Employee engagement chatbots are computer-programmed machines that employ natural language processing (NLP) to simulate human conversations. Chatbots for employee engagement are specifically trained and designed to replicate the role of HRs.They are the ideal virtual assistants that can communicate with employees through a variety of online channels.
Artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots are already a part of our daily lives, right from recommending what kind of products to buy, to playing music on voice command to registering our complaints when we are not happy with the ordered food. AI-powered employee chatbots too have been playing an integral role by interacting with us and resolving our queries on a day-to-day basis.
Multiple sectors are benefiting from artificial intelligence (AI) to not just provide better customer support but better employee engagement. The digital shift catalyzed by the worldwide outbreak of Coronavirus has led companies to upgrade their traditional approach to engagement, both externally and internally. With the focus currently on employee engagement and well-being, companies are turning to technology to build better communication and a smooth employee experience.
Employee chatbots are now being used extensively by organizations to resolve complex processes, communicate policies, and build frameworks that fall under the HR umbrella. They are available 24 hours a day and take care of common employee queries relating to employee sentiments, benefits, insurance, vacation, and sick time. This considerably helps HR teams to save time and effort while providing the employee with a positive, satisfying experience. Fast and personalized replies also boost better communication among the workforce.
In many organizations, HR chatbots have completely taken over the communication problem by becoming the primary layer of conversation between employees and management. HR chatbots can be easily integrated with the existing systems and offer a much easier user experience for employees as well as employers. A simplified, intelligent, quick and conversational virtual assistant allows employees to feel more connected to the company and have a clear vision of their goals.
Let’s understand in detail how these employee chatbots can be put to better serve them and the organization at the same time.
What Are the Use Cases for Chatbots in HR?
Asking HR professionals to support the documentation of each company employee and resolve their queries is a bit daunting. As HR endeavors become more strategic, it is crucial to make bandwidth for them to focus on the big picture. Trying to take out time to do long-term planning in between phone calls or emails asking for payslips rectifications just doesn’t work. Therefore, a smart and sensitive solution is necessary to avoid employee burnout in your HR department.
Starting with screening and recruiting, followed by onboarding, to supporting, training and finally offboarding – not only can chatbots save the HR team a lot of time by automating most of these tasks, but greater efficiency in these processes can also lead to considerable cost savings.
Let’s take a look at how chatbots are used in HR functions:
Screening & Recruitment
It is one of the most crucial HR responsibilities. Recruitment is a lengthy process that includes multiple processes and planning even before you execute it. Sitting down for individual interviews, walk-in interviews, and more can be difficult to manage.
An AI chatbot can easily eliminate these hassles by conducting initial screening and filtering candidates for the next round. Cloud-based technology ensures that you can conduct these screening sessions on a large scale. Additionally, you can incorporate skill-based tests into the chatbots to pre-evaluate the candidates before your team invests time in them.
Employee Onboarding
Onboarding new employees is time-consuming. HRs need to answer the same questions over and over again and need to explain the same processes to multiple individuals along with documentation. This is where an HR chatbot can frontload the onboarding process and make life easier for your HR team.
The chatbots can educate new employees about company policies, and internal processes, help them set goals and explain the expectations of their job position. HRs can in turn utilize the saved time to build interpersonal aspects of onboarding and team building.
Employee Support
Employees spend a lot of time looking for answers to simple questions. Often, it is just a matter of knowing where to look. For example, if an employee goes to the chatbot and asks a question about the remaining leave days. With some integrations and the user’s data, the chatbot answers them automatically without a human being’s intervention.
The same can happen with salary receipts and other similar matters, increasing the privacy of confidential information. HR chatbots for case management make this process a lot easier as they become a central hub to get answers to any company-related questions. Employees get the information they need a lot quicker, while saving time and increasing productivity.
Retention and Engagement
HR chatbots are a great measure to collect employee feedback in terms of satisfaction with their role, growth opportunities and training needs, perception of leadership and company vision, and even their work-life balance. Many businesses still rely on age-old annual surveys to obtain feedback from their employees. These surveys provide outdated information that takes a significant amount of time to see any actual results, by when the results are no longer actionable.
A 24/7 chatbot allows employees to share their thoughts around the clock. The best HR chatbots make collecting feedback efficient and intuitive, asking employees to communicate how they are feeling with a simple emoji. And employees can share information with chatbots in anonymous mode, which makes it easier for employees to express how they truly feel.
On the back end, machine learning technology turns regular feedback into personalized suggestions. Chatbots can easily measure employee engagement and managers and HRs together can use chatbot analytics to develop a plan of action.
Chatbots for employee engagement can also inform stakeholders of any areas that have pressing concerns or need immediate attention, and leaders can use chatbot data to make informed decisions about how they confront these problems, whether that be through one-on-one meetings or implementing certain employee engagement ideas and activities.
The best part is that HR chatbots with advanced AI-powered analytics can reveal whether or not the changes managers make actually improve employee engagement. In case things are failing, managers can easily change their approach instead of waiting for a whole year to go by.
Offboarding
HR chatbots are fully equipped to automate employee offboarding processes. The chatbot offers quick resolutions to queries, such as leave balance, taxes, duration of the notice period, etc. It can even send notifications and alerts on the last day of employment based on the notice period, settlements on pending invoices, surrendering of company devices and ID proofs, submission of relevant forms, etc.
In short, reducing the cost and time of an HR resource who otherwise would have executed each step personally and manually. These bots automate the exit process, collate responses, and help analyze HR’s other challenges in the organization.
How to Select the Right Chatbot for Employee Engagement?
When it comes to selecting an employee engagement chatbot for your business, you need to begin by defining your needs very clearly. Every business is different in terms of its organizational goals and objectives. Whether you want a chatbot for workforce efficiency, employee engagement, process automation, or Q&As, identifying the real needs in advance will put your plan on the path to success.
Post defining the needs, you will then dive into the pool of employee chatbots available in the market. To select the best chatbot for your company’s needs, you must be prepared with the list of hr chatbot features that you expect the chatbot to possess. These features will then further help you accomplish all the tasks you wish to automate.
If you are fairly new to this task, here’s a quick overview of the features you must look for in an employee engagement chatbot:
The bot you choose should have the following hr chatbot features:
- Available customizations as per the outlook of your business
- A well-stocked library of questions designed by subject matter experts
- Advanced AI-powered analytics, natural language processing, and Machine Learning to interact with your employees in a conversational and human-like manner
- 24/7 support for employees/employers
- Other important features are
- Case management
- Document management
- FAQ automation
- Knowledge management
- A cloud-based structure
- GDPR compliance and high data protection and security
- Integration capabilities with all the platforms employees are familiar with such as Slack, WhatsApp, Teams, etc.
- Real-time insights
- Multiple language support to give a personalized experience to your diverse workforce across the globe.
What Does Adopting HR Chatbots Promise?
Business leaders and HRs are drawing tremendous benefits by employing AI in employee engagement. Employee engagement is currently the top priority of leadership, and this is where HRs need to invest their time – more in strategic planning rather than answering repetitive questions.
An AI chatbot can take over all the mundane HR tasks and allow your team to be more productive. Additionally, the best HR chatbots can increase user satisfaction by simplifying information gathering and various follow-up processes.
Here are some more benefits that an AI chatbot promises:
- Automation of repetitive inquiries: With chatbots automating monotonous processes, you can use your human resources efficiently.
- Increased interaction rate: It is safe to say that once employees get into the habit of reaching out to the bot and receiving quick responses, there will be no going back. AI chatbots that are conversational in nature increase the chances of participation or interaction rate, no matter its use case.
- Increased HR team productivity: HR chatbots can empower HR teams to dedicate themselves to more meaningful tasks and achieve greater productivity in internal as well as external processes.
- Efficient data collection: The conversational AI assistants interact with employees or candidates and collect important data and integrate it with existing systems if needed.
- Cost reduction: By using resources efficiently and automating the right process points, the best HR chatbots not only save time but also significant costs. The ROI of using chatbots is unprecedented.
- Increased employee and applicant satisfaction: You free your employees from unpleasant tasks and improve the quality of interaction between your company and applicants – the increased satisfaction comes naturally when implemented correctly.
- 24/7 Availability: Whether it’s a query about applicant status or remaining vacation days, the chatbot serves interested parties and employees around the clock, without any waiting time.
By now, you must have gained clarity on why you need an HR chatbot, what kind of chatbot your company needs, and what things you can achieve by adopting new technology. Next, we are going to introduce a chatbot which is a combination of all the points mentioned above. Let’s take a look:
Leena AI: The Chatbot You Have Been Looking For
Leena AI is a virtual assistant for employees that comes embedded with an employee engagement platform for a holistic employee experience.
Integrated with advanced conversational analytics, Leena AI offers solutions that tell you how your employees are feeling and allows you to take data-backed actions. HR leaders can get insights on problems areas to solve before it’s too late and help improve employee engagement scores.
What More Can You Expect from Leena AI Chatbot?
- A customizable virtual HR team member who reaches out to your employees and bridges the communication gap between employees and the organization.
- Implementation of intelligent ‘Voice of the Employee’ software, backed by natural language processing and machine learning.
- Reduction of the cost and time of your HR resources with the help of a single platform that gathers feedback analyzes employee sentiments and lets you pin, plan, and track actions.
- A question library designed by our subject matter experts, who have worked with 250+ clients globally.
- A one-stop shop to elevate your employee experience with the least amount of effort and the integrations of your choice (HRMS and collaboration channels).
- Fit for companies of all sizes across the globe as we support 30+ languages.
- Excellent data security with its impeccable security standards that are GDPR compliant.
Wish to learn more about Leena AI? Schedule a Demo Today
Leena AI’s Methodology to Calculate Your Overall Company Mood Score:
Leena AI implements intelligent analytics after conducting each survey. This analytics help in pointing out the problem areas, unhappy employees, and engagement trends that further help HRs to build data-backed employee engagement strategies.
Let’s understand in detail how Leena AI helps HR teams build effective employee engagement strategies with the help of intelligent analytics.
Key Engagement Drivers
Leena AI is trained to identify the key themes and sub-themes for your organization and how they impact employee engagement levels. It assigns different weightage to each theme and tells you which themes to focus on more. It automatically creates actions on insights that have the highest impact on employee engagement.
Sentiment Analysis
Leena AI assigns sentiment scores to 7 primary themes and 48 sub-themes that primarily drive employee engagement. It gives you sentiment scores for each segment of your employees and helps you feel the pulse of your organization at the moment.
Text Analytics
Leena AI is equipped with natural language processing and machine learning. It analyzes all open-text responses right after your employees take the survey. It, then, assigns sentiment scores to the topics and tells you what matters the most to your employees.
Action Planning
Leena AI immediately identifies comments about critical aspects such as bias, harassment, etc. It flags them out for taking immediate corrective action.
Attrition Prediction
Leena AI uses sentiment analysis and text analytics to identify employees who are unhappy and can leave the organization. It empowers stakeholders to take actions to retain those employees and minimize attrition.
To Sum Up
There’s no doubt that employee engagement and well-being are the foundation of a healthy, happy and productive workforce. And, by integrating AI chatbots and data analytics in new, innovative ways, HR teams can gather valuable insights and take immediate action, all the while boosting employee engagement and ensuring their workforce feels more valued.
HR chatbots are changing the face of employee engagement. They are a much need platform for employees to express themselves and a platform for managers to gain deep insights to understand what makes each member of their team tick.
It is evident how significantly HR chatbots can improve employee engagement. An intelligent bot can do away with complex processes while also providing a supply of information to employees whenever and wherever they might need it.
Looking to Learn More? Schedule A Demo Today!
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Frequently Asked Questions
1. What are employee engagement chatbots?
Employee engagement chatbots are computer-programmed machines that employ natural language processing to simulate human conversations. These HR chatbots are specifically trained and designed to replicate the role of HRs.They are the ideal virtual assistants, who can communicate with employees through a variety of online channels.
2. What are the different types of chatbots?
Here are five different types of chatbots you can choose from to build a better user experience for your employees or customers.
- Voice Recognition Bots
- Menu/button-based Chatbots
- Rule-Based Chatbots
- Keyword Recognition-based Chatbots
- Machine Learning Chatbots
3. What are the benefits of using chatbots for employee engagement?
Chatbots can increase user satisfaction by simplifying information gathering and various processes. Here are some more benefits that an AI chatbot promises:
- Automation of repetitive inquiries
- Increased interaction rate with potential applicants
- Increased HR team productivity
- Efficient data collection
- Cost reduction
- Increased employee and applicant satisfaction:
- Available 24/7
- Removes bias
4. What are the features to look for in an HR Chatbot?
Here’s a quick overview of the features to look for in an HR Chatbot:
- Easily customizable Avatar
- Integrated with a question library
- Backed by Natural language processing and Machine Learning
- 24/7 customer support
- Case management
- Documentation management
- Automate FAQs
- Knowledge management
- Cloud-based Structure
- Compliant with GDPR
- High data protection and security
- Integrate platforms such as Slack, WhatsApp, Teams, etc.
- Real-time insights on employee engagement
- Must speak multiple languages
