5 Great Ways Bots Can Make Your Job Easier
Technology has progressed to the point that bots are becoming your team’s new digital co-workers. Do you recall those repetitive tasks and problems that sap your employees’ productivity and cost your company money? Bots are the simple solution to make your various tasks easier and help with your workflows. But what are bots? And how can they help?
In this blog, we’ll take a look at what bots are, and explore five great ways that you can use bots to make your job easier.
What are Bots?
Bots are software applications that are designed to imitate human behaviour, freeing up employees to focus their valuable time on more important work – like what you actually hired them to do! Bots aren’t a new technology – they’ve been around for several years – but with advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI), bots are becoming more and more prevalent, and are being designed with more and more tasks and activities in mind.
Below, we’ll explore five ways that you can use bots to boost productivity, take back your time, and make your job a bit easier.
#1: Bots Help Organizations Onboard New Employees
Cast your mind back to the day you started your current job. There were people’s names and titles to learn, passwords to set up for your various technologies, questions to ask - from where to get office supplies to where the bathroom is, and a great deal more information to try and digest.
As an employer that’s onboarding a new employee, you need to assign someone to answer frequently asked questions. While it does add a personal touch to the new person’s day, it does tie up another employee’s time.
Bots, like the ones found in Workplace from Facebook or the custom solutions that LineZero can develop, can help augment your HR team by answering frequently asked questions, automatically schedule the new employee for training or meetings with key people in your organization, provide insight into necessary HR information, and help the new employee get acclimatized to their new position.
#2: Accessing the Right Information – Integrate Microsoft SharePoint and Workplace from Facebook
Similar to how bots can onboard new employees, bots can also help people to access important HR information any time they need it.
Your HR people can’t be available every minute of every day to answer every question that your employees have.
Want to know how much vacation time you’ve got left? Or what the WIFI password is for the meeting room you’re using? Or how many sick days you’ve used so far this year? Or where your current harassment policy resides? Or what to do to submit your timesheets? There’s a bot for that!
In fact, by automating this process with a bot and creating a database of frequently asked questions, you’d be cutting down on the number of emails or calls your HR team must field, and you’ll improve your overall employee experience. With the bot’s ability to provide an instant response, your employees will have all the most pertinent information right at their fingertips.
LineZero’s SharePoint Resource Bot can help your employees do exactly that – your employees can search Workplace for SharePoint documents, allowing them to easily access content stored across multiple SharePoint sites, then use Workplace to open and edit documents. Without leaving Workplace, your team can easily search for the document or file they are looking for, see a preview, and open the latest version to collaborate on together.
#3: Spice Up Those Mundane Tasks, Like Booking Meetings
Let’s face it – nobody really likes having to find and book a time for meetings or events. It’s time-consuming, requires searching through several people’s calendars, and can be just downright painful.
But, with Workplace’s automation bots, you can create one that can help automate the task of searching through everyone’s calendars to find time slots that everyone is available. All you need to do is request a new meeting and select the people you want to attend, and the bot does the rest!
Want to make sure those who need to attend are actually there? Not a problem! This bot can also send automatic reminders to attendees and notify people nearer to the date and time of the meeting. And, if you’re having the meetings off-site, the bot will even direct attendees to it.
#4: Your IT Help Desk’s New Best Friend
“My printer won’t print.”
“I can’t remember my password.”
“Why isn’t my computer connecting to the Internet?”
It’s probably safe to say that your IT department is often inundated by service requests. But, what if you could get some help for them, and automate some of the non-urgent processes? Think about what they could do for your organization if those non-urgent processes, like helping people to troubleshoot printer problems, or resetting their passwords, could be offloaded.
With a bot that’s been designed to help your IT department, you no longer need to think about what you could do… you can make it a reality. And Larsen & Toubro Infotech (LTI) is a case in point. They created a Workplace chat bot that can help employees resolve IT Help desk requests, like unlocking their accounts and installing new software.
Workplace chat bots are capable of creating a new service ticket directly from a Workplace post, and then replying to the employee with a ticket number that helps them track where the service team is with their request. These bots are also able to manage basic support tasks, like resetting an employee’s password.
#5: Put Some Fun into Your Workplace
Sometimes, leaders need to take a pulse of what others in the organization think. Now, you could create a post, or even a poll on Workplace, but as a leader, you’re probably quite busy to analyze the results. But, a bot, like Surveybot, can conduct surveys through Workplace Chat and instantly analyze your employees’ responses in real-time.
Exploring Your Options? Talk to Us!
So, what are bots and how can you use them in your organization? Are bots right for you? If you’re still asking these questions, it’s time to talk to us! From design, to pilot, to implementation, our team of experts can help you understand how bots can be used in your organization and how to get started. Plus, we can build and customize a bot to fit the needs of your organization!
Want to learn more? Watch the webinar, “Enable Powerful New Ways of Working with Microsoft SharePoint and Workplace from Facebook” to see a demo of how Workplace and SharePoint are better together. If you’re ready to get started, give us a shout today!