The Fundamentals of Chatbots 

Chatbots are software robots that enable technology to interact with humans on human terms. With a well-trained bot, users can say or type what they need, and the bot will locate and provide information, answer questions, and take any action you train them to do. These virtual assistants can be trained to handle repetitive tasks that would typically require users to log in to an HR application and remember how to use it. They can be adapted according to the human needs, and use preconfigured lists of values for clean reporting. 

With these capabilities, we understand why many organizations choose to apply bot technology to HR self-service as a first effort. It has a profound impact on the user experience, and it makes HR more efficient by handling many tasks and requests formally handled by humans. The quick return on investment makes it easy to build a business case. 

However, there is much more to chatbots than efficiency. As chatbots grow into maturity, they will make both your HR group and the people it serves more connected and productive. The underlying technology in chatbots, Robotic Process Automation (RPA), has a significant impact on operating costs, but it also shifts human effort from routine tasks,¹ allowing them to focus more on building human relationships that foster creativity and innovation. 

How Chatbots Will Change Relationships 

How do these efficiencies in communication translate to higher value-add activities, and what are those activities? We explored three situations where we see significant gains. 

Chatbots in Recruiting 

Communication with job candidates influences how people feel about joining an organization. In a 2017 study, IBM found that only 57% of candidates said they were kept well informed during the hiring process, and only 63% were very satisfied with the candidate experience. Applicants who had a good experience were 38% more likely to accept a job offer.  The study also found an impact on attitudes toward the company and subsequent sales^.2 

Chatbots handle many of the routine communications that recruiters can often forget, like acknowledging applications and resumes, sending reminders about upcoming tasks, scheduling interviews, and even administering assessments. The big bonus here is that they can help overcome the lapses in communications that make applicants vulnerable to being snatched away by competitors. 

What’s the value-add for recruiting? 

Recruiters have more time to work with hiring managers. According to research by Bersin by Deloitte, that relationship is the most influential predictor of talent acquisition performance.³  

Recruiters have more time to work with prospects and candidates. The most effective recruiters are those who build relationships with potential employees. Top candidates are much more likely to want to work for an organization where they have a positive relationship with people in it. 

Chatbots in Learning and Development 

L&D has gone through some rapid changes in the past few years. We have new delivery modes in e-learning, instant video, and micro-learning. Adaptive learning driven by artificial intelligence promises to take learning on the job to a level of effectiveness we could not even imagine just a couple of years ago. 

All those changes have brought with them a new world of complexity to both L&D staff and the people they serve. Chatbots hold the promise of making that complexity manageable. 

Even without AI, chatbots can reduce the complexity of learning for the end-user. Instead of searching through catalogs, course lists, YouTube, the intranet, and who knows where else, users can tell chatbots what they need, and a chatbot will deliver. 

Chatbots can be trained to offer up suggestions for learning based on an individual’s career development plan or find recommendations for a new learning path. They could also handle many more time-consuming repetitive and mundane tasks, like managing an individual’s training calendar, locating resources, and producing reports. 

Support libraries for administrators can become conversational helpers instead of inanimate lists of technical material. They can even be trained to manage routine, repetitive tasks. 

What’s the value-add for learning? 

Finally, we can bring learning into the flow of work. What employees need information, learning in the moment, or a refresher on a new procedure, they don’t need to stop what they are doing and search for what they need. They can assign that task to a virtual assistant who will never tire of being helpful. Your people can spend their time learning instead of searching for what to learn. 

Chatbots in Performance 

The transition from annual performance reviews to ongoing conversations about performance is a long-term culture change project. Anything we can do to facilitate the conversations can be a benefit to both employees and their managers. 

Knowledge workers can spend up to 40% or more of their time looking for information they need to do their jobs. Imagine how you could help them by providing a virtual assistant that has indexed every resource in your content repositories. 

What’s the value-add for performance? 

How about reminders for busy managers? Think about a virtual personal assistant the will do this: 

• “It’s been over a week since you talked with Brenda about her project. Should I make an appointment for you?” 
• “You asked me to remind you to discuss training progress with your team this morning.” 
• “Jack’s report was due yesterday.” 
• “Your team meeting is tomorrow. Let’s develop the agenda. You can dictate it to me.” 

Imagine how your managers will feel when they can view any employee profile, any report, and their management coaching resources merely by asking for them. 

The Limitless Opportunity of Chatbots 

The examples given above are only a few of the possibilities for chatbots to improve communication and performance in your organization. Employee self-service is an excellent place to start, but we encourage you to move on to more sophisticated and productive applications as you can. The possibilities are endless. 

References:

1. https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/us/Documents/human-capital/us-cons-hr-bots-new-super-power-for-workforce.pdf 

2. https://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/cgi-bin/ssialias?htmlfid=LOW14341USEN. 

3. http://blog.bersin.com/surprising-1-predictor-of-talent-acquisition-performance.

Chasma Place, is an independent source for solutions that will help you keep pace with changes in the way your people work without ripping and replacing your existing systems.

From the 1980s until just a few years ago, HR technology focused on making HR work more efficient. It worked. HR teams are now a tiny fraction of the size they were 30 years ago.

There was a cost. For the employee who needed to use HR services, the experience changed from a face-to-face conversation with a helpful assistant to complicated self-service software. We hated it. Not that it was so hard to use once we got used to it, but we used it so seldom that we had to relearn it. The conversation changed from Hey, Jack, can you help me sign up for leadership training? to Where is that #@&% user guide? Never mind. I’ll just call Jack - but Jack’s busy.

Recently, vendors have been focused on the user experience and have made great strides in usability, both on desktops and in mobile apps. But it is still software.

Artificial intelligence is changing the game. Helpful chatbots and textbots surround us in our daily lives. If you want to get directions, find a recipe, or call a friend, we can ask Siri, Alexa, Cortana, or one of many other virtual assistants for help. And now they are coming to HR.

Artificial intelligence is on the cusp of helping us do just about everything in HR better. We can make better hiring decisions, promote the right people, and understand the learning needs of our workforce with the help of algorithms. But we think chatbots in HR will have a more significant impact because they will change how people feel about work as they are doing it.

Instead of sending an email or leaving a voicemail with busy HR staff and waiting hours or days for a response, workers will now be able to use AI-driven virtual assistants to get instant answers to their questions. If they want to submit a request for vacation time, they can just ask.

Because of the wonders of natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning, these virtual assistants will learn from their interaction with humans, and they will provide data from their conversations to help HR deliver better service.

Soon, we will be able to ask questions like these:

• what is the next step in my leadership training?
• How do I request parental leave?
• What opportunities are available to me in project management?

Achal Khanna, CEO of SHRM India, hinted last December that 2018 is the year of Chatbots in HR. They are already here – helping people, not replacing them.

Chasma Place, is an independent source for solutions that will help you keep pace with changes in the way your people work without ripping and replacing your existing systems.

Immediate requirement in Sales team
Immediate update required for new hire training
New Compliance Deadlines this month
The Coffee Machine is broken!

Before you can get started, a manager calls to ask you about recruiting status on his engineer requisition.

Many times you miss parts of the conversations as you always have a mobile to your ear and eyes on an email on the monitor.

You turn your head to see a colleague at your desk wanting to chat - which ends with ‘Good Day’. This so-called ‘good day’ actually ends up with many regrets like forgetting to inform a manager about a skype interview schedule, falling back on priorities, tough times with your boss, going home late, and failing at your personal promises.

Your day ends just when you felt it had started. You hardly find time to work on building strategies that elevate your culture and engage talent.

Is more time all you need?

What if you had a tool that not only saves you time but also enhances your effectiveness - a technology tool that can wisely handle your routine tasks like recruiting and onboarding activities, monitoring training and compliance, and coordinating with managers and staff to communicate on updates.

Enhance efficiency by implementing AI in HR

Artificial Intelligence - where we make machines work, think and react much like humans, can be a boon if adapted well to your HR processes.  

And the fascinating fact about AI is, the more you work with it, the better it learns and adapts.

AI can effectively manage the day-to-day activities of your HR team and here are few ideas to help you start thinking about it.

How AI can help Recruiting improve candidate profiling

Implementing AI in your recruiting processes saves time. AI can help you identify the right candidate profile that matches your skill set. While you let your machine deal routine repetitive tasks, you can work on critical things like having one on one conversations with candidates and drawing insights to improve communications.

While you onboard, reach out to your New Hires with answers to their questions - before they ask

During the process of onboarding, you have to coordinate with the new hires right from day one until they establish strong relationships with peers and managers. Many times it is hard to reach out to every new hire and provide instant guidance.

This is where AI can help you. You can deploy an AI-based virtual assistant that will tackle new hire queries and offer answers so you can focus on tasks that need human intervention.

In your training, let AI recommend the right courses for your employees

AI can analyze the kinds of training that have been successful to make better recommendations for your employee development plans.

Achieve smoother communication flow

With AI, you can train your machine to respond like the way you do. Your employees need not wait for answers. They can get instant help with their questions.

AI will give you the gift of time to focus on elevating your company culture and improving the employee experience. Not only that - your AI will provide spontaneous service by finding answers much faster than a human can.

Chasma Place, is an independent source for solutions that will help you keep pace with changes in the way your people work without ripping and replacing your existing systems.

Before we automated HR, we had armies of people who made a living doing the tedious manual work of handling employment and payroll transactions. For the employee, requesting vacation time was a matter of scratching a couple of dates on the paper form and handing it off to a supervisor, who handed off to the HR clerical staff. From the employee perspective, taking a day off meant saying “Hey Boss, I need to take my kid to the doctor on Friday,” leaving the manager and HR to handle the administrivia.

The Quest for HR Efficiency

The first wave of HR automation made HR more cost-efficient. The army of workers became much smaller, and fewer people made a living doing tedious computer and manual work.

Then came self-service, when HR pushed the work out to employees and their managers.

They hated it. Managers and employees flooded HR with calls about how to handle transactions, so a cadre of administrative worker arose to handle the tasks for everyone in the business unit or workgroup because people balked at learning how to use the software.

With the growth of cloud platforms, talent management platforms, payroll, and time and attendance, competition drove the effort to make those systems easy enough for anyone to use.

Why People Are Not Overjoyed about the New User Experience

People still hated it. Organizations deployed wave after wave of new systems with a lot of “change management” and hype, only to see the enthusiasm dissipate over time.

The trouble is that nobody who already has a job to do in the organization wants to do “HR stuff.” We don’t know anyone who becomes joyous at the prospect of applying for Family or Medical Leave. We have never heard anyone say, “I’m so happy! I get to fill out my online timecard!” or “I love doing those development plans!”

In practice, we just want to get the HR stuff done so we can get back to what we like doing.

The Tedium Is Still with Us

Today, instead of those vast armies of clerical workers, we have skeleton HR staffs populated by professionals and semi-professionals. They spend up to 30 or 40% of their time answering questions from managers, employees, prospective employees, and ex-employees about how to manage their transactions or where to find the information they need to do it.

Virtual Assistants Have Arrived

Relief is here. Cognitive computing, natural language processing (NLP), and artificial intelligence (AI) are working with text and voice messaging to create virtual assistants in our personal lives. Millions of us are using Cortana, Siri, Alexa, and Google Home.

We want the same experience at work. HR technology providers are responding, but small startups and niche providers are moving faster. Chatbots and text bots are currently used primarily in customer self-service, but they are moving quickly into HR, among other areas.^[1]

Now is an excellent time for companies to get in on the ground floor of HR virtual assistants to improve their productivity and to influence the direction these products take.

Recommendations

Before you jump into the mix, there are four things we recommend for you to think about as you prepare for your virtual assistants.

1. Evaluate solutions for compatibility with other emerging technology. A virtual assistant that stands alone will become an administrative burden. A textbot or chatbot should be compatible with others used in business including Cortana, Siri, and Alexa for Business. It should easily integrate into your HR software platforms, and be fully compatible with collaboration software, such as Microsoft Teams and Slack.
2. Work with other cognitive computing initiatives across your organization to build a shared lexicon.
3. Make it easy for users to report issues and suggestions by integrating the function directly into your virtual assistant. Automate the information-gathering for analysis so your users will be more willing to help.
4. Be transparent. Tell your people what you are doing, what information you are gathering, and how you will use it. And, while it almost goes without saying, it is better to say it – don’t pretend it is not a robot.

Sign up for more of our conversation about virtual assistants and the future of work. We look forward to hearing of the success stories of having assistants who are happy to do that “HR stuff” we all hate to do.

Chasma Place, is an independent source for solutions that will help you keep pace with changes in the way your people work without ripping and replacing your existing systems.

References:

1. Lun, Erwin Van. "Virtual Assistant – humanlike artificial agents for self-service areas." Chatbots.org. Accessed January 17, 2018.

Your learners and their managers want a simple, user-friendly experience. When they don’t get it, they want help — right now. When it gets to be too much of a pain, they call you, your support staff, or your support vendor.

It can take twenty minutes or more for a staff member to refocus after a five-minutes support call.

If you outsource user support, it can eat up your budget. Support services can cost up to $55 per hour for each support agent, depending on your location. And how much time do you spend managing support vendor services? How much do you spend on support when it’s not being used?

Are robots the answer to LMS user support?

Having virtual personal assistants that cater to our every whim is still in the future, but today we have cyber-assistants that can do many of the routine tasks that can take us away from critical work.

Cognitive computing can now be embedded in the systems and software we use in every aspect of our lives and is rapidly coming to our business software systems, using natural language processing to respond to typed or spoken commands and act as virtual assistants.

But before you hire a robot, you need to know what it can and can’t do for you. If you have had the same struggles we have with Alexa, Cortana, and Google Home, you know what we are talking about.

Right now, chatbots can do this for you:

• Handle troublesome but straightforward tasks like resetting a password — if you have defined the procedure.
• Find any training resource in your catalog or on your intranet — if you have indexed the content.
• Provide alerts and notifications you specify, like upcoming training and tasks. It can’t yet decide what you do and don’t want to be notified about.
• Suggest the next best training course in an individual learner’s development path – if you have trained it to know your development path structure and the individual’s training history.
• Search the Internet for a video course on active listening. The first time, you will get a much longer list than you want, but over time it will become more accurate.

Some LMS vendors are already working on developing virtual personal assistants for their products, but it may be some time before they are universally available. Many small technology innovators have already developed these virtual assistants and can deploy them in your software right now, and they will help you teach your chatbots what they need to know.

Seize The AI Opportunity

We hope we have given you a realistic idea of what chatbots and textbots can do for you right now and what they will do for you in the near future. Now that the technology is available, the hard work of adapting cognitive intelligence to our processes is well underway. Getting in on the ground floor now, you can get substantial cost savings, reduce your administrative overhead, and improve your learner experience.

Chasma Place, is an independent source for solutions that will help you keep pace with changes in the way your people work without ripping and replacing your existing systems.

Just a few years ago, the only way to develop sophisticated analytics and business intelligence was to spend vast sums on infrastructure and hire a gaggle of data scientists. Today, vendors supply those services and expertise to many customers, making it possible to solve big problems with a much smaller investment.

What most people ponder the science of artificial intelligence, they think of it as computers that think like humans, but that narrow definition overlooks the thousands of ways practical application of AI can assist us with mundane, repetitive tasks. We don’t know if computers will ever be able to imitate the neurochemical processes that drive human thinking, but when we teach them to handle complex tasks, they provide immense value.

Virtualization and Customer Service Meet HR

Automated text and voice response systems have been with us for a very long time. We suffered the inflexibility of limited pre-programmed systems that couldn’t think at all but only responded to specific inputs. Even today we often come across systems whose most frequent answer is I didn’t quite get that. Please provide one of the following responses.

Now, with natural language processing and deep machine learning, our virtual assistants are getting much better at assisting us with everyday tasks that seem to eat up so much of our time. Instead of having to train ourselves on what machines can process, our computers learn to understand us.

When we bring these virtual helpers into our HR processes, we provide better, faster service to the people we serve, and at the same time, reduce administrative overhead. The same concept that made HR software a service delivered over the Internet is now helping us spend less time processing things and more time doing the thinking that machines can’t.

Artificial Intelligence as a Service

We have been enjoying software as a service (SaaS) for almost 20 years and cloud data storage and services for over ten. Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), and soon after, platform as a service (PaaS), has enabled innovators to develop and deliver new solutions weeks instead of years without having to worry about data storage, security, and service delivery – now provided by the platform service. New apps and microservices spring up every day.

Now, we have artificial intelligence as a service (AIaaS), where we can enjoy sophisticated analytics, cognitive computing, machine learning, and virtual personal assistants priced on a price per use basis with no investment beyond the devices we use to receive the services.

Freedom to Experiment with AI and Virtual Assistants

What this means for Learning and Development organizations is that we can deploy virtual assistants with minimal financial or operational risk. We can embed virtual assistants into our learning applications using standardized APIs and we can make them experts in handling many of the interactions with our internal and external customers. Here are a few examples:

• Answer questions about certifications and remind us of renewal due dates.
• Help employees find curated resources anywhere on your intranet or external cloud.
• Help learners manage their development plans with “next step” recommendations.

That’s just the beginning of what AI driven virtual assistants can do to improve your learner experience and the flow of information. It’s only going to get better.

Chasma Place, is an independent source for solutions that will help you keep pace with changes in the way your people work without ripping and replacing your existing systems.