AI-based solutions see surge in demand to help companies retain business continuity

With work from home (WFH) becoming the latest household phrase, companies are now resorting to artificial intelligence (AI)-based solutions to ensure business continuity. They have started exploring automation possibilities for not just business-critical functions, but to also provide support to existing customers, onboard new customers, resolve queries and to increase employee engagement.

“We have been seeing more than a 100 per cent increase in sales of our call centre chatbot over the last two months,” said Rahul VP, co-founder of Articbot, a start-up that offers conversational AI-powered enterprise chatbots for automated customer support in multiple languages. “During this outbreak, enterprises are concentrating more on customer retention than sales. They are unable to operate call centres with full capacity, which has forced them to use automated solutions to maintain the volume of customers,” he added.

Rahul said that compared with January and February they have also been receiving double the sales enquiries and website visits over the last two months.

DheeYantra, a start-up that builds cognitive conversational chatbots for Indian vernacular languages, has also been seeing an increase of about 300 per cent in its sales pipeline for automating customer onboarding and customer support solutions over various channels such as WhatsApp, website widgets, and social messengers. Its co-founder Vidhu Bennie said that most queries are from customers in the banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI) and healthcare sectors. The firm has also launched a business-to-consumer (B2C) solution, Aham.AI, which provides information about Covid-19 statistics and facilitates self-diagnosis. Bennie said that in the coming days, they would be adding features such as mobile recharge, utility bill payments, and cab bookings, among others, in 10 Indian languages, to it.

Enhancing employee experience

Firms are also looking to enhance employee experience in the WFH scenario. Be it responding to employee queries, resolving tickets or managing requests on-the-go, enterprises are increasingly looking at AI-based solutions to automate and streamline processes and help provide a seamless experience to their workforce, specifically at a time when they are working remotely.

“Previously, the use cases were mostly around customer engagements. Now, we are also seeing a surge in demand for automating employee engagements,” said DheeYantra’s Bennie.

Leena AI, a start-up that builds AI-enabled conversational solutions to help enterprises automate employee queries and improve employee engagement, has also been seeing a surge in demand for its human resources (HR) helpdesk automation (which provides instant answers to employees’ HR-related queries), ticketing (which learns from previous tickets raised and solves new tickets automatically), and employee engagement solutions (which checks in with employees on a regular basis to know how engaged they are with the organisation).

“Post the lockdown, the pace of adoption of AI-driven solutions for managing HR processes has increased significantly,” said its co-founder, Adit Jain.

“Since almost all businesses were compelled to work remotely, new unforeseen challenges emerged. The ease of communicating directly with the HR decreased. Hence, the whole situation created the need to get a solution that answers parallel employee queries instantly, and makes the ticketing process easy and transparent,” he added.

Jain said that earlier, companies required its solutions to primarily automate the employee helpdesk and help direct HR’s efforts towards employee development, instead of having to answer repetitive queries. “Now, the focus has shifted towards efficient remote working and keeping the remote employee as connected as they were before the lockdown happened.”