Do you have the feeling that a chatbot could bring added value to your company, but your employees might not be ready yet?

Is your organization undergoing technological change – many new technologies – increasing skepticism among employees about the new tools?

Some of my consultations on chatbots end with the sentence“we know we need a chatbot, but unfortunately our employees are not yet at the stage where a chatbot would be worthwhile“.

In many cases, this is due to a lack of knowledge on the part of employees, but also on the part of management on the subject of chatbots.

A chatbot is NOT the annoying chat window at the bottom right of the website that greets every website visitor with a “hello”. A chatbot can also be perceived as a digital assistant that supports its users with recurring tasks or answers their repetitive questions.

Especially if you have the feeling that your organization still needs to “get used to” chatbots, it can be helpful to first introduce a chatbot as a digital assistant for your employees.

The employees then perceive the bot as useful support and are later motivated to use the chatbot with customers.

Chatbots communicate via natural language (written or spoken). For many people, it is easier to communicate with a chatbot than to learn a new computer program. The “hurdles” and “fears” of the new technology are usually lower with chatbots than with other new technologies.

Here are a few examples of how you could use a chatbot in your company.

1. to answer common IT questions

If you have just introduced a new tool anyway, you can use the chatbot directly to introduce the new tool. The likelihood that your employees will have questions about the new software is high. Most of these questions can be answered automatically. You can therefore develop a chatbot that answers the most frequently asked questions about the new tool. Your employees can ask their questions directly via chat and receive prompt digital support.

2. to release the vacation

In many companies, vacations or other absences must first be approved internally or at least the supervisor must be informed. The absences must then be entered in your own and usually also in the team calendars. These tasks can be completed quickly and easily by a chatbot. The employee writes a message to the chatbot with their vacation request. Based on its stored data, the bot knows which other employees need to approve this vacation request and which colleagues need to be informed about the absence. The chatbot sends a message to all participants for approval, as well as a calendar entry, and the employee doesn’t have to worry about anything else.

3. to record working time

In many companies, especially in corporations or agencies, working hours must be recorded precisely. This is a tedious process for many employees, especially when a job description has to be attached to every time worked.

A chatbot supports your employees here. He reminds the employees that they still have to report their times. Employees can then write directly in the chat how much they have worked and which tasks they have completed. The bot collects all the data and enters it into your company’s time management system.

4. to answer the most frequently asked questions on the intranet

The intranet is the central source of information for most companies. It often contains so much information that employees have to search for a long time for an answer to their question and this leads to dissatisfaction. Many of these questions come up again and again and can also be answered easily by a chatbot. Most employee questions are defined in advance and used as a knowledge base for the chatbot. As the bot continues to operate, the digital assistant is constantly being expanded and enriched with new questions and answers.

Regardless of which use case you choose, your employees can reach these chatbots via the following channels:

• As a chat contact in Microsoft Teams
• As a chat contact in Skype for Business
• On a separate landing page
• As a chat window on the intranet

And the good news is: you decide where the data is saved. This means you can save all chat histories on your company servers. If this is not desired, the data can also be hosted in a cloud with a server location of your choice.

If you would like to find out more, please send me a message to sophie@hundertmark.ch