If you’ve stopped by our blog lately, you’ll find other posts about how we’ve adapted to the COVID pandemic. Thankfully, our team is safe, healthy and working hard from the comfort of their homes. We’re in good spirits and remembering to laugh, with a few kids and the occasional pet joining in on Zoom calls!
As a startup (proudly based in St. Louis), we’re doing our part to help people navigate these times through the launch of our free coronavirus bot. Designed to help organizations get critical information to team members, you can deploy our bot on your site with a simple code snippet.
Recently, one of our advisors asked: “How do you envision Capacity positioned for a post-COVID world?” After some discussion, we decided to take this opportunity to share some insight on the trends we’re seeing and how we’re uniquely positioned to adapt.
MORE: Work from home.
For some, working from home is nothing new. For others, it’s quite the adjustment. And while many of us are hoping to get back to the office this summer, a fundamental shift has occurred. The ability to be as productive at home as in the office was once considered a superpower.
Now it is an expectation.
Meaning, companies need to empower teams to do their best work remotely. Working from home is becoming the new normal—and a permanent transition for many. Companies need digital tools like Capacity to aid in this transition and provide instant access to crucial data and tacit knowledge.
LESS: Barriers between desktop and mobile.
In most organizations, getting product or service support (as a customer or a team member) is a point of contention. More often than it should, it becomes a major detractor to the overall experience.
Even companies with great desktop support quickly devolve into a nightmare of menu navigation and illegible info when the conversation goes mobile.
In the 21st century, there’s no excuse for a bad mobile experience.
In a post-COVID world, everyone’s screen time is up (and not solely from Tiger King). Verticals like Fintech are seeing a 72% increase in usage. With smartphones becoming the main medium, customers won’t tolerate a subpar mobile support experience.
Capacity’s Concierge helps teams and clients get instant answers to the questions that matter most—no matter if they are on desktop or mobile.
MORE: Use of digital communication tools.
At Capacity, we’ve been advocates of digital communication tools like Slack and Zoom long before the coronavirus broke out. In a matter of weeks, millions around the world have embraced these technologies for the first time.
To ensure uninterrupted collaboration, Capacity is already integrated with Slack, Microsoft Teams, Symphony, and RingCentral.
We also want to make deploying Capacity completely frictionless, so we’ve rolled out our own Capacity Concierge to place on your website or intranet. With a simple code snippet, your team can access 24/7 level-0 support without even installing an app.
MORE: Need for support.
With unprecedented changes in workflow and consumer needs, teams and clients alike need support more than ever. Organizations in every industry are seeing massive spikes in customer support.
In some extreme cases, wait times to speak with customer support agents exceeded 7 hours or more, driving more call centers to employ AI to balance the workload.
MORE: Level-0 support via bots.
In the current (and rapidly evolving) economic climate, companies can’t afford to deliver a bad customer or employee experience. But companies also can’t afford to have trained staff answering the same questions over and over again.
MORE: Automation.
In addition to reducing the cost of level-0 inquiries, the cost of repetitive tasks must be also be addressed (while maintaining compliance and reducing errors). Automation is going to drive a huge increase in productivity as companies augment skilled teams with intelligent solutions.
What can be automated, likely will. Bots are ready to take on an ever-expanding range of tasks that free up teams to focus on higher ROI activities.
To be blunt, the time needed for the economy to fully recover is anyone’s guess. But without a doubt, companies are going to inevitably need to do more with less. This means reducing the use of skilled teams for level-0 support—and liberating employees for work that requires emotional intelligence and creativity.
LESS: Certainty.
When certainty goes down, communication must go up. Capacity helps companies in two distinct ways. The first is instantly answering inbound questions from team members and customers.
Through chat, Capacity can search your applications, documents, and spreadsheets for the knowledge users need.
But the second may be slightly less obvious. That is, Capacity helps companies understand where communication is falling short. In this way, think of Capacity as the ultimate form of analytics—empowering organizations with a better understanding of their employees’ and customers’ pain points.
LESS: Tolerance for black-box AI.
COVID-19 has accelerated the coexistence of bots and people working together. Which in turn, means people have less tolerance for systems they don’t understand. In fact, an ethical approach to AI is even more important than ever. That’s why we’ve committed to Seven Guiding Principles for delivering ethical AI.
MORE: Economic distancing.
While everyone has talked about social distancing—the physical separation of groups of people—we haven’t talked about economic distancing: the financial separation of companies that adopt these technologies from those that don’t.
Simply put, organizations that don’t embrace the trends listed above will become economically distanced from orgs that do.
Summary.
The proliferation of remote work and AI-assisted productivity are not fads. These trends represent the new normal, and organizations around the world are pivoting accordingly.
Capacity is poised to thrive under these changing conditions. Our mission is to help teams do their best work, and there’s never been a more important time for us to help our customers navigate through a post-COVID world.