Policy and Practice February 2019

technology speaks

By Gaurav Diwan

It’s Time to Chat About Bots: Using Virtual Assistants to Deliver Real Value for Human Services

T he birth of a new baby is a joyous occasion. If the family receives social services, it also requires an important administrative task: registering the newborn. Usually a caseworker helps parents complete paperwork manually. But what if Mom could register her new baby without caseworker intervention, directly from her hospital bed, simply by sending a text message on her mobile phone? This could help assure families of coverage while freeing caseworkers to focus more on people’s holistic needs. Welcome to the world of virtual assistants, also called “chatbots” or, in the example above, “baby bots.” Automate the Mundane No matter our jobs, we all have repetitive tasks that consume time we could be devoting to our “real” work. Human services caseworkers might rightly argue that they have more than their fair share of these tasks—and that their time could be better devoted to higher-value activities more central to their organization’s mission. In fact, if you were to sit down and ask your colleagues for a list of their most frustrating and time-wasting tasks, their responses would likely be both rapid and heartfelt. And if you are contemplating adoption of virtual assis- tants within your organization, that kind of chat is precisely where to start. That’s because virtual assistants are specifically designed to offload the kind of busywork that eats up valuable resources. Virtual assistants combine artificial intelligence (AI), robotic process automation (RPA), voice and text capabilities, and image content

support your clients around the clock, even on holidays, while reducing or eliminating the need for them to visit your office in person. Imagine what it would be like to clear your backlog of applications, slash error rates, and accelerate turnaround. These are indeed exciting possibili- ties. After all, no matter where or how you deploy these tools, you begin to free caseworkers to focus on what really matters: people and outcomes. Where to Begin Suppose you are ready to explore the use of virtual assistants within your organization. How do you get started? Generating ideas is the first step; again, asking your frontline workers to weigh in with a “wish list” is a great way to prioritize. From there, dive in and start experimenting through proofs of concept for your top two or three ideas. See what works well and where you might have opportunities to finetune the tool or the surrounding processes.

analysis to support intuitive, conversa- tional interactions. As illustrated by the “baby bot,” these interactions can be remarkably productive. Virtual assistants can be used to automate data entry or entire workflows, provide caseworkers with a highly interactive and intuitive way to get answers to their most-asked questions, or automate the capture and tracking of helpdesk trouble tickets. Envision What’s Possible While the mere mention of AI makes some people think “job eliminator,” the truth is that virtual assistants can and should be viewed as a job enhancer. These tools have the potential to reshape the way human services organi- zations deliver services—empowering you to spend less time on the mundane, and more time on the mission. I encourage human services leaders to be bold in their thinking about what’s possible with virtual assistants. For example, imagine being able to increase caseworker capacity by 15 to 30 percent. Imagine being able to

See Virtual Assistants on page 35

Illustration by Chris Campbell

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