Have you ever had to soothe a frustrated customer who's been on hold for a long time? Or lacked the time necessary to effectively manage your pipeline? Marketing, sales, and customer service are critical to the success of your business, but sometimes it's more than you and your team can handle, which often leads to frustration and overall job dissatisfaction.
Staff well-being should be prioritised to keep employees happy and engaged, which will result in better work performance. In this article, we discuss how chatbots can help to augment staff skills, improve their performance and job satisfaction.
Implications of Recent Technology Advancements
Automation and the use of chatbot technology to perform mundane, low level and repeatable tasks are here to stay. More importantly, these advancements are a blessing for many businesses, as they provide better tools that allow you to gain more power, which translates into greater efficiency and productivity.
As a result, margins will be higher. This implies the capacity and opportunity to perform more complex tasks as well as employ higher-order abilities, which is to grow. Your role as a leader requires you to identify the roles, processes, and experiences that can be improved by technology, and adapt to the new environment by creating new constructs and approaches.
Augmenting and Complementing Staff Skills With Chatbots
Enhanced humans provide better service, faster, at a lower cost. and in the process create all-around improvements, including job security and satisfaction. People with an intelligent chatbot by their side will outperform their competitors, which is why it's essential to consider every opportunity for improvement.
In this scenario, individuals will be able to focus on what they enjoy most about their jobs while offloading the admin chores that irritate them. Chatbots empower your team to shift their focus to more satisfying, higher-level tasks and improve their well-being. This is without a doubt a win-win situation for both the employers and employees.
This is where chatbots' true potential becomes evident. In a world where robots are constantly getting smarter, not to replace us, but to push us higher up the ranks, into bigger contests with greater rewards, using them will enable your business to increase its potential and reach new levels of performance.
Augmenting Marketing Skills
Chatbots can help you to put customer engagement efforts on autopilot. They provide a 24/7 presence to greet your potential customers, and instead of making them fill out forms and have them wait for a reply they enable you to interact with them in a casual, conversational manner in real-time, while they're already there and interested in the services that you provide. This lets you capture, qualify and connect with potential buyers faster, which results in an improved buying experience and increased chances for success.
Another important aspect is the ability to collect valuable data during the process. Without much data, discovering the wants and needs of your customers takes a lot of guesswork and the cost of these efforts can be hard to justify. A conversational chatbot can gather that information for you, freeing up your time to focus on higher-value customer engagements and the things that matter most, which also happen to be the source of joy for marketing professionals like creating personas, planning, and storytelling.
The role of marketing experts remains crucial even in the age of intelligent conversational bots but is leaning towards the role of a wise guide, a mentor, that is spreading wisdom, understands customers well, and leverages technology to help your business shape the brand you want to become.
Augmenting Sales Skills
According to McKinsey, 47% of all sales activities will be automated. It's worth noting that the operations being automated by intelligent chatbots are often the same ones that today's salespeople dislike doing, such as manually updating contact records in a customer relationship management (CRM) system, which saves time and effort on manual data entry.
Not every visitor is a good prospect, but chatbots can be used to help identify those that are. By collecting information at the front end and putting the focus on those more likely to buy, chatbots help to prequalify potential clients by engaging anonymous visitors and asking them key questions.
Chatbots move visitors further along the buying journey, by converting traffic into conversations and then either routing qualified prospects to available representatives for live chat sessions if any special assistance is required or booking appointments automatically, even when sales reps are asleep or on vacation.
Chatbots can help you to automate your sales-related activities and increase your focus on strong prospects, while also minimising wasted energy spent on those unlikely to buy. By taking over these types of tasks chatbots are allowing sales representatives to spend more of their time on doing what they do best: building relationships with buyers and closing deals.
Augmenting Customer Service Skills
Let’s face it, customer service roles can be tough. Chatbots provide support and can help you reach a larger audience without increasing the demands on your team. The contribution that chatbots make on the front lines can simplify and streamline challenging customer service interactions while making it that much easier for your staff to focus on more complex situations and challenges.
By answering common questions and helping to navigate through your service options, rescheduling appointments, and sending reminders, chatbots become an integral part of your team. Chatbots can serve as the first line of contact and answer simple questions while prioritising and forwarding important queries that require a human touch.
Maintaining a consistent standard of information and tone is critical to customer service. Chatbots allow you to establish automated, on-brand responses to send during interactions, thus ensuring cohesion across communication channels. Rather than worrying about employees deviating from a script or accidentally providing inaccurate information, chatbots allow you to program consistent, articulate responses to common questions. This in turn allows you and your team to maximise your time and focus on other business priorities.
Improving Staff Well-being with Chatbots
Staff well-being is one of the most important factors when it comes to their overall performance and company success. A happy staff will result in a happier work atmosphere, which ultimately leads to better work productivity - as employees feel valued and appreciated within their roles at work, they are more likely to engage with co-workers and be less likely to work against the business.
In the past, conversations required at least two human beings, but chatbots have changed this landscape. They can be programmed to automate a portion of your calls and live chat sessions, as well as manage SMS and social media messages.
While chatbots can't entirely replace human beings, they help to decrease the workload and perform mundane functions so your staff can focus on what they do best. In other words, chatbots empower your team to save time and maximise their unique human skill sets. This helps to create an environment where people feel valued and are excited to go to work.
Improving Job Satisfaction
Happy people are naturally more friendly towards others which benefit customers who are enjoying their experience with your business. Customers want to do business with companies that have an excellent reputation and provide outstanding working conditions for their staff members and chatbots can play a vital role in both of these areas.
Not only can this lead to more satisfying work and increased job satisfaction, but contented and engaged employees are more productive and creative than those who aren’t. Along with taking care of the visitors to your site, chatbots can help you increase team efficiency and raise morale across the board.
Improving Staff Morale
Chatbots can free you and your team from banal activities so that they feel challenged and empowered to address strategic issues. This improves staff morale and results in a team that produces better results because they enjoy coming to work.
This not only benefits productivity but also increases a sense of fulfilment and overall happiness. It should go without saying, but happy people do better work and will be open to new initiatives for the company which could have a further positive impact on results.
Increasing Productivity
Employees are happier when they work in an environment that is conducive to work, where they are more likely to work smarter, not harder, where they can focus on their subject matter expertise without constantly being distracted. In such an environment they can be their best selves, take the pride in their achievements and produce better outcomes for the business.
Chatbots help to improve productivity in several ways. By offloading the most common customer enquiries, staff can focus on other areas that require their unique skill sets. They are not distracted as often which leads to saving time on context switching where humans need to take additional time to come back to their thought process before being distracted to continue. If distractions happen often, context switching can significantly weaken the human ability to perform deep work.
Lowering Stress Levels
Lowering work-related stress levels is another important aspect that helps to keep staff healthy and happy. Customer-facing roles can be demanding and all human beings have a productivity limit. Sometimes the strain put on your staff during the peak hours, when they have to help customers over the digital channels and take care of the ones that came to your establishment can be too much, and before you know it, your employees seem burnt out and are falling sick more often.
By utilising a chatbot to answer repetitive questions about your service options, fees, or availability, your staff can focus on helping clients arriving for appointments and make them feel welcomed and taken care of. They also have more time to address issues escalated by the bot, because only a small part of them needs human attention, which reduces their stress levels and makes their job experience more enjoyable. This also translates to better employee satisfaction and reduced absenteeism.
Reducing Absenteeism
Completing repetitive tasks like asking routine questions or requesting that customers complete a survey can get boring fast. And work-related frustration can lead to increased sick days, decreased productivity, and other signs of burnout.
Lack of attendance is a major issue for companies and can be extremely costly. Improving staff well-being by offloading mundane, repeatable tasks is likely to reduce the number of days people take off for reasons related to their mental health. This is good for business as it lowers costs and further reduces the strain on other staff members who have to cover their absence.
Improving Staff Turnover
Employees are more likely to stay in their jobs where they feel fulfilled. A lack of job satisfaction is one of the most common reasons why employees leave their jobs. Decreased staff turnover means not only that there will be less need to hire new workers which saves time and money in recruitment for your business, but also that you won't have to invest in onboarding and training recruits.
Conclusion
The majority of us will choose to work with an enhanced human, one who is equipped with a smart robot on their side. And in today's battle for talent, where will the employees want to work? Where they have all of the tools they need? Where they are empowered to do amazing things or where they are still mired in dreariness and inefficiency?
A more productive, happier workforce can help you turn your business around. It will allow your employees to spend less time on simple tasks and more time tackling the work that requires their unique skill sets. It will make them happier and more satisfied with their jobs. Your business can't afford not to invest in recent technology advancements, empowering your employees that allow them to do their work better.