Chatbots have quickly risen from a trend to one of the most important assisting resources in many industries and fields. Without a doubt, they are one of the most disruptive factors in workplace communication in digital industries and beyond.
According to Tangowork CEO Chris McGrath, in the next five years, 90% of companies will be utilizing a chatbot in one way or another. In ten years’ time, chatbots will be able to answer any workplace question we can come up with, either textually or via voice.
In this article, we’re looking at how chatbots are changing our work environments, the way we talk to each other, and what we can expect in the future.
Messaging is already embedded deep into the workflow, so employing chatbots would not be a leap to using an unknown technology. With the introduction of Slack, Microsoft Teams, WhatsApp, and other messaging platforms, collaborative chatting is already something that’s engraved in today’s work culture.
In the same way, messaging is how we retrieve information — if something is unclear, you contact a colleague to clarify. If these questions could be predicted and identified, why wouldn’t a chatbot be the designated go-to ‘person’ for these kinds of tasks?
1. Publishing your Chatbot on Microsoft Teams
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In other words, introducing chatbots will be just another messaging channel with a helpful colleague!
Another perk of the fact that chatbots work on messaging platforms is that it’s easier to access automated help than ever before. Back when chatbots didn’t exist, users had to maneuver dozens and hundreds of different command words that trigger computational action. Now, it’s all done through the chatbot.
Starting to use a chatbot requires no prior experience or training — it is designed to cater to everyone, with exactly the same level of service. This is also one of the reasons why the majority of organizations are now utilizing the power of chatbots: they are incredibly easy to adopt.
If you have a rich response database for your chatbot platform, which also uses advanced NLP technology to identify exactly what users are looking for, naturally, you will have an easier time-solving problem and answering unclear issues within the company.
Due to these dilemmas and problems constantly cropping up, there is more pressure on intra-company support teams than ever before. According to Zendesk, internal IT teams receive almost 500 tickets monthly on average. Imagine the savings you can achieve in work hours and department size if you could reduce this number by even 10%.
This is where chatbots come in. In the previous sentence, we said imagine the savings, but chatbot technology is already so developed that it’s not necessary to just imagine anymore — even if chatbots manage to solve up to 10% of support tickets, you’ll see massive savings at a very low cost.
When we say employee communication, we’re referring to two things:
1) how employees communicate with each other
2) how employees communicate with the company
Chatbots have an impact in both of these scenarios.
In the first one, the reduction of redundant questions will take off a lot of communicational burden from employees, which will enable a higher degree of productive, collaborative, and creative communication.
In the employee-to-company case, questions like “What are my sales targets?“, “When is the deadline for this project?“, “Can I take tomorrow off?“ will be able to be answered by a chatbot, instead of a superior within a company.
In line with the previous point, employee-company communication can also be ameliorated with a chatbot. For example, if there’s a particular event or situation that’s receiving a lot of attention and similar questions directed to management or HR, the company can set up a one-topic-only chatbot that will clarify any issues.
For example, if your company is preparing for a merger with another company, it can spark an avalanche of similar questions, like “Will my job role change?“, “Will we move to another location?“, “Are we changing up teams?“ and so on. Instead of burdening management or other departments with answering these FAQs, a simple chatbot will do.
One of the challenges that a lot of companies are facing nowadays is multiculturalism and multilingualism in the workplace. Due to globalization and higher mobility, it’s no rarity that companies hire and host employees that don’t even speak the native language of the country they are working in.
Usually, this problem was solved with on-site bilingual and multilingual people who help these employees find their way around, but there is also a lot of potential in employing chatbots in this section as well.
“Setting up a multilingual chatbot can be a lifesaver for non-native employees. It’s also a huge step that was necessary if we wanted to continue to grow in the same way as if we were all speaking the same language“, says Yulia Berekova, a Russian language translation expert at PickWriters.
The modern workplace is a paradox: many things are simplified and automated, but the high number of apps and tools makes working more hectic and disorganized than ever before. To tackle this, chatbots can help by integrating several apps and offering an all-in-one platform, which employees can access instead of signing into dozens of different apps.
For example, if a company uses several different applications for the same thing (like different analytical tools for marketing), it can be very hard to eliminate the confusion that stems from different platforms, results and findings.
If you utilize a chatbot enterprise assistant, employees will always know that they have their go-to place for any type of issue. However, you will have to integrate your chatbot (or at least, its response database) to all the applications your company is using, which can be quite time-consuming.
In all the previous arguments, we illustrated some of the benefits that can be attained by employing enterprise chatbot assistants within a company. However, the question of whether there are possible downsides still remains.
Chatbots definitely has the potential to reduce or even eliminate the rate of human error, but they are still devised by humans, so there can be mistakes. To solve this, every employee needs to maintain a critical approach and think twice about everything they find out from a chatbot, especially if the issue is sensitive or time-critical.
Finally, there are possible downsides in the decrease of employee-to-employee communication. We’ve mentioned that a chatbot has the potential to decrease the need for question-asking among team members, but it’s quite unclear whether this can have a negative impact on their team dynamic.
Conclusion
Just like any other technological advancement, chatbots take some getting used to, but there is a variety of benefits when an enterprise decides to use them. Next to financial benefits in terms of saving work hours and financial resources, there is also a potential for improved productivity, better support, and a higher degree of integration with other technology.
If you’re still not implementing chatbots in your day-to-day business activities, consider some of the benefits we have outlined above and stay ahead of the curve!
Author: Elisa Abbott
Elisa Abbott completed a degree in Computer Science. She closely collaborated with many small business owners which brought her many insights into various industries. Elisa aims to provide excellent quality content to her readers and clients. In her free time, she loves watching movies in different languages.
