How AI chatbots can help boost intranet adoption rates?

According to Gartner, 40% of intranet portals fail due to inadequate adoption, subsequently leading to poor ROI. 

Businesses everywhere have pinned their hopes onto robust intranets with a goal to boost internal communications and increase employee productivity. So, when intranets fail due to dismal adoption rates, it is not an easy fact for organizations to reconcile with, given how expensive an intranet investment can be.

For an intranet to be successful and deliver the ROI, it is vital that employees adopt it and use it regularly. This, unfortunately, is not the case in many organizations, and for a variety of reasons.

Before delving any further, let’s first understand the numerous advantages of an intranet and the primary motive behind rolling out one.

 
• Streamlined Collaboration: An intranet acts as a unified collaboration platform for your workforce. Employees can share files, start discussions, access information - all within the structured space of an intranet. This streamlined collaboration ensures seamless teamwork for completing daily activities or while working on projects.
• Improved Communications: Effective communication across departments, locations, and hierarchies is essential for the successful functioning of any business. Intranets provide numerous tools like discussion groups, forms etc. They connect employees from different departments and locations and improve the relationship between the top management and employees.
• Increased Productivity: Modern intranets enable employees to quickly access any data or documents and thereby reducing the time to find information. Your employees don’t need to sift through the endless email threads again and again.

But all these benefits can only be realized only when the intranet is highly adopted. In this blog, we will discuss how an AI chatbot can boost intranet adoption rates and make your intranet memorable, meaningful and keep your employees engaged.

But before we step ahead of ourselves, let’s discuss what chatbots are.

What are chatbots?

A chatbot is a software, which is often powered by rules or machine learning algorithms and artificial intelligence to produce relevant responses to a user's query. Obviously, chatbots that leverage AI and Machine Learning are considerably more intelligent and efficient compared to rule-based chatbots. The conversation between the user and bot happens through a chat interface using textual or auditory methods. Chatbots are integrated with messaging channels like Skype for Business, Skype, Microsoft Teams, Facebook Messenger etc.

The fact AI chatbots are inherently intelligent is an interesting clue into how they can help amplify intranet adoption rates. Let’s delve deeper to understand exactly what chatbots are capable of, in terms of adding value to your intranets.

How chatbots help boost intranet adoption rates:

 

• The power of ‘push’ and ‘pull’ features of chatbots

Intranets contain a vast amount of valuable information but are solely a ‘pull’ medium. What this means is that employees have to login to the intranet server in order to access new updates, news, alerts, messages, etc.

On the other hand, imagine what a conversation with a co-worker may look like. If you decide there is a piece of information you want to relay to a colleague, you can quickly use a communication channel such as email, Skype or IM to ‘push’ your message to them, instead of your colleague having to ask if you have a message for her. So, while Intranet is a ‘pull’ medium, chatbots have the power of both ‘push’ and ‘pull’.

An Intranet Chatbot amplifies the intranet experience by notifying users about new and important updates and announcements that are stored on the intranet.  These notifications, which can be sent as popup messages, can also be customized based on the location or designation of an employee so that only the most relevant updates make their way to the concerned users.

When employees feel like they’re being kept in loop and abreast of events in the organization, they will be more likely to engage with the intranet on a long-term basis, thereby boosting overall adoption rates.

•  Personalization and easy access to information by giving the intranet a voice and persona

 Chatbots help create a personalized experience for employees in a plethora of ways:

Personalized alerts to the relevant user: Chatbots eliminate the need to login and navigate multiple screens to find the latest news. Instead, news that is relevant to them is given to them directly.

Quick suggestions: Chatbots answer user queries and provide relevant suggestions and additional data to users, depending on what they are looking for.

They can quickly learn office jargon by leveraging machine learning, which then helps provide a seamless, personalized, human-like user experience

Chatbots enable a brilliant Q&A based conversational interface which allows users a hassle-free access to information they need, amidst tons of data, by allowing users to ‘chat’ with their intranet.

For example, let’s say Amy from accounting wants to get access to the company’s HR and financial policies for 2012. What she would have to do to get this information is browsed through too many irrelevant data segments to find what she is looking for - if the organization is large enough or has been around for long enough, this is akin to looking for a needle in a haystack. This literally translates to lost time and lost productivity, and these long and drawn out procedures may even dissuade Rachel from using the intranet anymore.

A chatbot, however, acts as the bridge between vital data your intranet holds and the user who requires this data. And because chatbots enable a conversational interface, Rachel can simply ask the chatbot a relevant question - “What were the company’s HR and financial policies in 2012?” This question will get her a detailed report of all policies in a matter of seconds.

And the best part? She doesn’t even have to visit the intranet website or app to ask the chatbot this question. She can enlist the help of the chatbot via her enterprise’s widely used communication platform, whichever one it may be - Skype, Slack, Skype for Business, etc.

• Easy Updating with Automation

One of the biggest drawbacks that intranets have encountered in the past is serving up outdated content. In a typical work day, authors are forced to spend at least three to four hours a day just to update the intranet, and if this isn’t done, intranet adoption rates will quickly see a dip.

Chatbots, on the other hand, can complete the same task in just 30 minutes. Not only will you be able to provide users with fresh and relevant content, but you’re also enabling improved productivity for authors. Their time is better spent on innovation and drafting new ideas, rather than a long and tedious process of updating the intranet.

Driving intranet adoption is undoubtedly critical to organizations that are investing heavily, in hopes of generating increased organization-wide productivity.

However, what any intranet offers currently is a one-way conversation that your employees are not getting a chance to engage in. A chatbot can completely transform that and build the much-needed element of collaboration and community into your intranet. While you’re thinking about how you can boost adoption rates for your intranet, perhaps it’s time to take a step back and consider how you can make your intranet an engaging, fun, dynamic and incredibly useful tool for your employees.

Conclusion:

Acuvate’s MeshBOT is an AI-Powered Intranet Chatbot which helps businesses eliminate challenges with intranet adoption. It empowers employees to optimally utilize intranet. As employees interact with MeshBOT, it gathers information and patterns, which enables it to provide a personalized experience. MeshBOT is built using Microsoft BOT framework and Microsoft Language Understanding Intelligent Service (LUIS).

Author Bio:

Abhishek Shanbhag brings with him 12+ years of strong expertise across the Microsoft stack. He has consulted with clients globally to provide solutions on technologies such as SharePoint, Office 365, Azure, System Center and Enterprise Mobile platforms. He has worked with clients across multiple industry domains including BFSI, FMCG, Manufacturing, and Telecom.