How Microsoft Teams Chatbots Enhance Employee Experience

As organizations grow, they amass tons of tribal knowledge that often sits within documents, SharePoint sites and FAQ manuals. Not everyone is interested in everything and it becomes tricky to find the information quickly. This forces employees to switch context between applications or deal with the specialists / subject matter experts directly which causes frustration for both.

An FAQ bot can solve the problem and with Microsoft’s Q&A Maker tool it is simple to create a powerful chatbot rather quickly without writing a single line of code. However, there are two areas of opportunity to better the experience for employees:

Meet employees where they live: The best place for providing support is in the moment when one needs help. When employees spend most of their time collaborating and working within Teams – it makes sense to surface that information within Teams so that there is no costly context switching.

Bring in a human in complex scenarios: Employee needs for information are so varied that it is impossible to handle every scenario. It negatively impacts employee experience when the bot fails, and the employee doesn’t have anywhere else to go to. Therefore, there needs to be an easy way to bring a human in the loop when that happens.

We’re excited to bring to you the FAQ Plus app template that capitalizes on both the areas of opportunities above to deliver a rich employee experience. In addition, creating your own employee facing bot using the template requires no coding and deploys in minutes.

Here’s how it works:

Let’s say you’ve used the template to create a Teams adoption bot that answers all employee questions on using Teams while you’re rolling Teams in your organization.

Now the employee has a question about a new Teams feature and needs instant help. It is as easy as asking a friend through a quick chat message.

Change of any kind is hard and it requires careful hand-holding and human support. With this template it becomes simple to bring a human in the loop when the bot can’t help. If the employee has a question that the bot couldn’t help with – instead of having a dead-end with the bot – it is able to bring a human in the loop seamlessly! It posts a real time notification in the Team of subject matter experts using which the experts can directly provide help in the moment.

What’s so powerful about this experience is that one – it delights employees by providing help when and where they need it; two – by posting real time in the experts team, it is helping the team get real time feedback and gets the process on the path of continual improvement without requiring expensive and cumbersome context switching for experts – a true win-win.

Finally, as a bonus, there is lightweight ticketing built within the experts’ team experience so managing incoming influx of requests becomes easy and contextual. For example, I can quickly see a list of requests assigned to me or look at all unassigned request – all within the same team, without having to go to a separate application.

There are so many ways this template can be used to deliver delightful employee experiences. A few that we believe are particularly suitable include HR FAQs, IT Helpdesk and Change management for new internal initiatives.

As with all app templates, these are open-source production ready apps that don’t require writing any line of code, deploy to Teams in minutes and are easily customizable in branding and functionality. 

Why Wavenet?

Wavenet have over 20 years experience in voice technologies working with businesses across the UK to deliver high-quality, reliable voice and phone systems. With TeamsLink we have partnered with Microsoft to create a platform that provides on-net, high quality traffic through diverse routes to give your business the ultimate unified communications foundation.

We have an internal development team dedicated to advancing our technology and providing our customers with the best solution on the market. As well as our own developers we are partnered with vendors that can provide Microsoft Certified handsets that run Teams directly on-screen, giving you the choice of how you roll out Teams calling to your users.