When you manage a learning management system for multiple audiences inside and outside your company, things can get complicated — and no matter how user-friendly we make our software, our users must still point and click their way to the resources they need.
Your learners and their managers want a simple, user-friendly experience. When they don’t get it, they want help — right now. When it gets to be too much of a pain, they call you, your support staff, or your support vendor.
It can take twenty minutes or more for a staff member to refocus after a five-minutes support call.
If you outsource user support, it can eat up your budget. Support services can cost up to $55 per hour for each support agent, depending on your location. And how much time do you spend managing support vendor services? How much do you spend on support when it’s not being used?
Are robots the answer to LMS user support?
Having virtual personal assistants that cater to our every whim is still in the future, but today we have cyber-assistants that can do many of the routine tasks that can take us away from critical work.
Cognitive computing can now be embedded in the systems and software we use in every aspect of our lives and is rapidly coming to our business software systems, using natural language processing to respond to typed or spoken commands and act as virtual assistants.
But before you hire a robot, you need to know what it can and can’t do for you. If you have had the same struggles we have with Alexa, Cortana, and Google Home, you know what we are talking about.
Right now, chatbots can do this for you:
- Handle troublesome but straightforward tasks like resetting a password — if you have defined the procedure.
- Find any training resource in your catalog or on your intranet — if you have indexed the content.
- Provide alerts and notifications you specify, like upcoming training and tasks. It can’t yet decide what you do and don’t want to be notified about.
- Suggest the next best training course in an individual learner’s development path – if you have trained it to know your development path structure and the individual’s training history.
- Search the Internet for a video course on active listening. The first time, you will get a much longer list than you want, but over time it will become more accurate.
Some LMS vendors are already working on developing virtual personal assistants for their products, but it may be some time before they are universally available. Many small technology innovators have already developed these virtual assistants and can deploy them in your software right now, and they will help you teach your chatbots what they need to know.
Seize The AI Opportunity
We hope we have given you a realistic idea of what chatbots and textbots can do for you right now and what they will do for you in the near future. Now that the technology is available, the hard work of adapting cognitive intelligence to our processes is well underway. Getting in on the ground floor now, you can get substantial cost savings, reduce your administrative overhead, and improve your learner experience.
Chasma Place, is an independent source for solutions that will help you keep pace with changes in the way your people work without ripping and replacing your existing systems.