Why do your employees NEED a Digital Assistant?

Employees use more than 10 apps daily and this number will only grow (1)

And only 30% report that their company’s technology exceeds their expectations (2)

Why does it matter? Because the employee engagement rate can be as high as 91% for companies that have productivity-enabling technologies, and as low as 24% for companies that do not. And that has a massive impact on your workforce productivity.

Why is there such a gap? With the flexibility offered by the SaaS Application vendors, the pace of changes in the process and procedures has only increased. The number of new users on services also grows constantly due to the share of subcontractors on the systems and the acceleration of changes in the organisation.

That creates an exponential problem in quality, illustrated by the number of tickets opened at the service desk, although only 40% of users create one when they face a problem.

To address this, companies are focusing on Change Management, Communication and Training. However, it is expensive, not flexible and does not meet the current employee’s expectation to have their digital workplace experience up to the one they get on their B2C preferred digital services.

What is a Digital Assistant?

Take this example here, your employee services centre (Shortways Assistant here illustrated on SuccessFactors). How many times a day do you connect to it? Not so often. But you really don’t want to have it wrong when you’re dealing with it, given the impact it can have.

The Digital Assistant is here to second you in many ways. Based on your role in the company, your preferred language, it will suggest a guided tour for a specific procedure even with videos, a step-by-step assistance, with some specific bubble notes to understand how to best fill the fields.

Of course, it would give you a full-text search access to the knowledge base as a last resort.

How hard is it, to integrate a Digital Assistant?

Three main things to contemplate.

First, the Digital Assistant must be able to leverage the existing content, training materials and access your knowledge base. But it should also be able to create smart tickets in your Service Desk (eg. ServiceNow, BMC) automatically at the moment the user is facing a technical challenge.

Second, the Digital Assistant must be easy to distribute to all the target users, and it can be thousands. So, it is better if you don’t have to distribute some specific software or extension to everybody’s laptop.

Third, the Digital Assistant shouldn’t collect anything about the user’s navigation, so you can commit on data and user privacy while providing a 5-star concierge service type.

If your choice for a Digital Assistant matches those 3 criteria, the integration and the deployment will be very smooth.

Where to start?

Best is to start with a quick assessment by Services and Community of users.

On Services, identify the ones that are subject to the most changes in the next 12 months because of new roll-out, or Services upgrades. Look at those that are going to experience a spike of usage (like the Performance appraisal period, the Sales period, …) by users who may not be used to performing the operations on a regular basis.

On Community of users, consider big changes such as integration of a new organisation, on-boarding of a growing number of new employees or contractors.

Engage in Service Desk tickets analytics and research on the ones related to lack of training, or missing information in the help.

We have usual suspects:

• HRIS Performance Management, Recruitment, On-Boarding and Expense Management,
• Sales management with Opportunity qualification, Quotation and Forecasting,
• IT Management with Ticket entry, Service Request, Change and Asset Management.

And it is better if the Digital Assistant comes with bundles to support those domains, and leading cloud offerings in the like of SuccessFactors, Salesforce or ServiceNow.

Why do your Employees need a Digital Assistant, why do they need Shortways and AKT Global?

The Business case is quite straight forward. It starts by a sharp reduction of the cost of training and documentation associated with every new project. It grows with the reduction of tickets raised at the service desk (L0 is 6-8€, L1 is 12-25€) not to mention it cannibalizes precious resources who could be investing their time on more value-added tasks.

Then back to the beginning of the article, it will have a significant impact on the adoption of the Business process and Supporting Digital services, raising the overall Employee Engagement level, reducing the attrition rate, increasing the productivity.

AKT Global is a 20+ year Consulting firm, specialized in HR, and HR Technology. With more than 500 projects with SuccessFactors and other leading cloud applications, AKT Global has well identified the critical success factors for a high adoption of the new systems. With Shortways Digital Assistant, it is providing a rich set of capabilities in multiple languages, with a lean and scalable infrastructure which respects the users’ intimacy: an opportunity for quickly building a pilot and iterate with an agile approach.

(1) Josh Bersin for Deloitte
(2) Trends Shaping Employee Experience in 2022 – Achieve Engagement & Qualtrics