Over the last one year, advances in chatbot technologies have transformed workflows across many enterprise functions, including the HR department.
Chatbot for human resources management (HRM) is a holy grail function that combines task automation along with enabling a single, seamless interface that requires a low learning curve for anyone on your team. More importantly, it provides a completely customized experience for each employee.
To resolve an employee query, generate a report or build a business case, typically HR goes through an average of 5 – 10 systems. A chatbot-powered HRM, on the other hand, functions as a seamless cohesive unit that makes it easy for everyone to pull out information or execute tasks by just raising a simple request.
Secondly, it helps prioritize your strategic work. Imagine a team of 5 HR employees servicing hundreds of employees with an incessant stream of sundry queries: “What is my leave balance?”, “How do I reimburse my health cards?”, and so on. How much time are you left with to address serious grievances around advisories, harassment or crisis situations? This is missing the trees for the woods.
By focusing on low-value tasks, you give complex tasks a go-by, which ultimately bogs down the employee experience. Chatbot helps HR teams attend to more serious work by taking over these tasks that can easily be handled by an automated chatbot solution.
Today, medium to large organizations are very particular about where they want HR teams to act as human touch points and where they want employees to self-serve.
Below are some of the main activities that can be handled by chatbots.1. End-to-end onboarding process
An HR chatbot can make end-to-end onboarding processes effective and engaging. An interactive assistant can help the HR department collect necessary information. The new recruit could be given a quick start guide helping them understand more about the organization, products, clients, and overall culture.
2. Check leave balance
Consider this: an employee has to know their leave balance and they are on the road. They have to put up an email or login into an application to check the leave balance. All these functions are time-consuming and tedious. But with chatbot integrated into your HR system, they can simply ask the bot via text or voice command and access their leave balance in real-time. As with a human resource person, a bot can understand the urgency through its sentiment skills and answer the queries without extending waiting hours of the user, or handoff to someone from the HR team with the entire history and context in case it has not understood the intent of the user.
3. Self-assessment processes
HR chatbots could also be used to improve other aspects of the performance review, like the self-assessment processes. Instead of just relying on traditional self-assessment forms, an AI-powered interactive assistant can give an employee a conversational experience. Reminders to employees about goal settings or filling up appraisal forms can be easily delegated to these HR bots.
4. Fast answers to FAQs
Your colleagues in HR are likely to have answered the same questions several times. And creating a dedicated application to answer FAQs on company policies and processes is expensive. But with HR bots that are coupled with AI and machine learning and natural language processing (NLP), your company can have an assistant answering queries in real time.
5. Instant compliance tasks
The HR team must address new codes and ensure your business runs safely and legally from the start. How a business communicates this and enforces it effectively is equally important. Chatbots can be trained to send alerts for anything from new state regulations to approaching deadlines to your busy HR team. It can also be trained to alert employees about any outstanding items or new information that can directly affect them. It can personalize this information based on information captured during onboarding.
