Mike HeapMike is an experienced Product Manager who focuses on all the “non-development” areas of My AskAI, from finance and customer success to product design, copywriting, testing and more.
Created time
Oct 4, 2023 08:03 AM
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Publish date
Sep 7, 2023
Slug
faversham-house-using-my-askai-to-train-managers
Featured
Featured
Type
Case study
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Ready to Publish
Faversham House uses My AskAI to help coach their managers so they can get the best out of their people
- Faversham House runs exhibitions, events and publishes content for businesses and professionals in the utilities and sustainability space.
- They believe great managers are one of the key pillars to developing and motivating their people, but that traditional training resources can be difficult to consume.
- By creating a My AskAI with their management toolkit, managers are able to get tailored answers to their questions, utilizing the knowledge of a professional business coach, Phil.
- They now want to roll AskAI to their clients, so their sales team can focus on what they do best - selling.
What does Faversham House do?
Faversham House is a business and professional media and events company based in the UK. They are trusted by thousands of professionals to deliver high-quality insights, enabling better business decisions.
They create digital platforms, host exhibitions, round tables, and events, and produce publications, primarily operating in 2 markets: utilities and sustainability.
If nobody reads a handbook, does it impart any wisdom?
Like any good business, Faversham House has extensive documentation for their employees, used for onboarding and training that has been created and refined over many years.
Employees know these resources are useful, they know they contain most of the answers they need, but when confronted with the prospect of reading through all of it to try and find the right answer and then figure out how to apply the wisdom to their specific situation, they quickly lose interest.
We all sign off something to say we have read our employee handbook, but how many of us actually have…
So in the end you ask someone (probably a long-standing employee who is the fountain of all company knowledge), who gets frustrated at answering the same questions over and over or you just guess and hope that you and the person who wrote the guide, process or documentation are somehow psychically intune.
My AskAI giving Carl a hand(book)
With a keen interest in applications of AI, Carl discovered My AskAI and immediately started coming up with applications for it in the business.
He started off by creating an AskAI using the 70-page staff handbook and making it available to all by embedding it in the company’s Sharepoint, he even added a custom message with a link to the handbook for when answers couldn’t be found so users never had a dead end.
But then he realized a more powerful application - training their managers.
Faversham House is lucky enough to have an expert business and management coach in their Non-Executive Director, Phil. He had already produced extensive resources and material detailing proven techniques to help their managers develop, so they could get the best from their people.
And so the idea of “Ask Phil” was born.
Time to Ask Phil
Carl added the entirety of the management toolkit so that instead of having to read through pages of daunting guides, employees could directly ask questions to their My AskAI, framing problems in their own way and getting specific, tailored advice, relevant to their situation.
“Ask Phil” also now sits in their Sharepoint, ready and waiting to help their managers develop, using all of Phil’s wisdom.
Since adopting AskAI, many staff questions have been fielded by their AskAIs and feedback from staff has been incredibly positive.
“No-one has a bad word to say about it and even Phil (the human one) is now thinking about how he can use it for his coaching business!”
What next?
After Carl’s 1st experiments with AskAI he is keen to use it more extensively within his business by integrating it directly within Microsoft Teams with the official My AskAI Teams app.
But the real prize is still to come - creating an AskAI exhibitor manual that can be used by clients.
Whenever conference time comes around, the sales team at Faversham House finds themselves fielding hundreds of queries from exhibitors, with the majority of queries answerable from the detailed exhibitor manual, using AskAI here could be a big time-saver and take a lot of the heat from the sales team, freeing them up to focus on filling booths.
We can’t wait to see all the other innovative ways Carl and Faversham House look to use My AskAI in the future!
