Meet Engazify, your bot friend in Slack — Making teams happier
Bots, bots everywhere!
Lately I have been reading a lot about bots and how AI powered chat bots are going to be the next big thing in this technological evolution. So let’s just say it, Bots are here to stay. They are and will continue to make life simpler.
When you talk about making life simpler, Slack is the clear winner in workplace communication. You can get so much done by being super collaborative on Slack. That is one simple hack for productive teams.
What do most productive teams fear for — of course, becoming non-productive, duh! And what is that one thing that keeps every team member happy & productive — Appreciation. We all work harder when we know our work is meaningful. Doing a great job and knowing others value your contribution is what makes people happy & super productive.
Why is that important ,
A happy employee creates a repel effect of positivity that drives others to do good work and increases the overall morale of the team.
Giving feedback and appreciating your peers should not be a complicated task. It should not involve sending emails, or keeping a record of everything in excel sheets, or dealing with bulky enterprise solutions, or even worse — only remembering it during the end of the year appraisals. So how can we make it simpler?
We at Engazify are passionate about the idea of Happy Teams. What is that one thing that people love doing everyday — messaging. So why can’t appreciating your peers be as simple as just messaging a friend of yours. How awesome would it be if there was a solution to let people appreciate each other seamlessly and also make it more fun along the way? And that too at a place where they usually hang out, Slack.
So let me introduce you to our creation, Engazify Bot for Slack.
Hello Humans! I’m Engazify
Engazify is a faster and better way to appreciate your teammates, capture all your team wins, and save it for everyone to see. Engazify bot fosters a culture of peer recognition and celebration by gamifying the whole experience.
You can chat with him just like another friend in your team. You can ask questions, give feedback, or just start an interesting conversation. He is very young right now, though he will eventually grow with your guidance and also become smarter as he starts learning more about you.
How does it actually work?
Once Engazify is added to your Slack team, he will ask you to choose certain appreciation keywords (company core values) that you want to drive in your team, let’s say — Kudos, Teamwork, Customer Service, etc. Once that is set, he will keep an eye for these values in your team conversations in all the channels he is invited to. Once it sees that these values have been used to appreciate someone (eg. @brian kudos for fixing the bug), it will swoop in and notify everyone of this recognition. He also maintains a leaderboard to keep a record of all these appreciations & wins by adding an element of gamification to this whole process.
What’s next?
We will be making the bot smarter and more fun in the coming months. He will not only track your team appreciations but also help you set up your own rewards program for the team. And did we talk about awesome Analytics coming soon. Stay tuned for more updates.
We are opening Engazify for a limited number of users. To get an early access to Engazify Bot, go to engazify.com and join the waitlist. To boost yourself up the ladder, share us on twitter @engazify.
Thanks are in order
Engazify bot was just an idea sometime back and it would not have been a reality without the sheer hard work of each and every member of our team. Kudos to Team Engazify who believe in building amazing products that add value in everyone’s lives.
I cannot end this article without thanking few more people, who might not even know how they helped us indirectly to build such an amazing product.
Ben Brown & Howdy— Thanks for creating BotKit and showing the way to rest of the developer community that building bots is not Rocket Science. Without your help, we would not have been here. Wish you all the luck with Howdy.
Amir Shevat & the whole Slack Team — Your support was very vital in this process. First of all thanks for creating such an amazing platform where everyone loves to hang out and get work done. And then on top of it, being very supportive and open to helping developers build amazing bots on Slack. The knowledge base that you share on a regular basis are the keystone for every developer planning to build a bot of their own.
Feedback Most Welcome
If you do give Engazify a try — make sure to leave us a feedback. It will help us immensely to improve the product & experience for you guys. Tweet us directly @engazify on twitter.
P.S. This blog was originally published here.
Siddharth Shekhawat is the Founder of Engazify, a performance management bot which facilitates real-time employee feedback and appreciation within organizations. With artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities built right into it, Engazify helps Managers & HR make sense of their employee performance data and gather actionable insights and trends.