Conversational AI in Employee Experience

With the advent of conversational AI, companies are finding new ways to streamline internal processes and improve the overall employee experience by employing a bot-human hybrid model.

From the IT helpdesk to HR support, conversational AI has revolutionised the way businesses communicate and interact with their employees.

In this blog post, we’ll discover what employee experience is, how conversational AI can transform your workplace and explore how ChatGPT can elevate your employee experience to the next level.

Happy Employees, Happy Company: The Importance of Employee Experience

So, what is Employee Experience? It’s the idea that leaders should treat their employees with the same level of importance as their customers.

This means striving for employee satisfaction just as much as customer satisfaction. Managers should empower their employees by giving them ownership of their roles.

According to Gallup, teams with high levels of employee engagement exhibit a 21% increase in productivity.

Having happy employees will assist your company in the following ways:

• Attracting and retaining top talent in a competitive job market
• Increasing productivity and driving business growth, as well as promoting social responsibility
• Promoting the well-being of employees.

Not only this, but Research also shows that when employees feel valued and supported, they are more inclined to provide exceptional customer service, leading to increased customer loyalty and satisfaction.

“Everyone talks about building a relationship with your customer. I think you build one with your employees first.”

– Angela Ahrendts (Senior Vice President, Apple)

In today’s business landscape, leaders have recognised the crucial role of employee experience (EX) in driving customer satisfaction and business success. According to the Economist Intelligence Unit, companies that prioritise enhancing the employee experience tend to see an improvement in the customer experience as well.

A positive employee experience allows for a connection to the organisation’s mission, leading to increased engagement and, ultimately, better business results.

Role of Conversational AI in EX

Today, many companies are strengthening the digital culture among their workforce and thoroughly modernising the employee’s workplace environment.

According to IDC, spending on digital transformation is expected to reach more than $3.4 trillion by 2026.

In fact, since COVID-19, the volume of interactions handled by conversational AI systems (including AI chatbots and voice assistants) has increased by an estimated 250% in a variety of industry sectors (MarketWatch, 2022).

Conversational AI for the employee experience is the ability to provide instant, personalised support.

Employees can easily ask questions or request assistance through chatbots, which can quickly provide relevant answers or escalate the issue to a human representative if necessary.

Digital Employee Experience can positively impact employee engagement, retention, reputation, productivity, and profitability.

DEX involves providing access to digital tools and resources that employees need to perform their jobs effectively. It must be available to all employees regardless of their location or role.

The digitalisation of the workplace takes many forms. However, all existing initiatives seek the same goals:

• Improve collaboration across the organisation,
• Develop true business agility,
• Improve the workplace and, therefore, the quality of life at work,
• Secure sensitive data while ensuring employees a simple and fluid use of information,
• Increase productivity and reduce operational costs.

Business Standard says that your employees spend more than 3 hours a day on activities that are easily automated.

By automating routine tasks and providing instant support, employees can focus on more important tasks and reduce their workload.

Here Are 5 Ways Conversational AI Can Improve Employee Experience and Engagement

#1 IT Support

The IT helpdesk uses conversational AI to automate tasks like troubleshooting, software updates, and password resets. Agent Assist technology helps IT teams work more efficiently by automating repetitive tasks and providing quick access to relevant information.

This allows IT teams to focus on more complex issues and provides employees with faster support.

#2 HR Support

Another advantage of conversational AI is its ability to handle a high volume of requests without becoming overwhelmed. This is especially important for HR employee experience, who often have to deal with many queries and requests. It’s been found that chatbots can improve productivity.

Conversational AI can enhance various aspects of the employee experience beyond HR, such as AI-powered onboarding and training, which can assist new hires with providing relevant information and guidance through the help of a virtual agent.

#3 Facility Management

Conversational AI in facility management streamlines all team needs, offering instant support for equipment orders, badge requests, and access to the knowledge base and FAQs.

It also tracks and manages devices and sends notifications for office updates, closures, and security alerts. Chatbots assist with further questions and routing to the right person, allowing your team to focus on their work.

#4 Finance

AI can handle routine financial tasks automatically, such as providing answers based on company policies and FAQs. This eliminates the need for manual approvals and frees up time for more important tasks.

AI also handles follow-up questions, making it easy for employees to stay informed and focused on the financial success of the company.

#5 Employee Communication

Effective communication with employees is key to business success.

Utilising AI for targeted messaging and automatic notification, streamlines communication and empowers employees with necessary resources. New hires can stay on track with helpful reminders about upcoming training sessions, leading to a cohesive and productive team working towards achieving your business goals.

The secret sauce for an extraordinary experience is a combination of automation and human care. Whenever employees have a complex question, the conversational AI platform will automatically transfer to the domain expert (IT, HR, Finance, or else).

It is necessary to ensure that employees feel supported and valued in the workplace. According to Harvard business review, humans and AI are collaborating in 1,500 corporations worldwide by complementing each other’s strengths.

GPT-3 Enters the Conversation

In a world where artificial intelligence is advancing rapidly, GPT has emerged as a game-changer, setting new standards for conversational AI.

GPT-3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3) is a language model developed by OpenAI that uses deep learning techniques to generate human-like natural language text.

Some of the key features of GPT-3 include:

• Large-scale: GPT-3 is one of the largest language models to date, with 175 billion parameters, which allows it to generate more sophisticated and natural-sounding text than its predecessors.
• Unsupervised learning: GPT-3 was trained on a vast amount of text data using unsupervised learning techniques, which means that it can generate text in a variety of contexts without explicit instructions or examples.
• Few-shot learning: GPT-3 can perform few-shot learning, which means it can learn to perform new tasks with only a few examples or prompts without requiring extensive training.
• Multilingual: GPT-3 is capable of generating text in multiple languages, including English, Chinese, French, German, Spanish, and many others.
• Context-aware: GPT-3 can generate text that is context-aware, meaning that it can use information from previous sentences or paragraphs to generate more coherent and relevant text.
• Fine-tuning: GPT-3 can be fine-tuned on specific tasks, which allows it to perform tasks such as question-answering or sentiment analysis with high accuracy.

GPT-3 can perform multiple tasks

GPT-3 is a powerful language model that can perform a wide range of natural language processing (NLP) tasks with high accuracy.

Here are some specific tasks that GPT-3 can do:

• Text generation: GPT-3 can generate natural-sounding text in a variety of contexts, such as essays, stories, poems, and even computer code.
• Language translation: GPT-3 can translate text from one language to another with high accuracy.
• Question-answering: GPT-3 can answer questions based on a given context, such as a paragraph or a document.
• Summarisation: GPT-3 can summarise long pieces of text into shorter, more concise summaries.
• Sentiment analysis: GPT-3 can analyse the sentiment of a given piece of text, determining whether it is positive, negative, or neutral.
• Chatbot: GPT-3 can be used as a chatbot to simulate human-like conversations with users, answering questions and providing assistance.
• Text completion: GPT-3 can predict the next word or phrase in a sentence or paragraph, making it useful for tasks such as autocomplete and autocorrect.
• Text classification: GPT-3 can classify text into different categories based on content, such as news articles, product reviews, or social media posts.
• Language modelling: GPT-3 can be fine-tuned to generate text in a specific style or domain, such as technical writing, academic research, or creative writing.

For instance, ChatGPT, a fine-tuned model of GPT, performs the tasks of a Chatbot.  You might wonder what CHATGPT has in store for us when it comes to employee experience.

We let ChatGPT answer for itself:

We also asked ChatGPT, how it is different from a conventional chatbot, and here’s what it has to say:

“ChatGPT is better than a conventional chatbot in several ways. Firstly, its advanced natural language processing capabilities allow it to generate responses that are more similar to human language, providing a more engaging and personalized user experience.

Secondly, ChatGPT is trained on a large model of text from the internet, giving it a vast knowledge base to draw from and allowing it to provide more accurate and relevant responses to user queries.

Additionally, ChatGPT is capable of understanding and interpreting the context of a conversation, which enables it to provide personalised recommendations and address user queries more efficiently.

 Overall, ChatGPT represents a significant advancement in the field of chatbots, and its advanced capabilities have the potential to transform the way we interact with technology.”

ChatGPT is a versatile technology that can perform routine and innovative tasks, tailoring its capabilities to meet the specific needs of each organisation.

With its access to company knowledge bases, it can quickly provide employees with accurate information, freeing up their time to focus on more meaningful tasks.

In conclusion

Organisations must prioritise creating a positive employee experience (EX) that is equal in importance to customer experience (CX) to drive business growth, increase productivity, and promote employee well-being.

Conversational AI has emerged as a vital tool in a hybrid work environment to simplify the employee experience and boost engagement.

By automating routine tasks, providing instant support, and handling a high volume of requests, conversational AI allows employees to focus on more complex tasks and reduces their workload.

Just as AI helped us navigate the shift to a hybrid workplace during the COVID pandemic, it will also aid in overcoming any economic downturn.

So, the question is no longer how to implement conversational AI but when to implement it in your organisation.