Conversational AI for HR | Benefits and Use Cases
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HR personnel spend a lot of time dealing with repetitive tasks like onboarding, payroll, leave management, employee relations, and legal affairs. With this wide array of responsibilities, it can be difficult for HR staff and managers to deal with everything they need to in a timely manner. Increased responsibilities can lead to issues like delayed response times and inaccurate reporting, which can cause more problems down the line and impact areas like employee satisfaction and administrative efficiency.
“76% of HR Leaders say their managers are overwhelmed by the growth of their job responsibilities” – Gartner
Using Conversational AI technologies to offload some of their responsibilities reduces the workload for overworked managers, and decreases costs for companies, who no longer need to overstaff their HR departments to reach goals. Conversational AI and AI bots provide solutions to common HR-related issues, like workplace management, compensation issues, and benefits management, which increases productivity and ensures internal satisfaction within a business. Implementing conversational AI in Human Resources departments establishes a bridge between management and employees, reinforcing the connection between the two and allowing for a more effective form of communication.
Challenges Faced by HR Departments
Human Resources is quickly becoming more than just an administrative necessity for businesses. With a hand in each department, HR is a strategic partner for businesses in planning and executing their goals. With increased responsibilities, however, comes an increased amount of challenges.
One issue faced by HR departments, especially in the post-COVID-19 world, is employee engagement. Many employees struggle to see their positions as important in the grand scheme of their companies, which decreases their desire to perform. Additionally, there is a rising sentiment among employees about when, and where, they should be permitted to work. Since the pandemic, many prefer working remotely, while many managers would prefer to have a full office. To understand their employees and the work environment they desire, managers should strive to increase communication between themselves and their teams. With conversational AI technologies, this goal can be met, and there can be an increased understanding between managers and employees, creating a more efficient and pleasant work environment.
As HR becomes more relevant in all aspects of a business, more tasks are put on the plates of HR employees. Dealing with tasks like recruitment, candidate screening, onboarding, off-boarding, and leave management, HR staff can easily find themselves buried under an overwhelming amount of work. Conversational AI offers a solution to this problem, with the ability to handle many of these tasks, taking the responsibility away from HR employees.
Benefits of Conversational AI
Using conversational AI to deal with HR processes can help businesses tackle difficult tasks, and redistribute resources to focus on other, non-automated processes. HR representatives, who deal with issues of understanding employee’s perspectives, can use AI technologies to send out surveys and gather employee feedback about topics like workplace environment, preferences for remote or in-person work, and individual purpose in the company. This increases employee engagement and develops a better sense of understanding for managers to know what their employees want.
With the abilities of chat and voice bots at their fingertips, companies can simultaneously deal with tasks like employee acquisition and routine processes in a cost effective manner. Allowing AI to take over the more routine processes of an HR department gives human agents more time to deal with more complex issues; conversational AI is also able to evaluate certain situations and determine if they require the intervention of a human agent.
Use Cases of Conversational AI in HR
Using conversational AI to maximize efficiency in HR will benefit businesses in many ways. Below are 5 use cases to illustrate how conversational AI can be used in HR:
Employee Recruitment
Conversational AI completely changes the recruitment landscape for managers, taking over many roles at once and reducing the amount of pre-selection work for hiring managers. AI technologies are able to gather information from candidates and then analyze it to make suggestions to agents about the best suited candidates. AI can benefit the recruitment process by making applicants feel more valued in the process, asking questions about job and compensation expectations, and career aspirations. With it’s ability to tackle multiple tasks at once, conversational AI is able to analyze individual applicants, while handling scheduling duties to ensure an efficient recruitment timeline.
Promoting Equity in the Workplace:
Conversational AI’s ability to handle administrative duties like these are impressive and beneficial for employers, but the use of AI can also benefit companies in terms of offering an equal-opportunity recruitment process. Implementing AI technologies for the hiring process can prevent unconscious biases from playing a role in recruitment, ensuring a more equitable workplace.
Onboarding Assistance
The onboarding process can be tedious for new employees and managers alike. This process is also a formative time for a new employee to form an opinion about their company and employer, so it is important that managers offer a good onboarding experience. Therefore, implementing AI technologies to streamline this process can be cost-saving and efficient for businesses. Conversational bots can offer information to new hires that will help them in routine onboarding processes. If a new employee faces difficulties in any administrative tasks like filling out forms or setting up accounts, AI can provide assistance to set them back on track, involving a human manager when it is deemed necessary.
Internal Engagement
Born Digital conversational AI can be programmed to routinely send out forms to employees to gather information about the workplace attitude towards certain things. Regularly checking in with employees helps managers gather feedback on workplace experience and any individual issues/ concerns employees might have. Using AI technology to automate the collection of employee opinions can help managers to deal with any issues expressed in a timely manner, getting ahead of a larger issue before it occurs. Using AI to connect with employees can also help foster a sense of community in the workplace, creating a sense of understanding between employees and their managers.
HR Processes
Just as they can help with the onboarding process, AI bots can help with managing basic, day-to-day HR processes. Conversational AI can handle tracking employee attendance, progress, and engagement. They can also process routine paperwork like leave requests and overtime payments. In fact, conversational AI can assist with many payroll related inquiries, giving answers and explanations when prompted. When employees need clarification on standard processes for certain tasks, AI can easily find this information in a company database and provide the information in a timely manner.
Promoting Diversity and Inclusion in the Workplace
A benefit of using AI for businesses is that they eliminate all conscious and unconscious bias from the tasks they handle. In the onboarding process, AI bots only take into consideration information that is relevant to the requirements of the position. Therefore, factors like race, sexual orientation, and disability can be ignored by the AI bots, offering a more level playing field for all applicants. As businesses become more focussed on highlighting diversity in the workplace, they can utilize AI technologies to send out newsletters and articles to employees to increase their understanding of social issues that affect their line of work, encouraging employees to be more aware of their position in the world, as well as that of fellow employees.
The Future of Conversational AI in HR
As conversational AI technologies continue to develop, it will become standard for businesses to use the technology to improve their HR processes. Tasks like processing day-to-day forms, gaining employee feedback, and answering basic inquiries can become burdensome, especially at larger firms. Therefore it is more cost and time-efficient to pass these duties off to an AI bot.
“47% of employees believe generative AI will make their jobs easier and improve efficiency” – BetterWorks
AI is also becoming more effective in providing analytics to HR departments, as they can analyze employee-manager interactions, employee performance, and even look at long-term employee retention for the company. Analytics are then provided to managers, along with suggestions from the AI bots for how to improve performance, increase efficiency, and decrease costs. There are also developments in the realm of Digital Humans, which combine the human-like communication offered by voice bots and a realistic physical appearance, which enhances the user experience and makes interactions feel more natural. Conversational AI technologies are also being developed to offer enhanced personalization for users. HR departments will be able to use AI to offer services like personalized training plans for new employees, personalized schedules for offices, and a personalized experience for individual applicants looking for open positions.
Why Born Digital?
Implementing conversational AI into HR departments will prove to be effective for businesses, as it can make many standard processes much easier to complete while opening up time for managers and HR representatives to deal with more complex tasks, which require more attention. As these technologies get more popular in the industry, applicants and employees will start to expect to deal with a chat or voice bot, as they are the easiest and most reliable option for dealing with inquiries at any time. Using Born Digital AI solutions allow for businesses to get ahead of their competitors and streamline their HR processes, increasing efficiency and overall satisfaction.
Key features of Born Digital AI include:
- Advanced Integration Capabilities: Seamless integration with any website, as well as CRM, makes Born Digital simple to implement for any HR department. Requiring no coding on the company’s end, Born Digital’s conversational AI software is convenient for businesses to implement into their pre-existing HR systems.
- Multilingual Capabilities: Serving companies all over the world, Born Digital bots interact in almost all languages, making businesses accessible to a diverse clientele. This also allows for all candidates to have an equal opportunity in the hiring process.
- Sophisticated AI Conversations: Born Digital voice and chatbots engage in natural, dynamic conversations, replicating human interaction for clients to feel heard and understood, enhancing their experience; this is critical in HR because of the constant communication between employees and management. Without clear and natural discourse, it can be difficult for employees to get what they need from HR departments, and vice versa.