Get over the Pandemic standstill: Leapfrog with Digital Assistants that enable business continuity during COVID-19

Ah, yes. “I’m working from home today.” Just thinking about saying this (before all the COVID drama started) makes one genuinely happy. While everyone’s at the office, you get to enjoy a day or two taking work-from-home — relaxing a bit, sipping a cup of coffee, as you work at your own pace, without anyone looking over your shoulder, listening to some music on your TV or smart speaker. But now, what you used to enjoy occasionally, has become your daily routine.

Yes, I’m talking about how COVID-19 has involuntarily pushed each and every one of us into working from home. Or remote working as everyone so calls it as if it was discovered recently.

Remote working has become the new norm now owing to the coronavirus outbreak to promote social distancing and prevent hospitals worldwide from getting overwhelmed with a huge number of patients they can’t handle. Businesses, especially now, are looking toward efficient remote working tools and processes to enable Business As Usual (BAU).

Enabling BAU is not that hard, in my opinion. BAU/Business Continuity can be easily achieved if one knows where to look. I’m talking about AI-powered self-service options for employees (chatbots) that provide real-time solutions through automated workflows.

Because confidence in automation and AI as a means to minimize the impact of the pandemic is growing, according to 16% of 181 European companies surveyed by IDC in late March. The firm also noted that the application of AI to automate processes is a crucial response to the crisis, but it could also lead to increased adoption for other long-term goals.

“As a short-term response to the COVID-19 crisis, AI can play a crucial part in automating processes and limiting human involvement to a necessary minimum,” said Petr Vojtsek, research analyst at IDC, in a statement. “In the longer term, we might observe an increase in AI adoption for companies that otherwise wouldn’t consider it, both for competitive and practical reasons.”

But more on that later. Because, before talking about the solutions, let’s see what challenges you might face as a business trying to embrace remote working out of the blue.

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Challenges

1. No one was prepared for it, why should you be?

You’re not alone. Businesses all over the world are still in shock. Some have even shut shop (I feel for those poor buggers). But that’s not to say it’s okay to remain in a state of standstill. Life has to go on. The sooner your business embraces the fact that work-from-home is going to be there for a lonnng time, the sooner you can come up with short-term and long-term solutions.

2. Get used to people getting sick often

Yeah, you heard that right. This one’s not on your hands. No pun intended 😉 Given the fact that COVID-19 remains on aerosols in the air for about three hours when a person coughs without covering their mouth with a surgical mask or their elbow, community spreading becomes inevitable.

And community spreading means, employees will get sick. Nope, you can’t avoid it. There will be both asymptomatic employees and employees who are symptomatic and you can’t do anything about it. The least you can do is try to be understanding of those poor chaps who have locked themselves without any kind of human interaction.

3. Ramping up security is the need of the hour

Businesses already had to deal with Bring Your Own Devices (BYOD) to the workplace that presented a  labyrinthine of problems in itself. Now, with employees working from home on their laptops and mobile devices, fortifying your VPN to handle huge traffic and ramping up protection against threats like viruses and ransomware becomes imminent.

4. IT and HR departments will take a beating

You know who will be the most affected among your employees? Your service desk agents and your human resources personnel. Here’s why.

At the workplace, before all this work-from-home frenzy, IT service desk agents usually will be burdened with a huge volume of IT support tickets rising from employees not being able to log in to their desktop/laptop owing to forgetting their password or their account being locked. Now that employees are working from home and with some of the service desk agents falling sick, it’ll be a gigantic task for your internal IT team to tackle all the queries swarming around them.

Adding to your service desk agents’ problems, it’ll take hours for them to actually determine the cause of the problem, whether there’s a problem on the business servers or whether the employees’ device is faulty, now that employees are using their own devices. A difficult situation indeed.

Now let’s talk about HR. There will definitely be a slew of questions from employees for HRs to root through regarding work-from-home policies and the next steps. Simultaneously, HRs will have to deal with onboarding/offboarding employees as well as training new joiners. A precarious position to be in.

5. Work/Life balance, what?

Commuting to the office on a car/bike/bus/train, enjoying the gentle breeze on your face, observing people from different walks of life around you, and starting work after reaching office. Then, when the office gets over, leaving work-related stuff at the office, enjoying the wind and paying attention to nature and the people you come across on your way home, reaching home, having dinner, and spending some quality time with your loved ones. Just reading this alone makes you feel at peace, right?

This used to be the routine of many of us before COVID-19. Now, after work-from-home has come into effect, due to the government imposing strict rules around social distancing, the line between work and home has begun to blur for the many of us, with some of us working round the clock just because we are at home.

There might be more work-from-home challenges that you might face during this pandemic, but, according to me, these are the most important ones that’ll you have to pay attention to if you want to work out business continuity.

Now let’s take a look at some of the possible solutions to streamline business continuity.

Solutions
1. Come up with proper work-from-home policies and communicate them

C-suite personnel like CEO, CTO, CIO, and managers of an organization should come together and work on establishing ground rules that employees have to follow while they are working from home, for their own well-being, like

a. Being present for standups/meetings during the morning and letting their managers/supervisors know how their day looks like and what blockers they might face and then collaborating with their manager to come up with solutions to the blockers.

b. Letting employees come up with timeframes for their tasks and listening to them about the challenges they faced when they are not delivering on the promised timescale and working on resolving those challenges for them.

c. Having a more relaxed LOP policy in place in case employees report in sick.

d. Allocating a separate budget in addition to employees’ salary to sponsor their health expenses, house rent, electricity, WiFi, and food bills during these tough times.

e. Arranging face-to-face non-work-related group video calls once a week to let employees know that they are not alone in this and that the company is willing to support them in any way possible.

f. Not pressuring employees to work during holidays/weekends.

If your business is looking to lay off some of your employees, consider talking to your employees who are earning in 5 or 6 digits (dollars) about taking a pay cut and other possible workarounds instead of lay-offs.

2. Choose secure and easy-to-use collaboration tools

Zoombombing. There, I said it. Happy now? If you’re a company using Zoom for internal communication, given the recent turn of events, I would suggest you look toward alternatives like Slack or Microsoft Teams. Because, hey, no one wants a naked man interrupting their team video calls out of the blue ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

3. Build AI-powered digital assistants for every team and automate away

Companies are crazy about digital transformation now more than ever. Reason? Digital tools and services that’ll probably make change management and business continuity a breeze for them.

Even though digital transformation will always be an ongoing process and not a one-shot thing, digitalization enables companies to streamline their business processes with AI and Automation. And what better way to do that than to start building AI-powered chatbots with automated workflows for internal IT support and HR teams, right? Because, as we saw earlier, these teams definitely need a helping hand.

There are a plethora of Platform-As-A-Service offerings online that let you build chatbots. But it all comes down to, do they really serve your business’ needs? Because sometimes, businesses get carried away seeing the huge number of features that a chatbot building platform offers instead of carefully examining it for the features that they need at the moment — like a no-code platform that enables IT service desk agents to build personalized chatbots themselves, quickly, without any programming knowledge, or a chatbot building platform that has both a conversation builder and an automation builder that interlinks conversations with automated workflows and enables a chatbot to address a user’s IT concern and solve it real-time.

Let’s take a look at what all AI-powered chatbots with automated workflows can do for you when you build and add them to your company’s Slack or Microsoft Teams workspace.

a. Central Knowledge Base Access

Employees can question the chatbot on their team’s Slack or Microsoft Teams channel to know more about the current status of operations and the policies in place to enable work-from-home for them. They can even ask the chatbot to retrieve tech documents for them from the cloud, be it from Google Drive or OneDrive.

b. Integration with existing business applications

Instead of letting employees install apps one by one on their home laptops/desktops, internal IT managers and service desk agents can integrate their business applications with the chatbot to enable a seamless IT support experience for employees.

Service Desk managers can do this by integrating the application with the chatbot and automating workflows for the application from scratch or just by adding pre-built automations to their PaaS workspace.

Employees can then use the chatbot to either create an IT support ticket on applications like Freshservice or they can reset their account password themselves with an OTP. As simple as that.

c. Approvals made easy

IT managers can automate workflows for software installation requests from employees in a way that, when an employee has a multi-turn conversation with a chatbot about getting access to software for installing on their laptop/desktop, the IT manager is immediately alerted by the chatbot via email about the request to which the IT manager can give his approval or reject the request on the email itself by clicking on a button on the email.

d. Proactive self-service for employees

Why let employees go through the trouble of logging in to a static self-service portal when you can provide feature-rich self-service to them via chatbots on your business’ Slack or Microsoft Teams workspace?

Intelligent chatbots enable two-way communication in natural language with employees, by detecting their issue from their query, consoling/comforting them that it’ll be resolved, then extracting required information from a user’s text input using Natural Language Understanding (NLU), and then resolving their query real-time. Mind-boggling, isn’t it? What’s more, chatbots are always on the look-out for queries from employees 24×7 and learn from their mistakes themselves through Machine Learning. Chatbots also enable seamless hand-offs to service desk agents in case they can’t solve a query. What more can an employee ask for, right?

e. Reduce overhead for service desk agents

The last you’d want is for your service desk agents to burn out during times like these. The least you can do for them is to take the load off them by implementing AI-powered contextual chatbots with automated workflows that take care of employees’ L1 and L2 IT support queries, freeing up your service desk agents to focus on tackling and solving complex and challenging L3 issues that’ll let them upskill themselves. Thus reducing employee attrition and improving SLAs, and metrics like Mean Time To Repair (MTTR) and First Call Resolution (FCR).

The road ahead…

Remote working is here to stay, whether you like it or not. Seems like COVID-19 was just a catalyst to force companies worldwide into reconsidering their stance on remote working and overhaul their Business Continuity Planning (BCP) to address the issues at hand, if not for a longer-term.

Bottom-line? Work more on taking care of your employees by supporting them in every way possible and your employees will take care of your business for you. Clichéd, I know, but that’s the truth.

#StayHomeAndBuildAIChatbots #Automate #StaySafe

If you’re interested in incorporating an AI-powered platform to build digital workers for your workplace IT support that delivers resolutions to employees conversationally with automated workflows on Slack or Microsoft Teams, then look no further. Try Workativ today by signing up for a FREE now

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