Microsoft Viva + Beezy: Employee experience superpowers (Part 2)

In yesterday’s blog article, I talked about some of the reasons why we’re excited about Microsoft Viva’s potential in terms of the employee experience journey. Now, I’m going to delve a bit more into how and why Viva and Beezy work together, with an example so you can start to see the potential.

Viva and Beezy: Better together

I know. The whole ‘better together’ story can sound a bit like marketing BS, but hear me out. Ten years ago, we made a decision to create Beezy inside a platform, rather than as an autonomous cloud product. When we launched Beezy, we were SharePoint specialists (pre-Beezy, we ran an IT services consultancy dedicated to helping SharePoint customers navigate the platform), so it was easy to pick up Microsoft as our core technology.

Most importantly, we believed we could only fully achieve our vision if we leveraged a platform. Microsoft was the perfect partner to deliver the employee experience we’d already envisioned. Today, we’re the market player whose technology is more entrenched in Microsoft 365 than any other. With Viva, we’re excited for the organizations we work with as we move forward together as part of this new category. Let’s take a look at one simple example of the potential.

The power of the AI chatbot

A couple of years ago, we invested in our bot technology. It’s something we’re going to be talking about more over the coming weeks, too.

I’ve talked about the many upsides to bot technology in a previous post about the Beezy Bot, but that was pre-COVID. The world of work today is a different place, it’s constantly evolving, and I see even more need for organizations (especially large enterprises spread across locations and countries) to adopt these kinds of tools.

Just as they do in customer service situations, people in a work environment want answers and information at the tips of their fingers. An AI chatbot provides that, and it frees employees to focus on higher-value tasks.

If you consider the role of bot technology in the context of a digital workplace, it makes sense. Just think about the amount of apps, files, and tools employees are using to get their work done. Intelligent technologies can help tackle this maze of information.

The Beezy Bot today

The Beezy Bot can do multiple things for end users. One of them is to easily find expertise within a large organization. Any employee can access the Beezy Bot and ask: “Who knows about [topic X]?” and instantly get suggestions of colleagues with that skill or expertise.
Our bot knows this because we’ve developed features that let employees tag colleagues to indicate that they know about certain topics.

We also implemented a social endorsement system (à la LinkedIn) to make sure that when someone says they know about something, their network of colleagues can vet that expertise. The social component is very important here.

Here’s an example showing the power of Beezy’s bot technology today, recommending experts based on social endorsements

Plugging into AI, with Viva Topics

The bot capabilities are exciting because they can drive faster connections between people. Now, as we look to plug into the AI capabilities in Viva Topics, and organize information based on experts, topics, and content, you can start to see how Beezy can take things to another level.

Here’s how we can add a new layer of AI (provided by Viva Topics) to our expertise recommendations

This is just one example of why we’re excited about Viva. We’re working on integrations that will take employee experience to new heights.

Read part 1 of this blog to learn more about how Viva and Beezy work together to improve your employee experience.

You can also check out this recap from our March 4 event with Digital Workplace Group – Microsoft 365: Using Beezy to create and optimized EX with Teams, Viva + 3rd party integrations.