Can you see chatbots in the future? You bet!
A chatbot is a computer program designed to simulate human conversations. It’s mainly used to handle customer queries and is transforming every business function rapidly.
One such area that chatbots are transforming significantly is Human Resources! Since chatbots are virtual assistants, they can be used to communicate with employees via various online mediums.
Employees can easily access to the HR and organizational information through chatbots and this is slowly brewing into more advancements in the near future.
Chatbots are changing the way Human Resource operates
Chatbots are slowly changing the way HR operates. Modern-day HR teams have a challenging job with seemingly conflicting objectives. Human resource management is not just limited to the administrative and transactional roles of only hiring, firing and payroll management.
The HR teams today are more than just that, they have transformed into becoming strategic business partners, employee experience designers, brand builders, communicators and catalysts in change management, etc. Hence, they need some use of automation and AI tools to carry-out people management seamlessly.
Chatbots in HR can automate repetitive tasks that the HRs spend hours together to do. Chatbots automate HR-employee interactions across various mediums.
Imagine your employee needs help with the company policy or apply for leave, he/she can go directly to your chatbot, type in the request and get the work done in minutes, without wasting their or your time.
Though chatbots act as information providers, their functionalities are evolving onto complex tasks as well that we’ll touch upon in the latter section of this blog.
HR Chatbots can transform the traditional Service Delivery Model
Using chatbots for communicating with the employees, the HR teams are freed up from the redundant tasks and focus their time on employee’s experience and needs such as career management plans.
HR teams have a challenging job. They need to keep employees focused and working hard while also keeping them happy and satisfied at work. HR teams are often held accountable for employee retention and churn without the ability to manage the employees directly.
Chatbots, your new hiring agents!
Recruiters are often overburdened with candidate applications. Filtering through them, sorting and shortlisting can be a very time-consuming process. With this, they also have to make calls, send emails and schedule interviews, leading to employee burnout.
But what if there was a tool that easily automate these tasks? Chatbots perform all these tasks, streamline hiring for recruiters and managers.
Hiring has always been a time-consuming job, but there has been a significant decline in the total time invested in this whole process. As the image suggests, the decline started out in 2016, and chatbots came to rise in that very year! Chatbots in hiring filters candidates, qualifies them, communicate with them for follow-ups and even schedule interviews.
This cuts down the time taken for HR representatives to select through a list of candidates and schedule interviews for them. A chatbot can do it within minutes and handle a large sum of candidate applicants at the same time.
Chatbots in Onboarding and Talent Management.
Human resources teams are increasingly using HR chatbots to conduct employee surveys to streamline the onboarding process. In addition to being a valuable tool in your onboarding process, chatbots grant new hires a powerful ally and an introduction to the company’s team communication app.
During the onboarding process, chatbots can answer queries from new hires through the conversational interface. They can speed up the onboarding process by collecting employee information, completing forms, and assisting in online registration by removing the need for paperwork.
Automate HR routine processes.
As mentioned earlier in this blog, chatbots automate routine processes, be it for the HR or any other sector of the industry. They save an HR’s time and can substantially automate recruiting activities such as screening candidates, scheduling interviews and managing the recruiting life cycle for candidates and hiring managers.
Employee onboarding and orientation is another area that’s ripe for automation. New employees account for a high number of queries to the HR team that you can easily automate. You can also automate regular processes such as attendance tracking, goal tracking, performance review, employee surveys, and tracking paid leave balances.
Easily accessible and available at all hours.
Chatbots help human resources become more accessible to employees. HR teams can now provide instant responses to common queries with almost no chance for errors. Employees can reach out to the chatbots directly for FAQs on common policies, paid leave balance, company insurance policy, etc. Certain complex queries can be taken care of by the human representatives and chatbots can assign them to the employee automatically to take over the chat. This also enables the HR teams to intervene and respond quickly in sensitive conditions.
This is particularly helpful throughout phases of change-management when businesses roll out major changes in the organization or strategy. These changes result in an outsized range of worker queries during a very short time that the HR has got to address quickly to stop problems from festering.
The magnified accessibility to HR is especially valuable to the staff in remote locations, far from headquarters, since they’re bereft of the power to own passageway conversations with their HR groups.
Employee Engagement done right with HR Chatbots.
Employee engagement is the main focus of most of the human resource representatives and teams today.
Statistics show 88% of HR teams consider employee engagement a strategic priority for their organisation. Employee engagement is a workplace method designed to improve an employee’s outlook on the company and invest emotional interest into the organisational goals. HR teams work hard to maintain a positive work environment to increase engagement and improve employee experience.
If the right Employee Engagement methods are used, employees will be ready to push their limits and work towards the organizational goals, driven by a sense of personal interest in their work. Substantial improvements with the right Employee Engagement is shown in this statistic.
“But how can HR chatbots possibly contribute to employee engagement?”
Chatbots enable HR teams to engage with each employee individually. A chatbot 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.
Tools such as Natural Language Processing (NLP) and sentiment mining can let certain levels of emotional intelligence to be integrated with the chatbots. Smart chatbots these days can detect emotions like anger, frustration, exhaustion, de-motivation, sadness, etc.
Based on these observations, chatbots may involve HR representatives for special care towards the employee wellbeing. Chatbots may also optionally help employees become physically active and healthy by recommending and tracking their daily exercise routines.
Chatbots will offer skilled steering and mentorship to every worker. Investment within the career growth of every worker is probably the best ROI effort for HR groups and business organizations. Chatbots will develop tailored learning and development plans for every individual. This could embrace each soft and arduous skills that the organization needed for skilled success.
Chatbots will reinforce the culture of the organization by recommending applicable biological process courses. Chatbots will assess worker skills and suggest courses and modules that staff will take. Chatbots may also connect the staff/employees to mentors at intervals in the organization.
Report issues around employee confidentiality.
There definitely are necessary problems around privacy and confidentiality that a company should address. However, HR conversations, by their nature, tend to involve sensitive and private data. Organizations will befittingly address these problems by providing users and organizations with adequate management over their information.
Usually, the HR chatbot is always-on, extremely engaged, very customized -the good unit of Human Management. HR groups that adapt chatbots can realize themselves obtaining nearer to success, accomplishing the various impossible tasks and conflicting goals that their organizations place on them.
On the whole,
Chatbots in HR not only help in automating various routine processes but also enables seamless communication possible across many channels and under a huge range of circumstances. HR chatbots allow the HR teams to have a closer look over their employees and take necessary actions at the right time. Chatbots contribute to employee engagement, internal communications, onboarding, talent management, and hiring.
An HR chatbot does not just automate the Human Resource functions but also changes the way human resource department operates, enhancing HR functions dynamically.
To build an HR chatbot, visit Engati.
We’ve got the perfect HR chatbot template for you to directly integrate on your channel!
For more information on chatbot tech, here are a few blogs.
Thanks for reading!
Originally published at https://blog.engati.com on November 25, 2019.
