During the height of COVID-19, all eyes were on the customer. Brands invested in ecommerce, digital marketing, and how to continue to provide customers best in class CX. As support volumes skyrocketed, brands turned to AI—and some of the best and brightest found Ada.

Now, as the world re-opens, many brands are reconsidering traditional in-office expectations for employees, providing a hybrid model or going completely remote with a digital-first approach.   

While working from home offers great benefits to employees—less time wasted commuting to the office and more flexibility for employees with children—we’re saying goodbye to the days when quick questions can be brought up in casual conversation at the water cooler, or you can simply walk down the hall or roll your chair around to reach your co-workers. 

Brands are searching for the most efficient ways to bridge these gaps as they continue to grow and work remotely. Those who have found success in applying automation to their CX are learning that the benefits of automation can extend to the employee experience (EX). 

This is especially true for IT Help Desk teams. Leveraging automation as an internal approach to EX—coined by Ada as the automated employee experience (AEX)—allows brands to simplify and streamline internal inquiries, tasks, and processes in one platform. 

With AEX, brands can boost their employee productivity by automating repetitive tasks. Resolving technical or logistical work-adjacent issues like accessing technology or managing benefits allows IT teams to spend more time on valuable work. Automating tasks that typically slow employees down reduces friction among teams and increases job satisfaction.

Your approach to AEX intelligently comprehends employee inquiries through Ada’s Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and pulls in knowledge to provide quick answers and direct employees to resources. This creates autonomy among employees and allows IT teams to focus on more meaningful and interesting work. 

If you’re wondering how you extend the benefits of automation to your employees, AEX is your next step. Interested in learning more about how automation can improve productivity and overall EX for your ITSM team and beyond? Let’s take a deeper look.

Why Do You Need AEX?

A traditional approach to solving employee issues—creating a ticket and waiting for an email response—can take days to address. Standard channels for interactions of this nature, between employees and IT teams, don’t necessarily complement employee modern workflows that are now distributed, mobile, and more on-the-go. A ballooning backlog of tickets is too difficult for IT teams to manage and distribute without automated support. 

Automation can resolve tech issues efficiently by allowing employees to self-serve through a conversational AI chatbot. AEX directs employees to where they can find policies, technology how-tos, and detailed product information to free up your IT, HR, and other internal leaders to focus on optimizing their teams’ output.

Just because employees are working from home, doesn’t mean brands need to abandon their approach to employee engagement. Hyper personalized automated interactions with employees can be infused with empathy, emotion, and even humor—and they should be—while at the same time, providing answers to employee’s most common, most pressing, and most important questions. 

Ultimately, automating internal processes and interactions frees up your employees to do their best work and find the most satisfaction in their work. And that’s the sweet spot of AEX—providing a solution that not only improves EX but elevates it through hyper-personalization.

How Do You Automate Employee Experiences?

Look for a  no-code automation platform that integrates seamlessly with the employee-facing tech stack and enables internal teams to build efficiencies through automation. ITSM teams can use this conversational, self-service approach to pull in knowledge from distributed resources and quickly share them with team members.

Brands can start their AEX journey by automating their most common requests with a conversational AI chatbot. Think simple employee questions your service and help desk teams would typically respond to, like:

• How can I reset my password?
• Where can I find policies on holidays and time off?
• Where can I access my onboarding training?

Then, teams can take a more in-depth approach. 

AEX for IT

Brands that use Ada’s AI for EX found that they can automate many of their employee inquiries, enabling them to self-serve and resolve inquiries on: 

• Simple and static questions
• Password resets
• System access

AEX reduces average handle time for ITSM teams by pulling in information from knowledge bases on how to troubleshoot or set up systems. Set up your AEX to capture and store employee inquiries, summaries, and transcripts, and use them to inform future automation—just like you would in your approach to ACX. 

Using AEX to personalize IT service desk tickets and provide a smooth handoff to a live agent platform allows teams to:

• Store details, summaries, and transcripts
• Triage inbound requests and store all ticket contexts
• Provide contextual handoff to service desk technician support

At the same time, ITSM teams can leverage their AEX tool for software and hardware provisioning to stay on top of licensing approvals, transactions, and delivery.

AEX offers proactive corporate communications that target the specific employee user groups impacted on upcoming changes like: 

• Password updates
• Security training
• Maintenance and outages

How Can AEX Be Used Beyond IT?

Your AEX can span across multiple departments to strengthen and streamline your internal operations, from talent acquisition to payroll. Likely, your brand has a long list of resources for employees—old and new—on benefits, time off, company policies and processes, and commission guidelines. 

Instead of sending each employee to your reps from these teams to find resources, you can create a dedicated conversational AI chatbot to be their first point of contact. Like your ITSM chatbot, it can pull answers from a knowledge base to direct employees to standard documents and answer the “where can I find more information on” questions that people are likely to have at any stage in their employment. 

AEX for CX Agents

It’s becoming increasingly clear that brands need to focus on how to improve agent EX. According to a 2018 study by NICE inContact, every 10% of agent attrition leads to 1% of customer churn. Avoiding agent turnover is crucial for your brand’s cost-savings, especially when it affects the customer too. Brands can deliver AEX to their agents through their investment in automated customer experience (ACX), helping agents process requests faster and with more accessible knowledge. It also prevents brands from losing money through attrition, recruitment, and training of new agents.

As the human touchpoint with your brand, agents need to feel appreciated by their employers and equipped with the right tools in place to support their success. An automation-first CX platform allows agents to focus their attention and efforts on having better interactions with customers. With an ACX platform pulling in customer data on past challenges and inquiries and providing contextual hand-off to your support teams, agents will be empowered to find more meaning in their customer interactions, and more fulfillment in their careers.

AEX for HR

With simple questions out of the way, HR can dive more into the work that they love, like connecting with employees to support them and help them work through more complex issues. Automation can resolve employee questions on:

• Company-wide HR policies
• Benefits
• Recruiting 

AEX is also crucial when recruiting top talent. Automation enables talent teams to swiftly move their prospects through the application process, from interviewing and hiring to training and onboarding. 

Instead of wondering where to go and who to ask, an AEX platform provides a safety net for new employees—a first stop shop to where they can find their training modules, read up on company policies, and check tasks off the onboarding checklist. Automate welcome emails, one-on-ones with hiring managers, IT access for internal systems, send reminders for training completion, and send polls and surveys to check in on new employee progress.

This approach applies to other departments in the following ways:

AEX for Finance 

• Payroll
• Expenses

AEX for Facilities 

• Access
• Booking

AEX for Sales Operations

• Commissions
• Processes