Conversational AI in HR - A Guide to Solving Remote Work Challenges with HR Chatbot

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.

No Code - Free Conversational AI Chatbot

What is an HR chatbot?

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.

Challenges faced by the HR department:

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.

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

How are chatbots used in HR?

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

  • 1. Access to documents
  • 2. Delivery of HR or company policies
  • 3. Attendance tracking
  • 4. 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.

How can HR chatbots solve remote work challenges? (use cases)

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.

1. 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.

Conversational AI HR Chatbot Metrics:

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.

  • 1. Accuracy rate: How often does the chatbot give accurate information? Anything above 80% is considered good.
  • 2. The number of users: How many employees interacted with the chatbot?
  • 3. Daily usage: How many employees interact with the chatbot daily?
  • 4. Number of engaged users: Engaged users repeatedly converse with the conversational AI HR chatbot.
  • 5. Goal Completion Rate (GCR): Do the employees get sufficient answers to all their questions?
  • 6. 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.
  • 7. 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.

Are you ready to transform your organization with our HR chatbots?

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? Workativintegration with omnichannel integrations can help.

Schedule a demo today.

Auto-resolve 60% of Your Employee Queries With Generative AI Chatbot & Automation.

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