Blog / March 31, 2021

Why people-centric HR teams depend on conversational AI

Ahmed Al-Bahar, Head of Product

Tomasz Jurczyk, Tech Lead

Ivy Wang, Product Design Lead

why people centric hr teams depend on conversational ai

HR teams are overwhelmed. Charged with managing a successful and high-performing company culture, HR professionals are experts at handling every stage of the employee lifecycle — from onboarding new hires to managing benefits to coaching leaders. Ensuring the success of thousands of employees is no easy task.

The real problem is that HR is responsible for so many manual tasks: whenever an employee needs help, the HR team has to do it by hand. The result is that HR spends tons of time on routine, repetitive tasks — rather than on meaningful interactions. And for employees, all this time waiting for answers slows their workday down. With this manual approach, global companies would never have a big enough HR team to keep up.

step of the employee lifecycle Figure 1: HR teams are responsible for every step of the employee lifecycle.

At Moveworks, we realized that the key to scaling the HR team is speed. 

If you want employees to adopt new tools or fill out benefits, the right resources — from forms to knowledge articles — must be available to those who need them in seconds. And the only way to do this is to rethink the whole process from start to finish.

deliver real-time support at scale Figure 2: With Moveworks, HR teams deliver real-time support at scale.

That’s why the Moveworks platform is purpose-built to handle HR issues: to help you create a culture of instant help at work. In building this solution, we found that three fundamental roadblocks hold back HR teams from making change happen overnight:

  1. Employees don’t know where to go for HR support
  2. HR help needs to be personalized to each employee’s needs
  3. The employee lifecycle is overwhelming to manage

In this blog, we’ll discuss how Moveworks is helping top HR teams deliver real-time support — at a massive scale.

Creating a one-stop shop for support

When employees have HR questions, they don’t know where to go. HR may have a system to submit issues to dedicated experts, but that doesn’t mean next steps are accessible or obvious. Employees aren’t thinking about complex backend reporting systems. They just want their questions answered. So the IT team is flooded with HR requests, the HR team gets finance questions, and the Finance team gets questions about IT issues. 

That’s why we built a single starting point for employees to self-service their own support. On the front end, employees can ask any question in basic language. And on the back end, all the various support systems — from HR to IT — are integrated so that a single bot can answer every question.

one stop shop for support Figure 3: Employees can submit any support issue to the Moveworks chatbot to get instant help.

Our bot offers such a powerful experience because we’ve analyzed tens of millions of examples of how employees ask for help. By studying what these requests have in common, our machine learning models deeply understand everyday enterprise language. So we don’t have to predefine our bot’s actions. Instead, the bot autonomously works to discover the user’s underlying intent to give them the best response. 

Because of this approach, we can easily transition from answering IT questions to helping employees in all spheres of their work-life, including HR. With every in-bot conversation, our models understand more, and employees learn through repetition that Moveworks is the first place to look for help.

Reaching the right expert in seconds

If an employee has a complex or sensitive issue, our AI-powered Smart Handoff transfers requests to the correct specialist, automatically and immediately. By either routing issues to the right HR professional or linking users to a specific process or workflow within the HR platform or Intranet site — employees get the support they need, and HR professionals get questions they’re specially qualified to answer.

With Moveworks, problems aren’t just solved faster — they’re solved automatically. So employees can get on with their work, and HR teams are free to personally handle more specialized tasks.

right expert in seconds Figure 4: With Smart Handoff, employee questions get to the right department expert.

Delivering personalized HR support automatically

One of the biggest challenges for HR is the constant trade-off between speed and precision. Conventional automation tools offer fast service, but they typically aren’t smart enough to provide the accurate response. 

Consider an employee requesting details on the employee referral program. Even to answer a simple question like this would be difficult to automate, given that the correct response depends on many factors — location, department, and seniority. You need to take all of these contextual details into account to surface the right knowledge.

delivering personalized hr support Figure 5: Moveworks uses context — location, role, seniority, department — to make every answer relevant.

We created a bot that’s specifically designed to take all of this disparate information into account and automatically solve issues. Autonomously curating an identity map for each employee — Moveworks provides tailor-made answers or redirects sensitive questions to the right expert.

As an HR team, it’s frustrating when the resources you’ve spent so much time building aren’t used. Setting up and personalizing the right answer manually can take forever. Our solution transforms company resources into an immediately helpful format, ensuring that employees get only the relevant snippet from a knowledge base article or the appropriate form that addresses their specific request.

Streamlining the employee lifecycle

Company culture doesn't come down to only choosing the right benefits or enacting supportive policies. Company culture changes all the time, re-defining itself minute-to-minute. Onboarding, training, benefits enrollment, and career development are all opportunities for employees to know if their company is worth working at.

No HR team can operate at the kind of scale that modern enterprise requires. There’s so much to deal with that how you tackle every challenge matters. And that’s why having a strategy that incorporates machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) is critical, given these technologies’ ability to resolve thousands of issues simultaneously. 

send targeted messages to employees Figure 6: With Moveworks, HR teams can send targeted messages to employees.

Right now, communicating at each of these critical moments is time-intensive and manual. It’s time to incorporate real-time automation that can target the right employees at the right time, so no one tunes you out. 

With our solution, you can move away from the slow, manual email communication model and instead target specific employees with actionable messages. By automating internal communication, HR teams are free to focus on these bigger, more strategic projects that take time and human creativity to implement.

Redefining your digital HQ

In this digital era, companies blend together, all using the same SaaS tools. Our customers — like Palo Alto Networks — know that standing out comes down to the little things, like providing support the moment it’s needed. And that means investing in a digital workplace, just as much as a physical office.

“It’s really the small moments that create your company culture,” said Elizabeth Wheeler, Senior Manager of Benefits & HR Connect at Palo Alto Networks. “With Moveworks, we’ve made those millions of small moments effortless — by giving our employees what they need, when they need it. The result is that my team can focus on the big projects that move our business forward.”

With AI, there’s a fantastic opportunity to create an experience that’s distinctive to your organization. When we founded Moveworks, we shared a vision to empower employees worldwide to focus on the most impactful work. Extending our abilities to HR is just the beginning. HR teams handle an impossible workload, but with Moveworks for HR, these highly-engaged professionals can keep up with the modern workplace’s constantly evolving demands.


Contact us to learn how you can use Moveworks to automate HR support.

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