If you’ve ever yelled the wrong name at your mobile phone or smart speaker (Siri! Alexa! Cortana!), then you know how indispensable it is to have always-on access to digital assistance. From answering random questions and making lists to controlling lights and placing online orders, it’s hard to remember how we ever got along without them.

(Source: Forbes, “The 5 Biggest Mistakes Companies Make With Chatbots”) 

Now imagine that kind of utility in the workplace.

How much happier would employee be, and how much more efficiently would your business run, if your workforce had a resource they could rely on to handle the mundane administrative tasks that waste so much time? The answer is simple: a lot.

So how can you provide that kind of utility to your employees? Through the use of an enterprise chatbot.

1. Improved productivity

Being busy and being productive are two entirely different things. Unfortunately, employees are often simply busy, spending the majority of their time looking for information, navigating a maze of complicated systems or working through time-consuming, multi-step processes to complete high-volume, low-value tasks. A chatbot can simplify that administrative busy work and give employees more time to focus on the meaningful work that’s rewarding for them and valuable for the company.

2. Reduced costs

One of the most basic tenets of good business practice is cost control – eliminating unnecessary spending. Organizations such as Liberty Mutual Insurance that have implemented a chatbot to streamline processes have seen significant improvements in this area. For example, when Liberty implemented a chatbot to drive efficiencies across it’s IT help desk, the organization saw a 93% expense reduction for each help desk transaction as well as a 10% increase in employee satisfaction.

3. Increased flexibility

With two years of remote work under their belts and a shift to hybrid work underway, employees have proven to be resilient and more productive than ever before. But they need help. Specifically, they need help with working wherever and whenever it’s convenient for them. A chatbot is a great first step in making this happen. Chatbots make it easy to get personalized answers to top questions while on the go, whenever they’re needed. They also make it easier to find important information from across the enterprise and facilitate self-service functionality, assisting workers with the processing of routine tasks like service-desk tickets.

4. Contextual, consumer-grade experiences

Employees have high expectations of the digital experiences they encounter, and the workplace is no exception. Unfortunately, the digital experiences many organizations deliver fall far short of expectation, with 35% of employees surveyed for Dell’s Future Workforce Study admitting that the technology they have at home is far more advanced than what they have at work. The biggest reason for that is most of the digital experiences delivered in the workplace are one-size-fits-all, with no consideration of the unique needs of each employee.  
 
Companies can bridge that gap with a chatbot that uses existing employee data to create an experience that’s personalized, contextual and much more in line with the Amazon-grade experiences workers encounter in their consumer lives. For example, a chatbot could take advantage of patterns found in company-wide data to help employees advance their career by providing them with custom job recommendations made based on the job histories of colleagues with similar career paths. Workers can also self-select the kinds of information they would like to receive based on their preferences.

For more information on chatbots, including...

• An explanation of the key elements they need to have

• Guidance implementation best practices

• Case studies featuring successful chatbot implementations

Check out my DWG podcast appearance or DWG's whitepaper.