The employee experience is increasingly at the heart of the concerns of Human Resources and Internal Communication managers in companies. This is a major challenge with a huge impact on employee motivation, team cohesion, daily commitment, sense of belonging and desire to remain employed in your company. Good news: with the digital revolution, solutions have begun to appear that “augment” the tools already available to the company (for example, the internal newsletter) and thus enrich the employee experience. First and foremost: chatbots. Indeed, for anywhere between a few hundred euros (for a transactional chatbot) to a few thousand euros per month (for a conversational chatbot), you can already equip yourself with a high-performance tool.
Dozens of them exist, each with specific “missions.” Some are used to measure the social climate through surveys, others to provide assistance on business issues, and still others to make day-to-day work more fluid.
A chatbot that helps your employee experience on a daily basis
In this article, we specifically mention the example of a chatbot designed to “augment” existing document bases and other internal FAQs. With this chatbot, your HR department can say adios to the daily barrage of email requests about how to apply for vacation! Gone are the 10 monthly emails that ask the company’s CFO for the VAT number or the expense-claim procedure. You can drop this “parrot syndrome” that constantly interrupts your work to give your beloved employees information… to which they already have access!
This chatbot (called FAQ Assistant) instantly provides the employee with precise and up-to-date answers to practical questions—without human intervention and at any time, 24/7. The watchword here is simplicity. The administrator sets the most frequently asked questions and answers, while employees ask questions whenever and from wherever they want, from a PC, a cell phone, or another device. An “augmented” FAQ, instantaneous and humanized, in short. Who can do better?
@Talkspirit 2019
At the end of the day, we’re talking revolution because such a chatbot offers the company the opportunity to deeply transform the employee experience. Here are some of the benefits:
Facilitate access to ‘cold’ information
Of course, the major advantage the FAQ Assistant offers is simplification of access to “cold” information your employees may need on a daily basis:
- basic internal procedures (such as applying for leave, submitting expense reports, and ordering supplies)
- useful administrative information (such as VAT and Intracom numbers)
- direct links to business, HR, and other tools (such as leave management, expense report management, and meeting room reservations)
- information about internal life (such as meeting room wifi codes, meal ticket policies, public transportation, and recommended nearby restaurants)
As this list shows, the variety of information that can be processed by the FAQ Assistant is huge!
Strengthen the culture of transparency
The FAQ Assistant helps strengthen the culture of transparency of internal information. This transparency generates trust and forms the basis of the employee experience. Indeed, the FAQ Assistant allows any employee to obtain answers to questions that he or she sometimes might not dare ask directly (like when salaries are paid, how many days off are permissible for a wedding or move, or when an employee has already asked a question but forgotten the answer 😁). Information remains accessible at any time, from any support (PC, tablet, mobile) and from anywhere (no need for VPN!). Transparency also involves the “who does what” in the organization. The FAQ Assistant will facilitate the internal contact with a specialist/expert and tell employees who to contact for expenses or for a computer problem.
Of course, having such easily accessible information also makes it easier for new employees to onboard. As soon as they arrive, they’ll be able to access all the information that may be of interest to them. Think of it as self-service onboarding that complements (of course!) the day-to-day live support of their mentor/sponsor.
Enhance the role of your support functions
Another advantage is that your support functions are spared time-consuming and sometimes tiring tasks (e.g. answering the same question for the umpteenth time). This allows them to concentrate on more interesting and rewarding tasks. It will also improve their work experience and the other employees’ perceptions of their roles. The chatbot will give employees a first-level answer and then indicate which expert they can ask for further clarification.
Help your employees save time
Obviously, the most visible added value of the FAQ Assistant is to help all your employees save time—both in support functions (see the previous point) as well as throughout the entire company (24/7 accessibility with instant response time). Once the tool has been set up, the virtual assistant works by itself and informs your employees, eliminating lost time.
Strengthen the proximity between the company and those who support it
Last but not least, the possibility for employees to suggest additional database options to your FAQ Assistant’s administrator informs you of the subjects that interest your employees at any given time. You can update the Q&A database as often as you like—and in real time—to better meet the expectations of your employees with precision and customization. This is part of the new interactivity expected by young employees (digital natives) that companies must embrace and make universal. This is obviously a key asset to making employees (and especially deskless workers) feel that the company is at their side day after day—no matter what their status or field.
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The employee experience is a key element of the employer brand and corporate well-being (see the HappyTech Initiative). It is in response to this need identified by our customers that our teams have designed and developed this FAQ Assistant. In beta version since the beginning of 2019, it has recently been integrated (as a Premium option) on talkspirit.
With so many use cases, the FAQ Assistant should be quickly and massively adopted by your employees. A first bot massively adopted by its users is a springboard for others to come! So if you have the idea of modernizing the support functions in your company by using chatbots, now is the time to do it.
To find out more about this tool and how it works (both on the employee and administrator sides), or to get a free trial, please contact us here 👍
