With business continuity and crisis mode becoming the new norm as we all weather the turbulence and uncertainty of the COVID-19 storm – Attended Automation helps maintain service consistency and process efficiency, keeping your remote employees engaged and on-target.
At the best of times, and under normal circumstances, our global economy is exponentially growing in complexity with the need to support immediacy and personal connection in the customer experience domain. The COVID-19 world crisis has taken these complexities and pressures to new heights, forcing rapid innovation and large-scale agility to cope with remote business operations, remote employees and a new reality.
Looking at customer service operations, this new, distributed working environment makes service consistency very challenging to maintain. In addition, efficiency and cost control is critical, while on the flip side, ensuring empathy with a personal touch is more important than ever. All these factors are undoubtedly overwhelming and intimidating for employees who are expected to rapidly adapt to extremely different work conditions with amplified pressure and demands from both the organization’s management and end customers.
We’ve collected some insights for you together with practical ways to help your employees shine through tough times with NEVA (NICE Employee Virtual Attendant):
1. The Rise of Multi-Purpose Employees
Adjusting to new, remote work conditions is a daunting task in itself for your employees, but on top of this, many will need to rise to the occasion by taking on additional responsibilities and handling multiple types of customer interactions with varying degrees of complexity.
No matter the task or the customer ask – our attended bot, NEVA, is designed to provide each employee with real-time, context specific guidance as and when they need it during a live customer interaction, an after-call task or a back-office process. NEVA resides on each employee’s desktop and is automatically triggered by the employee’s desktop actions (via the application or screen they’re on, or by keyboard strokes and mouse clicks). She provides next-best-action guidance, via on-screen callouts. This proactive advice is based on the specific call or process type, and even the proficiency level of each agent. NEVA looks up required information across multiple applications and presents it to the user in a single, clear view. She also performs calculations and provides the employee with quick links to relevant data, all according to each individual employee’s real-time need.
NEVA also automates tasks on behalf of the employee, increasing productivity. This is particularly relevant right now when many organizations are dealing with massive backlogs in the back-office due to the large-scale disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. NEVA can automate desktop tasks or, trigger backend unattended bots to execute the automation on backend servers and help reduce the backlog.
With NEVA available around the clock to execute the more mundane, time-consuming admin tasks (which are sometimes also prone to errors) – your remote employees are freed up to provide customers with more human empathy and attention.
This is what it looks like to be guided and supported by NEVA in real-time, whether she is gathering, displaying and summarizing data from multiple applications or automating tasks.
2. Rapid Adaptation and Optimization of Business Processes
Not only do remote employees need to adapt their tasks and behavior to remote conditions, but existing business processes should follow suit.
With the constantly changing health guidelines and as a result changes in company policies, enterprises need a way to quickly communicate these new guidelines to their employees.
New process automations or guidance flows can be quickly developed using the Automation Studio tool (as seen in the above images), enabling rapid adaptation and optimization of existing processes for remote conditions.
3. Service Consistency
A remote work environment makes it more challenging for businesses to maintain consistent levels of service delivery. Well, as part of the real-time guidance that NEVA provides to employees – she can also be programmed to prompt the employee to read specific scripts or perform specific actions, ensuring consistent service delivery across interactions and service representatives.
4. When There is No Time and Space for Training…
When classroom training is clearly not an option and there is no direct way to communicate new plans, policies, products or promotions (to name a few) - NEVA can be a quick gateway to enriching employees' knowledge and communicating process updates directly to their desktops.
In addition, when supervisor attention is scarce, NEVA is especially critical and handy during this time of crisis, when employees may be faced with more complex tasks. With NEVA’s ability to guide the employee in real-time, step by step, the supervisor does not need to be behind each employee’s shoulder.
For those supervisors who prefer to keep a close tab on employee productivity from a distance, Automation Finder is an innovative capability of NEVA, designed to identify new processes to potentially automate and leave to the employees to manually handle those tasks which require their direct involvement.
5. Dealing with Erratic Call Volumes
As incoming call volumes may increase, NEVA helps keep customer interactions efficient and productive. For example, she can summarize the key activities from the call on behalf of the employee, or automate the after-call work, allowing employees to quickly jump on the next call and handle a larger amount of calls and tasks at any given time.
6. Keeping Compliant
Staying in compliance and ensuring that employees don’t miss the small print or a critical process step, is fully managed by NEVA. Compliance scripts are at the ready and displayed to employees to read to customers during customer interactions, and process steps are highlighted or executed automatically to ensure that your organization is covered.
7. Staying on the Productive Track
Its only natural that your employees will want to stay on top of daily news updates and reach out to their personal connections during this turbulent time. Desktop Analytics tools are a good way to assist management to stay on top of their employees daily activities, ensuring healthy levels of productivity and service continuity. Intelligent Desktop Analytics gives managers visibility into which applications their employees are using, with a clear distinction between usage of productive, business-related applications versus personal apps and web sites. Desktop Analytics also highlights computer idle and locked times, so productivity gaps can be identified, giving management the actionable insights needed to guide employees back to the productive track, in a focused manner.
8. Ensuring Employee Engagement
When your employees are working from home they may feel disengaged, as a result of not seeing or interacting with peers and managers. Also, they don’t have the ability to seek immediate advice, as they would in the office environment. The NEVA attendant is their personal robotic assistant and virtual team mate. They can even chat with NEVA through the organizational chat bot platform, and ask her to fetch critical data from the knowledge base, or perform a required action. With NEVA on their side they stay on top of data, get good advice and next best action recommendations as needed, keeping everyone productive and engaged.
Quickly getting to grips with intelligent automation and virtual assistant technology, during this unpredictable and turbulent time can help your organization, employees and end customers to enter into calmer and clearer waters.
Visit www.nice.com/neva to learn more, and get in touch with one of our automation experts to discuss how NEVA can empower your remote employees.
