How Conversational AI benefits home office workers

COVID-19 has forced employees of the Municipality of Amsterdam to work from home. This resulted in a rapid adoption of applications like Microsoft Teams for communication purposes. However, the quick transformation towards new applications translated into a variety of challenges. Ciphix presented a smart solution for this problem. Meet Adam, the MS Teams chatbot of the Municipality of Amsterdam!

Use case: Unique challenges in the digital working environment

he switch to work remotely from home has led to some unique challenges for employees. Physical meetings were cancelled and rescheduled as digital meetings using MS teams. However, the creation of a digital meeting environment has proven to be a big hurdle. Every meeting has to be manually requested and approved. As a result, employees lose a lot of time handling this high demand of requests.

The sudden change to a digital working environment naturally leads to a rise in questions that are directed to HR employees. Answering all these questions is not only a time-consuming process, but also repetitive, as a lot of these questions are more or less the same.

APPLIED TECHNOLOGIES

5000

Conversations monthly

400

Digital meeting rooms booked daily

1 FTE

Saved annually by handling meeting requests alone

Messages sent on average in a single conversation

Our solution: Introduction of Adam, the virtual assistant

As a typical day can yield over 600 meeting requests, a digital assistant needed to be built that could handle a large number of requests at once. Submitting a request should be simple for an employee and no human should be required to approve the request. Additionally, the digital assistant should be able to answer general FAQs, so that HR employees could spend their time on more value-adding tasks. With these requirements in mind, Ciphix developed Adam, a virtual assistant that is able to perform the following tasks:

Schedule a meeting for employees through email for a specific timespan
Instantly create a meeting room that can be shared with other employees
Automatically puts guests outside the Municipality of Amsterdam in a digital waiting room
Answer questions related to Microsoft Teams

Since Adam handles over 3000 appointments a week, at least 1 FTE is saved annually. Moreover, Adam answers 100% of all Microsoft Teams questions, allowing HR employees to spend their time in different ways.

Adam has become an integral part of the work-from-home experience for employees of the Municipality of Amsterdam. The chatbot has ensured that creating an online meeting is quick and easy. Employees don’t need to wait for approval of meetings and their questions are quickly answered by Adam.

The implementation of the chatbot has ensured that creating an online meeting is quick and easy. Moreover, rapid and accurate answers about MS Teams are provided. During the sudden change to working from home, Adam has proven to be a reliable virtual assistant for the Municipality of Amsterdam.