Employee Experience: Chatbots as an HR Asset

Employee experience is increasingly at the center of HR and Internal Communications priorities in organizations. The stakes are high, with a major impact on employee motivation, team cohesion, day-to-day engagement, sense of belonging, and employees' desire to stay with the company. Good news: the digital revolution has brought solutions that "augment" the tools companies already have (for example the internal newsletter) and enrich the employee experience. Leading the charge: chatbots. For a few hundred euros (for a transactional chatbot) to a few thousand euros per month (for a conversational chatbot), you can already equip yourself with a powerful tool.

Dozens of them exist, each with specific "missions." Some measure the social climate through surveys, others provide help on business topics, and others streamline day-to-day work.

A chatbot that supports your employees every day

In this article, we focus specifically on the example of a chatbot designed to "augment" existing document bases and internal FAQs. With this chatbot: no more daily emails flooding HR asking how to request time off! No more monthly messages asking Finance for the company's VAT number or expense-report procedures. Gone soon: the "parrot syndrome" that interrupts your work to provide colleagues with information they already have access to!

Read also : [Practical guide] 10 best practices to improve the employee experience

This chatbot (called FAQ Assistant) delivers instantly accurate and up-to-date answers to employees' practical questions — without human intervention, around the clock, 24/7. With one guiding principle: simplicity. From the administrator's side, they set up the most frequently asked questions and answers. From the employee's side, they ask their question whenever they want, wherever they are, from their mobile or PC. An "augmented," instant, and humanized FAQ, in short. What more could you ask for?

Ultimately, this is a revolution! Because such a chatbot gives companies the opportunity to deeply transform the employee experience. Among the identified benefits:

Streamlining access to "cold" information

The main advantage offered by the FAQ Assistant is, of course, simplifying access to the "cold" information employees may need on a daily basis:

• basic internal procedures (requesting time off, submitting expense reports, ordering supplies, etc.)
• useful administrative information (VAT number, intra-community number, etc.)
• direct links to internal tools: business tools, internal HR tools (leave management, expense report management, etc.), miscellaneous tools (meeting room booking, etc.).
• information tied to internal company life (Wi-Fi codes for meeting rooms, meal voucher policy, recommended nearby restaurants, etc.)
• and much more.

As this list shows, the variety of information that can be handled by the FAQ Assistant is immense!

Strengthening a culture of transparency

The FAQ Assistant helps reinforce the culture of information transparency within the organization. This transparency generates trust and forms the foundation of the employee experience. The FAQ Assistant allows any employee to get answers to questions they sometimes don't dare ask directly (what date are salaries paid, how many days off for a wedding or a house move, etc.) — or to questions they've already asked but whose answers they've forgotten 😁. Information accessible at any time, from any device (PC, tablet, mobile) and from anywhere (no VPN needed!). Transparency also means knowing "who does what" in the organization. The FAQ Assistant makes it easier to reach internal specialists and experts: who to contact for expense reports, for an IT issue, etc.

Of course, having information so readily available also facilitates the onboarding of new employees. From day one, they can access all the information they might need. Self-service onboarding, in a way — on top of, of course, the daily support from their mentor or buddy!

Freeing up your support functions

Another benefit is sparing your support teams from time-consuming and sometimes tedious tasks (answering the same question for the twentieth time, for example). This allows them to focus on more interesting and more rewarding tasks. This will simultaneously improve their own work experience and how they are perceived by their colleagues. The chatbot handles first-level answers for employees and then directs them to the relevant expert if further details are needed.

Saving your employees' time

Naturally, the most visible value-add of the FAQ Assistant is saving time for all employees. On one side: your support teams (see previous point); on the other: the entire company (24/7 availability with instant responses). Once set up, the virtual assistant works on its own, guiding employees and eliminating a major source of "friction": lost time.

Strengthening the bond between the company and its people

Last but not least, giving employees the ability to suggest additions to the FAQ Assistant's knowledge base gives you real-time visibility into the topics your employees care about. This allows you to update the Q&A base as needed, in real time, to better meet your employees' expectations with accuracy and personalization. This feeds into the interactivity now expected by younger employees (digital natives), which the company must embrace and generalize. And it is clearly a key asset for making employees feel (including deskless workers) that the company is by their side, whatever their role and wherever they are in the field, every day.

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Employee experience is a key component of employer branding and central to workplace well-being (see the HappyTech initiative). It was to meet this identified need among our clients that our teams designed and built this FAQ Assistant. In beta since early 2019, it has recently been integrated (as a Premium option) into Talkspirit.

With so many use cases, the FAQ Assistant should be rapidly and massively adopted by your employees. A first bot that is widely adopted by its users becomes a springboard for the next ones! So if you're thinking about modernizing your support functions with chatbots…

To learn more about this tool and how it works (both from the employee's and the administrator's perspective), or to start a free trial, contact us 👍