Why chatbots form an integral part of Work from Home culture?

As the world grapples in the ongoing fight against COVID-19, the industrial organizations are also struggling to engage with their distant workforce. As companies shifted their labor force to work from home, they were not ready to face the challenges this change brought with it. Though the employees were reliant on technology before, delivering similar levels of output while being geographically isolated required new strategy plans and rethinking infrastructural support. Further, it demanded shifting to digital transformation to find solutions and boost productivity. This was synonymous with the upgrade of prehistoric stone-age work culture settled at a particular place to digitally equipped remote workforce. And the best and easiest way to adopt this cultural change while ensuring employee engagement is via AI chatbots.

Why?

The main reason why companies should leverage AI chatbots is because of their 24/7 availability. Both customers, employees, can get a response almost instantly while the technology enables consistent messaging with every interaction. As a result, people can turn to these platforms at any time of the day and are not dependent on office hours. Although by definition, a chatbot is an automated program that mimics human conversation, it can be used for tasks ranging from technical support to creating a ticket with the help desk. They can also be integrated with other platforms, especially video conferencing apps like Microsoft Teams, Google Meets, and others. For an organization, having a chatbot can help with constant support for IT-related issues, easy onboarding, availability of HR policies and training modules, and many more. Further, chatbots are simple to use, time-saving, and can also align with various types of workflow behavior characteristic of digital remote workplaces.

How does it help?

In the HR department, AI chatbot can help in automating several tasks with higher efficiency. While it shall help in the obvious hiring and onboarding processes, it can also assist with auto-generation of the offer letters, contracts, and other vital documents with employees using NLP. Chatbots will allow addressing FAQs and networking for fellow applicants too. Moreover, they can provide continuous feedback and insight when required. All these shall enable HR managers to analyze employee sentiment and the primary effectiveness of HR processes. An AI-enabled chatbot can help employees to monitor and augment their professional skills to elevate their performance regardless of their location.

In the IT section, AI chatbot can offer information on queries, update work status, resolve IT issues, software fixes, and upgrades. Chatbots can help IT, teams, by accessing information and knowledge spread across channels, thus guiding towards a consistent omnichannel experience. It can also direct the internal teams through anything from helping customers to getting approval needed from other departments or units while working on projects. A chatbot can hence, act as a medium of interaction between departments and help improve person to person engagement even during remote working. It also facilitates, taking lightning-fast actions with just a click of an employee. With reduced friction, increased convenience, more unrestricted access to information, there will be a huge reduction in employee attrition, and higher satisfaction among coworkers.

Lastly, in the sales and marketing department, chatbots can be leveraged to identify and capture sales touchpoints, collect relevant information, and divert them to sales representatives to take the deal further. Moreover, these AI chatbots also helps to connect qualified leads with the right member of the sales team and use the experience gained from interactions with customers, to create interactive marketing campaigns and shorten the sales cycle for better outcomes. Moreover, chatbots ease up the collaboration possibilities for various departments and companies too.