To say that Corona Outbreak has put brakes on the entire world economy and well-being is an understatement. A majority of private offices have been closed and people across functions are working from home, leaving behind a huge chunk of un-answered questions- What? When? How? What should I do? Where to ask for help? Should I come to the office? Till when will I work from home?
At the beginning of the pandemic, the queries were abundant with great confusion. It was tricky to get quick responses on a single platform. Even the management hadn’t encountered such situations in the past, as such a crisis had never happened in the last century.
Realizing the situation, the organization set-up a Covid helpdesk that was overwhelmed with queries from anxious employees. To ease this pressure, there was an urgent need for a one-stop, scalable solution that could provide answers to everyone, 24*7.
Our response was to leverage Botify - our home-grown Bot creation platform, to create a COVID-19 Bot to quickly respond to our vulnerable and anxious colleagues.
What is Botify?
Botify.Kit is a codeless platform, developed in-house that enables the rapid development of multi-lingual virtual assistants (aka Bots). The platform provides:
- Cognitive and text mining features for building simple FAQ to complex scenarios based on virtual assistants
- The mechanism for monitoring and improving virtual assistants
- Testing tools to test virtual assistants quality quickly
- Connectors to different ticketing tools like SAP HANA, JIRA, Service Now to name a few
The USP of Botify is that it enables SMEs to set up the Bot on their own, without any involvement from software engineers. Using Botify, left us free to concentrate on the problem at hand – which was, to gather reliable information on Covid-19.
Challenges in Bot Setup
We did not have much data or information to start with. It was tough to differentiate facts from rumors in such situations, where anything could have gone viral through social media. To make sure we only extracted trusted information, our team siphoned through all the WHO advisories, and the Government of India advisories and collated information. In just a couple of days, we were ready with the first draft of the Bot to demonstrate in front of our onshore counterparts.
We took the following steps to make our Bot user-friendly, secure, and reliable:
- Regular update of the Bot with current information
- SSO authentication
- Responsive UI, so that it can be used on any tab or mobile.
- Fallback options like Intelli-Search & Automated E-Mail draft functionality
Thanks to close collaboration with our HR team and the COVID helpdesk, we were ready to go-live in 5 days.
Key Takeaways:
There is sometimes a perception that people prefer to talk to a human agent rather than a Bot. COVID-19 Bot has managed to break this myth by helping to reduce queries coming to HR and Covid Helpdesk by a huge margin.
In the last one month, the COVID-19 Bot has handled more than 1300 conversations & received over 98% positive feedback thereby showcasing how technology enables the resolution of queries to handle an unprecedented crisis like the Coronavirus pandemic. In fact, we are replicating the Bot for other geographies as well.
To summarize, Covid-19 Bot has indeed been a game-changer for us. It has proved, yet again, that Botify can be used to create a high-performing Bot in a very short period.
And the highly satisfying part - while we always create technical products for business, this time, the “business” was all about ensuring the well-being of our own colleagues.