With governments implementing various phased plans for re-opening, company leaders must carefully evaluate how to bring employees back to work and customers into stores. Masks, social distancing, and other procedures are being implemented to help keep everyone healthy and protect us as we all get back to work.
“With the global pandemic complicating even the most basic business interactions, companies need to find ways of managing new requirements without exhausting employees and other resources.”
The Challenge
In Massachusetts, for example, workers must be reminded that they should not come into work if they are sick. Each worker must be screened for each shift to ensure they do not have a fever, cough, shortness of breath or a sore throat. They also cannot have had close contact with someone who has tested positive for COVID-19. Many of these rules extend to customers visiting businesses as well. With the global pandemic complicating even the most basic business interactions, companies need to find ways of managing new requirements without exhausting employees and other resources.
Activities like daily symptom checks can add even more work to the plates of managers already swimming in new COVID-19 tasks and regulations. Checking in and assessing every employee coming in to work doesn’t have to be a manual job, however. Modern automation and self-service is the solution to getting back to work safely while maintaining new coronavirus regulations.
The Solution
For businesses to open again and safely reintroduce employees and customers to their workplaces efficiently, modern technology must be a core part of the plan. Today’s AI, automation, and self-service technology is perfect for the repetitive tasks needed to adapt to COVID-19 at the scale needed for major businesses. Every industry could leverage self-service messaging, self-assessments, and other digital tools to great benefit.
Proactive daily symptom assessments pushed to employees via text or email help keep your workforce safe during COVID-19. These automated solutions leverage end-to-end automation to keep the employee assessment process fast and simple for all involved. Business leaders can utilize modern Robotic Process Automation (RPA) solutions to process employee schedules and send automated text and email messages to the appropriate employees at exactly the right time. Employees then complete assessments on their devices, and management can be immediately notified of any assessment failures while employees and visitors who pass are granted easy access to a certificate of completion tagged for each individual workday.
Businesses like AirBnB hosts that already interact with customers via robust digital channels can further adapt by delivering updates, stay guidelines, and COVID-19 information via automated digital messaging. These businesses must now schedule visits in great detail, conveying a lot of dense, medically-focused information to customers while also making sure they arrive with the proper protection, including face masks.
SMS messagesand emails don’t get lost like paper fliers left in rental units. Hosts also benefit from knowing guests received all the proper information as they don’t have to worry about whether or not previous guests took posted fliers from the unit, and can implement read receipts to check whether or not guests have seen the messages sent to them.
Other businesses needing to precisely schedule customer time at locations can benefit from self-service solutions. Gyms, for example, must schedule multiple visitors at coordinated times. With smart forms integrated into proactive messages or embedded in websites and digital channels, gyms can simultaneously schedule appointments with up-to-the-second data from integrated backend databases, while also asking members to specify which equipment they’ll be using during their stay. This self-service frees up staff to have more time to focus on more time-consuming COVID-19 cleaning routines while also allowing staff to properly rotate equipment depending on what the next visitor might need.
Moving Forward
COVID-19 has changed everyone’s priorities. Today’s businesses should prioritize digital self-service as a critical piece of their coronavirus adaptation plans. Modern solutions likeVisual IVRand other automated self-service solutions are delivering a great response for businesses in every sector trying to adapt to the pandemic. Business leaders are slowly regaining control by letting modern automation handle repetitive, time-consuming tasks and letting their employees focus on more complex, important tasks. The pandemic has been a huge shift in business, but smart managers and executives are implementing the technology needed to smoothly and quickly get things rolling again.
