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 program 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 application 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 great er time efficiency,“ said Siddharth Shekhawat, cofounder of Engazify, l 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 mini mising 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 a monthly 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 unlock for human resource managers easy access to a range of information and empower them. The next step is for chatbots to integrate with apps and that will enable an even wider application.
PeopleStrong's Pankaj Bansal said the company is prototyping its bot, which will take care of transaction related 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. In India, Bansal said, the number of organised workers using HR functions will increase to 100 million in the next three years from 30 million at present. By 2020, he said, 30 million Indians will be using chatbots.
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