4 Ways WorkplaceBuddy makes a difference

Realizing true continuous and proactive customer engagement.

Microsoft 365 Adoption is relevant and important for today’s working environment: It helps individuals to enjoy their workplace, become more productive, and it helps organizations to utilize their 365 investment and stay relevant. Moreover, the cost of not doing adoption is becoming significantly apparent to employers. What happens if your employees are unsatisfied with the new workplace and don’t know how to make use of it? And how are they going to deal with the ongoing changes that are applied to the Workplace?

At WorkplaceBuddy we understand the importance of 365 adoption. We also see the challenges that adoption support experts have to deal with and the reasons why many adoption engagements fail. The fact is, it’s hard to: be available for everyone at all times, have an approach that works for all digital skill levels, provide interesting learnings that increase user engagement, and maintain support beyond initial implementation sessions; While all the while, adoption still needs to continue.

For these reasons, we have invented WorkplaceBuddy: A 365 Workforce Engagement app in Microsoft Teams to guide team members in a personal, relevant, proactive, and helpful way. We do this by:

1. Workforce (and personal) analysis

WorkplaceBuddy can be found inside Microsoft Teams and upon you opening it, the chatbot will ask to do an interview to get to know you a bit better. The interview takes roughly 5–10 minutes and it investigates what learning scenarios are most relevant to you, what your persona (profile) is, and what your digital readiness level a.k.a. “digital dexterity level” is. For partners, statistics of the entire organization are readily available in the dashboard of WorkplaceBuddy, enabling your adoption team to get a better understanding of the overall situation and the needs of your customer(s).

Also, for WorkplaceBuddy itself this interview (aka “the scan”) is very useful, as this gives the first (but not only!) input for the next step.

2. Personal learning journey

Thanks to the scan and the persona profile it provides (type of workplace user with which you share similarities), WorkplaceBuddy is able to present you a learning journey tailored to your specific needs and interests. This tailoring makes WorkplaceBuddy distinctively more interesting than other learning platforms where you typically have to navigate through a general library of learnings without any catered content for the person. Alas, the journey is not just based on the scan and your persona! Two people with the same persona could have entirely different learning journeys based on specific insights from their interviews, the learnings they specifically choose, or the questions they ask the chatbot!

3. Proactive campaigns

The campaigning part is where WorkplaceBuddy delivers its greatest contribution to increased user engagement and satisfaction. Based on different labels or Office Groups, specific target audiences can be defined inside an organization. With this capability, content drips can be created to deliver preset messages over time to those defined target audiences. This way, audience members can receive messages via Teams notifications based on what interests suits them best. Our best practice is to ask members for permission to receive those messages or a challenge (which contributes to fulfilling a badge!) in an upcoming time period. For example, we could tailor a campaign about security awareness once a week for a month! It turns out that users really appreciate this proactive help because the content is based on their profile and interests, with the possibility to decide for themselves if they want to proceed — and most people do!

4. Answers

Our service is not just an app — it also includes a functional support desk for Microsoft 365 related questions. You can ask a question and it will be answered by our chatbot, or by us (yes, by a human!). Once we have an answer, you will receive a notification. With just this section of WorkplaceBuddy alone, positive business cases are reached for all engagements done through WorkplaceBuddy. Questions that are answered by our chatbot often include an e-learning that can be watched instantly without leaving the app and may also contain a fun gif! With this amazing technology of the 90s, we still clearly contribute to workplace happiness.

This is how we do it! A scan delivered through an interview to get to know you, a personal learning journey to guide you, proactive campaigns to engage you, and a chatbot-helpdesk team to provide answers for you. With WorkplaceBuddy, a 365 support team personally engaging everyone in your organization is established at your company, by simply adding an app in Teams.