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HR bogged down with questions? AI can help!

by
MeBeBot
on July 26, 2019

Are employees flooding HR’s email with questions? YES!

Below is an excerpt from a recent article in the Employee Benefits News, a publication that provides the current awareness and insight benefit managers need to select, communicate and manage benefit programs to their employees, discussing how AI and Chatbots can help HR free up valuable time to be more strategic.

Reporter Kayla Webster writes, “administrative work, including answering employee questions, takes up about 73.2% of HR’s time, according to a study by the Center for Effective Organizations. That doesn’t leave much room for evaluating workplace culture, researching new retention programs or recruiting — all equally essential HR functions.”

“It takes about three minutes to answer a question, but when you consider how many of those are coming in you realize how much it can really bog [HR] down,” said Debbie Smith, Executive Vice President of HR at software company E2open — during a recent webinar. “We could spend that time on higher quality initiatives.”

To help redirect some of HR’s more tedious work, 20-year HR veteran Beth White programed a chatbot last year to specifically address workplace questions. She dubbed the virtual assistant — and her company — MeBeBot, which can be customized to answer questions specific to a company’s benefit program and policies.

“Our goal is to enable HR professionals everywhere to leverage technology to extend the knowledge of HR, and to put the focus back on our most important priority: our people,” White said.

Employees get frustrated when there’s too many digital platforms to access work benefits, she added. So MeBeBot is integrated with popular online communication tools like Slack, Skype and Teams that employees already use at work to make the application more accessible, White added. And being online, employees can access the program outside of office hours.

“You can get questions about your benefits answered when you’re at the doctor’s office,” White said as an example.

E2open is a customer of MeBeBot; the software company was able to save their HR department 184 hours of labor last year after introducing a custom chatbot, called Eva, Smith said. The HR department requested the chatbot be programed to answer basic administrative questions about benefits, taking time off and company policies. Since its induction, Eva has been answering around 300 employee questions a month, Smith said.

For the complete article, see here:

https://www.benefitnews.com/news/how-ai-can-assist-overworked-human-resources?brief=00000152-14a7-d1cc-a5fa-7cffccf00000