Building an effective system of internal communications is vital for any company. Corporate magazines and information stands are long in the past, replaced by emailing and intranet portal, as well as a number of other methods. They include corporate apps and social networks but those are often inconvenient and unable to help employees in a timely manner. Why is a virtual assistant the best way to manage internal communications?

Convenience

Employees can easily miss an important email from the internal communications department as they receive tons of other work-related mail. The company’s own social network and mobile apps offer a faster way of interaction than the intranet, but they are unlikely to be more convenient for employees than the services they use most often.

Chatbots gain an advantage here due to the fact that they can be integrated into an internal system as well as into almost any social network, be it WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook Messenger, etc. Employees don’t have change their preferred method of communication and seek support in company-exclusive services — a chat bot is always at hand.

Functions

Workers may not log into the intranet for weeks or even months and miss any announcements posted there. A bot, however, can instantly launch a universal push notification. Chatbots have the meeting schedule memorized and can answer any question about the company, its departments, the contacts and location of the employees. A human needs time to find the information, while a chatbot can access it at a moment’s notice from an updatable database.

Employee training is another task a chatbot can perform. Finding educational material, script templates and documents, program use manuals pose no problem for a virtual assistant. Afterwards, it can test the new employee’s knowledge by testing them through a natural conversation and then sending the information about each candidate’s number of correct answers.

A chatbot can collect feedback from your employees about their work in the company, process complaints and improvement suggestions (with the option for anonymity). This can help avoid extreme tension, since the employees have a chance to vent at someone—no matter if it’s a chatbot.

A bot can also help a worker relax during breaks by telling a funny joke, a story or simply chat about random topics.

24/7 availability

Chatbots have no need for sleep, food and coffee breaks (or holidays). They can consult employees or provide solutions for technical problems all days of the week. All that’s needed for them to function is an Internet connection and a way to contact a specialist in case the bot doesn’t understand the query. A chatbot also doesn’t need an ultrafast Internet connection to work, and its work slows only when it fails to understand the request. This problem is solved by the continuous improvement and optimization of chatbot technology.

In the near future, chatbots are set to become a significant part of internal communications and take on a majority of routine tasks. Employees will find it easy to ‘make friends’ with their virtual colleague and regularly benefit from them. Moreover, the resources and time saved by the bot can be used by the firm to develop other relevant projects.