Imagine a colleague (Let’s call this colleague Jinie) in your HR department that will start the day by reminding everyone in the company about their upcoming schedule.
And Jinie will work 24/7, surpassing Jack Ma’s 996 (9 am to 9 pm, 6 days a week) expectation from his workforce.
Jinie will not just do it accurately but also instantly.
At the same time, Jinie requires no welfare or staff benefits.
Then again, Jinie isn’t a human being.
Jinie is the HR Chatbot developed by PeopleStrong.
What is HR Chatbot and Types of Chatbot
According to G2 Learning Hub, “A chatbot is either powered by pre-programmed responses or artificial intelligence to answer a user’s questions without the need of a human operator.”
And chatbots are not built equal.
There are generally three types of chatbots.
Dumb Bots
These bots thrive on pre-programmed responses.
All they do is identify a specific keyword that the user is asking and respond with a text that is mapped to that keyword.
There may be hundreds of pre-programmed responses but if the user asks something that doesn’t match within the bot’s database of keywords, it won’t be able to respond properly.
Many of the bots that you find today will fall into this category.
Partially Intelligent Bots
These are more evolved bots that use NLP (Natural Language Processing) and are able to make sense of what a user is asking.
Even if you ask the question in multiple different ways, with spelling mistakes or grammatical errors, they will still most likely understand your question.
But they don’t show any intelligence in responding.
They will only be able to map your question to a pre-programmed response.
Truly Intelligent Bots
These on the other hand leverage data science & machine learning to do things that are way beyond the capability of the aforementioned bots.
They understand the context of the user and are truly conversational.
For example, the bot can know the demographics of the employee, relevant specific skills & competencies, past performance, compensation and hence can answer a wide variety of questions with contextual responses.
They are able to delight users with insights – what they need to know and when they need to know.
Why Use Chatbots?
According to The 2018 State of Chatbots Report by Drift, SurveyMonkey Audience, Salesforce, and myclever, the top three potential benefits of chatbots that consumers reported in their survey include:
- 24-hour service (64%)
- instant responses (55%)
- answers to simple questions (55%)
And it’s not just Millennials who see the potential benefits of chatbots. Baby Boomers were 24% more likely to expect benefits from chatbots.
What’s in it for HR?
Check out this job posting from NUS.
With Jinie, employees can get help and information directly from the chatbot.
In addition to providing employees with the optimal employee experience by giving them the information at their fingertips, the often overstretched HR department can migrate away from the low-value activity as HR helpdesk.
That will free up the much needed time to go into more strategic HR work.
How I am using Jinie as a user?
As a personal user, it starts each working day by informing me of my schedule and the unread emails I have in my inbox.
This reminds me of my priorities of the day and helps me manage my day better.
Generally, I use it to learn about my Leave Balance, find out Upcoming Holidays, know my Weekly Roster (more for workers on shift) and even to find out stuff that are not internal.
For instance, I could ask Jinie where is the nearest ATM…
… or recommendations on courses that I am thinking of attending.
Future Jinie Roadmap
In addition to improving the AI and capabilities of Jinie to better understand the nuances of how we write, Jinie will also grow horizontally to provide more support for employees.
This includes using Jinie to apply for your leave.
And connecting it to your Applicant Tracking System and have Jinie become your digital recruitment assistant.
Case Study – Aditya Birla Capital
Aditya Birla Capital (ABC) is an umbrella brand for all the financial service businesses of the Aditya Birla Group.
In 2016, ABC, spanning across 13 different business entities of the group and 12,000+ employees pan India & PeopleStrong partnered with the aim to digitally transform an employee’s work life and interactions they have with HR.
According to the Head of HR Ops and Shared Services, Suresh Mani, the key driver for them to adopt PeopleStrong’s Jinie is to create and deliver a consistent and exceptional experience across all their employees.
And Jinie helped the company overcome the challenge in a cost-effective way.
Employees that are decentralised and (some) without access to a computer terminal could also interact with Jinie on their smartphone, bringing user convenience to the next level.
Since Jinie’s implementation, Aditya Birla Capital has seen an increase in productivity and reduced response time significantly – the number of queries that still goes to HR related to ‘leave and attendance’ dropped from 1,000 queries per month to 200 per month.
The digital transformation in HR is tough but necessary.
By starting with one that provides instant ROI, it might pave the journey to ease towards the transformation end goal.
This article was published on AdrianTan.
PeopleStrong’s Recruitment Technology (Recruit) is a smart, scalable and one-stop recruitment solution for hiring the top talent. It is not merely an Applicant Tracking System (ATS), rather is AI-enabled, Unified, Intuitive and Intelligent recruitment platform which powers end-to-end hiring processes of 100+ organization across the globe. It is integrated with 50+ candidate sourcing channels, processes over 1 million candidates per year and rolls out 60,000+ joining offers per year. Get in touch with our recruitment solutions executive to know more about Recruit and how we can manage your Recruitments better.
