Chatbot For HR: How Start People Digitalises Absenteeism

Start People Interim is the second-largest player in the Belgian employment market. Every day, more than 10,000 people work through them on the labor market. The company has more than 500 consultants at their service. In order to better manage all these workers, they decided to implement a chatbot for HR.

Start People is specialised for small, medium-sized and large companies. They quickly realised that by focusing on online applications and innovative tools, they have more time for personal contact with their clients and candidates. To improve their internal processes, Start People decided to implement a chatbot for HR.

Challenge: Automate the process for temporary workers who are absent, ill or unable to work

Start People was looking for a quick and efficient way to inform HR consultants of temporary workers who are absent, ill, had an accident or simply cannot work for various reasons. Initially, the company managed all incoming calls from interim workers who were absent. Start People employees systematically repeated the same types of answers during these calls.

The aim was to automate these tasks because they take up a lot of HR consultants time, whereas they could concentrate on other more important and human tasks. What could be better than a chatbot for HR to solve this problem?

Solution: Create a personalised chatbot for HR to automate the absenteeism information process

We created the chatbot for HR hand in hand with the client. It is very important to work in the form of workshops in order to understand the company’s needs as well as possible.

Each business has its own processes and programmes, but also its own values and way of working. In order to build an efficient chatbot, it is essential to understand all this first.

How does a chatbot for HR work?

After analysing the needs, a simple process was set up. Start People’s request was to put the bot online on Whatsapp.

In a first step, the interim workers start a conversation on Whatsapp with the Start People’s phone number. Another channel selected by the client is on Facebook messenger. Concerning the last channel, it is on the website. As mentioned above, it is important to know your target audience and to adapt the communication channels to the end-users.

Once the interim worker contacts the bot it asks what type of absence is reported: illness, sick family member, etc. After linking the person’s ID to the Start People database, the bot automatically saves the information. Other paths are obviously possible for the bot in case it cannot find the data from the temporary worker. The goal is also to make the bot more and more intelligent and “human” as it evolves.
 

What if the HR chatbot doesn’t answer all the questions?

If the interim worker wants to, he can ask the chatbot to transfer the conversation to a consultant within Start People. In concrete terms, when a user has a question at the end of the conversation with this bot, or the user asks to speak to a human person, the conversation is forwarded to a platform. This platform, #Interact, allows Start People consultants to assign themselves a conversation.

Result of the HR chatbot: time saving and satisfied employees

The first results are fast and allow for initial feedback:

• Users are satisfied with this system. It allows them to communicate quickly with the temporary agency via a chatbot on their favourite channel.
• Employees save time and can concentrate on other more important tasks requiring human intervention. This avoids redundant calls and always answering the same ‘standard’ questions.
• For both the company and the users, this saves time and efficiency.

Finally, Chatbots help HR to become more accessible to employees for important human matters. They also allow the team to provide instant and accurate answers to common questions. Together with the pre-sorting of the chatbot, this allows HR teams to get in touch with each employee on an individual basis, depending on their personal situation and issues.