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Communication is an integral part of an organization. Whether it is communicating with the customers, shareholders, suppliers, or employees, effective communication has always been the key to success for an organization.

Businesses often make the mistake of focusing only on external communication at the expense of internal communication. It is important to understand that smooth, structured, and organized communication with the employees helps them work better and increases the overall productivity of the organization.

A highly effective way of communicating with your employees is through a decent support system. Owing to an increase in the complexity of business processes and personalized demands of the customers, employees need more support today than they needed a few years ago. Effective employee support makes sure that the right solutions are provided to the right employees at the right time.

Employee service desks have been providing ITSM services to employees and customers for several years. However, over time, employee support has become more than mere ITSM as other departments need structured employee support as well.

Out of all the departments apart from IT in need of a modern employee service desk, HR needs it the most.

HR And Employee Service Desk

The HR department is inherently an employee-centric department. Right from handling the hiring activities to ensuring healthy employee engagement, the HR department is responsible for handling the specific needs and preferences of employees working in an organization.

However, it often becomes difficult for employees to obtain immediate support and quick answers to the questions asked to the HR department. Whether the matter revolves around getting approval for leaves, queries regarding payroll, or the documents required for a presentation, employees may require an instant response from the HR department.

This issue can be resolved by setting up an automated HR service desk within an organization. In essence, a single modern employee service desk takes care of the issues faced by the employees belonging to all departments within an organization. The HR department can stay in touch with the employees through this platform and get their queries resolved in a few seconds.

The modern employee help desk makes use of AI technology to understand the questions asked, get the context of the same, and provide solutions that are unique to the concerned employee. Using a modern help desk, the HR department can not only provide quick employee support but also automate a number of HR processes such as onboarding, maintaining attendance, tracking leaves, handling payroll, and many more.

Before going to the technology of AI chatbots used by the modern HR help desks, let us discuss the issues with the traditional service desks.

Issues With The Traditional HR Service Desks

Years ago, an HR help desk was nothing but a desk with HR executives available for answering employee issues. As times change, these desks started becoming more virtual, with organizations setting up intranet facilities for providing employee support. However, these traditional techniques are hardly relevant in 2021.

Here are some of the major issues employees faced with the traditional HR help desks:

Lack Of Two-way Communication

Traditional HR help desks often resorted to one-way communication with the executives giving out guidelines, policies, and other relevant pieces of information to the employees over the intranet. The employees seldom had the facility of interacting with the executives to explain their issues better and obtain satisfactory solutions to their problems.

Generalized Solutions

Owing to the increasing number of support requests, it became difficult for the HR executives to take a personalized look at every case. This often resulted in the help desk providing solutions that were generic in nature. No matter how specific the employee queries were, they would receive solutions categorized in the same generic segments that added little value to the answers provided.

Manual Ticketing System

Learning from ITSM, HR help desks incorporated the manual ticketing system for resolving employee issues as well. However, the system doesn’t go well with every employee as not everyone can manage their tickets effectively. This often led to a lot of confusion for the employees when it came to keeping track of their support and request tickets.

Delayed Responses

The traditional HR help desks often failed to provide immediate solutions to the issues raised by the employees because of the sheer volume of issues raised on a daily basis. The traditional system was not equipped enough to handle multiple cases at once as organizations could employ a limited number of HR executives and agents to handle all cases routed to them.

This also resulted in the prioritization of cases. While the agents chose to answer the more pressing issues first, employees with basic queries often had to wait longer, often jeopardizing their work.

Incompetent Support

When organizations implemented intranet to allow employees to ask questions openly, they rarely received satisfactory answers as not everyone in the team is an HR expert. Also, as the number of cases kept increasing, organizations often resorted to hiring more agents just for taking care of the bulk of queries coming their way. This often resulted in sub-qualified agents taking up the positions and providing support to the employees.

It was these drawbacks that resulted in the emergence of an advanced and automated HR help desk. This modern help desk is powered by AI and makes use of an AI chatbot to handle almost every process taking place within the platform.

The Importance Of AI Chatbots In Modern HR Help Desk

The modern HR help desks make use of conversational AI to improve the overall experience of employees seeking personalized support. They employ AI chatbots that accompany the employees from the moment they log in to the platform and guide them every step of the way until their queries are answered.

The use of an AI chatbot replaces the need for an HR executive sitting at the first level of support (L1) to answer all the basic questions asked by the employees. Here, the entire L1 support is handled by virtual assistants who interact with your employees as they ask their questions.

Whenever a question is asked, the AI chatbot scans the enterprise knowledge base and comes up with a personalized solution in a matter of a few seconds. Thanks to artificial intelligence, the chatbots act like support agents who understand the questions asked, the context they are asked in, and provide precise solutions to the same.

AI chatbots tread on the thin line between interactive human support and automated machine learning. They provide a more human and dynamic approach to the HR help desk, allowing your employees to be satisfied and at ease while obtaining seamless support.

How Do AI Chatbots Answer HR Queries Of The Employees?

When a distressed employee logs into the HR help desk, an AI chatbot is ready to provide immediate answers to their questions. Your employee can choose to automate a process, give a command, or ask a question to the chatbot. When a query is raised, the chatbot will look into the knowledge base and provide the most suitable answer to your employee.

However, if the employee is not satisfied with the answer, they may choose to obtain L2/L3 support where the experts get involved. Here, the concerned employee’s case is routed to a dedicated expert who looks into the matter, comes up with a solution, and communicates the same to the employee via the AI chatbot. The modern help desk minimizes direct interaction with the agents to keep the system smooth and organized.

This way, an AI chatbot presides over a modern HR helpdesk and ensures that your employees obtain seamless support and get all their queries resolved.

Advantages Of AI Chatbots In The Modern HR Help Desk

Quick Resolution Of Problems

As opposed to the traditional help desks, AI chatbots help you resolve all queries of your employees within a few seconds. As the need to reach out to the HR executives is eliminated by the platform, your employees readily get the desired response from the virtual assistants, saving them the time that could be used more productively.

Automating HR Processes

Apart from providing answers to the questions asked by your employees, AI chatbots help you automate a number of HR processes to streamline the services. Earlier, employees had to resort to emails and phone calls for reaching out to the HR executives for obtaining forms, presentation documents, payroll updates, attendance details, and other relevant information.

Using AI chatbots in an automated help desk allows you to feed all relevant information within your knowledge base and let the system provide your employees with all the required information with little to no human involvement. A simple search would allow your employees to access all the required details and carry out specific processes on a single platform.

Building Workflows For Basic Services

Many organizations spend most of their time carrying out basic and repetitive processes. The automated help desk allows you to build automated workflows for services that basic to the department. These services include onboarding, offboarding, travel booking, reimbursement, catering request, circulation of policies, and many more.

The AI chatbots can sense specific triggers and carry out subsequent processes without the need for a prompt. For example, whenever a new employee joins the organization, the HR department can automate the process of sending them an email welcoming them, along with all relevant rules, regulations, policies, and guidelines important for the new entrant.

Keeping track of Personalized Support

The AI chatbots keep track of every interaction made with every employee using a centralized database. These details allow the virtual assistants to understand the context of the questions asked by specific employees. Just like Google tracks users’ search activities and provides suggestions based on their preferences, the chatbots take the history of interactions for an employee into consideration to provide personalized solutions to their queries.

Providing Self-learning Facilities

With the help of AI chatbots, you can allow your employees to get trained in specific skills all by themselves. If they require learning a few skills to perform their jobs better, you can make use of microlearning features within your HR help desk to help them get trained.

All you need to do is feed your knowledge base with the right resources and set up automated training processes to guide your employees as they train themselves. When your employees become self-reliant and no longer need external help for performing their jobs, you are bound to witness a spike in employee productivity.

Increased Employee Engagement

The use of traditional service desks often resulted in employees feeling confused and helpless. Employees often preferred not using the help desk altogether instead of being a part of a half-baked support system. Such an approach results in a drop in employee engagement.

When you employ AI chatbots for providing continuous assistance to your employees, they get to resolve their issues automate their processes without having to worry about whom to approach. This makes them genuinely motivated and driven towards doing their jobs and thriving at it. When employee engagement is high, you can retain the best talent in your organization.

Invisible Ticketing System

The AI chatbots handle the complete ticketing system, making it invisible for your employees. When an employee wants the help of a dedicated agent, the chatbots will create a ticket and route the case to a suitable agent. Along with the ticket request, the chatbot will also send the employee’s background on the basis of previous interactions.

When your AI chatbots manage the creation, management, and closing of support tickets, your employees are relieved of the biggest hassle faced while obtaining support from the agents.

The Final Word

Artificial intelligence helps you make your machines think and understand the issues faced by your employees. When used by the HR department within its help desk, AI chatbots perform a variety of processes that ensure the well-being of your employees and help you leverage your overall productivity.

If you have more suggestions for using AI chatbots in HR help desks, feel free to add them in the comments below.