Yesterday’s technology cannot support tomorrow’s workforce. HR is not known for its rapid adoption of newer technologies – but that is changing! The advent of cloud-based integrated HR systems, collaboration platforms, private and public social media ecosystems, and access to the massive amount of structured and unstructured HR data has opened possibilities for HR to not just be on the forefront of adopting newer technologies but adopt them much before the mainstream. More importantly, this availability of data and the advent of analytics-based powerful global HR platforms have enabled HR to adopt artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to support its global employee population to provide proactive, real-time, and personalized HR support that is setting newer benchmarks in employee support every single day.
Artificial intelligence and machine learning are no more the lingos of the software labs; the currency is gaining wide acceptance in day-to-day businesses. The employee service desk has seen quantum leaps in leveraging developments in AI-ML to provide proactive and personalized services to global employees; artificial cognition is slowly becoming indispensable to provide support to remote employees who have limited access to HR.
Neeyamo’s service desk platform NeeyamoWorks ServiceDesk and its HR helpdesk services, for instance, have an underlying premise that the best HR ticket is the one that was never raised! The focus of any new-age platform is extensively on deriving intelligence through HR data and powering omnichannel employee assistance – anytime, anywhere and in any language.
May A.I. help you?
Help from HR is becoming increasingly sophisticated with multilingual chatbots, voice assistants, machine learning algorithms tuning and contextually personalized search recommendations that guide employees to the right resolution. Predictive analytics and dynamic self-service dashboards are helping reduce the number of tickets flowing into the system, while prescriptive algorithmic resolutions are rapidly improving the first-contact resolution (FCR) rates. The availability of HR support via smart-bots have made powerful and personalized HR services available real-time and 24×7.
Employee experience aside, these AI-ML enabled smart service desk platforms are fast removing manual overheads associated with supporting seasonal, high-volume and very-often, low-value employee support incidents. These platforms can effectively support both high-volume transactions and analyze high-volume datasets at a level that could be very difficult for HR to administer even if they had the time.
Deriving HR Intelligence
HR data volume is compounding. There are structured data sets that are available in various HR systems, then there are documents/ web-documents, production data sets, and a vast amount of unstructured data – including sensors, images, emails, audio, video, and data gathered by social/ collaboration platforms. Natural Language Processing (NLP), powered by word stemming and lemmatization, is helping service desks operate smartly by analyzing these datasets and providing context-driven and personalized resolutions. Furthermore, NLP makes automated support conversational and friendly to the employee, and Neuro-Linguistic Programming helps embedded artificial intelligence leverage a vast amount of data for extracting prescriptive intelligence.
The HR service desk is omnichannel with self-service tools residing at the top of the employee support stack. Smart bots that are AI-enabled allow the system to take actions on behalf of the employee to apply for leave or escalate HR support requests, thereby eliminating frictions for the employees; chats are conversational, and community/ peer support is carefully curated.
Effective knowledge management is the key
Organizations that can harness a large amount of HR data that spans geographies, industries, and HR processes will have a definite edge. Service providers, on the other hand, are increasingly amassing critical and mandated HR data points such as global HR compliance that may not have been available in the HR systems by default. This allows HR systems to provide control points to HR operating structures, that can sometimes extend the system capabilities thereby significantly augmenting HR capabilities to support global employees.
Wowing the employees
Customizing employee experience and providing relevant content is the key formula to draw employees towards ‘smart’ HR service desks. The ability of the system to adapt behavior based on experience, correlate incidents to the persona and the context, along with other factors, will ensure an effective first-contact resolution and provide a ‘wow’ experience to employees. AI-enabled HR systems further allow employees to simulate and model scenarios to see what the likely outcome of an action will be. For example, the employee may choose to take leaves or plan over-time schedules and see the impact in a simulated paystub.
Surpassing dependencies on people & existing data-sets and introducing experiences to employees in order to emulate and learn on their own via deep-learning, is the likely path taken by most leading smart HR service desk solutions. The ability of these systems to self-diagnose and administer collaboratively induced self-heal will make HR support in tune with the times to come. Service desks are increasingly becoming smarter, and they will continue to do more as time progresses. The trust between the employees and the service desk is, however, going to be the key; this trust will have to be earned. Global HR service desk is the gateway for an employee to consume HR services and this will see innovations in leaps and bounds. HR service desk will continue to evolve and revolutionize the way an employee experiences HR services.
Go beyond FAQs – write to irene.jones@neeyamo.com to know how next generation platforms and/ or services can be leveraged to support your global employee base.
