Now, Chatbots Speed Up HR Work
A senior manager at lnMobi
recently received a popup alert on his computer screen to “catch up“ with
Ruchi, the company's newest recruit. The mechanism, which sought to ensure that
the employee could get immediate access to him, is being increasingly used by
companies to help human resources managers speed up some routine functions.
The technology being used
is a chatbot, a computer programme designed to simulate conversation with human
users, especially over the Internet.
HR companies casually refer
to this as a friend who chats with you and helps you with tasks such as booking
a flight ticket, reminding you to punch in for your attendance, sending a note
to your newly-joined team member or even training you for the next job
interview.
Besides InMobi, which plans
to roll out this function across the company by April, Yes Bank is looking to
introduce it by the end of the year. With this, employees can get quick
information on compensation breakup, leave, policies and benefits, as well as
ask questions that can be answered immediately.
The next step will be for
Yes Bank to develop this into a mobile-led app lication for employees to access
anywhere. “This will reduce the pressure on HR teams as employees can get the
information they require without having to personally go to someone for it,“
said Ritesh Pai, country head of digital banking at Yes Bank.
Some chatbots can help with
employee performance reviews and recognition, and engagement while other
applications can simplify the recruitment process through artificial
intelligence or even help manage complete on-boarding flow for the new hires
through a bot interaction.
“HR chatbots are more like
an automated virtual assistant that helps offices and businesses automate
critical time-consuming tasks, thus saving them huge money and leading to
greater time efficiency,“ said Siddharth Shekhawat, co-founder of Engazify,
which has developed such a bot.
BankBazaar, which has been
using chatbots in its main business for a few months, is now looking to extend
it to its employees so that they can raise questions and concerns straight to a
chatbot instead of the HR team.
The company wants to
resolve issues as quickly as possible, thereby minimising the 24-hour window of
query solving.
“We will test this chatbot
with a few employees before rolling it out company-wide towards the end of
March,“ said Sriram Vaidhyanathan, chief human resources officer at BankBazaar.
This kind of a bot will
help HR functions quickly gain scale for a number of routine tasks.
“It will help us collate
scores of manager assessments, for instance, on amonthly or quarterly basis and
the managers can see by their scores what percentage of people are satisfied or
dissatisfied with them,“ said Kevin Freitas, HR leader at InMobi.
Hyphen, a company that also
designs chatbots, is in the early stages of deploying its bots in companies
such as InMobi. “This will help in real-time management of employees and that
will be the next big thing in HR. In the modern workplace, listening to
employees once a year just wouldn't be enough,“ said Ranjit Jose, co-founder of
the real-time employee engagement solution for co-workers to share their
opinions.
This will grant HR managers
easy access to a range of information and empower them. The next step is for
chatbots to integrate with apps that will enable an even wider application.
PeopleStrong's Pankaj
Bansal said the company is prototyping its bot, which will take care of
transactionrelated work in HR. It will include any logging of information using
a paper and pen by an HR manager and replace it with a chatbot.
|
Varuni
Khosla & Brinda Dasgupta
|
ET10MAR17
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