New HR chatbot ensures faster and more efficient work

The HR department of SNCB will soon be hiring a new colleague. No spectacular news, you might think. And yet it is, because we at Ypto created that new colleague. As a matter of fact, SNCB will start using the first chatbot for their collaborators. Other chatbots will follow later this year, as we are also working together with TCS on a chatbot for other directions to ease our SNCB colleagues’ work.

The first chatbot for SNCB collaborators

Artificial intelligence and chatbots have been on the increase in organisations for some time now. Several companies are introducing the technology to work faster and more efficiently, in particular to support customer contact. No doubt you have already come into contact with a chatbot yourself, for example when ordering a package through an online store. Or even at SNCB, as our mother company also launched some temporary projects in recent years, with “Chatbot Céline” and “Pierre Perron”.

And so, the HR department of SNCB will shortly welcome a permanent chatbot collaborator. With the chatbot project, we are taking a major step forward, together with SNCB, towards the digital transformation of our national railway company.

Support for HR-related questions

The chatbot, which has been named Norio, will initially be used to help the HR department in answering HR-related questions of SNCB collaborators. This has two positive effects. On the one hand, HR information will be accessible more quickly and easily. Within a few seconds, the chatbot gives you the answer you’re looking for. That can now easily be done outside the office, because you can also address the chatbot on a mobile device. On the other hand, the workload of the HR department will be reduced when it comes to frequently asked or simple questions. This frees up time to focus on other tasks with more added value for the service.

The chatbot is available 24/7 through several channels (Microsoft Teams, internal website and apps). If the chatbot doesn’t recognise the question (yet) or doesn’t know the answer (yet), the question will be automatically transferred to an HR collaborator who will deal with it during office hours, or Norio will create a ticket in the HR follow-up system. The user will be able to choose one of both options. This fallback is important in order to help the user at all times, even when Norio is not able to provide any immediate help.

The project

In the framework of the HR transformation and the digitalisation of SNCB, Ypto was asked to develop a chatbot in 2018. The question was raised after several other projects involving self-service applications enabling collaborators to manage HR processes themselves.

In 2018, Ypto delivered a proof of concept with different parties in order to learn and to look for the best supplier. When TCS became our outsourcing partner a few months after the tests, they were selected to develop the chatbot. As a matter of fact, TCS is the perfect candidate, having the relevant experience and knowledge at their disposal. TCS developed almost the entire chatbot, from the visual appearance to the output. The only element that wasn’t developed in-house is the speech technology, for which the chatbot uses Dialogflow by Google.

After months of development, the technical component of the chatbot is now completely ready. A pilot group will now test the chatbot. Starting in August, some thousand SNCB colleagues will use the bot for two months. The chatbot team will be able to learn a lot from their experience. For example, is there a strong demand for particular content that is not yet provided for? Should the answers be formulated somewhat differently? Or do colleagues ask questions that weren’t really expected?

After the test phase with 1,000 collaborators, Norio will be available to all other SNCB collaborators.

Continuous learning

In the future, Norio will in any case continue to learn and develop. For the moment, he can only answer questions, but in fact the chatbot has a lot more potential. In the future, the chatbot will for instance launch transactional actions as well, such as requesting or reporting (sick) leave. Norio currently does nothing more than giving information on that subject and doesn’t start the process itself. Proactively addressing colleagues is another potential feature, which offers possibilities for onboarding or asking the collaborators’ opinions on various topics for example.

Which of those possibilities will be added in the future will mainly depend on the questions and feedback of the users. One thing is for sure: with this project, we undeniably take a new step towards the digital transformation of SNCB. Ypto can be proud of that achievement.