket gets reopened even when the user mails to thank the agent. Consequently, the support agent has to manually update and close all such tickets, often leading to duplication of efforts and an adverse effect on the agent’s productivity. An AI-powered Chatbot can detect the intent behind a user’s response before deciding whether or not to reopen a support ticket.

4: Identifies User Sentiments

Modern chatbots, with the help of ML and NLP, can calculate the magnitude of the user’s emotions and provide a numerical score to the core emotions. Chatbots can identify the type of sentiment and gauge the emotion behind it to see if the mood of the dialogue is positive, negative, neutral, or objective. It detects emotions like frustration, anger, sadness, positivity, happiness, and other emotions. This extra layer of information enables the human agents to adapt to the users’ mood and respond accurately, effectively and in the right way.

5: Assists Agents with Various Tasks

Traditionally, chatbots or virtual agents were used to deliver simple FAQs. However, AI-powered chatbots have redefined the boundaries of virtual agents. Today’s sophisticated chatbots can handle complex work, decide where to look for the right information, recommend solutions to human agents based on the user’s profile, and automate routine queries to free up the agent for more cognitive tasks. It can assist the agent in delivering superior support services by:

• Providing needed information and contextual suggestions to agents during a live conversation.
• Connecting the agent to backend knowledge bases and CRM systems and extracting relevant articles and documents, for better and quicker user issue resolution.
• Tackling the basic queries and escalating the complex requests that need human intelligence.
• Automating time-consuming and tedious daily tasks for agents, such as recording user information, post-interaction form filling, surveys, etc.
• Delivering the entire chat history, including sentiment analysis scores and other contextual information, to the agent.
• Mining audio calls and textual conversations to capture significant details and insights about users and technical issues.

6: Ensures Continuous Training

Service desk agents need constant training to keep them updated with ever-evolving products and processes. Additionally, every new hire in the team also needs to be thoroughly trained. But the cost of training these resources can quickly add up and get out of hand. AI-powered chatbots are capable of taking over the training duties and delivering constant learning. Chatbots can pick up on user behavior patterns to deduce what the best response to specific questions might be.

Adopt a Human+Chatbot Support Model

“20-25% of the workforces in advanced economies could work from home between three and five days a week, post COVID-19.”

–McKinsey study

With remote work and virtual meetings likely to continue, albeit less intensely than at the pandemic’s peak, organizations must strengthen their IT helpdesk support. Towards this end, organizations must look at fostering a coexistence model with chatbots working in line with human agents and augmenting productivity and efficiency. Chatbots can be used as the first line of support for users and fulfill basic, preliminary tasks such as password resets, access provisioning, etc. In case of an escalation or upon a user’s request, the chatbot can also hand over the conversation to a live agent.

Deliver Self-Service Helpdesk and Maximize Digital Adoption at Workplace

AgreeYa’s AI-powered Chatbot, built on Azure AI, delivers an intelligent self-service helpdesk for any time (24×7), anywhere (web/desktop/mobile), and instant support. It unburdens the IT service agents from repetitive tasks and empowers them with the right information for better support. With AgreeYa Chatbot, organizations can alleviate the IT helpdesk agent satisfaction and keep users happy with instant support. 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.

The post How Chatbots Can Improve Human-Agent Productivity & Efficiency? appeared first on AgreeYa Solutions.

– 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.

The post 5 Benefits of Integrating Chatbots to Improve Microsoft 365 Adoption appeared first on AgreeYa Solutions.

With the pandemic prepared to be dragged on for some time in the future, the understaffed or remote staffed organizations are struggling to deliver customer service and support operations like the post-pandemic era. Customers are struggling to receive adequate support and required information on time. Today, most organizations face a huge backlog of support requests leading to a delayed response to customer queries, stacks of unanswered calls and emails. This is where AI-powered intelligent chatbots can come to the rescue. There has been a lot of buzz around these software applications aided by voice or messaging which can simplify communication between organizations and their customers or internal staff.

How does an Intelligent Chatbot help?

While chatbots are not a recent technology breakthrough, the market for chatbots has certainly skyrocketed due to the COVID-19 crisis. Soon after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic IBM recorded a 40% spike in traffic to its conversational AI platform Watson Assistant. Similarly, in April 2020 Google launched its Rapid Response Virtual Agent, a version of Contact Center AI, in response to the COVID-19 situation. A series of other organizations also started implementing Coronavirus-specific chatbots for answering questions coming in from their concerned customers and employees. There has been a phenomenal rise in the adoption of chatbots and a recent MarketsandMarkets study predicts that the worldwide Conversational AI market size is expected to rise from USD 4.8 billion in 2020 to USD 13.9 billion by 2025.

Once adopted, intelligent chatbots can enable Indian organizations across all industries take their customer or employee experience to the next level. A chatbot can promptly address the basic customer support requests while re-routing more complicated queries to a human executive. It serves a buffet service for employees leveraging which they can obtain answers to their questions easily and drive value at the workplace. Standing in the present times, intelligent chatbots have become quintessential for an organization’s digital journey and in delivering next-generation intelligent customer or employee service.

How Intelligent Chatbots are Driving Enterprise Value?

1: Amplifies Customer Satisfaction

One of the important benefits of chatbot implementation is towards customer support. According to Opus Research, 35% of customers want to see more companies using chatbots. Additionally, recent Cognizant research found that 69% of customers prefer chatbots for receiving instant responses, and the same percent said they’re most likely to use chatbots for service-related inquiries. Chatbots are improving customer support operations by delivering the customers with 24-hour service and quick responses to support questions. Most customers today don’t have time for chit-chat, they just want quick problem resolution. And the chatbot delivers exactly that. Insights from the MIT Technology Review study suggest that 80% of organizations gain measurable improvements in customer satisfaction, service delivery, and contact center performance with Chatbot implementation.

2: Enhances Employee Satisfaction

Chatbots are helping the customer and IT support employees stay happy with the work at hand. By taking on the transactional level of service, chatbots free up human agents for higher-value activities that are more interesting and carry more business value. With chatbots, organizations can automate up to 80% of their routine support tickets. As a result, the customer support roles become less repetitive which leads to happier customer service agents. And happier customer service agents inevitably provide better customer service leading to brand loyalty and revenue growth.

3: Simplifies Internal Communications

Chatbots can play a huge role in facilitating better internal communications for employees. It can access an organization’s internal data and knowledge base to provide employees with prompt responses. As an example, the HR portal or the corporate intranet can have a live chat option wherein the employees send in their queries regarding leave policies to the HR department and receive instant responses. During the initial days of the pandemic, many organizations had implemented chatbots to communicate remote working norms and ensure employee wellbeing. Various other organizations deploy self-service chatbots to ensure high adoption of new technologies.

4: Boosts Productivity

According to McKinsey Global Institute research, the adoption of robotics, A.I., and machine learning – the foundations of automation – could raise annual productivity growth by 1.4% over the next 50 years. Much like all other intelligent automation technologies, chatbots yield high productivity. Apart from streamlining internal communications, chatbots can deliver relevant information to employee’s fingertips without searches and the time involved in that. Chatbots have the potential to deliver clear insights to employees and equip them to manage multiple tasks at the same time. This will ensure that everyone within an organization is delivering their productive best. According to industry experts, Chatbot’s ability to manage multiple tasks helps organizations to enhance 40% productivity within the organization.

5: Reduces Operational Costs

A study by Juniper Research predicts that by 2023 chatbots will save about $11 billion for businesses. Similarly, IBM mentioned in their blog that chatbots can help organizations save up to 30% of their customer support costs by speeding up response times, freeing up agents for more challenging work, and answering up to 80% of routine questions. Chatbots allow organizations to reduce the number of human operators by assigning low-level tasks to chatbots. Staffing a 24x7x365 contact center with human agents can be a costly proposition, as can be contracting a BPO contact center provider. When you add the resources required to support multiple lines of business and languages, it increases the headcount and skill sets required to serve customers around the clock. With Chatbots, organizations can set up round-the-clock support which acts as the first line of defense, and only more complex inquiries can be escalated to human agents. Chatbots can easily support an increased volume of support requests without any additional costs.

6: Analyzes & Secures Data

In this data-driven world, most organizations have to deal with an enormous volume of data daily, and to keep a track of all such data can be very challenging. Data security becomes a priority especially when an organization leverages a CRM system to manage customers’ data. Chatbots can enable organizations to overcome such challenges. AI-powered chatbots can customize interactions based on the learnings from past and initial interactions. It possesses the capability to automatically analyze organizational data and deliver resolutions within rapid time. As an example, HR teams can leverage a chatbot to make bulk changes and update employee’s contact details across an organization. The chatbot cross-verifies the details and makes the appropriate changes. Consequently, a chatbot can enable organizations to have well-organized and clean data.

Once considered to be a fun addition to a website, the application of chatbots to automate enterprise processes has undergone a massive change in the last year. They’ve moved into an essential customer or support service role for organizations that want to stay competitive. AgreeYa’s AI-based Chatbot delivers an intelligent self-service helpdesk with anytime (24×7), anywhere (web/desktop/mobile), and instant support for organizational users on various platforms.

The post 6 Ways Intelligent Chatbots are Critical to Driving Enterprise Value appeared first on AgreeYa Solutions.

However, as employees continue working from home, businesses, and their customer service / IT helpdesk teams are confronted with new challenges. They are witnessing an unprecedented level of demand, plus constant changes in the support volume due to new platforms and remote working.

A recent Zendesk study found that there has been, on average, a 48% increase in the number of support tickets since last February, witnessed at their platform. The study clearly shows that your employees are heavily reliant on instant and quality technical support during this “remote everything” era.

But the question is: how can organizations transform their IT helpdesk operations amidst the ongoing COVID-19 crisis to ensure business continuity, high employee productivity without overburdening their IT helpdesk?

Round-the-clock self-service platforms such as chatbots or virtual assistants, fueled by conversational AI and NLP, are helping best-in-class organizations adapt and efficiently manage their employee and customer engagements during the “New Normal”

How do Chatbots/Virtual Agents fit the bill?

With employees working from home, businesses are struggling to present them with efficient self-service options to ensure an uninterrupted flow of work and minimal business disruption. An AI-powered Chatbot that delivers 24X7 self-service framework for the employees could be the ideal option. It can offer prompt support to basic employee issues and queries and quickly escalate the complex interactions to human agents.

Furthermore, Chatbots or Virtual Agents can be deployed seamlessly across multiple digital channels and devices (including webchat and SMS for text-based service delivery and phone calls and smart speakers for voice-based interactions). Such conversational AI is scalable and improves its performance with time as it leverages and learns from other data to optimize the quality of replies. Thus, it can be safely said that a Chatbot gets smarter from experience, just like the best human agents do.

Now, let us take a deep dive into the benefits of Chatbots/Virtual agents in regards to employee productivity.

6 Ways to Improve Employee Productivity in the “New Normal” with Chatbots/Virtual Agents

1. Provide Round-The-Clock and Instant Resolutions

In today’s remote working scenario, where employees have to manage kids, pets, and home responsibilities alongside their office duties, employees usually have to extend their working hours beyond the conventional 8 to 5 period. Therefore, organizations must have round-the-clock IT helpdesk support to provide instant resolutions to employee support requests. By using Chatbots, organizations can tackle this aspect. Standard queries that would otherwise have to wait for at least a few hours, can be resolved instantly by AI chatbots and without any human intervention. Industry studies suggest that modern-day chatbots can answer roughly 80% of standard questions.

 2. Eliminate Time-Consuming Searches for Information

Chatbots can significantly improve employee experience. It can transform the way employees across an organization seek information. Let us take simple web searches as an example. Traditional online searches might deliver results that are completely irrelevant and thus useless for the employees. Employees end up spending a lot of time making such futile searches. Instead, specialized Chatbots with a rich domain or technology-specific knowledgebase can provide the most relevant answers to employee searches instantly. It can do all the legwork for the employees, save their time, and help them stay highly productive.

3. Anchor Learning of New Technology Implementations

COVID-19 and the consequent “New Normal” is presenting businesses with new challenges every day. Organizations are implementing new cloud-based technologies to tackle such challenges. However, these new implementations can create roadblocks for employee productivity. Employees would be needing time and sufficient training to learn, adapt, and utilize new technologies. Chatbots or Virtual Agents can address this problem. They can act as a personal coach, mentor, and learning buddy providing continuous and personalized support to fast-track learning of a new system.

4. Automate Mundane Tasks and Liberates Talent

A lot of work within any organization is routine and repetitive. Chatbots can liberate employees from such mundane and repetitive tasks. AI chatbots have been designed to complete such tasks faster and more efficiently than humans. Automating high-demand, but low-level work through a chatbot can free up essential time for employees. They can spend this time in taking up new initiatives that require human knowledge, intuition, and empathy. Instead of being deluged by repetitive tasks, the chatbot allows your helpdesk agents to be more productive and solve only complex problems. Chatbots allow your agents time to research, learn, and get better at what they are doing. Additionally, automation can also help organizations with the implementation of an organization-wide Governance structure.

5. Extend Support in Native Language and Understands Contexts

While a majority of your employees are multilingual, they might be more at ease while interacting in their mother language. Language is often an important factor in the extent of help you can deliver to the employees. Having an English-only support mechanism is not always ideal for employees, especially if you have employees or presence in multiple nations. Chatbots can offer multi-language support which comes handy while using them in different regions marked by different languages. Thanks to built-in AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP), the bots can understand the context of a conversation, quickly identify the purpose of employees’ queries, and thereby provide the most appropriate responses to employees. 

6. Enable Efficient Access to Business Data

Chatbots are brilliant in the process of unifying data from each department, practice, and operation across the organization. They can be easily and quickly integrated with LOB applications (such as ticketing systems, Intranet, Microsoft Teams, etc.) and external sources. Once this is done, Chatbots can act as a concierge and fetch the data required from relevant data sources with just a ping. However, before enabling the information, bots do check for permission levels, identify the area of query and check the access levels of the employee, and respond accordingly.

COVID-19 has created a planet of minimal certainty. However, one thing you can anticipate is: Chatbots will be a cornerstone of business continuity, employee productivity, and organizational growth during the digital-first “New Normal” and beyond. In the coming months, AI Chatbots would be a leading force across industries and verticals.

The post 6 Ways Chatbots/Virtual Agents can Improve Employee Productivity in the New Normal appeared first on AgreeYa Solutions.

However, the efficiency and promptness of the IT helpdesk is often affected by the flood of mundane support requests it receives in a day. With a lot of their time consumed in resolving mundane queries, they cannot support the organization in other growth areas.

Automation of IT helpdesk queries, with the help of a Chatbot, unburden and rejuvenate the IT department and help the users get immediate support when and where the need it.

Read this blog to know how the introduction of Chatbots in the IT helpdesk system enables an organization to transform its support efficiency.

The post How Chatbots/Virtual Agents Improve the Efficiency of IT Helpdesk Support? appeared first on AgreeYa Solutions.