/ 4 tips to strengthen your communication through automation
Alexander Wijninga
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4 min
With a crisis descending on the country and the rest of the world, unrest is rising at many companies. The COVID-19 virus brings more than health measures alone and the country is in a light lockdown. The majority of people are working from home, work is at a standstill and much is unclear. Questions such as ‘When should I report sick?’ or ‘What is the home working policy?’ are being asked all around. Your HR, spokesperson or crisis team has to answer every question, and to avoid uncertainty you want this to happen as fast as possible. Read how you can be a stable factor in times of enormous unrest and how your Conversational Assistant contributes to stable communication.
The importance of digitalisation has nowhere come to the fore so prominently as during the crisis situation the Corona virus brings with it. Companies that had their eye on short-term goals will run into problems that can easily be reduced or even resolved with the help of digitalisation. In recent research by Gartner, Senior Researcher Sandy Shen expresses the urgency of digitalisation: ‘The value of digital channels, products and operations is immediately obvious to every company.’ According to Shen the current crisis is also a wake-up call for organisations that have paid too much attention to daily operational needs, at the expense of long-term investments in digital business and long-term resilience.
‘Companies that can shift technology capacity and investments to digital platforms will soften the impact of the outbreak and make sure their businesses keep running smoothly now and in the long term.’ - Sandy Shen, Gartner
The Corona outbreak therefore immediately makes the importance of digital resilience clear. Your Conversational Assistant already stands ready day and night for you and your customers. Through this channel you of course want to be able to provide the latest information and so use your digital colleague optimally. Read on for handy tips and optimise your service.
With closed offices most staff work from home. For this your staff of course need the right tools. A customer service agent cannot put his/her desk phone at home, for example. Limited access to tools can lead to a delayed or even halted work process.
For both your service staff and your regular staff, it is important that they are supplied with the right tools. A call centre employee working from home may sound difficult. With the right technology, though, you make sure these staff are there for customers from home too. Make use of Watermelon's live chat software in the coming period. Thanks to the live chat function, staff can answer the pressing customer questions from home, by working from an all-in-one integrated CRM. Your Conversational Assistant still catches the first-line questions; the questions visitors cannot work out are handled via the live chat. That way you make sure your staff are supplied with the right tools at home too. Let Watermelon support you, in times of unrest.
Your crisis team probably consists of representatives from HR, and managers from several departments. A tip from Watermelon is to involve the staff who monitor the Conversational Assistant too. That way they are also up to date with the latest information and can process this information into the Conversational Assistant straight away. That way you keep both your team and your customers informed of the latest information.
You see bots for internal use in more and more companies. Watermelon's customer PepsiCo does this, for example. You naturally want to keep your staff informed of the latest developments about the home working policy, for instance, and at the same time you want to answer your employees' questions as fast as possible. That way you avoid confusion and create a stable basis for your employees. To take a load off your crisis team, you can deploy your Conversational Assistant as an internal automated FAQ. That way your staff are dealt with straight away and guided to the right place.
To strengthen the communication within your company, Watermelon has specially developed a Plug & Play Conversational Assistant. Thanks to this Plug & Play Assistant, schools can benefit from automation straight away, without losing much time and effort to it. The complete bot has been developed and stands ready for use. The convenience of a Conversational Assistant comes through clearly here again: within a day the Assistant was live, and ready to use.
In this period especially your customers ask questions 24/7. To have these answered as adequately as possible by your Conversational Assistant you of course want to make sure it is supplied with the latest information. Make sure, therefore, that you update this info regularly. You want to keep all the places where you supply both your staff and customers with information as up to date as possible. Bring in a member of staff who monitors these pages and the Conversational Assistant and supplies them with the latest info. By designating a specific person or team for this you take stress or workload away from your other employees within the crisis team. Divide roles as clearly as possible and offer your staff certainty. By providing the latest information on all your channels you also avoid fragmented information provision. That way you make sure both your customers and your staff are supplied with the right information.
Take a look at Watermelon's support page
More than ever we at Watermelon want to be there for companies, in order to stimulate business collectively. Do you still have questions after these tips about how your company can benefit optimally from automation? Then get in touch with your personal Customer Success Manager.
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