How Conversational AI can help employees solve their own IT or HR requests

Thierry Moncoutié

4 minute read

With its intuitive natural language conversational interface, a digital assistant integrates into an employee's work environment to support them daily and increase their productivity.

Automation and Artificial Intelligence technologies are fundamentally changing the way organizations work, freeing employees from recurring non-value-added tasks to spend time on more high-value projects.

For management consultancy Bain & Company, "Conversational AI will underpin many human-to-digital interactions, with virtual agents increasingly able to manage interactions, looping in people only where necessary."

While applicable to many uses, two major departments can particularly benefit from these technologies in their interactions with employees: IT and HR.

With employees spread all over the world, in the office or working from home, companies need to be able to function optimally while attracting and retaining their talents.

How chatbots and digital assistants optimize IT support

A 1000-employee company uses an average of 177 SaaS applications. That means more applications, more interfaces, and more FAQs to empower users, but also less autonomy and a constant increase in the number of requests to IT support teams!

In 2021, 70% of internal support managers reported an increase in employee requests.

As consumers, we are accustomed to frictionless experiences like Amazon, Netflix, and Apple. How can businesses keep up with increased requests and provide the same frictionless employee experience at work?

The solution? An IT digital assistant (with integrated chatbot technologies) is an ideal, single point of contact for employees to self-serve typical IT tasks like resetting passwords, creating new user accounts, or scheduling appointments to get new equipment.

LumApps digital assistant embedded into the employee experience platform

With its easy-to-use natural language conversational interface, an IT digital assistant can be incorporated into an intranet, a digital workplace, or an employee experience platform such as LumApps.

Plus, the LumApps digital assistant can sync with everyday business tools your employees are actively using such as Microsoft Teams, Google Chat, or Slack. By automatically indexing all the company's content sources, it searches the full knowledge bases to help employees solve their problems autonomously.

Our IT Digital Assistant brings new interactive services to our employees. We have reduced the number of calls to the Support team. It’s a very positive experience!

— Pascal Ribault, IT Support Manager at CDC Habitat

When necessary, it will also automate end-to-end workflows (e.g., reset a user's forgotten password or create an account in a business application). Finally, it will notify employees ("push notifications" on important information or events), with an open rate of 90%.

How a digital assistant supports HR operations

According to a global study by technological research and consulting firm Gartner, change management, employee experience, and the future of work all rank in the top 5 concerns among HR leaders' priorities for 2023.

An HR digital assistant can help expand your team by answering frequently asked questions on HR topics (such as labor agreements, administrative policies, salary, and vacations) in real time and in a conversational way. Not only can it look for answers within the intranet platform, but it can also connect with the company’s HR information system to deliver a full, complete answer.

It is also incorporated into the employees’ daily work tools (LumApps platform, Microsoft Teams, Google Chat, or Slack for example), and can send push notifications about important milestones. For example, "Don't forget to take your days off before such and such a date or you will lose them."

LumApps digital assistant integrates with existing platforms like Teams Chat and Slack

One of our customers, Imerys, used LumApps Digital Assistant to set up both an IT and HR bot on their platform.

When asked about their experience, this is what IT Director, Enabling Functions & Digital Innovation, Sébastien Levrot with Imerys had to say, “This has helped us avoid hundreds of additional support tickets and wasted resources. The digital assistant on our LumApps platform is a great way to get the best out of our internal tools and build a comprehensive employee experience at Imerys.”

Rapid implementation and intuitive handling

Ten years ago, launching a chatbot project was relatively complex, reserving the implementation of this type of technology to large organizations, supported by IT consulting and services companies, for relatively long projects (from 1 to 3 years), and budgets often exceeding $200,000 for a single chatbot!

In the early 2020s, as the technology matured, organizations aiming for operational excellence integrated more internal bots to assist their teams. Today, chatbots and digital assistants are more functionally powerful, intuitive, and even easier to implement.

Whether for IT, HR, Support Services, or other needs, LumApps Digital Assistant can be installed on relevant LumApps web pages or accessible in our mobile app. It integrates with your team’s work tools like Microsoft Teams, Google Chat, or Slack. Plus, 40+ pre-built micro-apps can also be leveraged to trigger workflows in business apps. If you don’t find the tool you need, you can leverage our intuitive, no-code environment to build dedicated micro-apps.

It’s an almost "plug & play" integration for staff with sufficient administrative rights. The ultimate goal? Reduce the strain on your IT or HR team, and support employees in their daily activities, for a better employee experience.

Get a Digital Assistant to improve efficiency for your team. Book a demo today.

Get a Digital Assistant to improve efficiency for your team.

Discover our latest content on Artificial Intelligence