“Uncertainty” is the most accurate word to describe the year 2020, where employees, teams, organizations, or even industries have witnessed life-changing experiences. The hugely altered environment has forced organizations to look at their digitization agenda with a renewed interest. Where once, automation was about adding a certain bling (without stirring the essential structure), today it is about adapting to the evolving business models & retaining top talents in a VUCA world. It is about transforming the very fabric and work culture of the enterprise.

We analyzed over 1 million+ queries from x employees from 350+ organizations spread across 10+ industries who use Jinie. The information has been processed anonymously and did not consider the names of the organizations or the individuals to avoid any bias. We bring out some interesting analysis and findings of how India Inc. has conversed with Jinie before, amidst, and after the lockdowns due to COVID-19.

Chart 1 – How employee queries panned over the pandemic?

With over 1 million+ user queries, it’s a safe bet to say that conversational AI Chatbots have streamlined interactions between employees and organizations. Employees are more inclined to clarify their doubts from a Chatbot than running around circles with the traditional HR teams, and there is an increased focus on AI Chatbots than ever before.

It’s proven by the fact that Jinie has been receiving 2 times more queries after the implementation of work from anywhere regime across organizations in areas of recruitment, payroll, leave and attendance, performance, health, policy-related information, and much more.

Chart 2 – Employees now prefer reaching out to HR Chatbots for Core HR Queries

HR as diverse a domain it is, it can get really complicated to manage all the modules under one umbrella. Out of 20+ query categories, employees tend to be driven towards asking the basic HR queries to Jinie rather than writing mails to HR spocs for repetitive and transactional ones. The majority of the queries lied in the following buckets like Leave, Attendance, Recruitment, Employee details and Payroll management.

Chart 3: Employees are now looking for answers more than just HR

3.1.  Health & Well Being

A newer addition to the mix of traditional HR queries would be the topic of Health & Well Being. Covid has definitely brought health to the forefront of every water cooler conversation and with 100% upside in such type of queries reflect that employees have allowed Jinie to guide them through these unprecedented times.

3.2.         Performance

When the world was fighting with uncertainties, Jinie was guiding organizations for continuous performance updates and reviews. Jinie answered 15,000+ performance employees’ queries across quarters with a slight dip in the initial phase but managed to provide a seamless experience amidst the pandemic.

Chart 4: How AI Chatbots are improving Employee Productivity in their own way?

From only managing the core HR functions, conversational AI Chatbots have come a long way with new-age advancements. They’re more efficient than ever before in contributing towards employee productivity by reducing time spent on simple tasks.

4.1.Meetings Like Conversations – PeopleStrong’s Open and connected technology sets the tone for the platforms of tomorrow and Jinie is the perfect testimony to represent the same. Out of more than 10,000+ sales document requests over the year, there has been a constant QOQ increase in the number of MS Teams or Zoom Meetings set up via Jinie.

4.2. Access to Sales Repository – Jinie works on the principle that “Keep your sales team equipped and the numbers will follow”. For implementing this thought on the ground level, the sales teams need to be well acquainted with all the latest documents, product presentations, and sales pitches for faster and simpler client interactions.

Chart 5 – Industry Based Insights

There is no doubt that Covid-19 precautionary norms have changed the work dynamics of many industries and organizations worldwide. But there are some organizations that have grabbed this as an opportunity to internalize their work practices and leverage technology as an enabler for a more connected and productive remote work environment.

The industries that have been the frontrunners in accepting the new normal and used AI Conversational Chatbots to power up distributed work environments such as BFSI, IT/ITeS, Manufacturing, and Retail.

Different industries witnessed a unique curve during this uncertain period, let’s view the industry trends as they behaved this year.

5.1. BFSI

With the majority of the on-ground workforce interacting with prospects and customers, conversational chatbots provide numerous functionalities like faster turnaround, 24/7 knowledge access to sales pitches and policies, real-time collaboration, and a self-intuitive interface for faster business execution.

5.2. IT/ITeS

 WFH policies have encouraged employees working in the Indian IT industry to extend their reach towards automation chatbots as work enablers streamlining employee query mechanism systems.

5.3. Manufacturing

 With manufacturing sites going into complete shutdown, employee queries witnessed a unique trend for this industry. Though the total number of queries reduced in the overall terms there has been a tectonic shift in the type of queries that the employees asked Jinie. Where employee concerns regarding leaves and attendance witnessed a dip, areas like performance and health witnessed a surge by huge margins.

5.4. Retail

With retail stores into shutdown mode, there has been a decrease in the number of queries. The retail industry was one another highly affected industry during the lockdowns. It followed a similar path to the manufacturing industry to witness a dip in the employee queries in absolute terms. This industry shifted its focus on the need of the hour agendas regarding performance, health and wellbeing, recruitment, and knowledge enablement.

Conversational AI Chatbots are becoming the backbone of a self-serve employee query mechanism enabling faster and efficient query resolution. This entails automating repetitive HR related activities like payroll, leave and attendance, employee helpdesk and also improve employee productivity with in app performance management, meeting initiations and much more.

provides instant and contextual responses, actions, and insight for all your employee queries and transactions. Leading to improved employee experience and productivity at the workplace. While cutting support services costs for the business.

The HR space seems like an unfitting candidate for implementing chatbots; but as the world of work transforms, HR chatbots are proving their worth in HR departments with increased labor efficiencies, reduced costs, and better customer/employee experiences.

HR Teams are always bombarded with emails and phone calls from your employees asking repetitive internal questions. Not only addressing frequently asked internal queries, but manually carrying out processes like assessing employee performance and going through appraisals is time-consuming and exhaustive for the HR team.

According to a recent Forrester survey, roughly “85% of customer interactions within an enterprise will be with software robots in five years” and “87% of CEOs are looking to expand their AI workforce” using AI bots.

Human Resources (HR) is one area where intelligent automation can streamline and personalize the entire HR process for all types of employees across geographies. Whether it’s accessing payroll and compliance policies, applying leaves, marking attendance, or completing training, HR AI-bots can assist employees every step of the way, on-demand.

We’ve put together the following ways in which Conversational AI Chatbots are disrupting HR:

1. Recruitment Automation– Conversational AI Chatbots can help automate recruitment by bringing down hiring efforts, efficiently shortlisting candidates based on predefined metrics, communicate with applicants, and streamlining the onboarding process effective and streamlined by removing unnecessary steps and drudgery while also educating the new hires about the organization.

1. Seamless Onboarding– Conversational AI Chatbots make onboarding truly a self-serve process as they have the ability to act as a connection between the new hires and work management software. They not only simplify the onboarding process but also provide access to organization policies, job role details, and more in just a few taps.

2. Efficient Performance Tracking– With Conversational AI Chatbots, HR managers can simplify and improve the effectiveness of performance management systems. Managers and employees can effectively and instantly give and take feedback enabling managers to collect, collate, and analyze the employee performance data to make the annual performance assessment fact-based, quick, and effective.

3. Work Assistant– Conversational AI Chatbots enable an open and connected ecosystem to ensure that employees stay on track to achieve better at work every day. AI chatbots provide periodical work reminders, updates on unread emails, pending tasks, meetings, and many more.

4. Employee Helpdesk– Employees spend many hours each month searching for basic company-related information regarding payroll, leaves, timesheets, attendance, etc. HR bots would quickly get employees the answers they are looking for, making them more productive and ultimately more satisfied.

5. Learning– Conversational AI Chatbots brings employee learning to the forefront with personalized course recommendations, share relevant study material, administer training with in-app tests/quizzes ensuring interactive participation and higher engagement.

6. LTA and Payroll – Conversational AI Chatbots can help employees manage entire LTA functionality directly through the chat interface. Employees can simply ask the AI Chatbots to access leave balance in real-time, punch in attendance, view rosters, and more.

7. Executive Assistance– AI Chatbots extends its offerings beyond HR queries too. They act as executive assistants providing updates regarding world affairs, stock markets, nearby places such as ATMs, Hospitals, and more.

The Way Forward

The conversational AI Chatbot industry has time and again proved its potential in providing a simple and faster means of the query of handling mechanisms across various domains. These chatbots enable organizations to build a more scalable and secure environment across locations, channels, and languages. What remains to be seen is how human-machine interactions become part of our everyday lives and impact our behavior in the long term.

Jinie – your AI-powered conversational chatbot, provides instant and contextual responses, actions, and insight for all your employee queries and transactions. Leading to improved employee experience and productivity at the workplace. While cutting support services costs for the business.

Many enterprises are turning to conversational chatbots to improve productivity within their organizations. Chatbots are rapidly entering the modern workplace, aimed to make an employees’ life simpler. Chatbots relieve employees from repetitive tasks so that people can work faster, seamlessly, and intuitively.

It can significantly increase employee productivity and foster constructive engagement by assisting them in automating mundane tasks like answering helpdesk queries, on-boarding new employees, applying for leaves, or tracking leave balance, answering FAQs, scheduling meetings, and reminders, and much more. The list is endless.

This can lead to cost savings, scaling up of operations, and powerful automation opportunities, where chatbots trigger actions and orchestrate processes across a range of applications.

Here are some ways how AI-Powered conversational Chatbots improve workplace productivity?

1. An intuitive and seamless conversational interface

Personal tech is shaping the user expectation from tech at the workplace. Today’s workforce prefers digital communications tools such as messaging apps over phone-based conversations and face to face meetings.

Conversational chatbots are automating a lot of repetitive HR activities especially managing leave, time, and attendance module for employees. With its ability to apply, check and regularize timesheets, leaves and daily attendance make a strong use for your organizations reducing task redundancy and improving employee productivity.

According to Deloitte Human Capital trends, phone-based conversations and face to face meetings are down by 30% and 44% respectively, instant messaging, work-based social media, and collaboration platforms have grown by 62%, 69%, and 70% respectively.

2. Alleviate app fatigue

On average, an employee uses ~10 apps (20 for DevOps) daily. This is causing app fatigue and is leading to a significant decline in workplace productivity – ~50% of workers say, they must switch between multiple apps just to get the work done and 70% say that work would be better if they could get all the important information from their apps on a single window. In this context, conversational chatbots are emerging as a winner in the enterprise productivity landscape through several potential benefits over traditional GUIs.

Jinie – An AI powered conversational chatbot brings all the necessary data from almost all the sliver-based apps that organizations might be using to one single place. Thus, creating a single access point for employees to streamline all day to day work-related tasks.

3. Integration Capabilities

Users can operate several business applications at once with a chatbot. It enables users to invoke multiple chatbot actions with team members at the same time and compresses multistep tasks into a single command – such as, ‘Get the list of closures in the last 2 months and email it to X is one command that uses 3 applications – CRM, Excel, Outlook.

AI conversational chatbot systems enable enterprises to streamline business processes and increase productivity allowing organizations to do more with numerous integration possibilities. For Example – Jinie – An AI-powered Chatbot seamlessly integrates with video conferencing tools such as Zoom or MS Teams to simply plan a meeting right from Zippi.

4. Process Automation

One major advantage of using conversational chatbots is the automation of mundane tasks such as answering frequently asked questions (FAQs) repetitively for different customers. For instance, text-based or voice-activated chatbots offer a seamless experience to users. Chatbots are designed to perform multiple tasks simultaneously and freed from errors, which humans usually find difficult to try. In other words, they will release the precious time of your employees, ease their workload and energy, and permit them to devote themselves to core business activities for growth and success.

How would like the ability of an AI conversational chatbot to send outlook mails in a matter of a few clicks? If this entices you, then Jinie does exactly that like a breeze.

5. Multilingual and Contextual Support

Chatbots exhibit the intelligence to comprehend and process natural languages, thanks to AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP). Their multi-language support comes in handy while using them in different regions marked by different languages. Chatbots also is intelligent enough to know the context of a conversation, and identify the aim of customers’ queries, thereby allowing employees to supply the foremost appropriate responses.

6. Personalized Attention

Giving personal attention to every employee might not be feasible sometimes, especially in large organizations. Apart from the high costs that accompany such a proposition, it might require logistics on a mammoth scale. That’s where an interactive technology such as a chatbot can serve as a reliable personal assistant to handle a variety of tasks normally performed by human assistants. Unlike humans, these sorts of software don’t feel tired they don’t need breaks, and that they don’t sleep in the least. Their services are available 24×7. They can schedule meetings, send reminders, set up emails, book tickets, and so on.

Conversational chatbots are gaining strong traction with its ability to understand and provide personalized attention to its users. One such example would be where Jinie reminds the user of all the actionable lined for the day such as pending tasks, emails and much more as soon as you start your day.

7. Data Security

Data security is a key consideration for any enterprise, particularly when dealing with regulatory frameworks and customers’ personal information. Flexibility is essential in an AI conversational chatbot to meet today’s exacting security conditions, across multiple geographies and legal requirements.

Chatbots have come a long way from being supporting functions to spearheading the change management agenda in an organization. The entire focus remains around how AI chatbots can actually improve productivity at the ground level and their capability to automate the mundane tasks.

Even though we have many examples of advanced, intelligent virtual assistants even today; the technology is still in the early phases. There will be a shift away from chatbots being simply reactive, as AI becomes more advanced and chatbots collect more data, bots will begin to develop the ability to predict what a user’s next move might be, or what problem they may be experiencing, and act on it in real time.

The segregation of the workforce due to the diverse nature of projects has led to organizations ensuring that teams collaborate seamlessly with no hassle.

The Institute for Corporate Productivity surveyed 1,100 companies and concluded that collaborative effort is five times more likely to yield a significant performance boost.

Impact of Improved Collaboration on Productivity

A collaborative environment lowers costs, reduces timelines, promotes productivity, and increases return on investment (ROI) by linking various teams to achieve shared goals, foster values, and develop relationships.

The ICP survey concluded that companies that used collaboration software reported a 49% reduction in email volumes, a 25% decline in the figure of meetings, and a 32% boost in productivity.

A Dimensional Research survey found that 53% of organizations indicated that implementing smart meeting rooms improved business processes, and 54% of business leaders aim to invest further in user-friendly collaborative solutions.

Collaboration Challenges for your ground workforce 

Here are some challenges faced by companies when trying to collaborate their ground workforce –

• Unclear Goals and Objectives

Unclear goals arise primarily because of communication barriers that continue to plague many workplaces. Employees who do not know what the company expects from them cannot perform optimally.

Unclear goals top the list of reasons for workplace stress, as per 41% of employees in a study by Comparably, which is a provider of compensation as-well-as culture data.

To specify goals and convey them to all teams, you need a dynamic collaboration platform like Zippi. It allows you to convert goals to daily and weekly tasks, which ensures that your team knows each task.

• Communication Barriers 

Miscommunication can cost a company with over 100,000 employees to lose about $62 million a year, as stated by the communications expert David Grossman.

According to an April 2020 Kaiser survey, roughly two-thirds of Americans are dealing with more stress compared to the same period the previous year, and 45 percent claim it has negatively upset their mental health.

People in a workplace assume that everybody is on the same page, or have the same perspective as they do, so nobody takes out time to check for understanding. This generally happens with people depending on sliver-based apps such as WhatsApp which are ineffective for business collaboration.

• Dependency on Emails 

Over-reliance on email as a communication medium is stripping people of their time and energy as-well-as their willingness to have a vis-à-vis confrontation with fellow teammates or other teams.

People already use email as a catch-all for intimate conversations, business communications, project and task management, deadline reminders, and many other utilities.

Such cluttering can dampen productivity and divert the attention of the employee consistently. It also eliminates in-person communication, which leads to the omission of several details.

• Low Organization Visibility 

In business, visibility means the extent to which a firm can estimate its future operations. Having visibility into the organization helps management to execute tasks effectively.

Low visibility describes the confidence of a company in its future conduct. It occurs during periods of economic downturn, which impacts all sectors.

Low visibility can demoralize employees and significantly dampen productivity. It can also lead to the halting of operations and lead to a temporary shutdown of some ongoing projects. To fight such woes, leaders need to step up and develop virtual Leadership Skills to ace the game of thriving remote culture.

• Ineffective Query Resolution 

Employees are always brimming with queries when working on an active project that requires quick resolution to facilitate the streamlining of tasks.

With so many teams coming up with unique queries, many companies fail to cater to them because of ineffective tools and traditional means of query resolution.

A lack of automated chatbot replies or collaboration software for automated solution generation is one of the major contributing factors towards flaming this incompetency.

Tips To Enable Your Ground Workforce with Collaboration Software

Follow these tips to enable your ground workforce with collaboration software to ensure high productivity and streamlined workflow –

• Setting clear goals and tasks 

Be precise with the tasks that you desire to achieve. Set achievable goals, hold meetings, give examples, and explain to all teams about your vision, so everyone stays on the same page.

Employees can better interact with each other and their superiors if they have a clear vision in mind with precise objectives and their deadlines.

With Zippi, you can convert goals to daily and weekly tasks to keep all teams on the right track. It lets you designate deadlines to reveal a precise turnaround time for projects.

• Focus on knowledge sharing 

Knowledge sharing ensures that employees get involved with information from across various other departments. This leads to higher productivity by helping teams achieve common goals swiftly and with better efficiency.

It motivates your workforce to communicate openly with others, interact with executives, and feel more valued as an employee.

Zippi offers a plethora of features to share information amongst teams in real-time and keep track of everyone’s progress without having to poke people.

• Secure Collaboration 

Due to the rising demand for business collaboration in companies, employees are now sharing data rapidly and while working on projects in real-time to produce the most efficient results.

However, with this dire requirement for immediate sharing, there is a high risk for accidental loss of data and breaches; and thus, you must encourage secure collaboration.

Data sharing via unauthorized collaboration tools is one area where data is at its most vulnerable state. Therefore, using software that is approved by your company and has reinforced firewalls must be preferred.

• Rewards and Recognition 

Employees wish to know their performance and input to the company, and acknowledging employees shows the look of success.

Companies recognize employees for portraying diligence and adding quality to the company, their accomplishments, or their tenure or service.

Employee recognition can help –

1. Retain superior talent
2. Boost employee engagement
3. Promote high performance

Zippi provides you with the necessary tools to help you easily identify the deserving employees based on performance metrics and acknowledge their efforts and dedication to your company.

• Real-Time Feedback 

When managing numerous projects at once, it can get cumbersome to keep track of everyone’s progress and leave comments for necessary tweaking.

Thus, it becomes paramount that you pick a collaboration software that can provide you with a smart dashboard that displays the progress of every team in real-time.

Zippi is the 1st app ever to feature inbuilt conversations on any task. This empowers you to provide qualitative real-time feedback through conversations.

Final Words

A lack of decent business collaboration can lead to misinterpretations, setbacks, inaccuracies, and inefficiencies that can dampen productivity.

If any business wishes to surmount the extremely competitive market, they must do so by implementing a collaboration software that will streamline all tasks and promote healthy accountability.

To promote collaboration among teams in various locations, organizations must provide employees with the appropriate tools to enable them to communicate and work together while being cost-effective.