29 Nov
From Hire to retire - How chatbots can automate employee engagement
By 2022, 70% of white-collar workers will interact with conversational platforms on a daily basis.
~ Gartner
Over the past year, amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, the business landscape has transformed completely to herald the emergence of the “new normal” of work. As the world went digital and employees shifted to remote locations, they struggled with connectivity, information discovery, and a host of HR issues.
Business leaders soon realized that designing the new-age employee experience, wherein employees could access meaningful, relevant, and contextual information seamlessly, required the coming together of human and digital components.
Soon, organizations globally started implementing AI-powered chatbots to emulate human support and enable remote employees to retrieve information, automate routine tasks, and find answers to frequently asked questions.
Indeed, chatbots can create compelling benefits for employees and generate enterprise value. Such bots leverage artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing to automate employee engagement. They operate 24X7 and can handle hundreds of employee requests simultaneously.
As chatbot adoption rises, enterprises have started deploying specialized chatbots for each function or department, including HR, IT, business intelligence, and the intranet. Consequently, employees have to adjust to the varying conversation styles and remember the diverse capabilities of different chatbots.
What if a single chatbot could take care of all your needs and provide consistent employee engagement, right from hiring and up until the employee exits the organization?
Let’s explore.
Automating Employee Engagement from Hire to Retire with an Aggregator Bot
As discussed above, with the growing demand for chatbots, enterprises have started deploying separate bots for each of their unique business cases, including HR, IT, business intelligence, CRM, intranet, and much more. The presence of multiple employee-facing chatbots not only requires employees to adapt to different conversational interfaces, but they will also have to constantly switch bots to retrieve function-specific information and accomplish different tasks, leading to a drop in productivity.
How can organizations counter the obstacles that arise due to the fragmentation of chatbots across departments/use cases?
The solution lies in building and deploying an aggregator bot— a centralized chatbot that links individual function-specific bots together.
On receiving input from the employee, the aggregator bot checks their permission levels and passes on the request to the specialized bot. This specialized bot quickly assesses the access level of the employee and responds suitably.
An aggregator bot improves employee productivity and satisfaction by eliminating the need to interact with multiple bots. So, for instance, if an organization has unified the three different chatbots for HR, IT, and the intranet, employees can raise an IT ticket, request salary slips, and access information from the intranet within a single conversational interface.
Learn More: Bots: Why Should Enterprises Bet On Them?
Hence, an aggregator bot offers organizations the following benefits —
- Reduces costs of building, deploying, maintaining, and expanding the organization’s bot ecosystem
- A single chatbot persona improves employee efficiency and satisfaction.
- Bot developers can study user interactions to recognize single matched intents, multiple matches, and unmatched intents.
- Training an aggregator bot automatically trains all linked bots as well.
- The aggregator bot recognizes user intent and engages the specialized linked bot to perform the task.
AI-enabled chatbots - Making engagement easier throughout the employee life-cycle
92% of HR teams agree that chatbots will be important in directing employees toward finding the information they need in the future.
An employee life cycle describes the journey of the employee with the organization. Before delving deeper into how chatbots help employees progress smoothly through each of these stages, let’s first understand what all employee-facing chatbots can do for your organization.
4 Ways AI-enabled chatbots make life easier for your hybrid workforce
- Answer employee queries instantly. For example, how can I reset my password?
- Fetch information quickly—for example, project files, HR policy documents, FAQ pages, business KPIs, etc.
- Perform tasks. For example, schedule a meeting, generate IT tickets, etc.
- Send personalized alerts—for example, IT outage, scheduled downtime, HR policy updates, etc.
From Recruitment to Offboarding: Aggregator Chatbot Use Cases
A single aggregator bot can take care of all your employee needs— right from hiring up until offboarding. Let’s explore the aggregator chatbot use cases in each of these stages.
1. Recruitment
- Parse resumes uploaded onto recruitment portals.
- Screen and filter applicants
- Schedule interviews with potential candidates
- Answer candidate queries
- Send updates about the status of the application
- Record feedback from the candidates about the recruitment process to gain insights
Use Case Example
Mandy has applied for the post of finance manager in XYZ Corporation and is sent a text by Xon, XYZ’s aggregator bot.
Xon: Hello, Mandy. I am Xon from XYZ Corp. I am reaching out to you in response to your application for the position of Finance Manager.
Xon: We see that your skill sets and experience match what is required for the role. Should I go ahead and set up an interview for you with our GM-Finance.
Mandy: Sure. Thanks, Xon!
Xon: Thank you, Mandy. Would November 5, 2021, 3 pm work for you?
Mandy: Umm…I have been working remotely from my hometown since the COVID-19 pandemic started. I still don’t feel safe to step out. Will I be required to travel to your HQ location?
Xon: I see you are based out of Los Angeles. Hence, we can set up the interview over Skype. Is that okay?
Mandy: That would be great. Thank you.
Xon: You are welcome. I have sent you a calendar invite for the interview. Please acknowledge the same.
Mandy: Sure.
2. Onboarding
- Collect and record document proofs, such as KYC forms, tax forms, previous salary slips, legal documents, etc.
- Automate the sharing of standard operating procedures, company policies, company overview documents and videos, organizational vision, and information regarding teams, key contacts, roles, etc.
- Simplify and automate IT onboarding processes, such as allocation of laptops, setting up of email accounts, etc.
Use Case Example
Mandy cleared the interview and was offered the job. She reached out to Xon again
Xon: Hello, Mandy. This is Xon. Congratulations on the offer. Welcome aboard.
Mandy: Thank you very much, Xon.
Xon: Before we begin with the onboarding formalities, do you have any questions?
Mandy: Could you send me some company-related information I can get familiarized with over my email?
Xon: Sure. Sending you the company overview video over email.
Mandy: Thank you, Xon.
Xon: You are welcome. Now, as part of the onboarding process, please send the following documents to humanresources@xyzcorp.com:
- A Government-approved identification document
- Last three payslips from your previous employer
- Bank account details
3. Retention and Engagement
Enabling employee self-service, automating mundane tasks, answering queries, and providing the required information through 1) IT chatbots, 2) HR bots, 3) Business intelligence chatbot, and 4) Intranet chatbot.
IT Chatbots:
- Manage service disruptions, initiate upgrades, and start remediation workflows.
- Answer standard IT queries, e.g., “How to connect to VPN?”
- Send outage alerts, wipe off stolen devices, and issue asset requests.
- Send personalized alerts on the status of IT requests
- Escalate the request to a human agent in case of a complex query.
Benefits: faster resolution times, improved incident management, better security, and higher employee productivity
HR Chatbots:
- Provide answers to simple, repetitive queries, such as leave balance, salary, income tax, vacation days, etc.
- Enable employees to apply for leave, book business travel (flights and hotels), etc.
- Send personalized notifications about rewards, holidays, and company policies.
- Facilitate learning by recommending learning material, sending reminders on pending courses, fixing coach appointments, etc.
Benefits: access information instantly, reduce cost-per-contact, engage employees with the latest HR updates
Business intelligence bots:
- Fetch relevant data from the BI app via text or rich multimedia (graphs, images, and dashboard screenshots). For example, “What were the sales of Product A in Q2-19?
- Send BI reports to the employee’s email id or through enterprise messaging apps (Teams, Slack, Skype, etc.).
Benefits: get valuable insights to the employees’ fingertips, ensure speedy decision-making
Intranet chatbot:
- Retrieve files, documents, and information content from organization-wide apps and tools.
- Get personalized, contextual, and meaningful alerts, content recommendations, and search results from enterprise-wide tools and apps.
Benefits: facilitates knowledge discovery, personalizes employee engagement.
4. Offboarding Management
- Offers quick resolutions to queries, such as leave balance, taxes, duration of the notice period, etc.
- Sends notifications and alerts on the last day of employment basis the notice period, settlements on pending invoices, surrendering of company devices and ID proofs, submission of relevant forms, etc.
- Automates exit interviews, collates responses, and helps analyze HR and other challenges in the organization.
How can Acuvate help?
At Acuvate, we use our low-code enterprise bot-building platform BotCore to help clients automate employee engagement from hire to retire. We deploy employee-facing chatbots for various use cases, including IT, HR, Business Intelligence, intranet, etc.
As a Microsoft Gold Partner, we use Microsoft’s best AI, machine learning, and natural language processing technologies, including LUIS, Azure Cognitive Services, and the Microsoft Bot Framework, to build enterprise chatbots.
Our bots are omnichannel and multilingual, and support popular enterprise messaging channels (Teams, Slack, ProofHub, etc.) and languages including French, German, English, Italian, etc.
We also deploy aggregator bots to help our clients deliver consistent and seamless engagement to remote employees within a unified conversational interface.
To know more about BotCore, please feel free to schedule a personalized consultation with our experts.
Abhishek is the AI & Automation Practice Head at Acuvate and brings with him 17+ years of strong expertise across the Microsoft stack. He has consulted with clients globally to provide solutions on technologies such as Cognitive Services, Azure, RPA, SharePoint & Office 365. He has worked with clients across multiple industry domains including Retail & FMCG, Government, BFSI, Manufacturing and Telecom.
Abhishek Shanbhag