16 Sep
Improve Employee Training and Engagement With Knowledge Bots
Rapidly increasing digitization and the emergence of hybrid working practices have resulted in a permanent shift in the kind of experiences employees expect at the workplace. Just as modern-day customers want faster, more meaningful and personalized brand engagement, employees have come to value and like rich, contextual interactions based on their behavior and changing expectations at work.
The new-age employee experience (EX) warrants technology as a vital enabler to augment and enhance critical touch points right from “hire to retire.” In short, designing modern EX entails mixing digital components with the human touch.
That’s where conversational AI has come to play a significant role. AI-based conversational applications, such as chatbots and virtual assistants, also known as knowledge bots in this context, have rapidly gained traction as a key facilitator of the “employee-first” approach that most organizations have adopted to create a more committed, engaged, and motivated workforce.
Employee knowledge bots offer a guided chat interface and the ability to ask ad-hoc questions to automate simple and complex employee tasks, answer FAQs, and retrieve relevant information for employees.
Powered by AI, natural language processing (NLP), and natural language understanding (NLU) technologies, such employee engagement chatbots enable employees to increase efficiency, save time, and focus on more productive work that demands higher attention. It is anticipated that by the end of this year, 70% of white-collar workers will have daily interactions with conversational AI platforms.
Easy-to-navigate and well-designed chatbot services have the ability to deliver high-quality human-like interactions, improve employee training and engagement at all levels, and help design effective employee experience strategies.
Let’s explore more.
Knowledge bots in employee Training and engagement
Streamlined and more personalized employee engagement enriches EX, makes jobs easier, and allows organizations to better address employee needs.
Whether it’s recruitment, engagement, training, collaboration, or support, conversational chatbots play a critical role in re-thinking and re-designing employee experience to focus on improving employee engagement and increasing self-service at a broad level through four critical functionalities:
- Pushing personalized alerts and notifications to employees based on role, location, interests, etc.
- Answering queries within a matter of minutes/seconds, anytime and anywhere.
- Automating day-to-day tasks that add little value to the organization, yet take up a hefty chunk of the employees’ valuable time.
- Retrieving the right information for employees from the digital workplace.
Looking at the role of employee knowledge bots in personalizing engagement and enriching employee experience through a functional/departmental lens:
A) HR Knowledge Bot
Organizations with a very large workforce struggle with managing the thousands of HR-related queries and tickets generated everyday, along with maintaining human-level interactions with each member of the workforce. Moreover, they must try to reduce cost per contact while ensuring employee engagement and HR efficiency is at its peak. With a majority of the workforce operating from remote locations, it is time to bring all HR-related functions, including onboarding processes, learning and development, etc., at employees’ fingertips.
That’s where we can use Microsoft’s Power Virtual Agents (PVA) to quickly develop an HR bot for you.
As a Microsoft Gold Partner, Acuvate uses Power Virtual Agents to accelerate the delivery of HR bot solutions that help customers solve HR-related business challenges faster. For example, with more than 1500 employees worldwide, Neptune Energy, an independent oil and gas exploration and production company, wanted a one-stop-solution for all HR-related queries such as terms and conditions, rewards and benefits, HR policies, and offshore employee guidance. Within two weeks, built with PVA and Power Automate, Acuvate launched the HR Handbook Bot for Neptune’s Employee Experience Digital Platform.
Delving deeper into the use cases, we see that an HR bot serves the following purposes:
HR Assistant
- Answer employee queries related to insurance policies, leaves, HR rules, benefits, etc.
- Schedule meetings, apply for leaves, input daily hours, etc.
Onboarding Assistant
- Schedule new hire interviews, send paperwork, and capture new hire details.
- Complete onboarding forms via chat and create standard employment letters.
- Resolve new hire queries.
Training and career development
- Send personalized AI recommendations on suitable internal open positions based on current profiles.
- Recommend training programs based on individual interests, needs, and passions.
Acuvate helped a Dutch British Consumer Goods company build an all-encompassing digital assistant to address routine queries for various departments, including IT, HR, logistics, and finance, for 160k+ workforce. The bot resulted in 47% time savings in getting answers to regular HR/IT queries, 30% increase in CSAT, and 40% reduction in cases.
Collaboration and engagement
- Fetch relevant information and allow employees to access the right tools quickly for greater efficiency and productivity.
- AI-based feedback collection, surveys, polls, and analysis to gauge and understand employees’ behavior, stress levels, emotion, and overall engagement with the organization.
Acuvate helped a major oil and gas conglomerate spin up a knowledge capture assistant quickly, to maintain the tacit knowledge base of the organization. Geoscientists possess a wealth of knowledge that they gather, interpret, and convert to meaningful insights. To preserve this knowledge even if one employee needs, geoscientists must manually capture and store the data, which can be highly tedious, error-prone, and may make discoverability of knowledge difficult. This process was made quicker and accurate with a knowledge capture assistant that could capture text, notes, and links with real-time voice input, convert geological terms into text, tag transcripts with relevant keywords, and make knowledge search and management a breeze.
B) IT Knowledge Bot
Growing digitalization has significantly increased the dependence on digital solutions and apps for everyday work. Consequently, the staff is constantly looking for help on various IT-related queries. While this has put tremendous pressure on IT helpdesks, failure to receive timely assistance hampers employee productivity and efficiency.
IT bots developed and deployed quickly using Power Virtual Agents can address routine queries and IT issues, and help with the following:
- Get common IT queries resolved (for example, “How do I reset my password?”)
- Support IT onboarding by allocating new laptops
- Report a potential security breach, obtain outage reports, get stolen devices wiped or disabled, etc.
- Send asset request and asset change request notifications.
Acuvate helped a client build an intelligent IT helpdesk chatbot to enable self-service support, answer IT-related FAQs, and help employees authenticate and resolve their queries using a guided conversation experience. The bot also integrated with the company’s ITSM tool to auto-create incidents upon the user’s request.
C) BI Knowledge Bot
To maintain competitiveness, make critical business decision, and stay up to speed with how the business is faring, business leaders need instant access to critical KPIs, metrics, and business insights. BI bots help executives access data-driven insights and make business-decisions in a quick, cost-effective manner.
- Get business metrics and KPIs at the fingertips.
- Receive quick answers to fairly specific queries, for example, “What were Product Y sales in Q1-2021?
- Receive alerts on movements (rise/dip) in critical KPIs.
- Get quick access to visual reports and dashboards.
Acuvate built a Data chatbot for a government agency responsible for supplying water to one of the largest municipalities in the USA. The chatbot was able to provide insights related to contracts, payments, vendors based on the natural language questions. Not just that, the unique feature of this data bot is that it can surface relevant visuals from Power BI on the chatbot itself so that users need not login to Power BI separately to view the visuals and drill down charts to find more info. All this can be done on the chatbot itself.
Due to the 24/7 access to real-time data with zero dependency on devices and portals, the client was able to achieve 90% reduction in invoice processing times and reduce cycle times for orders drastically.
How can Acuvate help?
At Acuvate, we help clients strengthen their employee experience strategy by building and deploying employee knowledge bots with our enterprise bot-building platform called BotCore.
As a Microsoft Gold Partner, our chatbot services leverage the best of Microsoft’s AI, machine learning, and NLP frameworks, including Azure Cognitive Services, the Microsoft Bot Framework, and LUIS.
Furthermore, keeping in mind our customers’ strong interest in building & deploying chatbots quickly, we leverage Power Virtual Agents (PVA) and Microsoft’s Azure services extensively to roll-out chatbot solutions with lesser time-to-market and help customers solve business challenges faster.
Along with their multilingual functionality, our employee engagement chatbots support popular enterprise messaging channels (Teams, Slack, ProofHub, etc.), thus helping clients to engage a globally dispersed workforce.
To explore more about knowledge bots, schedule a personalized consultation with our BotCore experts.
Abhishek is the AI & Automation Practice Head at Acuvate and brings with him 17+ years of strong expertise across the Microsoft stack. He has consulted with clients globally to provide solutions on technologies such as Cognitive Services, Azure, RPA, SharePoint & Office 365. He has worked with clients across multiple industry domains including Retail & FMCG, Government, BFSI, Manufacturing and Telecom.
Abhishek Shanbhag