VIL embraces next-generation HR service delivery

General questions went to an HR SPOC. Compensation questions went to payroll. Insurance, provident fund and tax each had their own team. Employees were used to walking up to HR, calling a back-office colleague or writing an email.

HR leaders wanted to make the experience more efficient and ‘phygital’: any employee, anywhere in the country, able to ask for a resolution at any time, with HR able to track how well it was resolved.

Reducing HR's transactional effort would follow from simplifying processes and redesigning how HR services were delivered.

As in most transformation journeys, the real challenge was a behavioural shift in how employees ask. The second was the variety of queries: no new HR virtual assistant can comprehend and resolve everything from day one.

Even after AISHA launched, employees kept raising queries the old ways. Leaving every channel open would have kept the old habits alive.

So VIL simplified the choice. Email got an auto-reply pointing to AISHA, then the other parallel channels were disabled one at a time, backed by a large communication campaign. Unresolved questions were turned into tickets and closed fast, so cynicism never had a chance to set in.

AISHA — the in-house name, with her own employee number, 200002 — answers HR questions and helps employees ask the right one. When she isn't sure, she raises a ticket, gets the answer from colleagues in the back office, and learns it for next time.

All employee queries — policy, payroll or insurance — now come through one channel. Third-party queries enter through the bot and are routed in the back end, so AISHA is the only place employees need to go. HR now sees which categories of query arrive, where processes can be simplified, and where the pain points are.

It also let VIL repurpose support resources to focus on L2 and L3 resolutions, and track metrics such as issue repeatability to see where the same problems keep coming back.

AISHA is now the core of VIL's employee service. New policies and processes launch through the bot, and every unanswered query becomes something she learns.

With every other channel shut down, employees get self-service convenience. Beyond instant answers, AISHA handles employee-specific queries through Leena AI's case management platform, and HR picks up unique unanswered queries in the back end and suggests responses for AISHA to handle on her own next time. VIL describes the Leena AI team as responsive and keen to build tailored solutions for its use cases.