The ultimate guide - 2023

HR HELP DESK

Human resource management is always a hard job to handle. From resolving calls to being a reason for employee experience, HR experience also matters. HR help desk supposedly makes HR operations easy and provides a better way to manage employee communication and collaboration and drive business outcomes.

In this article, we will uncover how your HR operations can maximize the HR help desk to drive efficiency and productivity and offer the best way to reimagine your human resource help desk for cost savings, employee engagement, and retention.

What is an HR help desk?

Once just an IT help desk version to help with HR operations, the HR help desk today focuses on improving human resource queries using tools and technologies.

Your internal help desk for hr can act as a central repository of information that your employees need to solve queries regarding Payroll, Tax calculations, PTO, and Leave Management 一 and to say more specifically, the HR help desk reduces effort and wait time when it comes to resolving the most mundane hr processes.

Also, with more modern and sophisticated embedded solutions such as self-service capabilities and automation, the hr help desk can reimagine the employee experience. They can reduce operational costs that your HR teams would otherwise waste primarily due to the lack of real timeliness of solutions.

HR help desk optimization with chatbot builder

Take note if your HR help desk uses a legacy approach, it costs you no significant investments to translate your existing system into an automated HR help desk support. All you need is build a scalable chatbot to offer conversational dialog management for your HR and employees. We will explore more about this option later in this article.

Why is the HR help desk important for your business?

More often than not, the HR activities include taking care of onboarding, offboarding, managing workshops, and delegating low-priority responsibilities to other team members while also ensuring each employee optimizes their time with full potential.

However, responsibilities entail more than just overseeing operational processes. Undoubtedly, it has greater responsibilities to optimize resources and save costs.

According to BambooHR stats, effective onboarding translates into 18x more commitment from new hires to the employer, increasing engagement and retention rates.

If your HR workflows are inefficient, it results in delayed response, causing employee frustration and disengagement, denying greater control over labor costs.

Ineffective onboarding may hit back at your bottom line in many ways 一

It means you need to refill these positions, which costs businesses an employee’s annual salary of up to $140,000, as peran employee attrition report.

So, leveraging the HR help desk can free up your team to prioritize workflows and manage efficiency, thus creating engaged employee experience and business value.

How does the human resource help desk benefit your team?

Your employees need support. An HR help desk truly fits the need.

HR help desk drives employee engagement

According to Gallup, disengaged employees can cost $7.8 trillion in lost productivity.

Also, a recent survey by Microsoft states that employees seek meaningful work to thrive. So, they want to contribute, and the best way to keep your employees engaged is to provide the information they need.

Fortunately, you can build a nurturing and thriving culture in your workplace by centralizing processes and helping your employee find information with a human resource service desk.

For example, confidential matters such as maternity leave management are something that employees want to keep under wraps. Employees secretly want to know the length of leaves and benefits without making it public across the department. But what if they communicate via back-and-forth emails without getting any positive response? When they get a response, it already does the damage and creates emotional stress.

An HR help desk can give you the ability to organize your information, save your time, and fast-track the process of maternity leave management. As a result, you can improve employee experience and build employee engagement.

HR support desk boosts employee retention

Assume you have a new employee onboarding, and the new hire expects engaging interactions on the first day. A list of necessary actions goes this way 一 sending welcome messages, providing a way to connect with stakeholders over a few days of joining, and a better way to know your organization. Unfortunately, too many administrative duties can interrupt your time and restrict you from catering to significant employee needs initially.

With an HR help desk, you can use the essential tools to customize and streamline workflows that help you provide all necessary resources and manage your onboarding efficiently. One positive experience builds long-term trust and loyalty, thus allowing you to reflect on company values and augment employee confidence for better retention.

The internal help desk welcomes feedback

More than salary, a thriving and ambient workplace always draws employees’ attention. They believe a workplace that creates employee value through opinion and feedback facilitates better engagement and mutual growth.

Thinking of running an employee feedback session may not work out, owing to the challenges in connecting with people across every department and bringing them to the same board. Imagine that even if you get them on board, there is a doubt that they can share some glaring issues in the open. You can miss out on important messages and not be able to take action to bring any changes.

But, sending out a survey feedback notification through your HR help desk portal makes it easier for employees to participate and provide essential information. Employees may elaborate more on administrative issues or any kind of discriminatory behavior if any. As a result, taking action and building a sustainable workplace culture is faster and easier.

With all these and more you can accomplish with the HR help desk, your HR processes can become streamlined and less labor-intensive with various tools. Ticketing systems reporting and analytics are two value-added features to help you gain flexibility at scale.

Auto-resolve Employee Queries With AI Chatbot.

What are some of the common challenges in the HR help desk?

When you aim to drive holistic value from your so-called HR help desk, the legacy architecture may need more scalability.Optimizing your internal HR help desk software with automationcan unleash more personalized solutions. We will discuss this later, though; let’s know the shortcomings.

Self-service capabilities

As reported by PwC, 19% of HR staff surveyed talk about the significance of self-service capabilities that are missing from their current HR tools.

Reluctance to adoption

HR leaders expect to increase their investment in HR tech solutions. But, a survey reported that training and development is a challenge, which makes it difficult to drive user adoption.

Traditional IT support desk

Most businesses still use their existing IT support desk as an HR tool. The solution does not have tools and features to support the growing HR challenges.

Growing agent involvement

With the existing HR support help desk, agents unnecessarily need to manage, monitor and resolve tickets for the first level of support. They need to handle them manually, which delays the response. Additionally,escalation is tough to manage.

Managed service providers

As you outsource managed service support, it becomes expensive with the growing burden of managing tickets in real time. Security and privacy issues are also other levels of headaches.

How to optimize your HR help desk for a streamlined employee experience?

It only takes a few iterations to embrace a modernized hr help desk.

Leverage app workflow automation

To manage the growing volume of HR operations, app workflow automation can prove beneficial to automate HR processes. It is easier to create using low-code or no-code canvas or interface while, at the same time, it enables you to achieve conversational AI capabilities.

Embed in your chatbot

By syncing your HR help desk with the most familiar communication channels, you can offer resolutions at your fingertips. When your employees need more detailed information about an app or company policy, it is more accessible to fetch via a chatbot interaction that produces a knowledge link and helps them proceed.

Automate ticket responses

When you employ automation for your HR apps, you can easily fetch the information to your chatbot system. No matter the issue, your employee can raise the ticket within the chatbot without leaving their app and accelerate the feedback.

Apply reporting and analytics

Automated HR help desk is a treasure trove of sheer data volume. You can analyze data and improve your HR responses.

What are the key benefits of an automated hr help desk?

You can leverage the key benefits of the hr help desk by integrating it with automation technologies.

Onboarding is faster and seamless

No matter whether it is a remote or onsite onboarding, you can quickly reduce wait time for the new hire and HR executive.

More than anything, your HR staff no longer needs to dedicate long hours interacting with the new hire. It just takes a few minutes to hand over details through automated email responses.

human resource help desk with automated onboarding capabilities
  • Enable app provisioning with detailed login and password information
  • Send a welcome video
  • Send an invitation for stakeholder communication and collaboration
  • Provide a link to knowledgebase to build cognizance about company culture and policy

Rapid HR request resolution with self-service capabilities

Automated HR help desk can offer frictionless employee experience. With the ability to embed with your business communication channels like Teams and Slack, you can easily automate several mundane activities your HR staff conducts. AI conversation chatbot makes it easy to automate basic-level support activities.

internal help desk with embedded self-service automation capabilities
  • Instantly reset the password without waiting for an hr staff
  • Get support to resolve account unlock issues or printer issues
  • Enable your employees to create a ticket to an hr staff when issues turn out to be complicated

Faster escalation of tickets to an expert

When things are tough to handle through DIY attempts, AI conversational platform can be designed to sort tickets and categorize the level of priority. You can apply workflow automation to implement this capability and pass the ticket to the right agent at the right time.

ticket escalation with an automated chatbot for the HR help desk

The magic of the workflow is that as soon as the issue gets resolved, the ticket also gets closed.

What are some examples of automated hr help desk use cases?

Modernizing your HR help desk with an automated chatbot unleashes multiple ways to increase user efficiency and productivity.

Accelerate response for payroll inquiry

With a traditional help desk, when an employee shoots a payroll inquiry, it usually takes several days, if not months. The reason it slips through the HR staff’s attention as it lands in the inbox bombarded with an influx of emails. Then there follows a couple of interactions back and forth via emails or phone calls.

If it is the case, you can imagine the level of employee frustration.

An automated HR help desk that uses chatbot integration caneasily manage payroll inquiries and provide all the necessary information to the employee.

Automated HR help desk for payroll management

You can create a FAQ-based knowledge base and apply automation to it. Trigger workflow when your employee escalates an inquiry and gives details via email or directly within your chatbot.

Seamless employee offboarding management

It is a very familiar scenario when your employee has to postpone their onboarding to the company they are likely to join. In another instance, if your HR member is absent, offboarding cannot occur. The situation may result in extra days allotted for that particular employee, forcing you to pay for those additional days. By automating the offboarding process, you can quickly reduce the risk of adding more to your operational costs.

HR help desk with automated employee offboarding solutions.

Simply create app workflows for your HRSM tools like BambooHR and Zoho People, and manage offboarding seamlessly. If needed, you can communicate via personalized email.

As soon as the employee is omitted from the HRSM tools, an app trigger sends out workflows and helps you speed up the process without involving your HR agent.

How to build a human resource helpdesk chatbot?

HR help desk chatbot builder

It needs you to determine your scope of HR operations, considering where you want to implement automation to transform the employee experience. Generally, as a CHRO, you must seek to automate the most mundane work process. Surprisingly, Workativ Assistant, a conversational AI platform, is a powerful tool to set you up and running with your HR bot in just a few hours.

All you need is to follow a few steps.

  • Sign up to create a new bot or download from the marketplace
  • Using pre-built app integrations and app workflows, you can connect your chatbot and automate responses (for say, connect BambooHR, Freshdesk, Zoho People, etc.)
  • Test your bot and make adjustments or edit conversations before you go live
  • Turn on your favorite business comms channels and embed the chatbot to allow your employees to leverage self-service capabilities
internal human resource help desk development with automation capabilities

If you want a visual guide to build your HR help desk chatbot,watch this video below.

How to build HR Chatbot in 10 mins

Leverage Workativ Assistant to help transform the HR experience

Workativ is a low-code and no-code automated chatbot platform. Our AI-powered conversational chatbot interface provides a variety of tools, for say, chatbot builder, chatbot templates, and app workflow within one platform with cloud-based deployment flexibility. It means no upfront costs are involved, eliminating the need to keep aside a huge chunk of the budget for operational expenses. Pay only subscriptions and tap into the exponential potential to transform your employee and HR experience.

Workativ’s competitive advantage

  • Within the first year of deployment, Workativ helps reduce call volumes by 40%
  • Achieve a 20% y-o-y increase in call reduction
  • With high-level self-service capabilities, the chatbot tool increases employee satisfaction level by 4 points
  • Gain up to 20-30% of HR labor reduction in the first year of deployment

On top of it, our conversational AI chatbot platform is capable of auto-resolving 60-80% of repetitive user issues and requests in seconds, freeing up valuable and expensive live agents. Thus, improving SLA, cost savings, and helping companies scale their support in minutes.

To learn more about our conversational AI solution for your HR help desk, schedule a free demo today.

HR Help Desk Frequently Asked Questions

How can I turn my traditional HR help desk into an automated human resource support desk?

One of the quickest steps to optimize your HR help desk is by applying automation through chatbot integration. Workativ Assistant allows businesses to download a pre-built chatbot from the marketplace and get started instantly.

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

Deepa Majumder

Content Writer

Deepa Majumder is a writer who nails the art of crafting bespoke thought leadership articles to help business leaders tap into rich insights in their journey of organization-wide digital transformation. Over the years, she has dedicatedly engaged herself in the process of continuous learning and development across business continuity management and organizational resilience.

Her pieces intricately highlight the best ways to transform employee and customer experience. When not writing, she spends time on leisure activities.