Customers always seek services or products from a company that delivers excellent customer service.Just as customers disapprove of bad customer service, your people or help desk support employeesare less likely to adapt to bad experiences with high-volume user requests.
The urge is to remove friction from the user and employee journey and focus on improving their experience. The easiest way to build an amazing employee and user experience is by using a conversational AI chatbot.
It is a general quest to solve problems autonomously, yet seeking a humanizing experience that does not feel so rigid and emotionally drained.
A conversational AI chatbot is what aligns with user expectations. It offers many benefits for leaders to drive fantastic business use cases and help them build a resilient workforce for long-term growth opportunities.
Our article is detailed research on why your business should use an AI or conversational AI chatbot to reap excellent benefits.
Benefits are luscious, leaving one irresistible to see what pertains under the fold. But the real essence of benefits lies within the right mix of technologies built to deliver business results.
Programmed with Artificial Intelligence or deep learning like natural language processing, speech recognition, and text-to-speech capabilities, a chat interface that enables human-to-machine conversations is an AI chatbot.
Interchangeably known as digital assistants, AI chatbots provide human-like experiences by replying to questions from FAQ-based answer repositories and helping users solve problems.
The bizarre pattern you can experience with AI chatbots is that they have limited capability to break down a user's unique or changing needs related to some requests.
AI chatbots contain predefined questions and answers in the form of FAQs.
When you ask a question outside these predefined FAQs, an automated chat interface repeats only the previous options instead of focusing on solving the current questions.
Say a user wants to know a company’s client policy for SAP S/4HANA integrations with IoT systems. He sends a request in an AI chatbot only to find ‘Sorry. I am learning. Please choose an option that best suits your query.’
There is no custom solution for the employee.
However, conversational AI chatbots have advanced NLP capabilities to identify, detect, and continually analyze patterns of user queries and deliver answers that match intent, entity, and context.
By providing advanced NLP capabilities, chatbots can offer immediate help or 24x7 support to customers or users who need solutions to usual queries.
One thing that is so significant for a conversational AI chatbot is that it does not follow a keyword or rule-based search like that of a FAQ or Q&A bots generally do.
It follows four steps to generate human-like responses through -
Large amounts of data used for training conversational AI platforms can help it gain the ability to learn from continuous interactions with humans and process language to generate responses in a natural way for any form of NLP questions.
Conversational AI chatbots ensure seamless and frictionless knowledge discovery for employees and help them work at scale. The benefits a conversational AI bot delivers translate into an amazing employee experience.
Things like PTO inquiry or asset provision look beyond normal for service desks.
They are simple tasks. But, a help desk takes longer to provide real-time information and help employees solve their problems.
Conversational AI chatbot allows for a swift resolution of these types of issues with an automated workflow. Just allow your employees to raise a request from within a bot and help them perform some actions to auto-resolve issues.
The ability to understand NLP requests and provide a solution to users empowers them to connect with the bot whenever they need help.
With an AI chatbot, answers are rudimentary, forcing users to wait for an agent to solve a problem. But, there is no scalability when an agent does not show up.
Conversational AI can offer custom responses in most scenarios and help users solve their problems.
Onboarding and onboarding require complex HR support. Conversational AI makes it easy for users to leverage automated workflows to control various processes. They can perform documentation, attend meetings, sign up for company applications or, deactivate them, etc.
Omnichannel provides more scalability than multichannel. Conversational AI delivers answers where employees are. MS Teams or Slack integrationscan offer employees integrated and unified information for knowledge discovery and facilitate autonomous problem-solving capability efficiently.
With conversational AI, language is never a barrier. By applying a language translator in the chatbot builder, users can easily get answers in their preferred language and get help instantly.
There is no repetition of the same answer in the conversational AI chatbot.
NLP-based search reduces ambiguity from the queries and surfaces contextually correct answers. As a result, any employee query has reduced MTTR and real-time solutions.
Employee queries, such as salary inquiry and PTO balance, etc. can see a resolution if a personalized answer is delivered.
Using a conversational chatbot has benefits for employees to receive personalized answers in an ongoing interaction session. Say an employee wants to know his leave balances. Conversational AI bot retrieves the exact information and fulfills his request.
Employee support with conversational AI is proactive rather than reactive.
Advanced reporting and analytics are a huge benefit of conversational AI chatbots to help analyze bot sessions and the number of tickets resolved or deflected. As a result, the service desk can initiate performance gaps and make improvements to offer efficient support ahead of time.
For example, automated notification workflows can be highly useful to nudge an employee to perform an immediate action for an application that faces an outage due to password expiry.
According to the Fifth Edition of State of the Connected Customer from Salesforce, 88% of customers believe that a company that provides customer experience should be as important as its products and services. Unfortunately, another Salesforce report suggested that 80% of customers are unlikely to connect with a brand for more than one bad customer service experience.
In 2020, 50% of U.S. consumers switched companies due to poor customer service. What could be the cost of this negative impact on your customers? Believe it or not, the cost of poor customer service for U.S. companies would range between $75 billion to $1.6 trillion annually.
Customers pointing at multiple reasons for their bad experience and switching brands include,
To a great extent, the disconnect between the IT help desk and the IT service desk could trigger a bad customer experience, another great reason for employee dissatisfaction.
How? If your team is bogged down by internal issues like a service outage or device glitch at the time when your IT help desk has one customer query, it could mean support being kept on hold, leading to customer frustration. The faster an IT service deskcould minimize employee issues, the faster it could resolve a customer issue.
Build your own IT or HR support chatbot without any coding.
That apart, employee burnout has a direct connection to impact on employee experience. The diverse work culture in the present time, which switches between remote and hybrid models, poses challenges for help desk staff to switch between devices, handle the growing volume of support tickets, and then work through the backlog. The growing challenge wears down employee stamina and their ability to handle client queries.
Here you can leverage the conversational AI benefit by adopting automation through chatbot integration in your ITSM tool or IT help desk software. An advanced IT help desk chatbot solution that Workativ Assitant platform provides is adaptable to supporting both employee and customer queries, thus resolving the issues at scale.
The conversational AI chatbot allows customized and automated workflows to work inside collaborative channels like Slack and Teams to unify conversation in one place, thus removing blockages and providing resources to handle support easily.
Simultaneously, the chatbot integration helps trigger issues based on priorities and escalate them to the support team equipped to handle the issues at its best capabilities.
As is with the common and repetitive customer queries, conversational chatbots can also help reduce the time to address these issues through automated responses.
So, your IT help desk team improving their MTTR or mean time to resolve by 5X allows faster closing of open tickets, reducing the backlog volume, and improving employee and customer experience.
A support ticket that takes 10 minutes to solve costs $25 in the U.S., while it costs $10 in other territories. Surprisingly, ticket handling costs decrease when the IT help desk improves their productivity by 60%.
Companies can implement the self-service capability by utilizing automation in the conversational chatbot. While the innovation helps automate repetitive IT help desk tasks, it also helps reduce ticket handling expenditure.
The powerful way is to use Workativ Assistant to build your chatbot and integrate it into your help desk software. By doing so, you can enable self-service capability and reduce ticket handling costs by 9x as you only need $2 to spend per ticket.
You can read the cost savings details here.
In addition to saving costs, it is also convenient for your business to utilize self-service-enabled chatbots in resolving low-level tickets your employees and customers may have. Therefore, you can free up your agents to help them focus on more complex support requirements and elevate the customer experience.
GoTo - a SaaS service provider for remote work model with 3500 employees, has a disjointed employee experience. They realized their employees needed more resources due to 50 dispersed applications spread over various sites. With more than 100 repetitive tasks to support the global employees through human agents, GoTo found that it caused productivity inefficiency. Adopting a self-service platform combined with FAQ pages improved efficiency and reduced productivity issues. Workativ Assistant allows GoTo to customize their chatbot profile and increase employee efficiency.
Not just a SaaS-service provider like GoTo, other business verticals can also drive AI chatbot business benefits with Workativ.
For example, a financial service receives a huge volume of tickets daily. Queries could range from details to transaction history, failure, etc.
Financial services can use a knowledge base or FAQ-based questionnaire to customize their AI conversational chatbot. As and when customers question, these chatbots can efficiently tie back to the customer's account details and relate their queries to the transaction history, thereby helping them to get relevant information and help reduce queries. This is a faster way to deflect ticket volumes for employees. The leading payment processor, PayPal, has leveraged AI to make its chatbot accessible to users. When its chatbot offers limited help, users can seamlessly communicate with the human agent in no time.
In another way, when you have more satisfied support staff, you are less likely to face short-staffed issues for the IT help desk that would otherwise require reinvestment in hiring new talent and spending additional resources for employee training. An artificial intelligence-powered chatbot can, therefore, seamlessly reduce operating costs for your organization.
96% of customers believe excellent customer service builds trust, as per the Salesforce State of the Connected Customer Fifth Edition. As it ties back to the improved employee experience, it is essentially important employees are empowered enough to handle simple to complex ticket issues effortlessly.
However, empowering your employees requires you to provide all the resources they need to accomplish their tasks.
With AI conversational platform integration in your HRSM tool and IT help desk or IT service desk, it is much easier to solve repetitive and mundane work processes that HR or service teams do daily manually. Using a knowledge base enables employees to find enough resources to solve their problems.
While this reduces the effort for the HR team, the content repository also allows your employees to find answers to the most basic queries as they require a significant password to log in to the devices, or need a new monitor, apply for leaves, or handle simple IT issues without needing to connect with the support desk or HR team.
It is one of the best business benefits of AI chatbot that helps employees reduce wait time and increase their productivity level while enhancing their confidence for long-term retention.
In this context, automation is the best gift of AI, which minimizes the extra effort for help desk staff and increases their efficiency to spend on customer service.
So, with your help desk comprising empowered and efficient support staff, you are more inclined to deliver high-level and quality user support, which wins back employees and retains them.
Additionally, taking customer service to the next level opens many possibilities to building new customer relationships. It is reported that acquiring new customers is 5-25% more expensive than retaining existing customers.
As per reports, maintaining a consistent and positive customer experience is highly likely to encourage 80% of customers to recommend your service to others. This can be a rewarding experience for your business as you tend to retain more customers while improving customer acquisition.
You can easily make your customer feel valued by enabling automation and self-service combined with the humanized customer experience, helping you reduce customer churn.
It is observed in a recent study by Qualtrics XM Institute study in the U.S., that employee churn is the key reason to put businesses at risk of losing 9.5% of revenue for the U.S. businesses. Simultaneously, as consumers are cutting short on spending due to bad customer experience, businesses are expected to lose $4.7 in annual revenue.
The rising volume of tickets and shortage of help desk staff compound the challenge for your support staff. Additionally, routing more complex tasks to the most capable support employee only adds to the complexity for businesses. As it mounts to physical fatigue and burnout, it challenges retaining staff. It is a usual scenario that leads to support employee quitting their jobs, leaving the HR team to fill those vacant positions and spend time and resources to train a batch of employees to set them up for work.
An AI conversational chatbot provides massive capability to reduce employee burnout by automating repetitive tasks and enabling collaboration with one unified platform rather than multiple tools. As collaborations are simpler than ever, your help desk staff can be more engaged and aligned with the employee support requirements.
Research shows that
AI conversational platforms can therefore be a powerful platform to help your support staff provide engaging employee experience while reducing the probability of revenue cracking through bad employee experience.
For example, the Workativ Assistant AI platform can be used to build your chatbot and also customize your workflow automation. By reducing wait times for employees, human agents can spend time on more complex and critical jobs, solve user queries in real time, and give them an effective way to work at scale without any friction.
Simply put, conversational chatbots can play an important role in influencing buyers’ decisions and driving them to buy from you, which can be the best platform to act as a revenue engine for your business.
Businesses today are more interested in embracing digital transformation. Conversation AI chatbots are powerful solutions to help drive this business objective. Creating an AI-based conversational model for small to medium businesses is an expensive iteration and a difficult process that takes a long time to achieve a business-critical mission. However, to leverage the conversational AI benefits, ready-to-use AI services are convenient and cost-effective.
However, we cannot overlook the limitations of these pre-built chatbots. Users can receive pre-programmed responses only, which fail to deliver contextual responses as they exhaust their resources and become repetitive.
The challenge for the ready-to-use bots are that they cannot adapt to queries outside of the preprogrammed structure or in case of an unexpected twist.
Chatbots built with machine learning, or NLP, are best designed to support unexpected customer queries and help speed up resolution. The no-code chatbot builder from Workativ provides simple to complex dialogue development capabilities for your chatbot.The additional advantage is that Workativ Assistant enables you to build a powerful AI conversational chatbot that also brings the flexibility to create workflow automation and helps increase the support team’s productivity as well as improve customer experience that expedites growth.
1. Can you make your business available 24x7 using Chatbot? Ans: Conversational AI chatbots can make your business omnipresent and provides the customers the convenience to engage with your brand 24x7 no matter where they are. |
2. How can automation be implemented through conversational AI? Ans: Deep learning and NLP technologies enable AI conversational platforms to tap into automation capabilities by improving data harnessing capabilities which helps them learn from real-time contextual experience and improve over time. Due to this specific quality, bots can understand the unexpected requirement of the customers and route the conversation to someone capable of handling the query. |
3. How does AI conversational AI improves help desk productivity? Ans: AI conversational chatbots are quipped to automate mundane and repetitive tasks of the support team, enabling them to free up efforts and improve productivity. |
4. What’s the Workativ differentiator as an AI conversational chatbot? Ans: Workativ offers a no-code platform to build your conversational chatbot, which is different from the ready-to-use chatbot builders as Workativ Assistant also allows to implement workflow automation for customer support reps. |
5. Does Workativ offer free chatbot AI? Ans: Yes, Workativ offers a free chatbot AI platform to help you build one chatbot builder and one active app workflow. To know more, visit the pricing page. |