5 Ways Chatbots for Employees Can Improve Remote Work Experience
In March 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic threw workforces worldwide into disarray. Employees were found struggling as they transitioned into a remote and virtual working environment while hundreds of thousands battled uncertainty and stress while looking for new opportunities.
A recent Oracle survey pointed out that 68% of working professionals found working remotely felt burned out, and 76% believe their companies needed to do more to support their mental health. This is where AI chatbots come into the picture as they enable HR professionals to communicate with employees in a more meaningful manner. According to a study conducted by Gartner, by the year 2022, 70% of white-collar workers will be interacting with conversational platforms like Acquire regularly.
Having said that, let’s dive deeper into this subject and understand the role played by chatbots for employees and discuss how investing in one such solution can improve your employees’ remote work experience.
What Are Chatbots For Employees?
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We all have an idea of what a chatbot is — it’s a computer program designed to simulate human conversations in the form of text or audio. The idea behind this technology is to streamline interactions between leads/customers and businesses so much so that 69% of consumers prefer using chatbots since they can deliver quick answers to simple FAQs.
Over the years, applications of chatbots have grown to cover internal communications inside an organization as well. They can be integrated with collaboration software like Microsoft Teams and be linked to technology-specific knowledge bases and websites. In that sense, chatbots for employees differ from customer-facing chatbots since the rules set for them are distinct and they need access to a far more exhaustive knowledge base than what is required by an average customer.
How Can Chatbots Improve An Employee’s Remote Work Experience?
Almost all organizations with employees working remotely and no self-service solution are struggling to make things work. Their workforce is met with disruptions at every step and there is always some friction in the workflow. The obvious solution here is deploying an AI-enabled chatbot that can cater to basic employee queries and escalate complex issues to live agents.
Conversational AI can be deployed across various digital channels and is highly scalable as it keeps improving with every interaction. With that in mind, let’s see how it pans out when it comes to assisting remote workers.
1. 24×7 Instant Resolution
As employees work remotely, they have to manage their household, their kids, pets, along with their official responsibilities. This means their deadlines are a blur and they often work beyond the conventional working hours. Hence, unless your organization offers round-the-clock IT support, you need a chatbot system for providing real-time resolutions to all support requests from employees.
AI chatbot systems can tackle queries that would otherwise take at least a few hours to be answered by a human agent. And that’s true for 74% of users who prefer chatbots while finding solutions to rather simple problems.
2. Automating Simple, Redundant Tasks
Most of the work within an organization can be tagged as repetitive. In a case like that, chatbots support employees by liberating them of routine and mundane tasks as they can execute more efficiently and quickly. What’s more, is that chatbots are designed to automate high-demand yet low-level work.
Taking the example of an IT helpdesk support agent, instead of burying them under a mountain of repetitive support queries, we can use a chatbot system so that the requests never pile up. This will free up your agents and make them more productive while catering to unique and complex queries. In a lot of ways, leveraging chatbots for automation can be the first step towards an organization-wide restructuring as your team works remotely.
3. No Need For Time-Consuming Searches
Going back to 2019, the average waiting time for live chat users was 4 minutes and 17 seconds. Chatbots could have potentially reduced the average waiting time and helped companies in increasing both customer and employee satisfaction. But more than that, these systems can completely transform the way your employees seek information across the organization.
For instance, traditional web searches can often deliver irrelevant results and the employee might end up wasting billable hours on futile searches. The most optimum solution here is using AI chatbots linked to a domain-specific knowledge base that can answer most of the common employee search queries. For all practical purposes, the chatbot does the heavy lifting for your employees and saves everyone’s time, helping them stay sharp and efficient throughout the day.
4. Enhances Self Service And Human Resource
The practical applications of chatbots are being rapidly increased to achieve a substantial portion of the HR department’s redundant tasks. Unlike an HR professional, a chatbot can be deployed and made available 24×7. Through it, the HR professional can answer common employee questions related to schedules, leaves, attendance, benefits, insurance, etc. Thanks to AI, the relies are personalized and quick and shows effort on your part to provide the employee with a positive and satisfying experience.
As employees work remotely, they are frequently switching between virtual locations and collaboration platforms and these platforms can be leveraged for hosting a chatbot. This shall also promote self-service on the part of employees and enhance conversational engagement.
5. Streamlines And Personalizes Recruitment And Onboarding
Apart from facilitating the core HR functions, chatbots are now also being used for recruitment processes and to iron out the onboarding process. The idea is to improve the candidate experience by embracing AI and empower HR professionals to focus on what really matters.
Final Thoughts
The AI chatbots we see today are not the clunky bots that we found riddled across websites a few years ago. With advancements in technology and rapidly rising demand for better products, chatbots today can cater to a variety of business applications, including supporting remotely working employees.
The way companies conduct business has evolved to become more technology-dependent and the chatbot solution has become a cornerstone of employee productivity and looking at the bigger picture, organizational growth.
