Multinational Edyn Group Solves Overflowing HR Inbox
Our client is the Edyn Group, a multinational hospitality organisation with an HR admin team of three, serving a large multinational workforce. Edyn Group is forecasting to grow to more than 750 employees within the next couple of years.
In the hospitality industry, work is around the clock. With teams across four countries, inbound, out-of-hours HR enquiries are a consistent challenge.
"We get a steady number of messages coming in after 5pm, peaking at 9pm (when night shift workers are settling into their shift) and then through the night," says Di Gwinnell, Group People & Culture Director.
The challenge does not stop there.
With the HR admin team looking after four countries while based in the UK and Germany, they find they spend far too much time digging through documents, researching country-specific guidelines, and triple-checking everything is correct before responding to employees.
Because challenges always come in threes, heres is the last one: languages. The HR team must understand and answer enquiries in English, Dutch, and German.
No mean feat.
Could an HR chatbot swoop in and save the day? Most likely, though it couldn't be any old chatbot. It needed to be a multilingual, multi-location, highly scalable chatbot.
With ubisend’s infrastructure approach, enabling businesses to manage multiple chatbots and locations from a single platform, we were a natural fit.
Creating a multilingual HR chatbot
With a rapidly growing workforce split across Europe, edyn's chatbot had to be multilingual.
Thanks to ubisend's support of over 60 languages, building edyn's chatbot was a breeze. The German staff speak in German to the German bot. The Dutch staff speak in Dutch to the Dutch bot.
Simple? Not quite.
It quickly transpired that some staff in Germany may not actually speak German. Indeed, we needed just one chatbot that could speak every language at once, regardless of the user's location.
Thankfully, the ubisend platform is geared up for this, too. As an employee first interacts with the chatbot, they can choose their preferred language, regardless of location.
Deliver location-specific answers
To provide accurate answers to their questions, the chatbot also had to know where employees are based.
For example, the question 'how much maternity leave do I get?' will have a different answer if the employee is in Germany compared to the UK.
edyn's HRMS, XCD, stores this information. Using ubisend's extensible integration toolkit, we can fetch an employee's location directly from XCD and enable the chatbot to deliver the correct, location-aware answer.
Thanks to all this context, Buddy provides accurate answers across the entire workforce.
There are many ways to measure the accuracy of a chatbot and how helpful it is for users. One of the key metrics to keep an eye on is fallback. A fallback is when a user asks the chatbot to step aside and to connect them with a human for help.
Over the last year, while about 200 staff regularly engage with Buddy, only 13 human fallbacks were requested; a definite win for the chatbot.
Di was also surprised to see how engaged employees are with Buddy, the edyn chatbot: "People also like to just ‘chew the fat’ with Buddy. We have only recently set up the small talk language option in German and it’s surprising how much a little light-hearted chat with Buddy drives engagement with the chatbot overall."
Simple chatbot management and takeover
At ubisend, we value how platform users find the software user-friendly and easy to use. HR needs tools in place that saves them time and effort, doesn’t over-complicate things or add new processes.
After the initial setup of their chatbot, the edyn staff wanted to be able to take over administering the technology. They needed access to the ubisend platform and the ability to edit content, change or add FAQs, and more.
This transition went smoothly, according to Di: "The platform is very easy to use. Technology isn’t a strength for some of us in the team but it’s not an issue with the ubisend platform!"
Even improving their chatbot's knowledge is a breeze, "We still get the odd question that we haven’t trained Buddy on and it’s easy to then create a new FAQ in all the necessary languages ourselves, so that the next time someone asks, Buddy can help!".
Immediate impact and plans for the future
Buddy, the edyn HR chatbot, went live and the staff saw an immediate impact. To Di, peace of mind is the most notable benefit of implementing the HR chatbot.
"As our HR admin team generally log off at around 5:30pm it’s nice to know that edynites have a point of contact through the night, for real-time responses to their questions. It also helps the inbox when the team log back on to start the day the next morning."
edyn's chatbot dashboard confirms Di's thoughts. 15.4% of messages sent to Buddy are outside of regular office hours. That's a large number of messages no longer sitting in the HR admin team's inbox before they even start work in the morning.
Di also confirms the edyn chatbot has solved the core challenge: saving time. "They [the HR admin team] certainly see less of the same basic, repetitive questions coming through."
The chatbot experience is appreciated by employees too. "We also get good feedback from our colleagues, they appreciate having another vehicle to ask questions (sometimes confidential questions), particularly in their native language."
So, what's next for Buddy?
Future iterations of the chatbot are already being scoped out. In particular, Di and her team would like to explore adding more languages and locations, semantic search, and more in-depth integration with XCD, their HRMS.
