Digital Transformation: Corporate or Internal Communications Using “Truthbot”

One of the most powerful and underestimated departments in business is Internal Communications. These employees are required to do more with less—less budget and less people—but produce more work. These individuals are not always fortunate enough to have digital communication tools to conduct their tasks. They must rely on a predigital and centrally governed model for communication. Their ways of working are a direct contradiction to producing a digital customer experience. Nowadays, organizations are ready to spend money to offer a digital experience to their customers, but don’t really bother about their employees, who are responsible for producing the digital customer experience. In short, organizations can offer a digital customer experience to their employees, which creates a direct positive impact, as well as provide the same or an enhanced digital experience to customers. It is high time for the director or chief of Internal Communications to revamp the corporate communication strategy, methodologies, and tools to align with the current revolution of digital transformation.

The existence of internal communication is to be the primary source of truth for all employees, sponsors, executives, and stakeholders. Internal Communications teams work collaboratively to publish truth in the most understandable way. Communication teams offer variation to their recipients by publishing news, information, and announcements on hot topics and trends so that readers find the knowledge useful. The result is user satisfaction. Some communications engage openly with employees and executives to generate topics on which they can publish information through an intranet.

In today’s world, we all have digital personas produced by our online behavior and our interactions with different applications. Furthermore, these personas are produced using internal messaging platforms in the form of reviews or previews about products and services. In the digital world, our perceptions are built by what is trending on social media rather than what we perceive as important. Headlines gain more attention, news in the form of videos or animation generate more views and shares, and analyses in the news gain maximum visibility. These are a few of the new trends created by digital media that attempt to produce news and information in the way people expect in the digital world.

As we experience the era of digital transformation, huge efforts and investments are made to create natural human conversation between humans and machines, and this is witnessed in the development of chatbots. The adoption of chatbots has a conversational interface with branding, marketing, commerce, Internet searches, customer service, and perhaps even the Internet itself. Today, it is uncommon to see banners such as “Chat with us” when we open a web site or mobile app. With such progress there is a strong feeling that other personalized communication channels such as e-mail, web portals, or mobile apps are not able to be sustained in the digital transformation era.

Directors of Internal Communications channels should focus on revamping their strategy and create a new team of communicators that can create a digital transformation. Operationally, this implies the communicators function more as guardians of conversations, rather than agents of approved content. They should spend more time listening and moderating, rather than creating and modifying content both on internal and external company networks. Digitally transformed companies have a social media command center that monitors the posts and sentiments of their network, and produces a plan of action based on trends noted.

Employees prefer internal messaging platforms over corporate e-mail or intranets, and governance over these platforms is very limited. Internal Communications teams generally have the perception that such responsibility lies with the IT department.

For Internal Communications teams now, there is an opportunity for chatbots to create a source of truth using Truthbot, rather than follow a reactive approach to build products based on the sentiments of employees and stakeholders received through feedback and suggestions. Truthbot converses with employees and stakeholders 24/7, provides access to precise information, and listens to employee concerns based on conversational trends, and much more.

Just imagine if you have 1,000 employees and most of them ask the same question of the facility management team. This would create chaos. The Internal Communications team could use a chatbot to interact with employees who are worried about potentially hazardous driving conditions. Truthbot helps executives think about internal communications in a different way .

How Chatbots Are Improving the State of Healthcare in India

India has a profound history in healthcare that reaches back to 273 BC, when the study of medicine was flourishing. During the British reign, there were a lot of hospitals built in India. After achieving independence, large private hospitals were built that use modern technology for treatment. However, the cost of medical treatment has always been on the high side in private hospitals; but, in government hospitals, despite less money being spent on treatment, medical services lack resources. Despite this, there are multiple chains of private hospitals that offer best-in-class service. Adoption of technology has changed the way treatment, disease control, research and development, and paramedical services are conducted and delivered. It has also saved time and money, and provided better accessibility to more people. In fact, people from other countries visit India to avail themselves of the healthcare facilities there.

mHealth is an abbreviation for mobile health—a term used for the practice of medicine and public health supported by mobile devices. An article published by the Singapore Healthcare Management Congress ( www.singaporehealthcaremanagement.sg ) indicates that, currently, healthcare has been transformed into the digital healthcare term “mHealth.” According to the article, 59% of people say that mHealth has changed how they find information on health issues; 49% say they expect mHealth to change how they manage their overall health. Wearable technology used to track health status has a market value of $3.1 billion. Technology giants such as Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Samsung are continuously in quest of developing healthcare products and services that can be adopted by users. There has also been a tremendous increase in the field of AI and nanotechnology during the past few decades in the healthcare sector. With the introduction of AI such as chatbots, it is evident that healthcare depends on technology for its progress.

There are plenty of chatbots available, such as your.md, sensely, buoy health, and infermedica, that help people gain confidence by providing them with useful and accurate results about their health. This shows how technology is changing the healthcare industry and making our lives better. These chatbots have successfully helped millions of people across the globe in addressing their health issues and giving proper advice. There are countless examples where AI can help doctors, nurses, and patients attain better healthcare, but it requires proper implementation.

Each year, the Indian government launches plenty of healthcare schemes, so that the state of healthcare improves in India, which affects lower and middle-class families. Chatbot implementations in healthcare reveal to us how chatbots are improving healthcare status in India. They help to increase reliability and reduce the cost of healthcare, which proves chatbots are a boon to humankind.

Build a Superhuman Human Resource Team Using AI Chatbots

Human Resources, like Internal Communications, is considered to be underrated by other departments because the nature of the work being performed is administrative. The functioning of a department depends on the technology and methodologies used in day-to-day operations, which lead to a greater—in this case, employee—experience. It is time for support functions such as Human Resources to be robust, efficient, and smooth in its operations using modern technology, thereby reaching a state of digital transformation.

Different departments in organizations have adopted digital transformation to create better employee experiences, but Human Resources has lagged behind compared to other departments as a result of strict processes and company policies to deliver standardized results. In general, it is said that Human Resource professionals spend most of their time conducting transactional and administrative activities, and their remaining time on strategy and talent management. With so much variation in operations, how can Human Resources can be part of a strategic business transformation? Today, Human Resources is engaged in performing multiple routine tasks that can be automated using chatbots, which will free up employees to tackle more challenging work. Unless all departments are transformed digitally, we cannot conclude an organization is transformed.

AI Chatbots Are Strategic Human Resource Partners

As the world begins to embrace the benefits of AI and intelligent enterprise automation, chatbots are emerging as an Agile solution for elevating employee experiences and optimizing transactional activities within Human Resources.

Per survey results published in the ServiceNow blog available at chatbotsmagazine.com , 92% of Human Resource leaders want to provide an elevated experience for their employees by using chatbots. In addition, more than two-thirds of Human Resource leaders believe employees are quite comfortable accessing chatbots to get desired information (Figure 8-1). Human Resource leaders also predict that, by 2020, more than 75% of employees will use chatbots for administrative or tractional Human Resource queries. With the development of chatbots, Human Resource teams can focus more on strategic activities rather than operational ones.

With help from AI chatbots, Human Resource teams will finally be able to move from an operational focus to a strategic one, and can impact the organization at a greater level. The graphs in the following section, from Kevin Kramer’s report ( chatbotsmagazine.com) , show how Human Resources today compare with Human Resources of the future using AI chatbots.

The Future of Human Resources

As seen in Figure 8-2, there is a list of Human Resource activities: administration, transaction, talent and performance, and strategy. Activities linked to strategy are accomplished the least because of the other activities.

In Figure 8-3, you can see that more time is spent on strategy after chatbots have been deployed.

Based on these figures, it is evident there will be a paradigm shift after the introduction of chatbots in Human Resources, and Human Resource high-value work, which could comprise 70% of Human Resource efforts. This does not mean that Human Resource teams can ignore administrative and tractional activities, which involves give and take, that are part of their work, but Human Resources can reply on chatbots to execute most of them, which will free up their time to perform strategic work. Consequently, Human Resources will become data driven, will focus on the employee experience, and will achieve operational excellence.

Data-driven Human Resources using chatbots will gain visibility in enterprise-wide conversations. With such an approach, we would expect Human Resource managers to effect the production of chatbots with a focus on data in order to change or improve company policies.

Human Resource teams adopting chatbots will achieve a personalized, instant employee experience. Employees can find answers to their questions using chatbots instead of using e-mail or making phone calls. They can communicate with a friendly chatbot using their preferred method, such as mobile, voice, or Web.

Human Resource teams will be digitally transformed and hence will achieve operational excellence. Chatbots can be deployed at a fraction of the cost and are available 24/7, 365 days a year. Money saved from implementing chatbots can be used for other Human Resource initiatives to focus on strategic goals and improve the employee experience.

Traditional Workplace of Today

Today’s workplace is still old-school (Figure 8-4). In fact, the average enterprise has nearly 700 apps and legacy software systems that are used for employee communication and collaboration with very few, if any, self-service options.

Organizations still prefer such systems or even unsupported vendor products, citing cost reasons. None of these systems is conducive to employee collaboration, nor do they have self-service options. With such constraints, employees are forced to follow workflows that are time-consuming and inefficient to gather the right information at the right time and from the right person.

According to a McKinsey report (blog.xenit.eu), “employees spend 1.8 hours every day — 9.3 hours per week, on average — searching and gathering information. Put another way, businesses hire 5 employees but only 4 show up to work; the fifth is off searching for answers, but not contributing any value.” Earlier, I mentioned that 75% of the workforce will be digital-savvy millennials by 2025. So, do we still anticipate productivity of employees to be driven by workflow or by introductive AI technology such as chatbots to access information in the most intelligent way? Per the Dell Future Workforce Study ( www.dell.com ), for enterprises to remain competitive, they must invest in smarter workplace technology to build a digital workforce that is more mobile, productive, and capable. By being mobile, face-to-face collaboration will decline, but collaboration will increase with the help of technology. Being productive implies the digital workforce will be digitally connected and will be better able to produce faster output. Being capable implies the digital workforce will use AI technology to achieve business goals.

Chatbots and conversational AI bring unique opportunities for enterprises to drive digital transformation across all departments, including Human Resources, IT, Facility, Sales and Delivery, Marketing and Communications, and Legal (Figure 8-5). By using AI technology such as chatbots, enterprises can create a more unified and flexible workplace in the future.

The workplace of the future will use chatbots as part of the organization to resolve business queries and achieve organizational goals. Say goodbye to the days when many workplace apps were required to accomplish different tasks. The workforce of the future will streamline communication across each area of the enterprise to execute daily tasks.