Staff Writer

Jun 24, 2019 | 07:57 PM | Chiradeep BasuMallick Freelance Contributor, HR Technologist

Holidays, benefits, recruitment, and culture are the top four areas where employees routinely have questions for HR. AI help desks can offer an immediate response, empowering the workforce and freeing HR from repetitive workloads. Read on to know about:

• AI help desk use cases shared by Spoke’s Head of Marketing, Josh Anish
• Seven benefits of adopting AI help desks
• The case for adoption, despite concerns around job loss

Answering employee queries takes up a large portion of HR work hours. Often, you may find yourself answering the same question multiple times and guiding employees through similar scenarios over and over. This is one definite area where automation powered by artificial intelligence (AI) can help.  

An automated employee help desk can work as the “first point of contact,” addressing basic queries and routing more challenging questions to human executives. Technologies such as AI takes this a step further, introducing intelligent automation where queries are solved not just based on predefined business rules but through insights gathered from previous interactions. 

We spoke to Josh Anish, Head of Marketing at help desk technology solutions provider, Spoke, to understand how AI-powered help desks help HR reduce the time spent answering repetitive queries. Spoke’s AI help desk addresses issues across HR, IT, and office management, creating a one-stop answer for most employee queries. Here’s what we found.

Common Queries That AI Help Desks Answer

Anish explains that a majority of tickets raised by employees – in Spoke’s experience – refer to common organizational policies. While the knowledge is available in company repositories, employees are unaware of how to access it, and therefore, are compelled to reach out to HR. The four top areas encountered by users are:

1. Holidays and vacations

For multi-location, mid-to-large sized organizations, holiday and vacation management can be difficult. Dates may vary from region to region, and employees risk losing out on optional holidays/earned vacations if they are unaware of these policies.

2. Company benefits

Because these vary dramatically from employer to employer, new hires regularly raise questions about the benefits, right from commute allowances to corporate gym memberships.

3. Recruitment and referrals

Employees could be eager to refer their peers but require a thorough understanding of recruitment guidelines before suggesting their friends/families.

4. Culture and ethics

Questions about miscellaneous norms in professional behavior, security, pets in the workplace, sexual harassment, and other areas are also frequently asked about.

“And it’s not that these questions aren’t important to employees,” adds Anish. “Everyone agrees that they are.”

To address this, Spoke offers an AI-powered help desk, which accurately answers repetitive employee requests to enhance productivity.

Seven Benefits of AI-Powered Employee Help Desks

While automation in IT service desks is now a staple, HR is yet to catch up. “IT ticketing systems offer specific insights into the status of every request; people can see exactly where their issues stand in terms of priority and completion. Meanwhile, HR requests seem to go into a black box which employees have no insight into,” explains Anish.

In other words, users need more visibility: How many open requests are currently on the dashboard? What is their request’s status? How fast are requests being resolved? And, how do employees feel about the organization’s responsiveness to their needs?

When implemented effectively, AI help desks offer the following benefits:

1. Simple and process-driven actions are taken away from the HR function, reducing the number of requests that are finally assessed by human executives.
2. Common questions can be answered immediately, letting users implement the advice without delay – and increasing employee loyalty in the process.
3. Complex queries that require a “human touch” can be seamlessly routed to HR, without disturbing (or creating friction in) the employee experience.
4. AI help desks can be linked to other internal systems, drawing information from employee self-service (ESS) modules, human resource information systems (HRIS), or benefits administration platforms.
5. AI chatbots can better organize employee request tickets based on the criticality of the issue, its urgency, and complexity level.
6. Productivity for HR teams witnesses a significant uptick, once the task of resolving queries is offboarded to an, AI help desk.
7. AI can identify which team member is best equipped to solve a query, resulting in optimal utilization of HR/admin/IT talent, as applicable.

Encouraging Adoption for AI Help Desks

Despite the clear advantages of intelligent automation for help desks, a long-standing challenge is holding back adoption. With so many HR responsibilities taken over by AI, traditionalists are anxious about job security and upcoming changes in employment models.

However, Anish assures us that these fears are unfounded. “AI isn’t here to take anyone’s HR job any time. Trust me; I’ve been working on the front lines of software AI for almost a decade now, and, despite the amazing work by engineers, I’m routinely shocked by how primitive much of AI remains. In other words, the robot revolution – at least in my humble opinion – is rather far off.”

While AI will definitely create a shift in employment and job roles, the impact will be largely positive. AI will eliminate 1.8 million jobs by 2020 due to effort optimization, reports Gartner, but it will add a staggering 2.3 million new jobs in return.

“In that spirit, HR pros should adopt AI and virtual assistants to do the repetitive work they no longer want to do themselves. And that means answering repetitive questions, bucketing requests by type, and streamlining onboarding processes,” concludes Anish.

AI help desks are the next logical step for future-focused and people-centric HR, reducing non-value adding workloads, to turn our attention towards strategic endeavors.

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Source: HR Technologist

https://www.hrtechnologist.com/articles/digital-transformation/7-benefits-of-creating-ai-help-desks-for-employees/#