🏂🏿 🤘🏽 〽️ Assistant or inspector: for whom is the robot calling? ☪️ 🤤 👨‍💻

Hello, Habr! I am the team leader for product innovation at CROC. You can call me a techie a stretch, but I talk a lot with developers, technical managers, and sales people. And I hope we understand each other well. We work a lot with startups, we help them with the scaling of sales, including through the accelerator. But now is not about that. Suddenly, it happened that we and many of our customers had to quickly change their plans and look for new forms of cooperation. Yes, it’s all because of the virus. I’ll tell you what tool we came up with to make the transition to a remote site painless and effective.

Spring 2020. Offline banned, people sit at home, but work is still necessary. And also - to check, stimulate and encourage employees. But even if your boss is Many-armed Shiva, he is unlikely to have enough limbs to keep everyone on the pulse. It is impossible to be both a boss, an assistant, and sometimes a psychologist for a large team. And why not, ”Infobot and I decided and made a secretary robot, a motivational robot, a robot tracker! In general, call it what you want, but it's really all about him.

How did we come up with this?

Deleted! How much in this word for office workers merged! In dreams, self-isolation looked idyllic: woke up without an alarm clock, did exercises on the balcony and sat down in a favorite armchair in front of a computer with a cup of morning coffee. However, often the realization that demons are hiding in their own apartment no less than in the previously damned office comes quickly.

As a result, the deadlines either hang on a string or already fall into the abyss, KPI rips off the baseboard in the apartment to settle under it. The soul of the "white-collar worker", herself surprised at this, begins to demand, if not a kick, then at least a confident use of soft power.

Startups, whose programmers, designers and marketers are scattered around the world, are of course more accustomed to working on a remote site. It is more difficult for large companies with a staff of several hundred, or even thousands of employees. Outside the office, horizontal communications and direct contacts with managers quickly collapse.

If the organization has dozens of departments with different specifics, it is impossible to come up with a universal tool for evaluating effectiveness. This problem is typical for banks, FMCG and IT companies. After the quarantine was announced, they were not ready for such a sharp transition. It was necessary to automate the functions of managers in order to save them from daily routine inspections and free up time for the development of projects.

What can a robot do?

Suppose a team has monthly KPIs that they must fulfill. Sales people need to attract hundreds of new customers. And so the whole department plows “from bell to bell”, but in the end the plan was still not fulfilled. They begin to understand, it turns out that employees are too often distracted by the routine - maintaining existing users.

In order to keep personnel in good shape daily, motivation alone is not enough. A tool is needed that will prioritize and direct the team's efforts in the right direction. In the morning, our robot is usually interested in plans for the day. It can ring up to 200 people per minute. The program generates answers in the text and sends to the chat. And in the evening he asks the feedback: "What did you manage to do today?" If the answer does not cover the plan, the bot will clarify what were the obstacles and how to overcome them tomorrow.

Notifications in telegrams on the results of the work of

Employees who overfulfill the plan, the robot on the contrary - praises in the general chat. In addition to the banal “great job!”, There is the option “baby, you're just space!”. And after a successful sprint before the weekend, the robot with the CEO’s voice can call employees with the words “Relax so that on Monday you would like to start work again”.

Employees are also well motivated by simple signs of attention: a robot can wish you a happy birthday or ask about your well-being.

What problems does the robot solve?

Interfering with the work of employees on a remote site can be internal (subjective) and external (objective) reasons. They need to be considered in a complex, because often one follows from the other. For example, the robot receives the following answer: “I phoned 15 customers already, but none of them wanted to test a new product. I'm afraid that at such a pace we will get into their “black list”. Immediately make a reservation that such frankness is already a plus to the karma of the whole team, this allows us to identify problems at the initial stage.

It may seem that the matter is the employee’s insecurity in his abilities. Perhaps this is so, and perhaps the team has been testing its hypotheses on the same audience for a week and, instead of being interested, receives a solid negative. So, it’s worth changing something: either a proposal, or Central Asia. The hypothesis is unlikely to be confirmed, because it originally had a mistake.

Thus, almost online team lead can adjust the strategy for achieving KPI, redistribute responsibilities in the team and analyze the results. Based on the polls, the robot generates a table that reflects the percentage of completion of the plan for each employee and the team as a whole, which they most often complained about. At the request of the customer, the analytics is sent either to the general chat, or only to the management.

Employee Responses in Report

Is it possible to "chat" the robot?

The robot has not yet learned how to control how honest the respondents are in their answers. Inveterate freeloaders will look for the opportunity to take off from work in any form both in the office and in the remote. However, tricks will sooner or later be revealed: either colleagues will notice, or clients will complain.

Nevertheless, the robot is not designed to identify the “weak link”, but to help employees work more efficiently. Now we have inquiries from large companies, where it is difficult to trace not only the KPI of one employee, but entire departments. The data collected by the program allows you to optimize their work, managers begin to better understand what the team has done to complete a specific business task.

And one more thing - the robot is devoid of emotions and empathy. Therefore, talking about your efforts in detail is useless. The result is important to him. From the process description, the program will still return to the final assessment: “Thank you for your zeal and perseverance, but what happened in the end?”

Yes, to talk heart to heart, to gossip with the robot also does not work. But this is probably for the best - so as not to be distracted once again. Conflict situations do not arise, because why quarrel with the machine, it still does not solve anything, it works according to the algorithm. So she does not have malicious intent. Therefore, they often trust the robot even more than their colleagues on the other end of the wire.

Is the robot always right?

It recognizes the robot using Yandex Speech Kit, and works with text based on NLP / NLU technologies Infobot , which is trained on telephone conversations. She filters out parasite words and reveals the essence based on context. Compared to text questionnaires and reports, where an employee needs to read questions and then write answers, voice communication with a robot takes 2-3 times less time.

Speech recognition accuracy - up to 90%. The dialogue system, also created by Infobot, verifies the response. The program already has 50 million calls, and we constantly upgrade its communication skills.

If the answer is not clear - the respondent indistinctly formulated it, or the connection jams - the robot asks again. Usually enough once. But stalemate situations also happen when it is not possible to “agree” with the program. Then she will ask you to send information in writing or switch the call to the manager. Finally, the results of the conversation are available to employees, so if they find a mistake in them, they can turn to the management and correct the data.

How to install and what after quarantine?

Team management in companies, of course, has common features, but still there are features for everyone. Therefore, first, we analyze in detail with the heads of departments their scheme: how communication and reporting are built, what cases they tried to apply, what worked and what didn't. And most importantly, what kind of result they want to achieve. Together, we clarify the bottlenecks that the robot can close. But we warn customers that our tool is an assistant, not another employee. If the team is already working at the limit, doubling it KPI without expanding the staff will certainly not work.

You can start the robot the very next day after the consultation. In the process, we specify the questionnaire, add functionality: alerts about company news, current team results and prospects.

Infobot script editor

Now all our customers use the cloud version of the assistant robot. Companies themselves can adjust the frequency of calls and update the list of respondents. If you need to change scripts, the manager turns to us, and we do this within 24 hours. So far, such a time frame suits everyone. There is an option to purchase a license and manage the program manually. For example, reformat the robot to receive calls from employees with reports, or complaints.

Unfortunately, apparently, the full format of the company’s work will not come back soon. We are all waiting for the reverse transition period, when we have to get used to the office again. And in this, our tool will also become an assistant: the reporting form will already be debugged, and the opportunity to notify the entire department about reschedule the meeting in a minute, or to remind you of the next corporate hackathon, will definitely not be superfluous.

Leave questions and suggestions for our program in the comments. I will answer them - I'm not a robot. And if you want to ask something privately, write to EMelkova@croc.ru.