99% of employers believe employees should have easy access to HR information. [According to a survey by ServiceNow]
Only 12% of employers can admit that their employees have easy access to HR information.
So where does this gap come from?
In fact, there are so many more questions!
What happens when an HR leaves?
Is all internal communication recorded?
Moreover,
Is there a solution to any of these problems?
Can technology provide a solution?
All of these questions have one simple solution.
HR Chatbots.
What is an HR Chatbot?
An HR chatbot is a virtual assistant representing a company's HR department. It harnesses the power of AI to converse with employees and automate HR operations like recruitment, onboarding, driving and enhancing the overall employee experience digitally.
What are the top 6 use cases of HR Chatbots?
The following use cases of HR chatbots can help understand how they can improve employee experience and along with automating complex HR services.
To know more about this, let's examine how HR chatbots work and affect different aspects of HR.
Recruitment process
Use the HR chatbot to digitise the recruitment process. They help you collect and filter out resumes, assess recruits, track applicants' recruitment process, schedule interviews, provide career growth of every worker and even collect interview experience feedback from recruits. An AI-powered HR Chatbot also automatically collects applicants' data and provides them with relevant information based on personalised engagement and frequently asked questions to help truly improve the quality of the recruitment process for a company.
Onboarding process
Statistics state that organisations with a strong onboarding process have an 82% new hire retention rate and a 70% higher productivity rate compared to others. Structure your company's welcome bot to help ease and organise the onboarding process for your incoming employees. Directly connect them with an HR representative or conduct a digital induction process to help them access all available data resources. Get them to join important channels on the company's messaging platform, explain leave and increment processes, and introduce them to their team members and bosses. This saves a lot of time compared to a physical onboarding process and covers more ground in a shorter period.
HR processes
Cover routine HR processes like managing leaves, reimbursements for employee expenses, providing payroll and policy information and automating employee engagement.
Managing leaves - use chatbots to automatically keep track of and manage employee leaves to ease the approval and carry forward processes for the entire organisation.
Reimbursements- employees can upload the required bills to be reimbursed. At the same time, the business can use them to calculate and keep track of overall employee and company expenses.
Policy and payroll information- chatbots collect and store data that can be retrieved as and when required. Employees can access applicable information more conveniently using HR chatbots.
Internal Engagement
Use chatbots to improve the overall internal engagement of the company by providing a platform where the HR department can contact and coordinate with each other while accessing and keeping track of provided information to improve the overall quality of employee experience using the HR chatbot.
This helps distribute work within HR and maintain privacy by allocating sensitive information only to authorised personnel. Moreover, businesses may consider calculating employee Net Promoter Score to get insight into boosting employee loyalty and increasing business performance.
Review employee performance
Use chatbots to analyse and record the performance of employees from time-to-time. One of the challenges faced by the HR department of a company is to track the performance of employees, and chatbots can do all of that and more. A chatbot can analyse data, which in turn can help form policies and plans according to the performance of the employees.
Employee Feedback
Instead of depending on annoyingly long end-of-year feedback surveys, use chatbots to request employee feedback proactively. The chatbot can be trained to casually ask for feedback while communicating with employees, store and then analyse the information. Chatbots can also engage employees and suggest strategies and solutions to improve their work life. This helps maintain a standard of employee experience and keeps necessary departments informed with necessary updates.
What are the benefits of HR chatbots?
HR teams are the heart of any organisation. HR chatbots can automate repetitive tasks and allow managers to utilise their time on more important tasks that require human attention.
Accelerated processes
HR chatbots speed up most lengthy HR processes like recruitment, onboarding, tracking and processing leaves, reimbursements and both internal & internal query solving. The best part is that since chatbots are AI-powered or rule-based programmes, they only improve the quality of these processes while fast-tracking them.
Easy query solving
Upload FAQs to your AI-powered HR chatbot once. Through machine learning and natural language processing (NLP), the chatbot can answer all questions 24/7 without fatigue or wasted time. This way, HR chatbots can handle repetitive questions asked by the incoming candidates, saving agents time for other responsibilities. The bot can also cross-question the candidates and collect additional data for better-quality reference.
Transparency in responses
HR chatbots are unbiased, backed by data and yet personalised. This A) Makes them easy to communicate with, in terms of workplace complaints and feedback B) Keeps them updated and highly accurate in terms of data collection and analytics.
Shoots up Productivity
According to a report by Deloitte HR, intelligent assistants or chatbots have proven to increase productivity by 99%, with 75% time saved on resolving cases related to workplace processes. This is because the employees spent 50% less on administrative processes and had more time to focus on their work than adjusting to the organisation's system. Chatbots also allow goal tracking for teams and individual employees, which is particularly useful for performance appraisals.
Simplified referral processes
HR Chatbots solutions also accept referrals from your employees. It can remind employees of the existing roles which are vacant and encourage them to add a referral for that role with an incentive. This helps increase employment while encouraging a healthy office environment for new and existing employees.
Cost-effective
Chatbots are a one-time investment and are self-updating and help save money on over-hiring. Chatbots can automate most tasks for companies, saving thousands of work hours. This unlimitedly results in lower spending with overall better output.
Easy Remote work
Covid has made remote working a new normal. With HR processes now automated, remote work has become even more sufficient. A chatbot is available to help employees with online onboarding processes and answer all possible questions while also providing platforms for team communication. This automatically eases the gaps between on-field and remote working, helping employees not be restricted by mere geography to explore their potential.
Efficient processes with real-time analytics
An HR chatbot can be used for more than just answering employee questions. There is also the opportunity to use these bots to gather employee data to make informed decisions and create more efficient processes. You can even calculate your retention rate to gain more insight into workforce morale and sentiments, headcount, attrition and payroll summary.
Statistics show 88% of HR teams consider employee engagement a strategic priority for their organisation.
What is the ROI of an HR chatbot?
HR Chatbots are changing the way HR operates. Modern-day HR teams have quite a challenging job with seemingly conflicting objectives. Human resource management is not limited to the administrative and transactional roles of only hiring, firing, and payroll management. Today's HR teams are more than just that; they have transformed into becoming strategic business partners, employee experience designers, brand builders, communicators, catalysts in change management, etc.
So, many teams turned to recruitment automation and AI tools to carry out people management seamlessly. HR chatbots promise a great ROI. They can automate repetitive tasks in seconds compared to an HR team that may take hours. They can also automate HR-employee interactions across various mediums. Imagine your employee needs help with the company policy or apply for leave; they can go directly to your HR chatbot, type in the request and get the work done in minutes without wasting their or your time. Though HR chatbots act as information providers, their functionalities are evolving into complex tasks, such as filtering through recruitment applications to save time and boost productivity amongst HR teams.
Examples of how HR Chatbot is transforming the workplace
Here are the two best HR chatbots as an example that you should definitely check out:
Phia is one of the best HR chatbots that provides conversational automation and employee engagement. A chatbot by peopleHum, Phia makes employee engagement a breeze, simplifying surveying, task updation, leave application, FAQs and querying, and more. Built on the Engati platform, the intelligent assistant comes with its API integration module, which makes it easy to hook into any back-end HRMS or employee information system. It's available in multiple languages, helping businesses from around the world.
But there are better parts than that- With Phia, there's no need to create FAQs. All you have to do is load all your compliance policies, guidelines and other materials onto Phia. Its self-learning engine creates the context, and she is ready to answer any question that your employees have on any aspect covered in the document. It manages this feat through the use of our DocuSense technology.
Altisource Portfolio Solutions is an integrated service provider and marketplace for the real estate and mortgage industries. It focuses on helping servicers, originators, and investors minimise costs and mitigate risks while maximising their results. Its AskHR chatbot helps employees across The United States, India, and Uruguay find answers to their HR-related questions and even access the forms and policies they are looking for.
Are you ready to streamline your human resource support?
HR chatbots not only help automate various routine processes but also enable seamless communication across many channels and under a huge range of circumstances. HR chatbots allow the HR teams to look closely at their employees and take necessary actions at the right time. Also, the introduction of WhatsApp Chatbot has contributed greatly towards employee engagement, internal communications, employee onboarding, talent management, and hiring. An HR chatbot does not just automate the Human Resource functions but also changes the way the human resource department operates, enhancing HR functions dynamically.
FAQs
HR automation is all about using AI and automation tools to free your HR teams from routine, monotonous tasks and allow them to focus on activities and issues that need their expertise. It can increase the HR department's efficiency and reduce the amount of time and money that the organisation has to spend on manual HR planning and processing.
Yes, recruiters widely use recruitment bots to screen candidates, interact with them, help them understand what would be expected of them if they get selected, and even get insights into the behaviour of the candidates. It even helps save time and money for the company. These bots might be deployed on channels like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, Twitter, Instagram, or even on the company's website.
HR chatbots enable HR teams to engage with each employee individually. It can maintain regular contact proactively with each employee throughout the year and assist them in various aspects. They can also detect any issues that need escalation or human intervention. Chatbots are also used in HR for recruitment activities and to help employees get access to policies, forms, and documents, as well as to help employees track their attendance and apply for leaves.
Chatbots can improve the employee experience by answering their questions 24/7. These bots provide employees with answers to queries regarding employee benefits, scheduling, insurance, vacation and sick time. They even offer fast, personalised replies to their queries, thus creating highly positive, satisfying employee experiences.