Chatbot for Employee Satisfaction

Satisfied employees are likely to attract, engage and convert customers with a more pleasant demeanour and a higher level of customer service, than an unsatisfied employee.
This creates a more satisfying customer experience, increases customer loyalty, and ultimately drives increased profitability. A research by the Workplace Research Foundation measured the impact of employee engagement programs on customer experience and profits, they found that it resulted in an increase of $2,400 in profit per employee per year. Such companies provided higher shareholder return and stock prices!

What effects employee satisfaction?

Apart from remuneration, it was found that when companies provide employees with the tools and skills they need, employee satisfaction rises, as does their ability to service customers better. Managers need to take into consideration the additional factors that yield profitability at every level in the organization and investing in technology that supports front-line or back-office employees is a key aspect in this. One good way of improving employee satisfaction and boosting productivity is getting their issues addressed promptly and chatbots can help in doing that.
A bot is a software that performs automated tasks, however in this article we will be talking about the class of bots that are integrated with chat platforms called chatbots.

So, what really is a chatbot ?

The simple definition is that a chatbot is software that can have conversations with a human. For example a user can ask the bot a question or give it an instruction and the bot can respond or perform an action as appropriate.
Types of chatbots
To understand how chatbot converse it is important to understand that there are two types of chatbots.

RULE-BASED

These are chatbots determined by rules. This means that they converse based on a defined set of inputs fed to them. This is also known as flow based response.

INTELLIGENT

Intelligent chatbots are chatbots that are built with artificial intelligence techniques. They keep learning with every conversation. It is because of this behaviour that it takes longer to train them.

Rule-based chatbots:

Conversations with this type of chatbot follows predetermined paths. At each step in the conversation the user will need to pick from explicit options to determine the next step in the conversation. How the options are presented to the user at each step in the conversation, i.e. whether they need a text, voice or touch response will depend on the features of the chat platform that the user is on and the design of the bot.

Intelligent chatbots: 

Artificial intelligence allows them to be more flexible in terms of the user input they can accept. They can accept free form input in the form of text or voice statements. AI also adds a greater scope of improvement, which is dependent on their use, so more they are used the more they learn. With speech recognition, the skills of an Intelligent bot can be further enhanced to converse over voice, understand the context and to some extent emotions as well. However, the learning in an intelligent chatbot may be slower than in rule-based chatbot, which relies on human inputs and can work swiftly based on inputs received.

Usage

While chatbots are now used in multiple ways across industries, in this article we will explain how it is contribution in improving employee experience.
Many renowned companies are increasingly using chatbots for internal self-service and issue management. For example a leading retail MNC with over 5000 employees recently deployed CZ Bot (powered by C-Zentrix) to improve issue management in its IT department. We deployed a rule-based chatbot for their IT team, using which employees all across the company can resolve their IT related issues like password reset, internet speed issue, mail settings etc.

CZ Bot has predefined set of instructions for commonly raised and self-manageable issues, so when an employee reaches out with one of those issues, CZ Bot provides them detailed, step-by-step instructions on how to manage the issues. In case of non-regular issues, CZ Bot gives an option to connect with one of the people in the IT department or raise a ticket. If an employee selects to speak with an IT representative they immediately are connected over CZ Chat and issue gets resolved promptly. This has greatly saved the time and effort on part of the IT team and has streamlined their workflow; employees are also satisfied, as they do not have to wait for long for minor issues to get resolved.

The same application can be replicated for other internal departments like human resources, finance, accounts, house-keeping etc. Out of the many uses of chatbots, this is probably one of the best ways through which companies can improve their employee satisfaction and therefore their customer experience.