What You Can Do With AI Chatbots for Employee Support

Onboarding Remote EmployeesOnboarding Remote Employees
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Make your work life easier by using AI chatbots for employee support. This guide will remove the intimidation and give you easy-to-use tools.

Artificial intelligence has taken the business world by storm — and human resource management is rapidly becoming one of the most popular uses for this technology. It can handle many routine tasks, like screening resumes, scheduling interviews, or sending out important reminders. 

What you may not have realized, however, is that you can also leverage AI to provide employees with timely assistance — all while reducing the workload on your support teams.

Below, we’ll show you how you can empower your workforce with AI chatbots for employee support. You’ll also discover how easy it is to set up your own custom chatbots using the RapidBee feature on Pulpstream.

What Are the Benefits of AI Chatbots for Employee Support?

AI chatbots for employee support: RapidBee's Chat with AI Assistants and HR Team page

Simply put, AI-powered chatbots for employee support are like enabling easy mode. With them, you can automate a lot of the repetitive tasks that HR teams and tech support teams routinely face, which leads to a much more streamlined experience for everyone:

  • AI chatbots can make the initial onboarding process much smoother for new hires.
  • By eliminating the work of answering FAQs, you can reduce the workload for both human resources and IT teams. 
  • Since AI chatbots can provide answers in real time, it eliminates the wait for answers to most questions — response times greatly improve.
  • You can improve the employee experience by using AI chatbots to provide on-demand training for new hires and long-standing employees alike.
  • Instant responses make life easier for employees, which improves both employee satisfaction and employee engagement.

As you can see, conversational AI can handle many of the most time-consuming tasks that support teams face — and the benefits all help you streamline workflows to enable increased employee productivity not only within IT and HR departments, but throughout your entire organization.

5 Ways Chatbots Help Streamline Operations

AI chatbots for employee support: RapidBee's AI Assistant chatbot

The benefits of artificial intelligence and natural language processing for employee support are enormous — but what about the use cases? That’s coming up next. We’ll show you how to go beyond a basic HR chatbot to create a virtual assistant that can provide self-service support on a variety of topics.

1. Employee Onboarding

Employee onboarding is one of the most challenging HR processes — and it can also be a confusing and overwhelming time for new employees, too. Here’s how a chatbot can improve the onboarding process:

  • Use your chatbot throughout the recruitment process to request resumes, schedule interviews, send out job offers, and provide personalized welcome messages once you’ve made a hiring decision.
  • Both prospects and new employees will have lots of questions about every aspect of the job. With AI, you can provide instant answers.
  • There will also be a lot of paperwork to fill out. AI-powered HR chatbots can guide new hires through documentation to help them ensure everything is filled out correctly.

On top of that, an HR bot can also help HR leaders gain data-driven insights into the onboarding process. It’s a simple task to analyze chatbot data, track onboarding processes, spot common areas where new employees experience difficulties, and then use that information to make improvements.

2. Employee Training

The average company invests 62 hours per employee into training each year. Even at a small scale, that’s a significant amount of time — and across hundreds or thousands of employees, this number can get downright enormous. 

Chatbots can help here, too. When you’re creating the knowledge base that your chatbot will work from, be sure to upload training content plus details about roles and job functions. The chatbot can use machine learning and generative AI to answer questions or guide employees through training materials.

Providing on-demand access to important trainings will help you to save time. Employees can learn where and when they want, making the upskilling process more seamless, and this is also another way you can reduce workloads to smooth out HR operations even more.

3. Questions About Benefits and Payroll

Questions about benefits and payroll represent one of the larger routine tasks that HR professionals must tend to. Some of the most common questions are typically related to:

  • Healthcare benefits, how to use those benefits, how to get new insurance cards, or how to change benefits packages.
  • Payroll inquiries, like how to access paystubs or change banking information.
  • Questions about 401Ks and other retirement benefits, including how to manage them or change contributions.
  • Inquiries into health and wellness programs and other benefits the company offers to support employee well-being.
  • Queries about sick leave, vacation time, or family leave, like how many days are remaining, or how employees can request time off in one of these categories.

Rather than letting questions like these pile up in the inboxes of your HR team, you can make HR support easier for everyone by providing this information to your chatbot so that it can answer questions for you.

For example, you can create a leave assistant by doing the following: 

  • Upload information about your company’s vacation, sick time, and family leave policies. 
  • Include information about state and federal regulations pertaining to sick time and family leave. 
  • Provide the chatbot access to employee data so that it can check leave balances and other details.

With this information, the chatbot can answer most all questions pertaining to leave, which will make the process easier for everyone when filing leave requests.

4. Other Common Employee Queries

AI chatbots aren’t just for payroll and benefits questions. You can set them up to answer all kinds of questions. Consider adding the following information to the chatbot’s knowledge base:

  • The most current version of the employee handbook and your company policies.
  • Your company’s health and safety policies.
  • Reporting and conflict resolution procedures.
  • MSDS sheets, instruction manuals, and other key documentation for chemicals, devices, and equipment.

These resources will turn your chatbot into a user-friendly knowledge repository that provides employees with instant access to all types of crucial information.

5. Technical Support

In addition to providing various HR services, your employee support chatbot can also serve as a helpdesk or service center that provides technical support. By providing it with the right information, you can enable a self-service IT chatbot to do the following:

  • Troubleshoot basic technical problems — and create helpdesk tickets for more complicated issues.
  • Provide instructions on how to set up and use phones, tablets, computers, and other devices.
  • Provide instructions on how to download, set up, and use the apps in your company’s app stack. 

Just as a chatbot can reduce the workload on your HR team by addressing common questions, it can also make life easier for IT teams, too.

How to Set Up AI Chatbots for Employee Support

AI chatbots for employee support: setting up RapidBee's New AI Assistant

RapidBee makes it easy to set up AI chatbots for employee support. All you need to do is follow the steps below:

  • Step 1: Choose how many chatbots you’d like to create. You can set up just one as a self-service portal to handle all inquiries, or create separate AI assistants to handle HR inquiries, leave assistance, safety policies, and so on.
  • Step 2: Upload documentation for the chatbot to use. Once you’ve uploaded everything, the AI Assistant setup window will give you options for which folders each assistant can access.
  • Step 3: Create sample questions. These will display when employees access the chatbot, which means you can use them as examples for questions that people can ask or an easy-access, clickable prompt to the top most-asked questions you see on a day to day basis.

And that’s it! Once you’ve completed the steps above, you can test the AI Assistant to make sure that it’s providing valuable insights. 

It’s also a good practice to continually update each assistant’s knowledge base. Add new information as you discover gaps in the AI’s knowledge, and make sure to keep assistants supplied with the most current versions of your company’s policies.

Easily Enable Employee Support With RapidBee’s AI Assistant

Whether you want to reduce repetitive IT and HR tasks, make it easier for employees to access essential information, or create a self-service portal that handles crucial HR functions like onboarding and training, RapidBee makes it easy. The platform allows you to create customized AI assistants that your workforce can use for instant access to important information.

And that’s not all that you can do with the RapidBee platform. You can also pursue initiatives to increase employee engagement and retention, conduct assessments and pulse surveys, improve the hiring process, and more. Sign up for a demo to discover the many ways RapidBee can empower your workforce.