5 reasons chatbot AI is a good investment for your employees

If you work within shared services (think HR, IT, Legal, Marketing, etc…), then you know how difficult your job can be. From enabling potentially thousands of people across different regions & languages to accommodating the most recent & sudden shift to remote work, a shared service role can be time-consuming and challenging. It’s no joke.

Fortunately, business leaders have been investing in AI & automation technology to simplify the process and improve their efficiency & scale.

Let’s learn specifically how chatbot AI for your employees is a good investment to help you do more with less:

1. Boost employee productivity

Every single day, employees have questions and search for their answers, whether on Google, a business tool, the company’s intranet, or reaching out to their team members or colleagues. That time adds up! As it does, employees spend more time than they should searching, which hurts productivity and their experience.

Fortunately, studies suggest that chatbot AI & automation can reduce employee time spent by over 70%! By designing chatbots that enable your employees to easily and quickly self-serve their most common questions and tasks, your employees can search less and work more!

Furthermore, your shared service staff gets time back too….it’s a win-win!

AI & automation built within HR chatbots can improve employee time spent by over 70%

2. Scale employee support at a low cost

Whether you’re a small startup or a global enterprise, providing your employees with the right level of shared service support is harder than expected, since small companies prioritize revenue generation over operational processes and large enterprises lack the staff to provide seamless support to their large, global workforce.

With chatbot AI and HR technology, you can not only scale your support more easily but you can improve the overall employee experience across all of your domains for a lower cost than adding additional resources.

Invest in chatbot AI, so you can augment your workforce (not replace them) and deliver a better employee experience.

On average, an HR team spends 40% of its time answering repetitive questions

3. Easily accessible & available 24/7

Have you ever had employees email you after hours about payroll, vacation, or benefits enrollment? How about on the weekend? Unfortunately, people need time off and can’t be there every time their employees have questions. That’s life.

But, chatbot AI can! That’s why businesses are investing and integrating AI-powered chatbots into their most common business communication tools, such as Slack and Microsoft Teams, so they can support their employees when no one else can.

And, when your chatbot AI doesn’t know the answer, it can automatically connect to a live person who does or create a support ticket, so your employees always have a path to their answer.

4. Better employee insights via analytics

The larger your business grows, the more distant you can become from your employees. Yes, you can send out that quarterly survey or engage in the occasional interview, but is it enough?

Chatbot AI can provide another data point to give you a better understanding of your workforce, since they don’t just simplify and automate, but they analyze! With every question submitted and every task completed, you can see in which region, about what topics, and what time your employees are engaging (while maintaing their individual privacy, of course).

A closer, more in-depth look at employee/user data generates invaluable user insights, leading to stronger processes, across your shared services. Concerned whether your employees know your latest COVID policy? With chatbot AI, that’s not a problem.

5. Reduce operational costs & great ROI

Chatbots save time and money. It’s that simple.

And, the larger you are, the larger those savings become (vice-versa holds true as well). Think of all the hours you and your staff have spent on answering FAQs and generic employee-specific queries. What about all the repetitive onboarding tasks that you have had to deal with?

That’s why hiring teams from Ikea, McDonalds, Sutter Health, and UC Davis invested in chatbot AI for their employees and some of them saw a significant impact on their business:

• 33% faster time-to-hire
• 50% lower hiring costs
• 90% net promoter score from candidates

When you look at the total cost of ownership and compare it to the time & money saved, the net-benefit of chatbot AI speaks for itself with payback periods sometimes as low as days (that’s right, not years, but DAYS!)