When we talk about chatbots, we usually consider their customer-facing applications. There’s no doubt in the fact that chatbots today have become invaluable assets for organizations to enhance customer experience. But what about the business applications of chatbots? Can enterprises also use chatbots to improve their employee experience?
Yes, there is really no limit to what you can achieve with the help of intelligent chatbots. And, in today’s article, we are going to see how businesses can use enterprise chatbots to elevate the experience for customers as well as employees and other internal stakeholders.
What are enterprise chatbots?
Enterprise chatbots are automated programs that simulate human conversations. They are not rule-based chatbots that can only handle simple tasks like setting reminders or answering basic questions. Enterprise chatbots are capable of much more than that. They are also known as high-performance or AI chatbots that use machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) to understand users’ intent and handle complex tasks.
We know how chatbots have been here for the longest time. Their growth has been so prominent across a number of industries that now, around 1.4 billion people use them on a fairly regular basis. In fact, 69% of consumers prefer chatbots for receiving instant responses, and Gartner predicts that by 2022, 70% of white-collar workers will interact with them on a daily basis.
Let’s have a deeper look into how they are making as much a difference for employees as they’re making for customers.
Employee & Customer Experience Are Both Important Components of TX
A business survives on attracting, engaging and retaining customers and employees. When it comes to experience, which one do you think is more important – customer or employee? They both hold equal significance, it’s never one or the other. Successful companies take employee and customer experience hand in hand which gives them the ability to outperform their competitors.
Besides employee retention, there is another business value in creating and fostering EX. Companies with highly engaged workforces are 21 per cent more profitable than those with low engagement.
Leading companies are beginning to recognize the connection between EX and CX and are planning to create individualized employee experiences comparable to consumer experiences in the next two years.
Enterprise AI chatbot solutions can be your first step towards transforming how employees interact and access the information needed to help increase their productivity and satisfaction. Below mentioned are the top enterprise chatbot use cases for improving workplace dynamics.
Use cases of enterprise chatbots managing employee experiences
1. HR chatbots
The most popular use case of an enterprise ai chatbot solution is HR. Let’s face it, on a daily basis, the HR team spends a lot of time answering the most basic questions about the organization’s policies, framework and processes.
The HR team can use NLP-powered enterprise chatbots to cater to these straightforward queries and free up their time to focus on more fulfilling tasks. On the other hand, instant replies to their questions will also keep employees happy.
2. Recruitment chatbots
Recruitment chatbots are saving the day for enterprises worldwide. During the recruitment process, there is plenty of back and forth between the executive and candidate on phone, emails or texts. Keeping in mind that this is where employee experience starts, recruiters need to make sure that the process is hassle-free.
These chatbots help the recruitment team categorize and screen multiple applications, schedule interviews and even give assessments to the candidates. On the candidate front, chatbots help them by answering common queries and providing immediate feedback on their application status.
3. Onboarding Chatbots
Do you think recruitment is a tedious process? Let’s talk about onboarding. Research suggests that only 12% of employees in the US agree that their organization has a good onboarding process. Successful onboarding is the deciding factor of employee experience and not to mention, it sets them up for either success or failure.
An employee is likely to feel stressed and overwhelmed if the company doesn’t have a smooth onboarding process. On the other hand, if the complete responsibility of onboarding a new employee rests with the managers, it can put a significant strain on their workload. This is where an enterprise chatbot can help.
Most employees would agree that finding the right person for a particular task is the biggest challenge when you are new to an organization. Chatbots can help new hires by directing them to the right person. They can also walk hires through the onboarding paperwork and get them up to speed with the company’s history and policies, helping them feel more comfortable at the new job.
4. Learning and development chatbots
In the age of constant development, employers must focus on helping employees hone their current skills and develop newer ones to support the organization’s goals.
Chatbots can provide a truly personalized and engaging approach to learning and development. Here’s how they can help:
a. Bots for tutoring
Going through lesson after lesson on an e-learning platform can get monotonous. Chatbots can be used to create learning experiences for employees similar to one-to-one tutoring. Enterprise chatbots help make social and interactive learning possible as they take part in dialogue with each employee.
b. Bots to increase learners’ engagement
To make sure employees take out time from their busy schedules to devote to learning, employers need to make sure that the learning process is engaging. Enterprise chatbots can periodically remind employees about their remaining assessments or study material, conduct a quiz every now and then to test their knowledge, and send them words of encouragement every day to help them complete their courses in a timely manner.
5. IT helpdesk chatbots
Much like HR, the IT department stays occupied with an endless number of trivial questions on a daily basis. IT helpdesk chatbots provide a 24/7 self-service facility to employees and help them get answers to the routine or level 1 queries promptly. Chatbots can also guide employees through a basic troubleshoot without requiring the IT team intervention. Imagine how much time the IT department can save with the help of such chatbots?
In case of a more complex issue that requires help from an IT professional, employees can also submit a ticket using the chatbot. Companies can also integrate their chatbots with pre-existing ITSM tools to further streamline the processes.
Benefits of employee-facing enterprise chatbots
1. Save employees’ time and efforts
Across different business verticals, chatbots can handle routine questions and queries, saving time and effort for employees. For instance, chatbots resolve up to 80% of basic or repetitive customer queries without the need for human resources. This frees up the time of human agents to concentrate on more complex customer problems.
2. Redefine cross-functional employee engagement
Thus far, most of the internal communications are held randomly over emails, calls or other messenger apps. This means that till now, teams have been connecting in isolated silos which increases the risk of error and miscommunication. All of this can greatly impact the quality of employee experience.
Moreover, each team in an organization has its own proprietary tool. For example, CRM for sales, HRMS for HR, various automation tools for marketing and so on. These tools work great within a team but when a member from another department is required to collaborate using one of these tools, things may fall apart.
This is where enterprise chatbots can help. Chatbots can make a real difference in how cross-functional teams engage. A chatbot can help managers in the workforce task assignment and confirmation of task status from an employee with a single click.
Companies can also deploy a chatbot on all of their internal communication channels like messenger apps to make cross-functional communication seamless for their employees.
3. Improve productivity
As we discovered, a lot of tasks in an enterprise are routine and repetitive in nature. Chatbots excel at handling such tasks and by assigning high-demand, but low-level work to a bot can free up time for employees to handle higher-value tasks that require greater intuition, human knowledge and empathy.
Benefits of customer-facing enterprise chatbots
1. 24/7 availability
Recent research suggests that 88% of customers expect a response from businesses within 60 minutes and that 30% expect an answer within 15 minutes or less. With the help of chatbots that are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, providing customers with instant responses will never be a problem.
2. Provide personalized service
Technologies such as AI, ML and NLP that power the intelligent chatbots today enable them to process and record customer data to impart personalized customer service. Enterprise chatbots are able to adapt conversations to customer’s moods and intentions which makes the conversation more natural and engaging for the customer.
3. Handle Multilingual Queries
The Internet has made businesses across the globe more accessible to the customers. A customer sitting in the UK can easily order a product from North America within a matter of minutes. This makes multilingual customer support a necessity for businesses. Hiring a human agent who’s adept in speaking different languages can be quite difficult and to be honest, very expensive. This is where chatbots come in handy.
Enterprise chatbots are multilingual which means, they are programmed to converse in more than hundred languages. So now, they can answer queries in multiple languages and can even detect the customer’s language and adapt the conversation accordingly.
4. Provide omnichannel support
Stats show 47% of consumers admit to using three to five different communication channels to get in touch with a brand. This is where having an omnichannel CX strategy helps.
You may notice how omnichannel has become the hot new buzzword, like the holy grail of customer engagement, and rightly so. Chatbots deployed on multiple channels can provide customers with a seamless and integrated experience. Now, customers can communicate with a brand using various channels and they can pick right from where they left instead of starting their journey all over again.
5. Maintain consistency in service
Human agents can have good and bad days which can affect the way they provide service. Chatbots on the other hand are not subject to mood swings. They are able to provide consistent customer service, not like robots that ticks customers off. More like an emphatic and intelligent AI virtual assistant.
Things to consider before deploying enterprise chatbots
Enterprise chatbots, although dealing with both internal and external communications, should function as a whole. Their role is not just about automating repetitive tasks but also about delivering smooth and efficient engagement across the entire employee and customer lifecycles.
In other words, before deploying a chatbot, make sure that you plan about its different use cases and set the right expectations. Also, ensure that your chatbot leverages technologies such as AI, machine learning and NLP to provide the kind of service that you expect.
Building such intelligent chatbots for your enterprise doesn’t necessarily mean increased costs for your business. The beauty of chatbot solutions available these days is that you can create a chatbot without hiring specialized developers, which maximizes your return on investment.
Wrapping up
The key to a great customer experience is what goes on inside your organization. Happy employees make for happy customers. This is why, in 2022, to gain a competitive edge, you should focus on enhancing both your external as well as internal customer experiences.
Furthermore, with Yellow.ai’s no-code chatbot builder and agent-assist dashboard, you can discover new avenues of growth. Learn how Yellow.ai can help you enhance the total customer experience of your business; get a free demo today!
