As a digital transformation firm, we believe in using cutting-edge technology as a key lever to empower our employees and help them embrace and drive cultural change. Business-to-employee (B2E) chatbots can play a major role in enabling a business culture of agility, creativity and innovation. So for the next step in our digital transformation journey, we decided to integrate this technology into our digital workspace to increase the speed and efficiency in accessing the information employees need in their day-today lives at Valorem Reply.
After analyzing the anatomy of our employee experience, we found that just the “discoverability” of the massive amount of information - internal communications, organizational assets, policy documents etc.- spread across all of our corporate data sources, can be a huge challenge for employees. We decided to explore the opportunities in AI-driven chatbots to facilitate the everyday work for our employees and deliver information through an intuitive, seamless, unified and omni-channel experience. In short, we were inspired to leverage the cutting-edge technologies we work with every day to create an impactful tool for the sector that matters the most - our people.
Valorem Reply was one of the earliest adopters of Microsoft Teams as a beta client- three years later and it has become an integral part of our internal communications and project delivery. And since Teams is our central collaboration platform, we decided to leverage the power of Microsoft Bot Framework to build a Teams-based, AI chatbot. Our plan was to a top-notch experience for employees, allowing them to easily find knowledge without having to navigate away from their favorite applications.
The result is a bot that has helped streamline processes by converting employee queries pertaining to HR, IT, Operations or Marketing that formerly needed to be routed to online requests or offline personnel to self-serve experiences that improve job satisfaction and productivity. Our chatbot can answer employee questions on Recruitment, On-boarding, FAQs on Company Policies, Employee Training, Common Questions, Benefits, Annual Assessments/ Reviews, Corporate Branding, etc. By providing faster and better service not only does this have a positive impact on the employee experience, but also key divisions within our organization. Business units like HR and Marketing have seen a reduction in inbound inquiries, allowing them to focus efforts on more strategic work to reach organizational goals and better serve our clients.
With a global footprint, we have used this technology to help drive transformation to each and every Valorem Reply employee around the world and scale efforts across each of our offices. The Bot curates content recommendations and responses according to the employee's geographic location to serve up only the most relevant information for an even more personalized experience. And thanks to the power of our Microsoft Cloud infrastructure, the chatbot can now channel information from several data sources across disparate systems like SharePoint, Yammer, corporate websites etc.
The Valorem Bot is deployed as a scalable service in Azure and is available 24/7 so all employees will have a consistent, high-quality experience no matter how many people are using it or what time of day they use it. Also to ensure the best user experience, it leverages Microsoft Cognitive Services to provide intelligent services like LUIS which helps process natural language commands. Security is ensured with integration to Azure Active Directory (AAD). Rich analytics served through reporting dashboards that are powered by Application Insights and are used to track usage, popular queries etc to help the Valorem Bot learn and become more useful to employees. The Valorem Bot can also be integrated across multiple channels to increase interactions and reach employees wherever they may be through the intranet portal, Cortana etc.
The Road Ahead
These are humble beginnings and the digital transformation journey has no end. So we continually work to incrementally enable more scenarios into the Valorem Reply Bot. We continue to monitor chatbot usage and add new use cases as users gain experience with the bot. We allow the feedback collected from the users - their needs and expectations- to guide the experience and improve speed, efficiency, and productivity. Our long-term roadmap for the bot includes integration with our other business productivity tools like Dynamics 365, SharePoint, Yammer, Azure DevOps etc. to automate routine workflows such as time sheets, PTO requests and daily task tracking etc.
A personalized and conversational chatbot powered by AI and capable of quick, accurate, on-demand service delivery can set the tone for your digital transformation agenda. We can help you build one for your unique needs and environment. Go to valoremreply.com or email us at marketing@valorem.com to learn more.
