Be mindful of your workplace ecosystem when assessing digital associates for your company

Enterprise executives must consider all aspects of their company and industry to select the best fit digital associate (DA) for their needs. In the HFS Webinar Propel Your Business Operations “Straight to Digital on February 28, 2020, Robert Skaljin of TD Bank spoke about his experience integrating digital associate software into the company. His selection and transition process is an excellent real-life example of how DAs interact with enterprise ecosystems to create more efficient and effective business processes. Leaders assessing the feasibility of integrating DA technology into the workplace should look to TD Bank’s approach for guidance.

Identify the right use cases for DAs within your company

TD Bank identified its call centers as one of the high-potential areas for DAs. Initial use cases targeted customer experience through the integration of the technology in TD Bank’s mobile apps and call centers. Through a pilot test with iPsoft’s DA Amelia, TD Bank was able to automate the top 50% of reasons why people called into the IT help desk. Smaller internal pilots like this allowed the company to map the number of registered and active users and how they interact with the DA and see first-hand the impact the product can have on the company and its consumers.

TD Bank is introducing bot bashing to boost company morale around DA technology in the workplace

Fear surrounding rapidly advancing technology in the workplace has consumed employees dating as far back as the first industrial revolution. So how do we neutralize this now? TD Bank approached this problem with enthusiasm and incentive. Fear generally stems from the prospect of the unknown; for technology, that’s particularly true when it is both widely unknown to most individuals and the capabilities are so advanced that power dynamics feel threatening. TD Bank combats this with various techniques; summits with business and tech partners, roadmap building activities, and education programs ease nerves and neutralize internal concerns regarding the products. Hour-long sessions with employees testing bot capabilities and limits and subsequently training the product allow employees direct interaction with the learning process for the product. TD bank refers to this process as “bot bashing.” This activity allows people to connect personally with the technology and familiarize themselves with the technology behind it all and the capabilities that they bring to the table. Therefore, the employee outlook is shifted from a position of possible threat to that of balance and entertainment while improving the bot throughout the exercise. This is an outlet both for employees to feel more comfortable with their new digital associate and for enterprise leaders to be transparent with staff throughout the integration of this technology.

TD Bank identified some factors to consider when assessing your needs for conversational AI platforms:

• Talent and appetite to train digital associates. When you are considering DAs, it is important to consider how much effort training the tool requires. Some DAs require a lot of training, but with that training comes more company and industry-specific capabilities. Company leaders must weigh what fits best with the current company needs. A company must have the desire to train AI to respond to organization-specific tasks. TD Bank first tested smaller use cases at call centers to see the bots’ capability to train and build dialogue flows independently through experience.
• Company security needs: Especially in the case of TD Bank and other financial enterprises, aspects like security and privacy are very important. Looking at deployment options available, especially regarding the decisions about cloud versus on-premise operations, companies can assess their comfort level and security desires regarding the information this technology will possess.
• Vendor strength: It is important when selecting service providers or products to take into account what they perceive to be the next steps for their product’s AI capabilities. For example: What are they doing to make their natural language processing stronger? Are they leveraging other things alongside DAs?
• Cost: When TD Bank assessed DAs, DAs were consistently cheaper than employing call center agents. The most important question, then, is finding the right tasks for humans that provide value and the tasks that DAs can handle to reduce cost and improve efficiency. Finding the right balance of talent and tech is paramount, but these DAs have been known to significantly reduce costs, and it’s a compelling case for DAs.

The Bottom Line: For maximum success, be thoughtful when assessing the impacts of digital associates on your workplace to deploy them with the right partners.

TD Bank is an excellent example of the effective integration of digital associate products into front- and back-office operations. Companies should strive to maintain a balance between lowering company costs and improving both customer and employee experience when integrating technology into the workplace.