After 18 months of addressing one crisis after another, many HR and IT Teams face burnout, resignations, and struggle to hire replacements. HR has been the strategic talent partner to the CEO resolving issues such as preventing COVID19 infections at work, managing new COVID19 legislation, improving remote and hybrid working models, determining when to reopen the office, and helping management overcome the great resignation and labor shortage. Now, the rough season of benefits open enrollment, performance management, and salary structure and adjustments is at hand.
The stress is especially high in fast-growing companies, whether the growth is driven by organic hiring, turnover, or mergers and acquisitions. These companies face huge volumes of onboarding, hybrid working orientation, engaging employees, and leading change. Some HR leaders are coming to realize that in an era of labor shortages, there is an option to hiring valuable (but scarce) human resources talent for HR. Instead, use digital technology that compliments the work of the HR professional, to create “super teams.” CEOs need their strategic partners to be at their best…and HR needs an intelligent digital partner!
HR will benefit from this strategic shift in thinking during this era of digital transformation. In 2109, Gartner predicted that 25 percent of digital workers will use a virtual employee assistant by 2021. HR leaders are following the lead of marketing and IT teams, realizing that they need anywhere operations, enabling employees to use digital technology to interact with HR systems from anywhere in the globe, at anytime. While anywhere operations empower remote workers, it also supports organizations in a hybrid work model where employees can move through various locations seamlessly from office to supplier to customer site and home.
Different generations expect a work environment that operates with a “consumer-like” and modern digital presence. Millennial and Generation Z employees (24 and younger) expect business systems to work as seamless as buying a product on Amazon. They want immediate answers to their questions about onboarding, hybrid working, benefits, and other HR, IT, and operations policies, just like they receive from Alexa, Siri, or Google digital assistants.
The landscape of digital technology usage in HR has changed dramatically in the past 18 months according to a February 2021 by The Hackett Group. The pandemic and remote work have accelerated the use of previously extravagant technologies, such as video interviewing, video conferencing, and chatbots. The Hackett Group predicts that five new categories of HR digital technology are expected to grow substantially, namely AI chatbots to automatically answer employee inquires and onboarding.
The benefit from AI chatbots, such as MeBeBot, to overworked human resources staff is having an easy-to-use and affordable partner that will relieve them of answering the commonly asked questions from employees. Let the bot do it! It is faster, accurate, and even asks employees if they were happy with the answer. The bot will also track the number of inquiries by categories, geographic location, and the questions the bot could not answer, providing an early signal of a new issue.
In addition to relieving the stress of your current HR staff as your company grows, you do not need to add staff to answer employee questions manually or staff a help desk ticketing system. And the bot will not quit on you. It scales easily and is designed to be updated and managed by your team. No code writing skills are required and real-time usage data is generated without having to extract reports! If you are acquiring a company, the bot can easily address the plethora of questions that newly acquired employees have as they onboard with your company.
MeBeBot’s customers report 90 percent accuracy with the answers employees receive, a 75 percent reduction in employee questions answered manually by staff, and happier employees. Saving one to two hours a day per staff person is significant and helps reduce their stress. It also saves employees from anywhere time because their questions are answered faster by the bot than awaiting a return email or response to a help desk ticket. MeBeBot customers also report $250K to $1M savings within 12 months. This makes MeBeBot an investment with a fast time to value.
Additionally, MeBeBot customers benefit from our push messaging feature that makes it easy to schedule and send out task reminders for onboarding, benefits open enrollment, performance management, and mergers and acquisitions. Besides, MeBeBot’s Intelligent Assistant answers questions from thousands of employees around the world, meaning customers benefit from our shared learning, or crowdsourced approach, on training the AI data model to understand the various needs and inquires employees have.
One of the best aspects of MeBeBot is that it installs in Teams, Slack, or as a web chat in minutes. The entire solution can be launched to your employees in days to weeks after editing the curated knowledge base of hundreds of questions and default answers, to fit your policies and culture. If your over-worked staff needs help, the MeBeBot Customer Success Managers can modify the knowledge base for you, using the “best of breed” approaches used by other customers.
HR departments have performed admirably over the past 18 months. Now is the time to reduce the stress they face by providing HR staff with a digital partner and “assistant,” to complement their work and save them the burden of repetition while freeing up time to focus on higher priority initiatives.
Reach out to MeBeBot today and learn how we can save your staff time, improve employees’ experiences, and provide you a fantastic return on investment.
