It’s a common source of frustration among both HR teams and employees: HR professionals see many of the same questions day in and day out, and sometimes answers to those questions come slowly because there are myriad other HR tasks to tend to. Employee satisfaction goes down and productivity can start to suffer, too.
This is where instant HR service can come to the rescue. Modern technology, including generative AI and natural language processing, can help you provide instant responses to common HR queries.
Read on and we’ll show you the biggest advantages of enabling HR instant responses and how you can make them happen.
When human resource departments are slow to respond to employee questions, it can bog everyone down. Picture it: Employees spend less time working because they’re spending more time searching for the information that they need. Meanwhile, HR teams are spending excessive amounts of time answering the same questions over and over instead of moving on to handle other tasks.
All the while, frustration builds among both employees and HR professionals — and that leads not only to declining levels of productivity, but also decreasing employee engagement and satisfaction.
Slow HR responses can lead to lowered levels of employee satisfaction and engagement. Technology like generative AI can provide instant answers to bring both satisfaction and engagement back up.
And the benefits go deeper than that. When you implement a self-service system where employees can ask questions and get instant answers, you can expect the benefits below.
According to Gallup, 55% of work locations are hybrid, and another 26% are remote. Modern distributed workforces and hybrid workforces often have employees working during their preferred hours or working from time zones that fall outside of the standard 9-to-5 Eastern Time. Instead of waiting for HR teams who may be working vastly different hours, employees can get real-time responses.
When responses are slow to arrive, it can give the impression — even if unintentional — that there is a lack of transparency within the company. That’s in addition to the frustration of not being able to access enough information to satisfy someone’s needs or to proceed with a task.
Offering instant responses to employee inquiries builds a sense of trust and transparency while alleviating frustrations, both of which are essential for building employee engagement and satisfaction.
New hires will naturally have lots of questions about a variety of things: Specific job duties, particulars about healthcare and other benefits, company policies, how to request vacation time, and so on.
Automated learning management systems that can offer instant answers to these questions will not only improve the onboarding experience, but help new employees find their footing and reach maximum productivity levels sooner.
An HR team member who isn’t burdened with answering repetitive questions is one who can spend more time on personalized performance reviews, refining company policies, or performing other strategic tasks.
In other words, your HR department can focus on the things that really matter, like acquiring the best talent, creating a better workplace, and improving employee retention.
Looking for a solution that provides instant answers to common human resources questions? RapidBee delivers advanced AI tools that can provide personalized responses so that employees can get the support they need when they need it most. Best of all, it’s easy to get started.
With machine learning and natural language processing, AI chatbots are invaluable for answering employee queries — but to accomplish this feat, they’ll need a knowledge base to work from. On RapidBee, creating a knowledge base is as simple as uploading documents and other assets to the platform. The AI can take it from there, using this information to find and provide answers.
The big question is, what information should you include within your knowledge base? Make sure that at minimum, you’re providing the following:
It looks like a long list of information — but the more you can include in your knowledge base, the easier it will be for employees to use the chatbot to get the answers they need.
While AI has a lot of use cases, there will be times when questions prove to be more than it can handle — and that’s when human HR support will step in. The RapidBee platform allows you to streamline this process through automated support ticket management. You can set up various rules, time-driven automations, and other variables.
From there, the platform will handle the rest. If the self-service chatbot is unable to answer an employee inquiry, it will automatically escalate the question to a support ticket. It will route it to the right team member, creating a seamless workflow that allows HR professionals to skip the repetitive tasks so that they can focus on the issues that truly require human intervention.
Next comes testing — but don’t worry, you won’t need to invest in expensive AI training and development services. Instead, you can test RapidBee’s AI-driven chat simply by asking it some of the common questions that generally populate your HR team’s inboxes.
You can even roll it out to a select group of employees so that they can experiment with messaging the chatbot and provide feedback on the results.
Either method will help you to identify areas where you may need to add information to your knowledge base so that the chatbot can provide answers.
Once you’ve finished testing the AI, it’s time to roll it out company-wide. However, like most initiatives, you shouldn’t treat this process as a one-and-done implementation.
Instead, commit to continuous refinements. For starters, company policies, benefits packages, training materials, and other important information will evolve and change with time — and it’s critical to keep your automated helpdesk supplied with the most current information available. Also, continuous refinement will enable your AI tools to provide better and better responses, which will help streamline HR operations even more over time.
Instant responses can work wonders for improving employee satisfaction and engagement while reducing the workload on your HR team. RapidBee makes it easy to set up a fully featured helpdesk that includes an AI-driven chatbot, automated support tickets, and more.
To discover how you can use these features in your organization, request a free trial.