Employee Experience Archives - BotCore Enterprise Chatbot Fri, 15 Mar 2024 09:27:06 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.6.1 https://botcore.ai/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/cropped-favicon-32x32-1-70x70.png Employee Experience Archives - BotCore 32 32 Total Experience in the Age of Conversational AI Platforms https://botcore.ai/blog/total-experience-in-conversational-ai-platforms/ Wed, 18 May 2022 12:41:00 +0000 https://botcore.ai/?p=10254 Total Experience in the Age of Conversational AI Platforms This new decade that began with the COVID-19 pandemic ushered in an era of business experiences that are mobile, remote, and digital-centric. The keywords here being “experiences” and “digital.” Yes, we are in the midst of a business environment that feeds on experiences that empower, driven […]

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Total Experience in the Age of Conversational AI Platforms

This new decade that began with the COVID-19 pandemic ushered in an era of business experiences that are mobile, remote, and digital-centric. The keywords here being “experiences” and “digital.”

Yes, we are in the midst of a business environment that feeds on experiences that empower, driven by social, cultural, and economic changes. And yes, “digital” is the fodder fuelling these experiences. So, putting it in simpler words, the quality of the digital experiences businesses deliver to their customers is foundational to their success in today’s landscape.

After all, products and services are commodities that can be easily imitated and lose their differentiating value in the long run. But it’s the emotions and feelings that customers take away that matter the most and create memorable brands at the end of the day.

But, it’s not just about the customers anymore. To create exceptional experiences, it is vital to focus on providing meaningful employee experiences. After all, fulfilling even a minor customer request requires coordination amongst different departments at the workplace. A great employee experience makes it easier for employees to do their jobs and serve customers better. Moreover, it is only an engaged, motivated, and enthusiastic workforce that would work towards reaching outstanding CSAT scores.

Hence, intelligent, future-oriented organizations understand that they cannot separate customer (CX) and employee experience (EX) strategies into silos anymore. As important as it is for CX and EX to function outside the formerly created vacuum, it is equally vital to strengthen “experience” strategies with thoughtful user experiences (UX) and flexible multi-experiences (MX).

As put forth by leading analyst firm Gartner, “MX, UX, CX, and EX (or, simply “total experience”) are inextricably intertwined in the digital experience economy.”

In its latest report, “Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2022,” Gartner defines total experience (TX) as “a business strategy that integrates employee experience, customer experience, user experience, and multi-experience across multiple touchpoints to accelerate growth.”

Through holistic management of the expectations of various stakeholders, including customers, employees, suppliers, and vendors, TX boosts confidence, satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy.

So, how can an organization optimize experiences for its customers, employees, and other stakeholders?

The simple answer lies in enhancing the everyday interactions that make up a considerable chunk of a typical day at work. And mature conversational AI technologies and platforms can play a significant role in this.

Let’s explore further.

Understanding Total Experience from an Organizational Perspective

By 2024, Gartner estimates that organizations providing TX will outperform competitors by 25% in satisfaction metrics for both CX and EX. Additionally, by 2026, 60% of large enterprises are expected to employ a total experience strategy to transform their business models and achieve “world-class customer and employee advocacy levels,” in which both groups are motivated to promote the corporate brand.

So, what is total experience from an organizational perspective? TX consists of the following four components 

  • Customer Experience (CX) – Customers’ interactions and feelings about a brand
  • Employee Experience (EX) – Employees’ interactions, perceptions, and engagement with the company
  • User Experience (UX) – How a user feels after interacting with your product or service. Measured in terms of KPIs like error rate, abandonment rate, success rate, etc.
  • Multi-Experience (MX) – Delivering seamless and consistent experiences on multiple touchpoints, devices, and modalities.

Jason Wong, a distinguished VP analyst at Gartner, rightly stated, “While excellence in one area is valuable, the organization as a whole can be further strengthened if these four disciplines are intertwined as a Total experience (TX) strategy so that they mutually reinforce one another.”

As discussed above, everyday business interactions amongst the different stakeholders, including customers, employees, support agents, suppliers, and vendors, drive overall experience management in any organization.

These stakeholders demand new-world experiences that are A) personalized, B) consistent, C) resolution-driven, and D) enable faster decision-making. Often, these interactions are routine and repetitive, leaving massive room to automate and optimize them using the latest technologies. Additionally, even though managing individual stakeholder experiences may be effortless, problems arise at the points where they intersect.

With an explosion of interactions taking place across different channels, how can organizations deliver new-world experiences for everyone at scale and ensure seamless TX? Moreover, most prevailing digital technologies in the workplace fail to understand the context and respond conversationally to customer and employee queries, consequently increasing human dependencies and operational costs.

The solution lies in deploying AI-first conversational technologies that work in tandem with chatbots, voice bots, and other virtual assistants to offer contextual, meaningful, and personalized engagement to customers and employees, and a rich user experience with real-time alerts, nudges, and contextual information.

Conversational AI Platforms for Total Experience (TX)

Conversational Ai Platforms For Total Experience

An integrated conversational AI platform brings CX and UX together by helping users build automated workflows and deliver intelligent conversations that delight customers and engage employees.

Conversational AI platforms ensure a robust total experience (TX) by integrating powerful UX and MX and building intelligent virtual assistants and chatbots that provide user-friendly, consistent, multilingual experiences across numerous social, messaging, web, and voice channels.

Customer Experience

Chatbots and voice bots deliver exceptional, quick, personalized, and resolution-driven customer support. These bots leverage powerful AI, machine learning (ML), and natural language processing (NLP) capabilities to understand customer sentiment, learn from past customer behavior, and recommend the right products based on their interests, activities, and profiles.

Employee Experience

A conversational AI platform can make employees’ lives easier by building chatbot personas for every need. Be it HR, IT helpdesk, business intelligence (BI), or the intranet, employee-facing bots answer simple and complex queries, perform day-to-day tasks, and fetch relevant information.

Additionally, agent assist bots simplify the access to the CRM system and knowledge base for agents, providing contextual information and suggestions about the customers in the middle of interactions.

User Experience

A chatbot’s UX comprises its usability, accessibility, and the pleasure of interacting with it. Enhancing these three aspects constitutes an exceptional user experience. Simply put, the faster the bot is able to understand and execute the user’s request, the better will be the UX.

With the latest advancements in machine learning (ML), natural language processing (NLP), and natural language understanding (NLU) technologies, a conversational AI platform can ensure users have a seamless, natural, human-like conversations with customers and employees, understand their needs better and quicker, and offer maximum support by asking the bare minimum number of questions.

Multi-experience

Conversational AI platforms allow users to experience personalized engagement across multiple channels (social, web, voice, etc.), through multiple devices (mobile, desktop, smart speakers, etc.), and across multiple languages (multilingual functionality).

How Can Acuvate Help?

Acuvate is a Microsoft Gold Partner that helps clients build intelligent chat and voice bots using its enterprise bot-building platform called BotCore. Powered by Microsoft Azure and AI technologies and armed with advanced, future-ready functionalities like Knowledge Graphs, context management, dialog builders, machine learning, and a superior NLP engine, BotCore is used by 150+ customers across industries for a range of customer and employee use cases.

What’s more, you can offer customers the convenience of conversational IVR support with text-to-speech bots and the option to interact in the language of their choice with 90+ languages.

It is a low-code platform that can be deployed both on-cloud and on-premise and provides integrations with 100+ enterprise systems, including Office365, PowerBI, Oracle, SAP, and much more.

To know more about BotCore, please feel free to schedule a personalized consultation with our experts.

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All you need to know about conversational AI + what’s in it for your business https://botcore.ai/blog/all-about-conversation-ai/ Mon, 22 Nov 2021 22:21:00 +0000 https://botcore.ai/?p=9063 All you need to know about conversational AI + what’s in it for your business Ever since the pandemic wreaked havoc on the entire business landscape, customer and employee experiences (CX and EX) have transformed drastically. With the advent of various technologies, customers now expect personalized, immersive, and end-to-end brand engagement. Even employees are now […]

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All you need to know about conversational AI + what’s in it for your business

Ever since the pandemic wreaked havoc on the entire business landscape, customer and employee experiences (CX and EX) have transformed drastically.

With the advent of various technologies, customers now expect personalized, immersive, and end-to-end brand engagement. Even employees are now considered customers of a digital world— expecting seamless collaboration and tailored engagement, even as interactions become more virtual, mobile, and distributed.

Over the past year, conversational AI has emerged as the new spectrum in both CX and EX.  Businesses globally have adopted conversational AI to provide customers and employees exceptional experiences throughout their journeys with the organization.

As per Gartner, the conversational AI market is expected to reach an astounding AUD 22.6 billion by 2024.

This blog takes you through everything you need to know about conversational AI and what’s in it for your business.

What is Conversational AI?

Conversational AI is a set of powerful technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI), natural language processing (NLP), dynamic text to speech, intent and entity recognition, and machine learning (ML) that empower computers to understand, process, and respond to human utterances and text inputs naturally.

Conversational AI is used in chatbots, voice bots, and virtual assistants and helps conduct simple, natural, human-like conversations with customers and employees. It allows enterprises to design cost-efficient digital experiences, streamline internal operations, and deliver superior customer engagement.

Bots can operate 24X7 and provide instant solutions to millions of customer and employee requests simultaneously.

Users may experience the technology on various platforms, including social media (WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger), enterprise messaging apps (Microsoft Teams, Slack, Zoom), voice assistants (Alexa, Google Home), websites, and interactive voice response systems (IVR).

Emerging Capabilities of a Conversational AI platform

Let’s take a look at some of the emerging capabilities of conversational AI businesses should look out for —

  1. Low-code chatbot development – Low-code chatbot building platforms like Microsoft’s Power Virtual Agents allow people with little or no coding knowledge (citizen developers) to build professional-grade bots within a few days. Such platforms host a visual interface, pre-configured templates, and drag-and-drop features, and reduce development costs by up to 90%.

  2. Multilingual chatbots – Only 7.5% of the world’s population are native English speakers. Global organizations employ people from around the world and have a wide customer base that spreads over geographies. Multilingual chatbots help scale the business’s localization efforts and amplify reach amongst customers from different regions. By making them feel heard and supported, organizations that engage with their staff in their native language have higher chances of building loyalty and retaining employees.

  3. Omnichannel experiences – As discussed above, users can experience conversational AI through bots embedded on different channels. Here, a significant capability of the technology is its ability to empower users to start a conversation on one channel and continue it in another— without losing context.

  4. Proactive engagement – As the business landscape becomes more digitized, the users of conversational AI not only expect omnichannel engagement but also want organizations to understand their intentions and preferences and respond accordingly. Bots must anticipate customer and employee needs in advance, intervene at moments when they may need help, and push personalized, context-aware information at the right time.

  5. Sentiment analysis – Another key capability of conversational AI is sentiment analysis— a bot’s ability to comprehend the type and intensity of a user’s sentiment, steer conversations, and escalate to agents for human support.

  6. Context management – With conversational AI, interactions feel truly human-like. A chatbot can remember critical information from past dialogue and retain context from one response to the next, ensuring interactions don’t feel scripted.

Conversational AI for customer and employee experience

Conversational AI has a wide range of use cases for both employees and customers.

In the case of employees, function-specific bots for HR, IT, business intelligence, CRM, and enterprise intranets are making life easier for remote workers by fulfilling the following use cases—

  • Answer employee queries instantly— anytime and anywhere
    For example, “How do I reset my password?”, “What is my leave balance for this year?”
  • Simplify and automate mundane, repetitive tasks
    For example, raise IT tickets, book meeting rooms, schedule a video call
  • Fetch relevant information quickly
    For example, retrieve project files, HR policy documents, and business KPIs
  • Push personalized alerts and notifications
    For example, network outage, HR policy changes, upcoming events

Learn More: 4 Ways Chatbots Are Making Life Easier for Remote Workers

Moreover, chatbots transform customer experiences and ensure meaningful engagement at every stage of the sales funnel as follows—

  • Reach – Push alerts about new products, send personalized tips, collect data about customer preferences.
  • Acquisition – Suggest products to purchase, help customers navigate the brand’s online store, assist with checkout, guide on product use.
  • Retention – Analyze customer needs, inform customers about latest offers and sales, upsell/cross-sell products.
  • Loyalty/Advocacy – tailor loyalty programs, send personalized rewards and discount coupons, collect customer feedback.

Learn More: Customer Service and Beyond: Harnessing Chatbots to transform the customer experience

What can conversational AI do for your business?

By harnessing the power of conversational AI in everyday business, organizations can reap the following benefits

Benefits for customersBenefits for employees/organization
  • Increase revenue through upselling and cross-selling opportunities
  • Build a loyal customer base through personalized and meaningful engagement
  • Reduce customer effort
  • Improve net promoter scores
  • Improve employee productivity
  • Reduce voluntary turnover rates
  • Uncover data-driven insights to make intelligent business decisions
  • Reduce cost per contact

To learn more about conversational AI and how businesses can transform the post-pandemic digital CX with conversational AI, please feel free to go through our e-book “Transform the post-pandemic digital CX with conversational AI.”

In this guide, we’ll talk in depth about what is conversational and how it has helped transform customer experience in a post-pandemic world.

Conversational AI: A sneak-peek into real-life use cases

Una - Unilever’s chatbot for HR

Unilever leverages its HR chatbot Una to answer employee queries on various HR topics, including performance appraisal, allowance, and perform certain routine tasks like checking meeting room availability, claiming for healthcare, etc. Una is capable of conversing with employees in 106 countries, using 32 languages.

Paid Add Ons Image

Leena Nair, CHRO at Unilever, in an interview, said, “Una hub is like a google search  leverage scale in transaction answering. UNA handles about 7 million transactions in a year.

By using this technology, we have taken time away from the HR person, in some cases, as high as 1 hour a day, that usually they would spend in resolving queries and given them the time to do things that drive business performance which is doing interventions for teams, getting people focused on the big things to do.

In our recent Univoice survey, 93% of our people felt that they were really well supported during COVID with the equipment and technology that allowed them to be productive.”

Ponds Chatbot

POND’s SAL

POND’s SAL is an exciting real-life example of how conversational AI has transformed the digital customer experience.

SAL leverages technologies such as artificial intelligence and augmented reality to provide an immersive online shopping experience. Customers can say “hi” to SAL on Ponds’ flagship Shopee store.

Users must first upload a selfie, and while the personalized skin analysis takes place, SAL sends beauty tips to keep them engaged.

Post determining the customer’s skin type, SAL offers personalized product recommendations from POND’s across four significant areas – pimples, wrinkles, spots, and uneven skin tone.

95% of users who completed the SAL experience on Shopee have stated a positive experience with the bot.

How can Acuvate help?

At Acuvate, we help clients deploy customer and employee-facing chatbots that deliver fast, meaningful, and personalized interactions with our enterprise bot-building platform called BotCore.

As a Microsoft Gold Partner, we use the best of Microsoft’s AI, machine learning (ML), and natural language processing (NLP) technologies to build our bots.

BotCore hosts the following list of advanced capabilities —

  • An intuitive, low-code, visual interface, allowing the quick implementation of AI chatbots
  • Flexible integrations with existing legacy systems and AI services
  • Our chatbots simulate both simple and highly complex conversations.
  • Our bots are deployable on most of the popular enterprise messaging and social media channels and support several languages, including English, German, French, Italian, etc.

Moreover, we help clients build and implement AI chatbots using Microsoft’s low-code bot-building solution called Power Virtual Agents (PVA).

To know more about BotCore and PVA, feel free to schedule a personalized consultation with our experts.

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Deploy Employee Experience Chatbots in Microsoft Teams https://botcore.ai/blog/chatbots-in-microsoft-teams/ Mon, 01 Nov 2021 13:48:00 +0000 https://botcore.ai/?p=8992 Deploy Employee Experience Chatbots in Microsoft Teams Over the past year, Microsoft customers have spent most of their time collaborating and working within Teams. Indeed, with 145 million daily active users, Microsoft Teams has emerged as the go-to platform for employees to host meetings, talk to colleagues, and send and receive project updates. Needless to […]

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Deploy Employee Experience Chatbots in Microsoft Teams

Over the past year, Microsoft customers have spent most of their time collaborating and working within Teams. Indeed, with 145 million daily active users, Microsoft Teams has emerged as the go-to platform for employees to host meetings, talk to colleagues, and send and receive project updates.

Needless to say, it makes sense for organizations to surface information that employees need within Teams and help them get day-to-day tasks done without switching contexts.

As organizations grow and mature, they amass a sea of knowledge that often gets trapped in siloed tools, SharePoint sites, FAQ documents, and other internal apps. This makes it tricky to find information, requiring employees to switch between disparate apps frequently.

Moreover, as employees work remotely, they often encounter IT and HR issues that need immediate remediation. Usually, such appeals are mundane, repetitive requests that make it difficult for support staff to focus on tasks that add business value. Additionally, it may require employees to routinely deal with specialists (IT/HR), causing frustration for both parties.

As seen above, today’s employees are living within Teams. Hence, what’s better than deploying employee experience chatbots in Microsoft Teams that can help employees fetch the required information quickly and get routine tasks done seamlessly within the same platform?

Let’s explore further.

Deploying Employee Experience (EX) Chatbots in Microsoft Teams

A chatbot embedded in Microsoft Teams can answer simple questions, guide users to relevant knowledge articles, create support tickets, help employees automate simple to complex tasks, and escalate requests to human agents when needed – all while staying within Microsoft Teams.

Getting all requests fulfilled while sitting within a single hub helps employees focus and maintain workflow without getting distracted by different browser tabs or multiple apps and tools.

What all can your employee experience chatbot do within Teams?

1. Answer employee queries instantly - anytime, anywhere!

An EX chatbot deployed within Teams can be called to answer queries, such as “How many vacation days do I have?” or “How can I set up a VPN?”

Indeed, the convenience of accessing the chatbot within Teams itself – the place where employees are spending most of their time – reduces app fatigue and boosts employee productivity.

Moreover, the chatbot is available 24X7 and can handle multiple queries simultaneously at lower costs to the organization. The employee can ask questions from anywhere from the Teams mobile app – irrespective of whether they are at home, in the office, or elsewhere.

However, if the bot fails, the system can quickly bring in a human-in-the-loop by posting a real-time alert to the subject-matter experts, who can then provide help in the moment.

Learn more here.

2. Simplify everyday tasks with the Teams chatbot

The employee experience chatbots deployed within Teams can automate simple, repetitive tasks on behalf of users. Users can scope such bots to manage a few simple commands or even complex AI-driven tasks.

Examples include – changing passwords, setting up VPN, raising tickets for outages, completing log reports, updating customer or sales database, etc.

Additionally, employees can leverage the Teams bot to simplify common HR tasks like applying for leaves, issuing asset change requests, schedule meetings, submitting onboarding documents, etc.

3. Surface relevant information within Teams

Indeed the quick and seamless discovery of relevant knowledge reduces employee fatigue and burnout and substantially improves productivity.

Employee experience chatbots can retrieve files, FAQ pages, documents, and other information from the organization’s internal network (for example, key business metrics from BI apps) and surface the content within Teams, eliminating the need to switch between apps to get work done.

4. Deliver personalized alerts

Employee experience chatbots can push notifications and alerts within Teams (for instance, latest policy updates, documents added to an existing project folder, scheduled downtime, etc.).

Such notifications are personalized based on the concerned employee’s role, geography, interests, duties, etc.

Microsoft VIVA and Employee Experience Chatbots

Launched in February 2021, VIVA, Microsoft’s employee experience platform, brings together communications, knowledge, learning, resources, and insights and builds a conducive organizational culture that empowers people and teams to be their best from anywhere.

Microsoft VIVA consists of four modules delivered through Teams – VIVA Connections, VIVA Insights, VIVA Topics, and VIVA Learning. Together, they help organizations deliver end-to-end engagement and ensure people have the knowledge and resources they need – right within the everyday workflow.

The question then arises – “How can EX chatbots work alongside VIVA to deliver a better employee experience?”

As seen above, with the increase in digitization, employees demand answers and want information instantly, at their fingertips. By working in tandem with Microsoft VIVA, EX chatbots can do just that.

For example, VIVA Topics helps organizations curate Topic Pages on different subjects, including company jargon, project names, software, etc., and surface the same across email and other apps. By harnessing AI to reason over knowledge, VIVA Topics helps organize information across content and subject-matter experts.

Now, the employee may start the conversation with the bot by saying, “What can you tell me about topic “X?”

The bot may throw up topic pages that talk in-depth about the topic “X” or may suggest employees who possess expertise on the same.

Additionally, by sending links to the latest training and other learning resources available on Topic X, employee experience chatbots can add a new layer of AI (powered by VIVA Learning) to deliver the relevant knowledge and expertise intelligently.

Another example is that of VIVA Insights. VIVA Insights delivers managers and employees data-driven recommendations to foster productivity and reduce burnout at the workplace. Here,  EX chatbots can send personalized reminders to employees to take regular breaks, book focus time, and guide on closing out the day’s tasks.

On the other hand, the bot can also send insights to managers and leaders on employee productivity and work patterns and trends that minimize attrition.

Benefits of deploying EX chatbots in Teams

  • Improve productivity by simplifying day-to-day tasks and providing access to all information right within Teams.
  • Enhance digital employee experience for the hybrid workforce.
  • Reduce employee burnout, fatigue, and employee attrition.
  • Decrease costs of providing employee support at scale.

The Different Chatbot Personas in Microsoft Teams

A) IT Chatbot

  • Raise tickets for service disruptions, IT outages, or requests for service outages.
  • Answer common IT queries, e.g., “How do I reset my laptop password?”
  • Automate IT onboarding processes, requesting preferred laptops to new users, setting up email accounts, etc.
  • Automate other IT tasks, including sending outage alerts on Teams, issuing asset change notifications, and much more.

B) HR Chatbot

  • Provide answers to queries – leave balance, income tax, yearly holidays, HR policies, etc.
  • Simplify recruitment and onboarding activities – submitting document proofs, scheduling interviews, etc.
  • Allow employees to apply for leave, schedule meetings, book travel, and much more.

C) Business Intelligence (BI) bot

  • Retrieve required data from the BI app via text or multimedia (reports, graphs, dashboard screenshots, etc.). For example, “What were the operating expenses in Q3-19?
  • Request for reports or dashboard links via Teams chat.

D) Intranet Chatbot

  • Retrieve files, documents, and valuable knowledge from anywhere across the company’s internal network.
  • Get personalized and meaningful search results from all internal apps within the intranet.

Deploy Employee Experience Chatbots in Microsoft Teams with Power Virtual Agents

Power Virtual Agents (PVA) is a low-code graphical interface solution that provides an instant, bot authoring canvas to build rich, intelligent, and responsive conversational chatbots that easily integrate within Teams.

With its low-code interface, pro and citizen developers alike, including domain specialists, business analysts, and skilled app developers, can design and publish employee experience chatbots for Teams without needing a complex development environment.

After developing the chatbot in the PVA portal, the user must publish the bot and configure the Teams channel to make it available to Teams users.

Click here to learn more about making your chatbot available in Teams through the Power Virtual Agents portal.

Prerequisites to adding a bot to Teams using Power Virtual Agents

Here are a few requirements you should be mindful of before deploying PVA chatbots in Microsoft Teams –

  • Familiarity with the Power Virtual Agents platform.
  • Your organization’s Teams app permission policies must allow the Power platform apps to be added to Teams.
  • Before installing the bot in Teams or sharing it with others, publishing it at least once is mandatory.

Case Example —> To know how to quickly build a Microsoft Teams bot with Power Virtual Agents, do check out this video.

Deploy Employee Experience Chatbots in Microsoft Teams with BotCore

As a Microsoft Gold Partner, we, at Acuvate, help clients deploy employee experience chatbots in Microsoft Teams for various use cases, including IT, HR, Business Intelligence, intranet, etc., with our low-code enterprise bot-building platform BotCore.

Akin to Microsoft Power Virtual Agents, BotCore leverages a graphical interface and visual tools to assist users in deploying smart AI-enabled bots within Teams.

We use Microsoft’s best AI, machine learning, and natural language processing technologies, including LUIS, Azure Cognitive Services, and the Microsoft Bot Framework, to deploy employee experience chatbots in Microsoft Teams.

Our bots are multilingual and support global languages, including French, German, English, Italian, etc.

We also deploy aggregator bots to help our clients experience easy, consistent, and seamless engagement – all while sitting right within Teams.

To know more about BotCore, please feel free to schedule a personalized consultation with our chatbot experts.

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Using Employee Experience Chatbots to Drive Hybrid Workforce Productivity https://botcore.ai/blog/employee-experience-chatbots-hybrid-workforce-productivity/ Thu, 22 Jul 2021 07:55:00 +0000 https://botcore.ai/?p=8649 Using Employee Experience Chatbots to Drive Hybrid Workforce Productivity Employee experience involves a variety of factors, including how employees find meaning in their work as well as how they perceive, interact, and respond to internal practices and the organizational culture during their employment. A great employee experience creates higher employee engagement, and highly engaged and […]

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Using Employee Experience Chatbots to Drive Hybrid Workforce Productivity

Employee experience involves a variety of factors, including how employees find meaning in their work as well as how they perceive, interact, and respond to internal practices and the organizational culture during their employment. A great employee experience creates higher employee engagement, and highly engaged and committed employees create a better experience for customers who they interact with and serve.

~ ResearchGate’s paper on Transforming Digital Employee Experience with AI

Over the past year, employee needs have transformed significantly due to increased digitalization and the emergence of remote work. In line with this trend, employees expect more personalized, interactive, consumer-like engagement. Consequently, designing the new-age employee experience requires the amalgamation of both human and digital components.

In light of this development, the usage of AI-enabled chatbots that emulate consumer-like experiences and deliver rich, meaningful, and contextual interactions to remote employees has grown exponentially over the past year. So much so, that by 2022, 70% of white-collar workers will interact with conversational platforms on a daily basis.

These AI-based assistants answer basic employee questions, retrieve information, and automate routine tasks, which help employees save a considerable amount of time, increase efficiency, and focus on value-adding business activities. Research by Gartner has shown that in 2021, artificial intelligence will recover 6.2 billion hours of worker productivity globally.

Recent studies and trends have made it clear that workforce dynamics are changing, and most employees (precisely, 59%) would only consider a new position or job that allows them to work from a location of their choice. In other words, the future of work is a hybrid working model – a combination of remote and traditional office-based work.

Let’s talk  about the types of employee experience chatbots and how organizations can use them to drive hybrid workforce productivity.

How are employee experience chatbots driving hybrid workforce productivity?

Before delving into the function-specific use cases of employee experience chatbots, let’s look at the four ways these chatbots are being used to drive hybrid workforce productivity –

  • Answer employee queries instantly – anytime and anywhere
  • Automate and simplify mundane, everyday tasks to boost efficiency
  • Get the required information at the employees’ fingertips – 24X7 and from any device
  • Push personalized alerts to effectively engage remote workforces

Now, let’s look at how each of the function-specific EX chatbots fulfills the above use cases.

1. HR Chatbot

An HR bot acts as the go-to assistant to complete different HR tasks and get information related to HR policies. From streamlining recruitment, onboarding, and training activities to answering questions regarding benefit plans, vacation plans, and best practices, such chatbots provide 24X7 access to self-service support and reduce cost per contact.

  • Ask questions regarding leaves, insurance policies, existing HR cases, rules of the land, missing ID card
  • Apply for time off, log daily work hours, update work profile, schedule meetings with the HR personnel
  • Access company and HR policy documents and information repositories, get employee information
  • Schedule interviews, capture details of new hires, and complete various onboarding forms via chat

2. IT Helpdesk Bot

From answering FAQs to automating various IT onboarding activities, to managing devices and service disruptions, IT helpdesk bots provide employees access to quicker resolutions, increase IT staff productivity, reduce cost per ticket, and ensure remote workers can operate seamlessly without major disruptions.

  • Ask questions regarding the status of tickets and common IT issues (for example, “How to connect to the VPN?”)
  • Reset passwords for devices, talk to a live agent, report incidents
  • Allocate new laptops, disable/wipe stolen devices, etc.
  • Get information regarding outage reports, access IT policy documents, reports, and IT knowledge base
  • Receive asset request notifications, new change request notifications, incident notifications, etc.

3. Data Analyst Bot

A Data Analyst chatbot, also known as a Business Intelligence bot, integrates with business intelligence apps like Oracle, Power BI, and SAP Business Objects to simplify the consumption of business intelligence and drive data-driven decision-making by managers.

Employees can ask natural language questions and get business-critical data at their fingertips, eliminating multiple logins to BI dashboards and filtering of complex BI dashboards.

  • Ask questions about business KPIs. (E.g., operating expenses in 2019)
  • Get pinpointed answers to any information available in the BI system. For example, “What is the top-performing product in 2018?”
  • Access reports available in the BI, LOB, or DWH system, or get links to desired dashboards.
  • Get visual reports in multimedia format on email.
  • Receive alerts about a dip or rise in business KPIs.

Driving Hybrid Workforce Productivity with a Unified Enterprise Bot

While each of the above chatbots serves their function-specific purposes and helps drive hybrid workforce productivity, the problem with having multiple chatbots is that employees must adapt to different conversation styles, platforms, and bot personas and remember the specific functionalities of each of these bots.

What can organizations do to overcome such issues? Well, the answer lies in deploying a unified enterprise bot. Often known as a universal or concierge bot, such a bot links individual use-case-specific bots into a single bot.

When an employee inputs a question/issue, it first reaches the unified enterprise bot. This bot then checks for authorization and permission levels and escalates the issue to the specialized function-specific bot (IT, HR, etc.)

Therefore, a unified enterprise bot delivers a consistent employee experience by acting as a personalized Enterprise Virtual Assistant (EVA).

Deploying a unified enterprise bot saves the cost of building, maintaining, and training multiple bots, as any features added to this bot can be leveraged by other functional bots.

Leveraging an employee experience platform to drive hybrid workforce productivity

In addition to deploying AI-enabled chatbots, many organizations have taken the more holistic approach to drive hybrid workforce productivity by implementing an employee experience platform.

An employee experience, or EX platform, is a cohesive space that unifies powerful tools required for collaboration, employee engagement, well-being, learning, and knowledge discovery under a single roof.

Such platforms boast advanced functionalities, including –

  • Internal communication and collaboration tools
  • Cognitive enterprise search
  • AI-driven content recommendations
  • Intelligent idea management
  • Multilingual and omnichannel capabilities

Moreover, organizations can implement an aggregator bot on the EX platform and extend the platform’s utility to increase adoption and enhance operational efficiency.

Such bots can be integrated with enterprise messaging apps (such as Teams and Slack) and enable the following –

  • Easier access to information by helping employees locate files, documents, and information seamlessly from anywhere on the organization’s network.
  • The bot’s AI and ML capabilities promote knowledge mining by carrying out a cognitive enterprise search to pull the most contextual and relevant information.
  • Increased collaboration and employee engagement by pushing internal news and alerts and sending personalized content and people (SME) recommendations.
  • Consistent employee experiences by allowing the staff to raise HR and IT tickets, access business intelligence, and perform tasks like leave requests, travel settlement requests, etc. from the platform itself.

How can Acuvate help?

At Acuvate, we help clients build and deploy employee experience chatbots to drive hybrid workforce productivity with our low-code enterprise bot-building platform BotCore.

As a Microsoft Gold Partner, we build bots for HR, IT, business intelligence, CRM, etc,. by leveraging the best of Microsoft’s AI, ML, and NLP technologies, including LUIS, Azure Cognitive Services, and the Microsoft Bot Framework.

Our bots are omnichannel and multilingual, and support all popular enterprise messaging channels (Teams, Slack, ProofHub, etc.) and languages including French, German, English, Italian, etc.

Additionally, we build and implement employee experience platforms for organizations with our autonomous, AI-enabled intranet solution called Mesh 3.0. Build on the Microsoft SharePoint foundation, Mesh delivers a seamless employee experience with capabilities, such as –

We also deploy an aggregator bot within Mesh, called MeshBot, to help employees utilize the intranet optimally, access information, and get all work done (HR, IT, etc.) from a single window. 

To know more about BotCore and Mesh 3.0, please feel free to schedule a personalized consultation with our experts.

The post Using Employee Experience Chatbots to Drive Hybrid Workforce Productivity appeared first on BotCore.

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