Transforming employee experience through virtual enterprise assistants
Imagine a workplace with a personal assistant to organize, simplify and guide as you work. It will increase the productivity of the employees by manifold and make them efficient in their work with an enhanced experience. With the millennials entering the workforce, who are driven by experience economy, providing enriching employee experience by the organizations have become as important as their focus on good customer experience. A great employee experience (EX) will ensure that the top talents are acquired and retained in the organization.
Digital transformation and democratization of Artificial Intelligence (AI) have enabled organizations to employ AI-powered virtual enterprise assistants (VEAs) to enhance employee experience. According to Gartner’s study, 58% of organizations are ready to invest in developing virtual assistants for their employees in the next two years. Tech-savvy companies in the insurance and finance domain have been the early adopters of VEAs, realising this exponentiation in demand the vendor landscape is becoming unprecedentedly competitive. Currently, over 1000 vendors have captured the market of conversational platforms.
These Virtual Enterprise Assistants come with voice recognition technology and interactive User Interface (UI), like in Alexa and Cortana, which go beyond functioning as just automated chatbots and be interactive with the employees. It is also tailored to the needs of an individual employee and personalized to a great extent by drawing patterns through machine learning, which will make the employees feel having their own smart digital assistant at work.
Virtual Enterprise Assistants are designed to take up enterprise as well as the personal level of tasks that an employee would encounter in his/her day-to-day work.
Enterprise-level tasks
Frequent queries raised by employees to VEAs are
· IT Helpdesks such as hardware or software upgrades, password reset, access to systems, and status updates of the tickets.
· HR helpdesk such as holidays and leave application, insurance & benefits, and company policies
· Finance department on reimbursements, taxations, and compensation.
A VEA will act as a one-stop source for employees having queries with any department in the organization. It is possible to integrate the functions of all departments and give a hassle-free experience for the employees, reducing their time in unproductive tasks. For example, booking and reimbursement of travel and accommodation for a customer visit involve employees getting in touch with the HR and Finance departments in the organization, but a digital assistant will integrate and automate the process with a single command by the employee.
Also, onboarding, training, and assessment of an employee can be streamlined and made simpler by the VEAs through interactional UI, reducing the paperwork and making the job easier for the HR managers.
Constant bi-directional feedbacks to the management and employees enabled by the digital assistant will help in keeping track of the performance and help in the performance review of the employees.
Personal level tasks
Knowledge management
VEAs can largely boost the productivity of an employee by helping them to minimize the time spent searching for the information related to their project. By deploying AI, ML, and NLP, these digital assistants can dig and retrieve data from the enterprise as well as third-party databases and show only the results relevant to the employee’s work.
Task Management
An employee would have multiple tasks to be completed within deadlines. With VEAs, an employee can create and assign tasks, keep track of its progress and deadlines, view summaries, set reminders, and get notifications on the updates. An employee can forget toggling between various taskbars and simply give voice commands to his/her digital assistant like “Show update on a task”, “Set remainder for a task at 6:30 PM” and so on.
Meeting Management
A VEA will make scheduling meetings an easy job. In just a voice command like “Schedule a meeting with XYZ client and ABC team on 13th this month”, it will take care of inviting, accommodating mutually available time based on the calendars, fixing and reminding the invitees for the meeting. It can leverage machine learning & natural language processing to take notes and share them with the attendees for knowledge purposes and easy retrieval.
Virtual enterprise assistants can also make internal communication exciting and engaging by sharing news, updates, and achievements with the team and the organization.
Making the VEA accessible through omnichannel (desktop, mobile, and web applications) will be easy for the employees to carry forward the conversation started on one platform to the other.
VEAs provide many benefits for the employees for building their digital dexterity, enhancing their convenience and inter-connectedness with the organization. Also, as employees are adapting to personal assistants like Siri, Alexa, Cortana, etc. in their personal spaces, they wish to have the same experience in their workplaces. All these factors have made it inevitable for organizations to find a partner who specializes in developing VEAs and invest in building conversational platforms for their employees.