Why we built an AI-based HR chatbot from scratch for automating our HR processes
Do you know? On average, an HR manager receives about 500–600 queries a day about leave requests, interview status, appraisal status, medical insurance, job applications, payroll details, etc. Addressing these queries is a tedious task, then again manually carrying out the processes associated with theses queries would be pretty exhaustive for any HR manager.
What if a chatbot or a conversational tool can interact with these people and provide them the information they seek? What if machines could automate the HR processes such as leave processing, payroll management etc?
With advancements in AI, machines are now able to mimic “cognitive” functions associated with the human mind, such as “learning”, “problem-solving”, “ profiling”, “skill assessment”, “decision making” etc. If we are able to leverage these qualities for augmenting HR process using machines, we can save our HR managers from most of the repetitive and mundane tasks they do every day. So that, they can focus on more productive works such as motivating the employees, enriching employee culture, etc.
And we did it!
When we realized this problem, we looked out for products that can solve it for us, but none of the products available in the market served to our requirements. We wanted the chatbot to be as humane as possible. Moreover, it had to be integrated with the HRMS, CRM, and other communication channels. Eventually, we built an AI-powered conversational tool highly customized for the HR department.
A workplace requires something beyond normal chatbots, more like a virtual HR assistant that automates mundane and redundant HR tasks. An HR conversational tool can communicate with employees through chat, or even speak with an employee to engage and deliver the requirements of the employee.
How AI-powered HR Chatbots Transform the HR Department for Better
While hiring often takes center stage, an HR team is responsible for hundreds of other duties that directly influence the organization but aren’t as visible. They have to manage a large and varied employee base while operating with a small team. Their responsibilities are huge and their goals are always challenging. HR managers seldom get enough time and resources to work efficiently.
Its time to focus on the human side of HR
Many HR Managers state that their challenge on a daily basis is maintaining high levels of employee engagement when much of their time is taken up with laborious work. Since they do everything from hiring new talents to keep employees focused and working hard while making sure they are happy and satisfied at work. An HR Chatbot can automate mundane and repetitive HR tasks so that HR managers could focus on things that require more individual attention such as hiring, employee training and building better employee relationship.
One of the major challenges that most employees face today in an organization is the difficulty to access relevant information on HR policies and processes. Today, more and more organizations are trying to gain a competitive edge over the other by utilizing advanced core technological implementations, since the HR department plays a crucial role in creating a measurable impact on both employees & clients.
Here are a few use cases of HR chatbot in the HR department:
An ideal HR chatbot is built using state of the art advanced Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning Algorithms to perform HR tasks based on employee interactions. It should be easily accessed through company portals or other messenger applications for easy deployment in the workplace.
Speedup Recruitment Processes
Long gone are the days, where an HR manager needs to look out for prospective employee candidates through social media accounts. Based on the needed job description, HR chatbots could do social media background checks and even analyze their posting patterns. Moreover, they are able to fetch resumes from the database for recruitment purposes. Beginning from candidate listing, pre-screening, schedule meetings, interviews, potential employee background verification could all be efficiently carried out by HR chatbots. Intelligent automation with AI-powered chatbots frees up HR manager’s time more reliably and efficiently.
For instance, after someone applies for a job position at a company an HR chatbot almost immediately engages with the applicant. It performs a pre-screening process where the candidate is asked certain client-specific “knockout questions” based on their job description. If a candidate doesn’t complete the pre-screening process, then the chatbot would notify the HR manager to send a follow-up email. If the prospect appears to be apt for the job position, then the chatbot would schedule a face-to-face interview and also adds the interview date directly onto the HR manager’s calendar schedule. Many organizations are increasingly recognizing the need to involve cognitive tools and AI systems to build a better-augmented workforce.
Easier On-boarding
For an HR manager, the word “on-boarding” indicates a blitz of mundane, time-consuming administrative processes like employee detail collection, data entry, resource allocation and many other interfaces where the HR managers are compelled to enter the same employee data over and over — such as first name, middle name, last name, employee id, department allocation etc. But, this is not an efficient way when it comes to multiple employee entries at the same time.
HR chatbots save a significant amount of time by automating on-boarding processes. Thus, it is the best solution for this particular use case. Through a single, user-friendly and multi-purpose interface an HR chatbot could be programmed to register the on-boarding data of a new employee automatically based on the required information given to it by means of a simple conversation.
Acts as a 24*7 Help Desk
Decreasing work stress and time on HR-related task — is the prime reason for using AI-driven chatbots. Beginning with their very basic function, chatbots help us rapidly complete mundane tasks by answering and solving our simple yet very important workplace problems, processing HR queries like “how do I file my salary expense reports?” down to the classic problem “I forgot my company account username and password.”
HR chatbots help us to avoid these counter-productive scenarios, by providing instant responses to the wide majority of employee queries. Through advancements in natural language processing, each employee can instantly discover the solution that best fits their intent. Along with layered HR, dialog flows clearly outlines potential conversational paths. Moreover, it is also possible for the chatbot to provide personalized, accurate answers to the employee in just a few seconds. Issue resolution feature of a chatbot is what keeps the HR team back in the track by resolve any issues raised within an organization.
HR Chatbots are redefining the HR department by minimizing bureaucracy and granting employees greater independence. It will streamline and personalize many of the HR processes such as recruitment, onboarding, FAQs, employee training, employee benefits, annual reviews, etc.
Enhancing Employee Satisfaction
Modern progressive organizations that regard employee talent as their biggest asset invariably need to adopt interactive employee satisfaction practices. Every company need to reshape themselves to accommodate the requirements of their agile workforce — this task is only possible when companies simultaneously adopt both technological and cultural shifts, with the aim of establishing an open and cohesive working environment.
Performance appraisal or talent development is one of the most time-consuming HR activity. An HR chatbot helps to facilitate real-time feedback in a transparent and reliable manner by analyzing an employee work quality &. Lengthy and tedious appraisal forms could be replaced by automated feedback sharing with an intelligent HR chatbot.
Attendance Management
One of the most reliable features that a progressive HR chatbot should have is the smart employee identification feature. Through the use of improved image processing, a person’s physical features could be recorded and it is then later used for attendance management.
Traditionally, attendance marking was done via bio-metric or swap machines. Processes like histogram classification, noise removal, face detection, and face recognition greatly automate attendance management in HR. Employee tracking in real-time helps to automate inputs for payroll processing.
To make this feature more reliable Accubits Technologies have partnered with Intel to build highly efficient AI applications using Intel’s AI accelerators. With this partnership, Accubits aims to increase performance and optimize its products and other offerings on Intel-based platforms. As the first step for this Accubits migrated from a GPU based architecture to Intel’s CPU based architecture. Intel’s CPU based architecture has increased the computation capability of the product by 2.7%.
Bottomline
In a bid to streamline HR processes and provide greater employee satisfaction, Accubits technologies have launched AMI - HR chatbot a state of the art AI & NLP technology. AMI - HR Chatbot can understand the importance of each ‘value-added services’ in an HR department and automates the mundane communication tasks of an HR manager. The end result is a reduction in the response time of the HR department and the overall operational cost.
To get a demo get in touch with us!
