Facing the challenges of a distributed workforce

Current lockdown conditions are forcing organisations to reconsider the effectiveness of their business continuity plan. Businesses must address how a modern workforce can operate efficiently, as it adopts and adapts to new ways of working for the future.

Prior to the seismic events of recent months, customer service teams predominantly operated as centralised functions, organised and managed into physical teams by discipline or skill.  Team leaders have the role to distribute and track tasks daily, creating a need for coaching or performance encouragement. This key role requires the, often-overlooked, ability of visual observation and a subconscious sense of what is normal.

As businesses transform from this well-understood and structured operational model, to one that is unstructured and disconnected physically, it offers the opportunity to capitalise and tap into the power of artificial intelligence to make decisions irrespective of workforce location.

The Oxford dictionary defines artificial intelligence as:

〝The theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages.〞

At Lokulus, we have created our own AI ‘bots’ to meet the needs and demands for clients across the globe, and now more then ever, they are the essential tool to support this new remote-working world we live in.

Meet REG, our intelligent resourcing bot. REG augments the role of the traditional team leader by understanding at a holistic level both demand and available resources (colleagues), all in real time.

Exploring this concept in more detail, a detailed knowledge of both the demand and resources are required prior to applying the intelligence.  Each task is segmented by work type, method of working, anticipated duration and a relative priority.  For more diverse organisations, this segmentation may be extended to include other factors such as brand or language.  In much the same way that tasks are analysed, colleagues consist of known primary and secondary attributes, coupled with dynamic properties such as most recent activities.

Unlike the traditional task distribution methods undertaken by a human, REG allocates tasks singularly based upon current real time knowledge of the backlog, allowing for the ultimate in flexibility during the working day.  Additional factors such as continual context switching that have been proven to dramatically effect productivity and fatigue are also included within the resourcing algorithms.

Simply put, when a busy organisation is managing many thousands of tasks, REG can consistently analyse every second of every day, and deal with all the possible variables a human cannot.

Aside from optimising your workforce, REG also monitors the performance of the individual, all in real time. REG tracks the effectiveness of each individual, comparing their performance against benchmarks for each task type, overall availability and importantly their qualitative metrics.  Team leaders can then utilise this information by applying their own skills to identify opportunities for improvement.

Now more then ever, business continuity is essential, and thankfully, the right tools are out there to ensure customers are able to access the best service, no matter the sector.

This is the opportune moment to realise the full potential of AI for remote working and integrate into your current systems.