Outdated Traditional Staffing Plans
Traditional staffing plans are limited. In a traditional staffing plan, humans are forced to do repetitive tasks which can cause limitations to what brands can accomplish throughout a specific time period. Creating an optimal staffing plan calls for more than just making sure you have the right headcount to meet operational needs. It requires having the necessary tools in place to provide a way to focus on the scalability of how much can be accomplished in a certain amount of time.
Most businesses don’t take into consideration the amount of time and how costly training each new employee is. According to Training Magazine’s 2020 Training Industry Report, customer service training is the most costly, followed by industry-specific training, IT/Systems training, and mandatory compliance training. The average company in the U.S. spent $1,111 per employee last year on training costs and spent 55.4 hours providing the training. A traditional staffing plan can also cause inconsistency in the delivery of brand knowledge. With the amount of training being done across the year, it’s very unlikely that staff is being given the same knowledge year-round. Lastly, traditional staffing leaves you in the position of being unavailable to consumers at any given moment, because humans can only accomplish so much during a workday.
Technology-First Staffing Plan
As times evolve, so must our way of thinking. Organizations need to shift their mindset to a technology-first staffing plan. The problem across most organizations is that they look at certain technology, such as conversational search and AI-chat, as a “nice-to-have” or as part of their innovation strategy. Instead, they need to shift their focus and view it for what it has ultimately become; an expectation. New conversational technologies have been increasing slowly in popularity as consumers looked to interact more personally with their favorite brands. However, Covid accelerated the desire, expectation, and adoption of contactless services and conversational technology. This technology must be removed from the innovation budget and moved appropriately to the operational budget. Technology-first staffing plans allow for implementations that can absorb, mimic or supplement human resources.
In-Depth Technological Solution
When an organization lumps conversational technology into their innovation strategy budget as opposed to their operation budget, they’re essentially limiting themselves until these applications become mass-market needs like HubSpot or Salesforce. While great assets, these tools are simply helpful in ensuring staff can focus on overall strategies for singular tasks. When adopted, technology such as conversational AI and chat can be a part of the staffing mix. This tech can help maximize staff; when surveyed, 64% of brands utilizing AI chatbots say employees are able to spend most of their time solving complex problems. Conversational AI allows for scalable branding, which allows brands to meet their consumers on their preferred channel that they’re already engaged within their daily lives. Brands can also discover in-depth consumer insights and automate communication to deliver an enriched consumer experience.
With conversational AI, technology can take on the heavy lifting that goes with customer support. An organization would benefit from an AI-powered assistant answering repetitive food & beverages questions, giving mobile ticket support, or telling someone where they can park rather than using up precious staff hours. "Conversational AI technology should be deployed to fill gaps on an organization chart that humans are unable to fill, not step in front of a human who is too busy," says Satisfi Labs CEO Don White in a recent interview. With this tech in place, brands allocate more time for their traditional employees to shift their focus to more meaningful work that increases productivity and generates greater revenue.
A Shift In The Consumer Market
Consumers are more demanding than we’ve ever seen, and they’re constantly asking questions in search of effortless engagement experiences that are tailored specifically for them. Humans by themselves, can’t keep up with the increasing volume in demand or offer scalable always on-brand answers, and 85% of buyers prefer to ask questions before making a purchase decision. Conversational AI allows consumers to have personalized one-of-a-kind interactions with brands. In turn, it improves conversions and revenue growth, because consumers gain access to information that can influence their visitation and purchase decisions in a timely manner. In fact, 47% of consumers are comfortable making a purchase from a chatbot. And thanks to zero-party data insights, brands can use what they discover directly from consumers to optimize their marketing campaigns.
Consumers want quick, customized experiences, and traditional staffing plans can only offer so much to meet those wants. However, on the flip side, when organizations can leverage technology with their full brand knowledge, they put themselves in a better position to solve for the limitations set by traditional staff. Implementing conversational AI, and recognizing it as a vital piece to your staffing plan, is an effective way to address this issue and bridge the gap. It creates an engaging experience for consumers and allows organizations to better maximize their staff.
With a team of expert AI-powered Assistants, the Answer Engine powered by Satisfi Labs aligns chat and voice Assistants to jobs that are done by humans. Request a demo to experience Satisfi Labs’ conversational AI and learn how expert AI-powered Assistants can save staff hours and drive more revenue for your organization today.