Dealing With COVID-19: How Conversational AI Can Help With Business Continuity In Times Of Social Distancing
While the economy has shaken worldwide due to COVID-19 pandemic, the demand for customer support is at an all-time high.
B2B companies are somewhat better off, but only for now. Today’s consumer sentiment will become tomorrow’s enterprise sentiment. Sales strategies have to be reimagined for a world where travel and meetings are off the table. Customer support is hard to be redesigned to be not dependent on people coming to call-centres. ITSM needs to have 10 folds capacity with the rise in demand for low-level query resolving.
Are enterprises equipped with what is needed to continue business as usual in times of disruption?
No. Hotels.com didn’t see this coming, the airline Industry is slapped from more sides than one, the banking and financial companies are dealing with fluctuations and variability like never before and so are enterprises in every vertical.
Mitigate risks with Conversational AI for business continuity planning (BCP)
Business continuity means maintaining business functions or quickly resuming them in the event of a major disruption.
Here’s how conversational AI can be deployed easily and quickly to keep the lights on:
Automate customer support
The first and foremost thing to secure for BCP is your people, both, customers, and employees. And for customers to seek support, the call-centre is still the most dominant channel in contact-centres.
Most call centres have existing systems that include IVR, call recording, agent disposition applications, and basic analytics. While these systems are necessary, they present a few challenges. For one, your workforce needs to be in front of their systems, interlinked with knowledgebase, FAQ DB and more. To cater to Customer Support, especially in times of social distancing, Conversational AI helps in creating customer conversation channels such as a WhatsApp chatbot, a website widget, and voice bots. These can be done in as little as 24 hours.
Automate ITSM
Automating low-level processes in the Service Desk enables IT staff to move away from a reactive landscape in which they are constantly putting out fires and allocate more time toward proactive activities. With most of your workforce forced to work from home, the overhead on the ITSM team for such queries must be huge. Ease their load of troubleshooting connectivity issues or helping a user install new software by letting conversational AI take over. Most ITSM requests involve a multi-turn conversation in which the virtual assistant guides the user through a series of steps. Close to 65 per cent of these queries can be automated with the help of conversational AI digital assistants.
Automate employee engagement
In a time when social distancing has become the need of the hour, there is a sudden shift in employees working remotely. With employees and enterprises, both trying to find a balance between how to manage the new working equation, there are many questions that arise. These questions are crucial and can be efficiently answered by a conversational AI chatbot, resting on WhatsApp or Facebook or web. And if an employee has a critical question, it can be transferred from the Chatbot to the HR personnel in real-time. Conversational AI in times like this, can help restore the balance by taking the load off from both, the employees and HR teams.
