As of 2021, chatbots are omnipresent. From news to updates about your food delivery, there’s nothing chatbots cannot handle. And, you can safely add employee experience to that list now. Employee experience chatbots have entered our workplaces and are increasingly being adopted by organizations. Even though Gartner’s Hype Cycle predicts that widespread adoption of this technology is still a few years away, HR chatbots have proven their mettle when it comes to how to improve employee experience.
What is an HR chatbot?
AI-powered HR chatbots, also referred to as employee experience virtual assistants, are primarily digital assistants that leverage AI-ML to automate the repetitive tasks of the HR team, thereby improving the overall efficiency. The bots are empowered to answer employees’ frequently asked questions, improve HR service delivery, and make the onboarding process less cumbersome.
The bots perform all these tasks by understanding the text or speech using natural language processing, playing a pivotal role in employee experience strategy.
What is employee experience?
Employee experience is a sum total of all the interactions that an employee has with the organization, be it the quality of the free lunch or their much-awaited appraisal. An employee’s perceptions and observations about their workplace often govern an employee’s decision to stay with an organization.
Employee experience is widely accepted as composed of three major things: the work culture, physical environment, and accessibility to technology. The work culture and physical environment are aspects we will leave for a future article. However, the technological environment, which takes up one-third of employee experience, becomes a crucial area of investment for organizations looking to deliver a stellar employee experience. This is exactly where a powerful AI-powered chatbot comes into the picture and answers the question “how to improve employee experience using chatbots?”
How to improve employee experience with HR chatbots?
The workforce is predicted to be composed of 75% millennials by 2025 and organizations are well aware of the low level of tolerance this group has for time-taking processes. Add to this the unique employee experience challenges that the new hybrid workplace has ushered in, and you have a fairly intimidating scenario when it comes to employee experience.
Employee experience virtual assistants are built to dive into the massive pool of information stored in legacy systems and serve it to employees at the click of a button. These chatbots require minimal human intervention and can deal with employee queries and requests and resolve them in no time. In doing so, they not only deliver a positive employee experience but also free up the bandwidth of your knowledge workers and HR personnel.
If you’re still not convinced that chatbots are the perfect answer to “how to improve employee experience using chatbots?” and that employee experience chatbots are the wing person you need to crack a date with employee experience, fret not.
Here are four ways in which HR chatbots can help you upgrade employee experience you deliver.
Eases employee onboarding
As your employee’s first brush with the organization onboarding matters, 30% of employees decide to quit within the first 90 days. So, even though we would all like to make onboarding a pleasant experience for our new joiners, clearly many of us are not succeeding at it.
Taking the paperwork out of the employee onboarding process remains a distant dream, but HR chatbots can make this process a lot less tedious and painful. From answering any queries a new employee might have about company policies to dropping them periodic reminders about their training schedule, HR chatbots can walk employees through the onboarding process without human intervention.
While a human buddy remains a perfect addition to your onboarding strategy, HR chatbots are often a lot faster at giving responses and these instant responses will go a long way in making a good first impression on your new hire.
Contributes in skill development
70% of employees would leave their job for another that prioritizes employee development. What’s worse than providing no training opportunities at all is sending out generic, non-personalized training opportunities and material to your employees. And HR chatbots can help with this.
Also known as “virtual coaches”, HR chatbots are trained to provide employees the knowledge and highly personalized training they need while they are on the job. Whenever an employee doubts any aspect of their job, they simply need to ping their virtual coach and have a plethora of links and relevant training resources delivered to them through chat. In the long run, this information can help employees get the much-needed upskill they were looking for.
Helps Collect employee feedback and relay it back
The connection between employee feedback and employee engagement has been established across various studies. Employees show a higher engagement score when their companies provide a feedback mechanism, and the number goes further upward when this feedback is acted upon.
By sending out employee engagement surveys that can mostly be finished through automated replies, HR chatbots can gather a lot of data regarding the general engagement level among employees. Through analysis of this data, these chatbots come up with detailed reports that can highlight exactly where the issue lies and why employee engagement is at a lower stride within the organization.
Further, they also hightlight how they can leverage these data to boost the overall employee engagement. Some of these AI-powered chatbots go a step ahead and suggest actions that the leadership and HR department can take to ensure disengagement does not turn into attrition.
Improves HR self-service
Though employee self-service takes the load off of HR departments, the experience is not quite the same on the employee side. Complex HR systems often ensure employees aren’t able to do most things on their own and eventually need HR personnel’s assistance to complete most tasks and source information.
With an HR chatbot to guide employees around the self-service system employees can navigate these tasks without bugging the HR department. Be it calculating their leave balance before applying for leave or getting a detailed list of health benefits before choosing the right insurance option, HR chatbots are equipped to handhold employees through all of these tasks.
Remain connected with remote employees
The HR team is always looking for ways to keep the employees motivated and engaged. Remote employees often feel detached and perform way less than what is expected from them. Employee experience chatbot can be pivotal in such a situation. It can help bridge the gap by building seamless communication between remote employees and the HR team. Your HR department can connect with the employees anytime and inquire about their engagement with the company. This way, your remote employees won’t feel disengaged and unmotivated.
Wrapping up
HR chatbots translate to improved employee experience and this is now evident from the discussion above on how to improve employee experience using chatbot. The benefits of integrating HR automation clearly highlight the purpose of an HR chatbot or virtual assistant. They are now integral in improving the employee experience and making them more productive and happier.
HR chatbots being equipped with NLP streamlines the entire communication with employees and enables the HR team to focus more on improving the workplace. The bots also help businesses reduce expenditures as employees won’t waste paid hours on tasks that the chatbots can perform on their own.
Still not convinced why you need an HR chatbot? Get in touch with our executives for a thorough walk-through of what these chatbots can do for you.
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Schedule a consultationFrequently Asked Questions
What is an employee chatbot?
An employee chatbot is a digital assistant that helps employees stay connected with team members, managers, and colleagues across teams. The bots play an integral role in keeping the employees updated about the recent developments in the organization. Being powered with NLP abilities, the bots can seamlessly decipher the texts and address employee queries, improving the overall employee experience. Further, it can capture employee feedback and handle various aspects pertaining to an employee’s lifecycle.
How can chatbots support employees in their daily work?
Scheduling meetings, booking meeting rooms, submitting hours are some of the essential tasks that are low in complexity but are time-consuming. Consequently, this hampers the concentration and productivity of the employees. A bot with natural language processing handles all these tasks seamlessly and allows employees to concentrate more on their core responsibilities.
What are the benefits of chatbots integrated into employee workflows?
AI-powered chatbots integrated with Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing capabilities are enabling organizations to redefine the employee-employer relationship by automating the repetitive tasks of the employees. Chatbots are also turning out to be pivotal in transforming how employees interact and access the information needed to improve productivity.
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