24/7 Support, Zero Wait Time: The Promise of Generative AI in Employee IT Assistance

Imran Quraishy
Generative AI
Published in
9 min readApr 27, 2024

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Employee support is proving to be one of the best applications of Generative AI. With multidisciplinary NLP capabilities, Generative AI unlocks great benefits and holds immense promise to transform employee support.

But can we expect that Generative AI can drive 24/7 employee support and zero wait time?

Generative AI has a massive adoption rate across customer-facing chatbots because of the advent of ChatGPT.

It can unleash similar effectiveness to tackle common support challenges for employees more efficiently.

Like customer support, industry leaders can look toward Generative AI to make things easier for support teams and help desk users.

Let’s see how you can make great use of Generative AI to ensure zero wait time for 24/7 employee support.

What is 24/7 support for employee IT assistance?

24/7 employee support ensures that employees get help and find answers to their queries to solve problems — no matter when these questions come up, what time, and from which place in the day.

Companies can enable 24/7 employee support using chatbots, knowledge bases, and embedded messaging.

Post-COVID, companies have an intense need to help implement 24/7 support for their remote and hybrid employees because customers suddenly find growing needs to resolve their product or service-related issues.

Other than assisting employees with round-the-clock employee support, there is an immense need for 24/7 employee support.

Why do you need 24/7 employee support?

The very fact is that a company’s IT support or help desk cannot deliver 24/7 support with human assistance. There are some challenges.

Let’s say, one day, support has a coverage of 6–8 hours. It’s going well. The next day, it has a coverage of 12 hours. Unfortunately, the next day, it needs 24 hours of support.

Can your team become available to tackle 24/7 employee support? Certainly not.

24/7 employee support is essential because it makes employees feel comfortable and helps them get going without human intervention.

  • Provide support in local time zones

For example, if your remote or hybrid team members reside in a different time zone, your support team will likely not be available for users, preferably at their specific time.

Most businesses, however, have teams available for 24/7 employee needs. However, those lacking enough resources to arrange support can benefit immensely from 24/7 chatbot support.

Your employees can easily get help if they need assistance solving a productivity challenge.

  • Offer support for new tools and policies

You have a growing team. Rules, policies, and tools are designed individually for each employee segment.

Your remote, on-site, and contract team members can have varying needs.

A 24/7 chatbot support can help them learn onboarding rules, apply for tools, access any tools without the manager’s approval, apply for leaves, claim reimbursements, etc.

  • Meet user expectations in digital first-time

Generally, employees are reluctant to compromise their experience at any cost. Making information available at their fingertips is a testament to ensuring long-term retention of employees for your business growth.

Employees rarely want to know if you manage a small or big team. They need digital support first to help automate responses and resolve problems.

However, optimizing 24/7 chatbot support can help yield long-term cost-effectiveness for your business growth.

Can 24/7 support ensure zero wait time?

Customers hate to wait. A second delay can send off customers knocking at other doors who want to listen immediately.

Employees also value minimal wait times. Although it is not incorrect to say your team would prefer 24/7 support with accuracy and thoroughness in responses — that too in zero wait time.

However, most chatbots can only feature the fundamental capability of automation and fetch information for what they are trained with.

This limitation can restrict users from retrieving real-time information.

This would ultimately hinder 24/7 support and zero wait time.

Leveraging large language models that can retrieve immense amounts of information from the data they are trained with can improve information search. So, a chatbot built with Generative AI capability can ensure 24/7 support with zero wait time.

Why Generative AI for 24/7 employee support with zero wait time?

Generative AI has massive capabilities to comprehend NLP queries and produce human-like responses.

Most surprisingly, what comes out as a challenging chore for humans, Generative AI makes that easy to complete and gain success.

This is mostly suitable for repetitive and mundane chores, which become error-prone as tasks get exhaustive and draining.

Generative AI efficiently reduces the time to solve repetitive tasks using natural language understanding and the ability to learn new techniques and interactions.

No matter if a query is new. Generative AI can examine its database and chat history to build contextual responses to solve issues and help maintain 24/7 support.

How can Generative AI ensure 24/7 employee support with zero wait time?

Companies can unleash multiple use cases of Generative AI that can complement chatbot functionalities in various ways.

Leverage generative AI for employee-facing chatbots

If you look closely, HR functions are critical areas that often seem overwhelming. This perhaps urges HR leaders to pilot, plan, and implement generative AI solutions inside the employee-facing chatbots.

Gartner reports that 43% of respondents in their survey like to adopt GenAI-based chatbots for HR service delivery.

Generative AI’s outstanding capabilities can benefit IT support, including enterprise service management and HR services.

24/7 chatbot support use cases with generative AI are as follows as below:

  • HR functions

With generative AI chatbots, you can easily help automate multiple HR functions without human intervention.

You can efficiently provide workflow automation for functions such as HR operations, including onboarding and offboarding, documentation, HR policy access for leaves and PTOs, recruiting and hiring, etc.

  • IT support

IT-related issues can be frustrating if they persist over a certain period. Common IT support issues include resetting passwords, software installation, account unlocking, user group addition, printer installation, and more. Waiting for a human agent and resolving these issues can be uncertain, ultimately affecting productivity and efficiency.

Generative AI-powered workflows can address these challenges and help provide 24/7 support with zero wait time for your employees.

  • ESM support

Besides HR and IT support, enterprise service management also calls for 24/7 support. It can involve finance, marketing and sales, operations, supply chain, and logistics.

Generative AI-based workflows built with proprietary data related to specific business functions can help your people capture significant information for projects, deals, financial updates, etc. — anytime your employees want it.

Optimize self-service for your employees

Self-service is often limited because it offers solutions for routine tasks using FAQs and predefined conversation templates.

A self-service interface can encompass complicated navigation and UI, hindering users from easily working with modules.

However, a conversational AI platform can simplify user interaction with self-service modules.

While a conversational AI can increase user adoption, embedded workflows designed with Generative AI capabilities help enhance automation for common issues and even complicated problems.

While a typical chatbot offers limited capabilities, Generative AI chatbots can extend automation, improving information search and ensuring information accuracy. As a result, employees feel more confident about relying on Generative AI self-service for 24/7 support with zero wait time.

Deliver personalized recommendations for employees

Your team is diverse, so not all teams can use the same type of processes for their tasks.

They need a variety of tools and technologies. Things can turn drastically unpleasant if these tools become unavailable.

By enabling integrations with company-wide tools and assets, Generative AI can fetch real-time alerts for users and allow them to perform necessary actions to continue to use their preferred tools.

For example, if a marketing manager uses a CRM tool, it needs to be password-protected occasionally for security purposes.

By sending a personalized recommendation to the manager, Generative AI workflow can help him implement password changes in advance and avoid future issues.

Help agents work faster

A report by NBERG claimed that generative AI-based conversational assistants can help improve productivity by 34% in low-skilled and novice agents.

This is quite effective for cases that need expert help.

However, generative AI-built workflows easily eliminate the need to rely upon skilled human agents.

Embedded Generative AI properties can help novice agents retrieve information for questions they lack proper knowledge.

They can handle a situation with recommendations suggested by Generative AI. Not only does this help reduce the dependency on skilled agents, but it also enables novice agents to gain confidence and handle situations independently.

With this regard, Workativ has an agent screen window embedded within its conversational AI platform. It uses generative AI properties to allow agents to get updates about tickets, apply AI suggestions, and leverage data analytics to improve user experience.

Create predictive answers

FAQ-based chatbots are unlikely to create answers independently outside the predefined templates.

But Generative AI has amazing abilities to create new and innovative answers based on chat history, actions taken, and new suggestions.

With the help of natural language understanding, a Generative AI chatbot can generate new answers for unexpected queries.

For example, if a new employee asks, ‘In how many days can I get a day off?

A generative AI solution can draw calculations and suggest an accurate answer by examining data about a new employee who must serve probation. However, filling out a form to learn more about the clauses to apply for a day off in the early days at work can also be recommended.

Get data analytics for chatbot improvements

Fetching data and building a comprehensive report of user interactions is challenging. However, Generative AI can handle vast amounts of data and easily translate that data into actionable insights — designed to reveal which issues are most intimidating for IT or HR support.

Based on the suggestions, IT leaders can build a plan and improve current hurdles to employee support.

This is also one effective way to improve IT assistance and ensure 24/7 employee support.

Workativ and Generative AI to facilitate 24/7 employee support.

Generative AI is undoubtedly the most promising AI innovation for businesses worldwide. Since employee support can maximize generative AI for ultimate transformation, businesses aim to implement LLM-powered chat support for their employees and improve efficiency.

Workativ’s no-code platform makes it easy for industry leaders to leverage generative AI properties and enable hyper-automation for employee support.

Using Knowledge AI, Workativ’s Generative AI tool, IT leaders can immediately benefit from large language models and augment automation for repetitive and mundane workflows.

Its no-code chatbot builder lets users easily implement workflows for common and complicated use cases by enabling the generative AI feature. Working with LLM architecture and deploying your bot does not require a cloud platform or deep learning curve.

Whereas app workflow automation can boost employee self-service, embedded shared live inbox makes handling tickets easy for agents.

With Workativ, agents, and employees can boost their productivity and efficiency while easily resolving common IT problems.

Simultaneously, Workativ is the right tool for companies longing to implement 24/7 support and enable zero wait time to elevate user experience.

It’s no wonder that generative AI is the businesses’ greatest priority to improve employee support and remove human dependency to drive towards zero wait time. If you are interested in driving employee support independent of human agents for common use cases, Workativ can help you.

To learn more about our Generative AI offerings for 24/7 employee support, schedule a demo today.

This story is published under Generative AI Publication.

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CEO & Founder at Workativ | Ex - IBM, Oracle, BT | Entrepreneur & Angel Investor | SaaS |