22 Jul
Using Employee Experience Chatbots to Drive Hybrid Workforce Productivity
Employee experience involves a variety of factors, including how employees find meaning in their work as well as how they perceive, interact, and respond to internal practices and the organizational culture during their employment. A great employee experience creates higher employee engagement, and highly engaged and committed employees create a better experience for customers who they interact with and serve.
~ ResearchGate’s paper on Transforming Digital Employee Experience with AI
Over the past year, employee needs have transformed significantly due to increased digitalization and the emergence of remote work. In line with this trend, employees expect more personalized, interactive, consumer-like engagement. Consequently, designing the new-age employee experience requires the amalgamation of both human and digital components.
In light of this development, the usage of AI-enabled chatbots that emulate consumer-like experiences and deliver rich, meaningful, and contextual interactions to remote employees has grown exponentially over the past year. So much so, that by 2022, 70% of white-collar workers will interact with conversational platforms on a daily basis.
These AI-based assistants answer basic employee questions, retrieve information, and automate routine tasks, which help employees save a considerable amount of time, increase efficiency, and focus on value-adding business activities. Research by Gartner has shown that in 2021, artificial intelligence will recover 6.2 billion hours of worker productivity globally.
Recent studies and trends have made it clear that workforce dynamics are changing, and most employees (precisely, 59%) would only consider a new position or job that allows them to work from a location of their choice. In other words, the future of work is a hybrid working model – a combination of remote and traditional office-based work.
Let’s talk about the types of employee experience chatbots and how organizations can use them to drive hybrid workforce productivity.
How are employee experience chatbots driving hybrid workforce productivity?
Before delving into the function-specific use cases of employee experience chatbots, let’s look at the four ways these chatbots are being used to drive hybrid workforce productivity –
- Answer employee queries instantly – anytime and anywhere
- Automate and simplify mundane, everyday tasks to boost efficiency
- Get the required information at the employees’ fingertips – 24X7 and from any device
- Push personalized alerts to effectively engage remote workforces
Now, let’s look at how each of the function-specific EX chatbots fulfills the above use cases.
1. HR Chatbot
An HR bot acts as the go-to assistant to complete different HR tasks and get information related to HR policies. From streamlining recruitment, onboarding, and training activities to answering questions regarding benefit plans, vacation plans, and best practices, such chatbots provide 24X7 access to self-service support and reduce cost per contact.
- Ask questions regarding leaves, insurance policies, existing HR cases, rules of the land, missing ID card
- Apply for time off, log daily work hours, update work profile, schedule meetings with the HR personnel
- Access company and HR policy documents and information repositories, get employee information
- Schedule interviews, capture details of new hires, and complete various onboarding forms via chat
2. IT Helpdesk Bot
From answering FAQs to automating various IT onboarding activities, to managing devices and service disruptions, IT helpdesk bots provide employees access to quicker resolutions, increase IT staff productivity, reduce cost per ticket, and ensure remote workers can operate seamlessly without major disruptions.
- Ask questions regarding the status of tickets and common IT issues (for example, “How to connect to the VPN?”)
- Reset passwords for devices, talk to a live agent, report incidents
- Allocate new laptops, disable/wipe stolen devices, etc.
- Get information regarding outage reports, access IT policy documents, reports, and IT knowledge base
- Receive asset request notifications, new change request notifications, incident notifications, etc.
3. Data Analyst Bot
A Data Analyst chatbot, also known as a Business Intelligence bot, integrates with business intelligence apps like Oracle, Power BI, and SAP Business Objects to simplify the consumption of business intelligence and drive data-driven decision-making by managers.
Employees can ask natural language questions and get business-critical data at their fingertips, eliminating multiple logins to BI dashboards and filtering of complex BI dashboards.
- Ask questions about business KPIs. (E.g., operating expenses in 2019)
- Get pinpointed answers to any information available in the BI system. For example, “What is the top-performing product in 2018?”
- Access reports available in the BI, LOB, or DWH system, or get links to desired dashboards.
- Get visual reports in multimedia format on email.
- Receive alerts about a dip or rise in business KPIs.
Driving Hybrid Workforce Productivity with a Unified Enterprise Bot
While each of the above chatbots serves their function-specific purposes and helps drive hybrid workforce productivity, the problem with having multiple chatbots is that employees must adapt to different conversation styles, platforms, and bot personas and remember the specific functionalities of each of these bots.
What can organizations do to overcome such issues? Well, the answer lies in deploying a unified enterprise bot. Often known as a universal or concierge bot, such a bot links individual use-case-specific bots into a single bot.
When an employee inputs a question/issue, it first reaches the unified enterprise bot. This bot then checks for authorization and permission levels and escalates the issue to the specialized function-specific bot (IT, HR, etc.)
Therefore, a unified enterprise bot delivers a consistent employee experience by acting as a personalized Enterprise Virtual Assistant (EVA).
Deploying a unified enterprise bot saves the cost of building, maintaining, and training multiple bots, as any features added to this bot can be leveraged by other functional bots.
Leveraging an employee experience platform to drive hybrid workforce productivity
In addition to deploying AI-enabled chatbots, many organizations have taken the more holistic approach to drive hybrid workforce productivity by implementing an employee experience platform.
An employee experience, or EX platform, is a cohesive space that unifies powerful tools required for collaboration, employee engagement, well-being, learning, and knowledge discovery under a single roof.
Such platforms boast advanced functionalities, including –
- Internal communication and collaboration tools
- Cognitive enterprise search
- AI-driven content recommendations
- Intelligent idea management
- Multilingual and omnichannel capabilities
Moreover, organizations can implement an aggregator bot on the EX platform and extend the platform’s utility to increase adoption and enhance operational efficiency.
Such bots can be integrated with enterprise messaging apps (such as Teams and Slack) and enable the following –
- Easier access to information by helping employees locate files, documents, and information seamlessly from anywhere on the organization’s network.
- The bot’s AI and ML capabilities promote knowledge mining by carrying out a cognitive enterprise search to pull the most contextual and relevant information.
- Increased collaboration and employee engagement by pushing internal news and alerts and sending personalized content and people (SME) recommendations.
- Consistent employee experiences by allowing the staff to raise HR and IT tickets, access business intelligence, and perform tasks like leave requests, travel settlement requests, etc. from the platform itself.
How can Acuvate help?
At Acuvate, we help clients build and deploy employee experience chatbots to drive hybrid workforce productivity with our low-code enterprise bot-building platform BotCore.
As a Microsoft Gold Partner, we build bots for HR, IT, business intelligence, CRM, etc,. by leveraging the best of Microsoft’s AI, ML, and NLP technologies, including LUIS, Azure Cognitive Services, and the Microsoft Bot Framework.
Our bots are omnichannel and multilingual, and support all popular enterprise messaging channels (Teams, Slack, ProofHub, etc.) and languages including French, German, English, Italian, etc.
Additionally, we build and implement employee experience platforms for organizations with our autonomous, AI-enabled intranet solution called Mesh 3.0. Build on the Microsoft SharePoint foundation, Mesh delivers a seamless employee experience with capabilities, such as –
- Internal communication tools
- Collaboration tools
- Azure cognitive enterprise search
- Content management system
- AI-driven content personalizers
- Intelligent idea management
- Knowledge mining with Azure
- Multilingual capabilities
- Expertise Finder
We also deploy an aggregator bot within Mesh, called MeshBot, to help employees utilize the intranet optimally, access information, and get all work done (HR, IT, etc.) from a single window.
To know more about BotCore and Mesh 3.0, 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