Back to Office Virtual Assistant

In these pandemic and post-pandemic days, employees of different companies around the globe will slowly start returning to their offices. Still, there are many unanswered questions and now, more than ever, employers need to implement channels of crystal clear and timely communication. Use a chatbot to offer your employees a way to learn information through a simple conversation, letting them know what are the things they need to do and what safety precautions to take. Virtual assistant chatbot will provide relevant, timely, and clear information, and can be built and deployed over various channels. Back to office virtual assistant will be able to help you communicate these topics to your employees:

• When do employees need to come to work? What are their schedules?
• What do they need to do to have a smooth return to work? 
• What are the new processes and Health and Safety guidelines? 
• What should parents with small children do? 
• Can they prolong their WFH?
• And receive meaningful employee feedback

If you are interested in providing this information to your employees, read further as this use case will show you how to create a Back to office chatbot that can answer questions your employees might have before returning to work.

Process Workflow

IMPLEMENTATION STEPS

Pre-requisites:

1. Consider the changes you implemented in your company and also how will you communicate those changes to your employees.

2. Group those inquiries into intents and based on the intents, design the dialogs how you want conversations to proceed. You can base the dialogs on the following intents that deal with the new situation: Personal protective equipment and Masks, Workplace hygiene, Expenses, Staggered schedule, Extended WFH, etc.

3. Create intent training files for each intent-based dialog—they should contain phrases you expect to receive from your employees.

Steps over Web Interface:

1. Login to the web interface and select Answers module.

2. Click Create chatbot button and create a new chatbot. Name the bot and select the channel you would like to use to communicate with your employees. As chat apps are becoming more common as a means of communicating information to employees, you can go with one of the available chat apps.

3. As a pre-requisite, you should have already prepared the intent training files for the topics you want to address so import them (if you haven’t created them beforehand, add them manually). Bear in mind that each intent needs to be trained with a minimum of 50 phrases. For the PPE and Masks intent, you can see a sample of intent phrases:

4. Based on the dialogs you want to create, you will need to create attributes to support saving  values. For example, if your chatbot will also process leave requests, you can add attributes to save the dates of the requested leave. You also need to create attribute where the shift schedule for the employees will be saved.

If you want to offer your employees the option to talk to a person, select which attribute values will be visible once the conversation is routed to the person responsible for it.

5. For this use case, we need keywords and their synonyms for the AM and PM options when selecting work shifts (you can always expect people to respond with variants of the AM and PM periods and you want your chatbot to recognize those variants).

6. Now that all dialog pre-requisites are created, we can design the dialogs. In this case, dialogs will be based on the intents, so click on +ADD DIALOG and create a new dialog. Select the intent for the first dialog and start building it. For the Staggered schedule dialog, we need to get the information to which shift is the employee assigned.

7. Use Call API to get information from your internal system where the schedules are set. Save the information to the previously created attribute.

8. Let your employee know which shift they are assigned to by adding Send text element with the attribute where the information on the shift schedule is saved.

9. For the possibility that the employee is not satisfied with the schedule, add Process User Input element where you can gather data regarding their preference, either AM or PM, or if they are happy with the status.

10. Depending on the user input, add different messages for each of the user inputs and how you will handle them.

11. Continue creating dialogs until you have incorporated all the intents.

12. Once you are done with the dialogs, use the Simulator to check how well they perform.