How We Redefined Employee Experience with Conversational AI

Introduction

By its nature, technology thrives well in well-defined environments, be that the front end, back end, database, hosting, natural language processing engine or any other component. At the same time, the Humans in HR are fabulously complex and adding experience to them is not that easy.??

As per McKinsey global survey in 2021, the adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is continuing its steady rise, at least in one business function, from 50% in 2020 to 56% in 2021. According to a recent BCG study, over 80% of companies accelerated their transformation projects last year, and some aligned to this thought sometime before, likewise, we were too.

As per Gartner, in 2021 Artificial Intelligence will recover 6.2 billion hours of worker productivity globally. And by 2022, 70% of white-collar workers will interact with conversational platforms on a daily basis. Our crew at UL Technology Solutions (ULTS) have started interacting with the conversation platform for work by mid of 2020.

Nowadays, home is where HR should enable work and talent alone cannot solve the current nature of workstyles. And if not in these hybrid times, when would HR leverage or adapt technology to positively impact work!

The Trigger

The HR team used to spend a lot of time addressing the frequent/repetitive inquiries from employees. Sometimes the calls are very urgent and they will be looking for a quick turnaround.?

There was an incident when one of the employee’s father was hospitalized and the employee urgently needed his corporate insurance number. Though the requested details were already shared with the employee, he was not in a position to trace it. He immediately contacted me, as I am his HR point of contact. This was on a holiday and I was away attending a family function. I immediately sought help from other HR team members. And to cut it short, it took over 3 hours to finally share the requested details with the employee.

The Birth and Incorporation

While we conducted a random pulse survey at ULTS, it was evident that only less than 8% of employees are only willing to make an appointment and speak to HR. And just 28% have expressed okay to login to the intranet for accessing the information they are in need of.?

So what is the expectation? Anytime and anywhere instant response with legitimate information.

And what is the solution? Establish an HR person who can work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and 365 days a year. Thus we designed the role, developed the job description and recruited this novice; also reliable virtual HR person - ‘ulEva’ into the Talent Excellence team. And we lovingly call her ‘Eva’.

Soon after the onboarding, we started enhancing the information in her custody. She is very patient to learn and accommodate inputs, which seldom juggle as any other tech solution. And the journey is going on.

The Edge that Eva brings to the table

Eva, the self-service HR chatbot at ULTS, is designed to improve the employee experience by giving instant responses to their questions, without having the need to go through portals, documents, or reach out to people.

Moreover, no need for a separate Sign-On. Some of the instant services it renders include but are not limited to

• Personal information like Insurance card, UAN, Bank Account Number, PAN etc.?
• Public and shareable information about colleagues like contact number, email ID, Reporting Manager etc.
• General information like company holidays, company address, contact details of HRBPs etc
• Status tracking like claim status, ticket status etc

And in a nutshell, as seen in the image.

This is available on the official chat platform. As we step to the different era of the workplace, enabling such with the technology, and information at fingertips in any convenient channel 24/7 for the employee would create an impact for the organization and business as a whole.?

Eva also helped in the swift transition to the remote work model without significantly impacting HR efficiency. Moreover, employees benefit from a more personalized experience and become productive by avoiding the unnecessary distractions of following up with persons concerned for some critical and instant information requirement.

Mode of Communication that Improved adoption rate

We know there is an overload of information everywhere and we don’t pick something unless it taps our attention. Here is a sample announcement that we used, to create awareness about Eva and her latest service additions. It turned out to be really effective as we could generate some enthusiasm among the employees which drove the adoption.

Wear on some Thinking Hats well before the Action

The brainstorming sessions led by the HR team with User Experience, Software Testing, Cyber Security, AI/ML teams and some random employees’ pool poised us with a few critical queries and responses.

Can we integrate and use the chat interface of any well-accepted social media app?

• So that the interactions were smooth for the end-user. And the employee experience part is better.

But, how can we insist employees install and access a particular social media app to access a piece of official information?

• Will they be comfortable using the same! If not, the purpose itself is in vain.
• How do we authenticate an individual employee in such a scenario?
• How do we ensure the data privacy of an employee?

How about building an internal mobile app? But,

• How can we still insist on this as a mandate for everyone to install?
• Will they be ready for another app to the kitty and managing another username and password for it?

Few brainstorming and iterations narrowed down our thoughts to integrate with existing workplace tools itself – Google Chat. Moreover, we are using the G-Suite as the collaboration platform. This addressed all the above constraints.

The objective was so intact that we have to achieve the end result without compromising the constraints.?

Technology Used

We use Google Workspace as a collaboration platform for work. The Eva is an integration of the following

• The front end or interface is Google Chat
• The engine is Dialogflow, which is a Natural Language Understanding (NLU) platform.?
• The database is PostgreSQL accessed through the indigenously developed HRMS portal on the Odoo platform

The security part is by default taken care of by Google authentication. So there is no need for separate access control and this also takes care of any external access troubles.

The introduction of Google Workspace in October 2021 further eased the experience, as Google integrated Hangouts and Google Chat. Thus Eva is available within the email interface irrespective of the device employees use.

Initially, we built the Proof of Concept (PoC) by integrating Rasa NLU, Telegram and Google sheets. Though we couldn’t meet all constraints in this attempt, especially the user-based authentication and data protection. At the same time, it did boost our confidence to build the current one by meeting those.

A Capability Building Exercise

Another question that pointed to the Talent Tech initiative was – Why should we utilize internal resources to build it when we have many ready solutions available!?

But the CTO’s (Chief Talent Officer) thought was different. This initiative was started in early 2020, and that was the same moment when we hired a good number of graduates from campuses to different CoEs (Centre of Excellence). He translated this as an initiative to build internal capability for the AI team. And this chatbot was developed by then graduate hires under the guidance of a senior AI/ML developer.

Moreover, Eva evolved as a proven AI chatbot that can be implemented for our customers to help them deliver an enhanced experience to their employees. The experience of Eva brought in the capability of developing Chatbots.?

With this expertise, the chatbot was included as a value-added service to some of the solutions developed for our clients.

The Result - Data speaks for itself

We did a fact check for monthly HR queries in early 2020. On average we have 150+ transactional queries per month from employees through various HR team members; wherein close to 70% are based on readily available data in the HR database and the majority of them can be made public too.

And when we convert this to the human effort, it accounts for 1.2 FTE of an HR Associate role per month, including the lead time.

And now when we analyze the utilization of Eva for the year 2021, the number of information ask (sessions) counts to 22 per week and the average interactions per ask counts to 11. And it is obvious that many sessions will cover more than one query. This accounts for addressing 100+ transactional queries per month in our organization having employees strength close to 400. Thus, there is a direct saving in time, effort and in turn increased employee experience. And the direct money savings? I leave it to your math based on the above data points!??

Is it enough? No, not at all. It’s a journey.

We have more scope to learn, improvise, enhance and continuously improve - as we practice that as one among our core values.

Sustain the adoption with Integrated Digital Strategy

Crafting a clear and integrated digital strategy is key to sustaining the usage and impact. For example, implementing this solution as a standalone application will address the challenge of reaching out to employees, and not the utilization which is very critical to yield the actual result. This was very well possible for us with the governance of the CIO (Chief Information Officer). And it translated an actionable business roadmap that addresses use cases and technology, people, and organizational capabilities.

Accountability of Progress toward a defined Outcome

The effective monitoring of results is critical to measure the ROI. So, we followed the simple and good corporate hygiene of measuring progress; and it includes

1. A weekly review of Talent Tech initiatives
2. Tracking of outcomes at the program level and initiative level
3. Maintaining a single source of data and analyzing trends, even if the usage goes up or down
4. Publishing the data to all relevant stakeholders and making it accessible anytime
5. Defining actionable tasks on a week on week basis with a centralized tracking
6. A quick user orientation is practised as part of every onboarding session

Conclusion

In order to accommodate the swift shift to working from home, we have also implemented more than 20 tools and integrated those to enable the workforce. I strongly believe, our HR technology initiatives have already started transforming the employee experience and preparing ourselves for the Future of Work.

Remote work is here to stay in one or the other form. Organizational level technology transformation is necessary to build modern digital workspaces and enable employees to seamlessly collaborate with each other while working remotely. ulEva is just one example of how technology is transforming employee experience at ULTS while significantly reducing the time the HR team spend in responding to routine, repetitive requests that can more easily be automated.

Some may feel it is contradictory to think that technology can help us be more humane, but I believe it is the other way around – resetting the human back in HR better.?

ulEva – the HR Chabot could free up the HR personnel to impact the moments that matter to employees.

Moreover, Eva evolved as an implementable chatbot for our clients.