Conversational AI in HR: Solve Remote Work Challenges

It is the month of February when employees are usually looking out for new opportunities. Your HR chatbot receives several questions about benefits, pay raises, bonuses, perks, and so on.

Remote work, can it be flexible for your employees on all sides?

Many studies confirmed that productivity level is quite impressive with the remote work culture.

No rides to the office. Less frequent chances of getting stuck in the traffic. And lots more to feel less drained out in back-and-forth daily commuting.

When remote work looks so comforting, employee disengagement slowly slips in, and productivity issues become a big headache for HR leaders.

Remote work does have flexible time-in for employees globally.

What’s an employee's reaction who is actively looking for an answer to an HR question at a time when HR people are unavailable?

Who’s responsible for handling employee queries, then?

HR themselves.

However, the changing landscape of remote work keeps HR engaged in many HR priorities and activities.

A question is simple, but it can take days for an HR to answer or sometimes overlook it.

We can assume that an obvious employee disengagement can ensue.

Process efficiency is significant for HR leaders to keep employees engaged and make business resilient.

Instead of manually managing HR processes or functions, adopting conversational AI in HR processes or HR chatbots is an efficient and effective tool to create employee value in a remote culture.

According to Gartner, AI or a more deep-tech AI version like Generative AI can help HR leaders drive organizational success.

81% of HR leaders have explored or implemented AI innovations in HR processes.

For 76% of HR leaders, it is a do-or-die situation for them. They believe they would rather lose to those who leverage AI solutions for HR process efficiency if they do not.

Why conversational AI HR chatbots?

Data gathered from the HR bot will tell you that your employees feel under-rewarded and seek ‘better’ opportunities. That’s your cue to get things sorted with your employees.

Do you want to create custom metrics to track important KPIs for your business?

Want to understand what your employees think about the latest changes in your remote working policies?

Do you want to know what your employees feel about the changes in the work timings?

All of the above and more can be handled by HR chatbots. They are an incredible addition to your arsenal of automation tools.

Simply put, an HR chatbot or conversational AI chatbot for HR is an HR workflow automation for human resource processes or functions. Common employee questions HR handles manually or often misses to answer can easily be dispatched to employees at any time and anywhere through a QnA workflow automation.

An HR chatbot with conversational AI can allow employees to engage in seamless question-and-answer interactions through channel integration like Teams or Slack.

While conversational AI integration makes HR chatbots incredibly adaptable for users, it offers a convenient way to access information for common questions and resolve a problem without having to rely on an HR executive.

HR chatbots are specially trained to reprise the role of HR staff in your organization. They change the way HR departments function across verticals and geographies.

HR management is not only about hiring, interviewing and payroll management. There is much more to it. HR teams today are strategic business partners, enablers of brands, catalysts in change management, and so on.

You can facilitate HR operational efficiency through AI and automation tools for various HR-related tasks. HR chatbots can automate repetitive tasks and HR-employee interactions.

For example, if your employees working remotely want to understand the leave policy, they don’t have to email HR asking for details or search the length and breadth of the employee portal for answers. They can go directly to the HR chatbot, choose the section for the HR chatbot, and get the answers. It will take anywhere from seconds to a few minutes.

Workativ has a dedicated app workflow automation for HR systems that helps you streamline leave management for your employees while reducing extra work for your HR professionals.

By 2024, 75-90% of all queries are projected to be handled by bots. Even though HR chatbots used to deal only with information sharing earlier, they have extended their functionalities and indulge in complex tasks too.

HR professionals have a lot of ‘grunt work’ such as filling out forms, responding to emails, approving applications, etc.

Additionally, many more repetitive processes in payroll management, maintaining employee records, updating policies, and answering emails and calls prevent them from doing their core tasks.

Unfortunately, the drudgery of manual tasks lowers their productivity and causes burnout.

They would rather focus on important tasks such as employee experience, learning, and development, employee retention, employee relations, etc., than perform paper-pusher tasks.

According to the State of Chatbots Report, chatbots have two significant priorities.

• 1. the #1 use case for chatbots is “getting a quick answer in an emergency,”

• 2. the #2 use case is “resolving a complaint or a question.”

To sum up, chatbots solve some of the biggest issues that plague HR teams.

How does an HR chatbot help overcome employee disengagement?

Conversational AI Fosters Employee Engagement Benefits

A simple perspective of distraction at work could refer to trying to access an app but failing due to wrong password credentials.Password for a particular app, say, an SEO manager tool, has been changed several times but isn’t updated in a centralized sheet.Tracing the admin is not feasible for a remote employee either.The disengagement results in remote employees having productivity issues.

Conversational AI HR chatbots can help you before employee disengagement can harm your business.

• Unified employee experience - Your employees are always where they love to work – their familiar collaboration channels such as Slack and Teams. Conversational AI can sync with these communications channels and enable employees to have their HR requests resolved autonomously.

• Common HR responses in one place - Gone are the days of waiting for email replies. Conversational AI makes FAQs more meaningful through NLP, helping employee search for intent, entity, and context-based answers for their common queries. No further workloads on HR teams to handle mundane and repetitive tasks.

• No switching between HR modules - HR chatbots or conversational AI removes the hurdles for HR teams to continuously update employee or other key information in the HR system. Allowing employees to take this responsibility through app workflow automation inside a self-serve interface makes it easy for them to fill out the necessary details and get out of the pain of working with complex modules in a dedicated HR system.

According to Gartner, 70% of employees will interact with conversational platforms daily.

Did you know that employees spend more than 3 hours a day on HR requests, such as

• Access to documents

• Delivery of HR or company policies

• Attendance tracking

• Leave applications, etc

Instead of spending time to solve these HR queries for employees, organizations can leverage HR chatbots to streamline these processes through automation.

HR chatbots like the Workativ conversational AI platform can become an easy stride for HR leaders to automate manual tasks and dedicate themselves to strategic business priorities.

When it comes to managing business process efficiency in human resources, business leaders can use HR chatbots for a wide range of use cases.

With the emergence of chatbots as a solution for improving HR operations and employee support, plenty of software is available in the market today. So, we’ve compiled the 10 best HR chatbots for enterprises to look for: 

Workativ

Workativ is a conversational AI platform that enables enterprises to improve employee satisfaction, productivity, and business operations by offering solutions to automate IT and HR support. The platform effectively serves enterprises looking to automate HR processes with custom workflows and enable 24/7 HR helpdesk. 

Key features of Workativ:

• No-code setup and deployment: Enterprises can easily build, deploy, and manage the HR helpdesk bot at scale. All this without writing a single line of code.

• Knowledge base integration: This platform connects to your knowledge base, utilizes the power of AI to understand user intent, pulls relevant information from multiple data points, and generates personalized answers for each query. 

• Workflow automation: Workativ seamlessly integrates with popular HR tools and applications, enabling enterprises to easily create complex workflows and automate routine queries like password resets and employee onboarding and offboarding. 

• Agent handover: Workativ offers live transfers of complex queries to HR teams with full context and conversation history. This allows the HR team to solve issues right away. 

• Dynamic notifications: HR teams can use this feature to notify employees of important announcements in policy changes, remind them to fill out survey forms, or simply wish them on birthdays/anniversaries.

• Omnichannel support: The platform integrates with Slack, MS Teams, and websites, enabling enterprises to provide seamless HR support to employees in their preferred channels. 

• Analytics and dashboard: You get a complete overview of chatbot usage, bot sessions, user queries, live status, and more. These analytics will help you track how effectively employees use the bot and make informed decisions to provide better support. 

Pros:

• Improved employee engagement

• Increased employee satisfaction and trust

• Faster resolution of HR-related queries

• Reduced workload on HR teams

• 24/7 human-like HR support 

• Ease of implementation

Cons

• Training the chatbot with advanced configurations will take some time. 

• Users report minor issues on the platform but say they can be resolved quickly by the customer support team.  

Pricing 

Contact the sales team to know the detailed pricing plans.

Leena.ai

Leena.ai is an employee experience platform that uses generative AI to provide constant employee support and reduce IT, HR, and finance tickets. 

Key features of Leena.ai:

• Smart ticketing: Leena.ai  allows employees to submit tickets from multiple platforms. It then categorizes the tickets based on urgency, auto-resolves basic queries, and assigns complex queries to the right person in the HR department.

• Sentiment analysis: The platform utilizes AI to analyze employee feedback surveys and HR-employee interactions, giving HR teams deeper insights into employee emotions and satisfaction. This helps organizations improve the workplace environment. 

• Document generation: HR teams can use the platform to generate meeting minutes and HR-specific documents like annual attrition reports, summarizing key points from employee surveys, etc. 

• Knowledge base integration: The platform integrates with your company’s KB to extract key information from images, text, and videos to accurately answer HR queries. 

Pros 

• Good customer support

• Efficient in automating HR-related tasks

• Ability to handle employee ticketing efficiently

Cons

• The AI agent has a limited understanding of complex or nuanced queries. 

• Lack of intuitive UI and UX

• Users face issues while downloading reports

Pricing 

Visit Leena.ai for more information.

 Rezolve.ai

Rezolve.ai is an employee support platform that uses conversational AI to automate IT and HR functions. It enables companies to design custom workflows and provide personalized interactions with employees. 

Key features of Rezolve.ai:

• GenAI-Powered Virtual Agent: This feature enables employees to quickly get answers to common workplace queries such as leave balance, benefit policy, and salary information.

• Live chat support: Employees can use this feature for complex queries like payroll issues. The bot will instantly connect with an HR support agent to resolve their queries.

• Integrations: The platform has over 150+ integrations, including popular HR tools like Workday, BambooHR, and Gusto. 

Pros

• Efficient handling of tickets

• Offers real-time analytics

• Customizable workflows

Cons

• Limited customization features

• Users report technical glitches

• Users report that it may take a long time to fix small issues.

Pricing 

Visit Rezolve.ai for more information.

Humanly

Humaly is an artificial intelligence recruitment platform that enables HR teams to manage end-to-end recruitment processes, such as screening qualified candidates, assessing their resumes based on company values, and scheduling interviews. 

Key features of Humanly:

• AI screening: The AI chatbot automatically screens applicants based on predefined rules such as skills, qualifications, location, and experience. This saves recruiters from manually sorting candidates. 

• Scheduling workflows:  The platform allows recruiters to create workflows to automate interview scheduling and send reminders to candidates.

• Recruitment insights: The platform uses AI to transcribe video meetings and analyzes the conversation to describe good-fit and bad-fit applicants. 

Pros 

• Effective recruitment analytics reporting

• Offers personalized dashboards to users

• The platform is intuitive and user-friendly

Cons

• Bulk action on the platform can sometimes take long or fail. 

• Some users find the platform to be too expensive.

• Lack of flexibility while scheduling interviews. 

Pricing 

Contact Humanly to get a pricing quote. 

Amber by inFeedo

Amber by inFeedo is an AI-driven employee engagement platform businesses use to improve employee experience, identify unhappy employees, and reduce attrition rates. It helps with various HR management functions, such as taking employee surveys, regularly checking in with employees, and answering HR-related questions instantly. 

Key features of Amber:

• AI-driven conversations: Amber provides instant answers to employee queries and uses AI capabilities to provide human-like chat experiences. 

• AI-feedback summaries: The platform summarises employee feedback, highlighting important factors. This helps HR teams better understand employees' sentiments. 

• Automated email responses: The platform sends personalized email acknowledgments to candidates, saving HR from manually replying to all emails.  

Pros 

• Automated survey helps in personalized employee engagement

• Frees up the HR department to focus on important tasks

• Keeping track of employees working remotely and hybrid is easier

Cons

• Users find tracking employees they’ve interacted with difficult as there are no tags to find them later. 

• The dashboard is not user-friendly to use.

• The platform doesn’t allow actions for specific employees unless a trigger is initiated. 

Pricing

Contact inFeedo to get a pricing quote 

Intercom

Intercom is a popular platform that primarily offers solutions to build AI-driven customer support. It also provides tools for building HR chatbots to automate various HR functions, such as onboarding employees and answering common employee questions. 

Key features of Intercom:

• HR helpdesk bots: Enterprises can build HR helpdesk bots to handle common queries, collect employee feedback, and more. 

• Team inbox: The platform offers a shared inbox for HR teams. This allows multiple team members to collaborate on responses and track employee queries. 

• Ticket creation and prioritization: The platform allows employees to submit requests from multiple platforms and prioritizes tickets based on urgency, such as sick leave applications or payroll discrepancies. This allows HR teams to resolve each query effectively.   

• AI-powered insights: The platform provides comprehensive insights into HR queries, helping managers identify gaps and improve HR support. 

Pros 

• Good customer service

• User-friendly interface

• Efficient handling of queries

Cons

• Needs improvement in search functionality

• Users report that sometimes chatbots fail to assign the chat to available team members.

• Limited options for filtering conversations

Pricing 

• Essential: $29 per user/month (billed annually) or $39 per user/month (billed monthly)

• Advanced: $85 per user/month (billed annually) or $99 per user/month (billed monthly)

• Expert: $132 per user/month (billed annually) or $139 per user/month (billed monthly)

AskHR

AskHR is a platform that uses AI virtual assistants to provide 24/7 employee support. The platform integrates email, Slack, MS Teams, and intranet, meaning employees can access HR support from their preferred channels. 

Key features of AskHR

• AI assistant: AskHR offers round-the-clock assistance in addressing common workplace queries. This reduces the workload on HR teams. 

• Engagement analytics: The platform analyzes your employee engagement and feedback to reveal insights into employee satisfaction and potential workplace issues. These insights help HR teams elevate the company culture. 

• Multilingual support: The platform natively supports 50+ languages, enabling employees to access HR support in their preferred language and improving employee satisfaction.

• Smart routing: Questions the bot can’t answer will be queued for the HR team to answer. The AI assistant will then learn this new information for future use. 

Pros

• Efficiency in reducing tickets through real-time responses

• 24/7 availability of HR support

Cons

• The platform needs a better user interface.

• Limitations of AI in understanding complex queries. 

• A user reported that initial implementation may take longer. 

Pricing 

Contact AskHR to get a pricing quote 

Moveworks

Moveworks is an emerging platform that offers various AI-powered solutions for IT, HR, finance, and marketing teams. The platform’s Co-pilot enables you to automate routine tasks, provide instant answers, and improve employee productivity. 

Key features of Moveworks:

• AI assistant: The platform offers an AI chatbot that enables employees to get answers to common HR queries, such as downloading payslips, filing income tax, and more. 

• Search analytics: The platform provides granular insights into HR search queries to understand gaps, trends, and content quality.

• Employee notifications: This feature allows HR teams to notify employees about important announcements, such as policy changes and tax filings. 

Pros 

• The platform requires no coding

• Multi-channel support capabilities

• Resolves repetitive HR queries efficiently

Cons

• Users state difficulty in integrating Moveworks with their existing systems.

• Users express concerns about controlling data access levels and restricting queries that may expose sensitive data. 

• Potential challenges in extracting information from knowledge base articles. 

Pricing 

Contact Moveworks to know detailed pricing plans. 

Kore.ai

Kore.ai is a popular platform for companies to build, deploy, and manage AI-powered virtual assistants. Companies can use this platform to automate HR tasks and improve employee experience. 

Key features of Kore.ai:

• No-code platform: Users can build custom HR virtual assistants without any coding. 

• Choice of LLMs: Users can either bring their custom LLMs or use out-of-the-box options with popular providers like OpenAI and Anthropic. 

• AI search: Kore.ai connects with all your HR systems, searches for relevant information from these sources, and provides contextual answers to employee queries, improving self-service.  

Pros

• Intuitive platform

• Integrations with other communication channels like websites, mobile apps, and social media platforms. 

• Efficient in handling routine user queries

Cons

• Users express limitations in using certain features and accessing templates from the bot marketplace. 

• Unavailability of options to create custom solutions independently.

• Users report poor product documentation. 

Pricing  

• Essential: $50 per user/month (billed annually) or $60 per user/month (billed monthly)

• Advanced: $150 per user/month (billed annually) or $180 per user/month (billed monthly)

• Enterprise: Contact the sales team. 

Barista by Espressive

Espressive is a platform that provides workplace support by automating IT and HR services. Barista, an AI employee co-pilot, is the main product of Espressive, which helps enterprises provide seamless HR support.

Key features of Barista:

• Smart ticketing: The platform automatically classifies, prioritizes, and routes incoming HR tickets to the right member of the HR team, enabling faster response times. 

• Customizable workflows: Users can customize workflows for the bot to handle complete onboarding and offboarding procedures, like providing new hires the right training material and sending exit forms to employees leaving the company. 

• Multichannel HR support: Users can access employee support from their preferred communication channels, such as Slack, MS Teams, and mobile phones. 

Pros 

• The platform reduces the workload of HR teams

• Effective workflow automation

• Ease of adding new information to train the chatbot

Cons

• Users report a difficult learning curve.

• Users say the platform can be complex to set up based on the organization and security restrictions.

Pricing 

Contact Espressive for detailed pricing plans.

HR teams are inundated with challenges, day in and day out. When things go well, everyone takes them for granted, but if there are hiccups anywhere, it can affect the organization as a whole. HR teams are one of the most vital cogs in an enterprise. Apart from handling routine and mundane tasks, they are responsible for bigger issues like employee engagement, employee satisfaction, and increasing retention rates.

Improves the onboarding experience:

The first day can be tough for any employee. There is a lot of uncertainty and unfamiliarity. There are documents to pore through and sign, training manuals to read, and several HR-related tasks to complete. You also need many seniors to make onboarding new employees a smooth affair.

If you have an HR chatbot, the new employees can get most of their queries solved. From perks to job responsibilities, everything will be spelled out clearly.

The chatbot can even provide step-by-step onboarding for the employee. Even if the new hire wants access to a particular platform, the HR chatbot can enable it without involving the IT desk.

Workativ provides seamless onboarding workflow automation for HR leaders to have complete peace of mind.

Creates a unified experience:

Organizations that have many employees usually struggle with one thing: inconsistent experience. It so happens because processes and knowledge aren’t shared between teams. Without having to involve multiple departments, HR chatbots can feed the relevant information, and the employees can access it themselves. If you don’t want certain information to be shared across all levels of employees, it also allows you the option to manage access controls.

Create automated workflows:

When there are automated workflows, your employees do not get bogged down doing unnecessary tasks. It will result in a sharp productivity increase and high spirits.

HR chatbots can help create automated workflows that can provide everything from how to provide access to certain tools to getting approvals from other departments.

On average, HR chatbots reduce six actions to just one request when an employee searches for something. It enables the employees to focus on what they are hired to accomplish.

Provides customized employee support:

For employees who are working remotely, if they do not get their queries answered in a reasonable period, they’ll feel unheard. What if they could get instant answers? HR chatbots provide all the answers in a single place, and more importantly, they use previous chat history and other activities to provide personalized employee support. With an HR chatbot, the employee can get personalized employee support to save time and reduce their effort.

Offer quick feedback:

Knowing what the employees in your organization think is important. Chatbots are an incredibly effective tool for candidates and employees who want to share their feedback about the happenings in the organization. Sharing forms, collating the data, and trying to analyze them is difficult and takes up a lot of time. Collecting feedback via chatbots helps you collect unbiased feedback within seconds.

HR chatbots can be used to gather information on employee satisfaction. When your immediate boss sends out survey forms, the average employee is likelier to share positive feedback to curry favor with the higher-ups.

However, an HR chatbot's anonymity helps them be open about their emotions.

The fact that sentimental analysis and natural language processing can be integrated with HR chatbots raises the expectations from it. The chatbot will detect anger, sadness, frustration, happiness, etc., and special attention can be given to employees who feel negatively about the organization.

Auto-resolve 60% of HR Support Queries with Chatbot.

Reinforcing organizational culture:

Making sure that remote employees are motivated to get their tasks done without any hiccups is the holy grail for most organizations. While multiple technologies can uphold employee motivation, nothing can beat a chatbot.

HR chatbots can engage with employees frequently and personalize interactions to share specific information with a particular employee.

24*7 access:

If you are working in a big enterprise, the chances are that the teams are spread across the world in different time zones. Employees who want certain information immediately will find they have to wait for at least 24 hours to get responses.

In some instances, they might need immediate redressals, and unfortunately, that might not be possible, especially since everyone is working remotely.

With these HR chatbots, instantaneous responses can be given to most queries without any delays or errors. Common queries, such as insurance policies, processes, common policies, etc., can be handled directly by the HR chatbots. If there are complex queries that the HR chatbot doesn’t have an answer to, it can automatically transfer them to a live agent.

When there are a lot of changes happening in the organization, in terms of organization or strategy, HR chatbots help with change management. Changes can lead to confusion for the average employee, and their worries must be quelled before they boil over. The accessibility that HR chatbots offer is pivotal, especially for staff who work in faraway locations. The chatbots give them a chance to be heard.

Employee Engagement:

Keeping your employees engaged with the organization, even when working from the office daily, is a difficult ask.Imagine if most of them are working remotely in different geographies. Newly joined employees have even bigger troubles as they are in uncharted territories.

HR chatbots can act as an effective self-service portal. AI-powered and NLP-driven HR chatbots can converse with employees, understand their sentiments, and offer relevant solutions. HR chatbots can engage with employees at any scale. It will also help the leadership to understand the sentiments of the employees.

When you introduce HR chatbots to your organization, remember that you need to keep evaluating their effectiveness. To do so, you need to have metrics in place to evaluate the chatbot’s performance. Let us look at a few HR chatbot metrics.

• Accuracy rate: How often does the chatbot give accurate information? Anything above 80% is considered good.

• The number of users: How many employees interacted with the chatbot?

• Daily usage: How many employees interact with the chatbot daily?

• Number of engaged users: Engaged users repeatedly converse with the conversational AI HR chatbot.

• Goal Completion Rate (GCR): Do the employees get sufficient answers to all their questions?

• Transfer to Human Agent: How many chatbot requests are transferred to human agents? If it is high, then the chatbot needs more training. There are also instances where the employee prefers interacting with a human agent if it is a complex query.

• Length of the conversation: This is a dicey metric. Why? Because you want the HR chatbot to take as much time as necessary to solve the customer’s problem, but not so much that they quit the conversation. The organization needs to find the sweet spot when it comes to timing.

With Workativ conversational AI bot for HR, you can have the luxury to leverage comprehensive data insights and improve HR process efficiency by making changes to the existing workflows.

As we have mentioned earlier in the article, HR chatbots are not only to share information but also a vital cog in several circumstances.

HR chatbots help the organization get a holistic view of what the employees search for often, what issues plague them, how they react to a particular policy change, and so on. The analytics gathered from the HR chatbot can be used to make business decisions.

If you want to empower your HR team with an intelligent automation platform, try Workativ’s Conversational AI HR Chatbot.

Every business has varied HR functions. Only custom solutions in HR workflow automation can help you accomplish your business goals. Workativ provides the tools and features to help you build custom workflow automation and take control of HR process efficiency.

The advanced NLP engine enables you to create workflows and apply advanced machine learning and deep learning techniques to your FAQs.

With the ability to comprehend the intent and context of NLP-based queries, the Workativ Conversational AI bot can give more meaningful answers to solve common problems such as,

• Password resets

• Account unlock

• Asset provision

• Add users

• VPN troubleshooting

• Printer problem

• Laptop request etc

Workativ lets your HR team focus on more critical HR jobs while your employees have more air to breathe with the feeling of joy and relaxation that they can handle HR queries autonomously.

Do you look to provide the easiest way for your employees to adapt to the HR chatbot and be independent in solving their problems? Workativ integration with omnichannel integrations can help.

Schedule a demo today.