How Conversational Chatbots Enhance Support Agent Experience And Productivity

Over the last few years, AI has emerged as one of the most productive and beneficial technologies for organizations functioning in every industry. Technologies like AI and machine learning enhance the effort put in by professionals across the board. They allow machines to think and analyze data like human beings and help organizations undertake a range of processes. 

When it comes to providing seamless employee support, conversational chatbots have revolutionized how support agents assist your employees. 

What Are Conversational Chatbots?

As the name suggests, conversational chatbots are virtual assistants who interact with your employees to provide seamless and automated support. They use the technology of conversational AI to understand the context of the questions asked and tailor support that is unique for the concerned employee.

Conversational chatbots are used in modern employee service desks to reduce the dependency on support agents. The traditional service desks routed every case to the support agents, making them overburdened with cases. This often affected the quality of support provided by the agents. With conversational chatbots, the agents can be relieved of handling many cases at once as the virtual assistants provide automated primary support to the employees.

Here are some of the significant steps involved in the functioning of conversational chatbots: 

1. Direct Interaction With The Employees
   
   Whenever an employee faces an issue and requires assistance, they can log in to the automated service desk and assist the chatbots. These chatbots readily interact with employees, providing them with a blend of human-like conversations and the precision of a machine.
   
   
2. Understanding The Context
   
   As conversational chatbots interact with your employee, they consider historical data about the concerned employee to provide personalized assistance to them. The virtual assistants analyze previous interactions and processes undertaken by the employees to tailor solutions that best suit their needs.
   
   
3. Scanning The Knowledge Base
   
   Conversational chatbots depend on the data stored within your enterprise knowledge base to provide support to your employees. As a question is asked or an issue is raised, the chatbots scan your knowledge base to look for the ideal solution based on the needs and preferences of the concerned employee. Once the solution is found, they revert to the employee within seconds, allowing them to return to work without unnecessary delays.
   
   
4. Routing The Case To Agents
   
   In most cases, employees are satisfied with the primary support provided to them by the chatbots. However, if the concerned employee needs further help, the chatbots automatically route their case to a suitable support agent for secondary support.
   
   Along with the case, the conversational chatbots send all relevant details about the employee and the case at hand to allow the agent to provide personalized and holistic assistance. Once the agent resolves the case, the solution is communicated to the concerned employee immediately. Finally, the virtual assistants automatically closed the case, and the details were recorded in the knowledge base for future references.
   
   One of the biggest advantages of using conversational chatbots to provide employee support is that they keep learning and growing with each interaction they have with their employees. The technology of conversational AI allows the chatbots to learn new aspects about the employee as they interact more with them, thereby increasing the quality of the support provided.
   
   

Benefits Of Conversational Chatbots For Support Agents

Here are some of the major ways in which conversational chatbots increase the experience and productivity of support agents: 

1. Reduced Case Load
   
   In the case of a traditional service desk, support agents are often bombarded with several cases simultaneously. This often distracts them from looking into every matter in detail and makes them hurry while providing solutions; when the focus of support agents shifts from providing personalized solutions to getting done with the caseload, the quality of support provided is bound to reduce.
   
   Conversational chatbots share the caseload directed towards the support agents by providing the primary support themselves. By implementing these virtual assistants, only bigger and more severe cases go to the support agents, providing them enough time to deal with the same. As the excessive dependence on the support agents decreases, the quality of support provided by the agents goes up.
   
   Read More: The benefits of Chatbots over traditional employee service portals
   
   
2. Greater Personalization Of Support
   
   In the case of traditional service desks, the support agents often had to make extra effort to understand the context of the issue raised for providing personalized support. Conversational chatbots provide your agents with all necessary details about a case when it is routed to them.
   
   This helps the agents to access sufficient information regarding the concerned employee before they go ahead with resolving their issue. This way, the support agents can provide more personalized support to your employees by understanding their needs and preferences.
   
   
3. Seamless AI Assistants
   
   The traditional service desks often limited the support provided by agents to answering FAQs. With conversational chatbots, your support agents can have automated AI assistants to help them provide a range of services to your employees. The use of conversational AI allows your agents to undertake more complicated activities while providing support to your employees, such as helping them look for the right information, recommending the ideal verbiage to use while providing support, automating routine queries, and much more.
   
   As seamless AI assistants, conversational chatbots help the support agents through processes like:
   
   - Providing all the required information and context during a live call or chat with a few simple clicks
   
   - Helping the agents connect to the backend knowledge base and CRM to procure suitable articles and other relevant resources based on the issue at hand
   
   -Providing the agents with the entire chat history regarding the concerned employee to improve the quality of support provided
   
   - Facilitating automation of time-consuming activities such as recording details of the concerned employee, filling surveys, forms, asking for feedback, etc.
   
   
4. Listening To Agent Interactions To Suggest Improvements
   
   While the traditional support system involved managers listening to the agent conversations for quality assessment, the process was often slow and tedious. With the use of AI and machine learning, you can have conversational chatbots listen and analyze the interactions undertaken by your support agents to suggest improvements.
   
   The chatbots use text-to-speech technologies and machine learning to assess the quality of support offered by your support agents. The virtual assistants can listen to thousands of conversations regarding your agents, find specific patterns in the same, and suggest changes wherever necessary.
   
   Moreover, the conversational chatbots undertake a thorough sentiment analysis on the responses made by the employees to assess how effective the support has been. This further allows your agents to improve their processes and provide more streamlined assistance to your employees.
   
   
5. Integration With Collaborative Platforms
   
   Modern service desks can easily be integrated with collaborative platforms to provide better support to your employees. By integrating with a collaborative platform, the conversational chatbots make sense of the data stored within the platform and use the same to provide personalized support to your employees.
   
   Also, integrating your service desk with your collaborative platform allows you to centralize the support provided to every employee working in the organization. This eliminates chaos and confusion as to which platform to use to seek employee support.
   
   
6. Automation Of Ticketing System
   
   One of the biggest drawbacks of traditional employee support is that of the manual ticketing system. The traditional ticketing platforms were often confusing for employees to understand and use. However, it is important to understand that the manual ticketing platforms confused the support agents equally. Just like the employees, the agents often find themselves lost and confused while handling tickets using the traditional platforms.
   
   Conversational chatbots allow your support agents to eliminate all confusion by automating the ticketing system. As the employees auto-resolve their issues, the agents can view the cases and provide personalized solutions through virtual assistants. This makes the entire ticketing system smooth, automated, and highly effective.
   
   
7. Increased Accuracy
   
   The use of technologies like conversational AI and machine learning increases the accuracy of support provided by your support agents. The conversational chatbots ensure that the information provided to the agents about the case at hand is 100% accurate. Instead of the agents manually having to crosscheck the information and retrieve data about specific employees, conversational AI allows them to be double sure about the cases handled by them.
   
   Increased accuracy of employee support allows employees to have more faith in the support provided by the organization they work in. This leads to high engagement and productivity of employees across the board.
   
   

The Final Word 

These were some of the most important ways in which conversational chatbots enhance the productivity and experience of your support agents. Along with the employees, it is always important for an organization to cater to the needs of the agents when it comes to implementing a service desk. Always make sure you go with modern and automated platforms to leverage the support provided to your employees.