Employing AI Chatbots for Virtual Onboarding and Learning
In today’s competitive employment market, organizations face various challenges in managing the right talent. Ensuring employees work at their maximum potential while keeping them motivated, satisfied, and suitably rewarded is challenging. These modern workplace dynamics have led organizations to revamp the methodologies on how they engage with employees throughout their work lifecycle, from recruitment to onboarding, training, development, and performance management. One evolving cutting edge system that can help organizations reach their business goals while maximizing learner engagement is chatbots.
Chatbots are artificial intelligence (AI) based computer programs that simulate human interactions. Think about the last time you asked Siri a question. It was an interaction with a chatbot. Chatbots can play a critical role in reinforcing organizational values through effective and personalized engagement that would be otherwise expensive for an organization to manage.
Could chatbots be right for your organization to help employees improve their skills? There are several benefits to employing today’s chatbot technology to guide your workforce through onboarding and learning while retaining their interest.
Supporting the Onboarding Process
Onboarding inducts new employees by guiding them through company culture, policies, systems, and procedures. It is a time-consuming, expensive, and repetitive process. Engaging chatbots can enhance and streamline the learner’s experience by playing a crucial role in virtual onboarding.
A chatbot can guide new employees in their onboarding journey right from the pre-joining formalities until they are enrolled and operational. Chatbots can assist by providing quick responses to their queries on the organization’s mission and values, team structure, roles and responsibilities, and IT systems. The chat interface is more approachable and can make it easier for employees to inquire about sensitive issues that they would have been reluctant to ask in person. Since the chatbot is sourcing the responses from its database and aggregating company policies, new inductees can be assured of the accuracy of the information.
Engaging Learners
Introducing a chatbot as a real-time performance support tool for employees can be helpful in many ways. Chatbots are more interactive and engaging than workbooks, training notes, and other reinforcing tools. Depending on the context of the learning program or support initiative, a chatbot can be designed to focus on a variety of tasks: introducing new concepts, practicing skills, tracking goals, providing reminders, supporting performance, and answering queries. Chatbots are now even integrated into many eLearning platforms.
Organizations that understand that everyone learns differently—what works well for one might not work for another—can leverage chatbots to their advantage. Chatbots can help personalize the training for each employee using AI and Natural Language Processing, or NLP. AI and NLP enable chatbots to identify the underlying intent behind the text a person types, then deliver a response that matches that intent. Chatbots can understand the skill level of a learner and provide applicable information. Mobile learning has further increased the accessibility of Chatbots, providing training in real time. Organizations can also leverage the analytics from Chatbot interactions to enhance their learning strategies and engagement.
Adapting for the Future
Chatbots are truly transforming the way employees learn at work. This AI technology speaks in a natural language and interacts as if you are communicating with a human. When chatbots are incapable of finding a solution, they redirect employees to other applications or the human assistance team to guarantee an acceptable level of support. With 24-hour availability and instant answers, personalization is the key to the evolution of chatbot technology that can access and reference the history of user interactions with the company. Utilizing analytics from a chatbot, organizations will better understand when and how to enhance their learning strategy to improve their employees’ virtual onboarding and learning journeys.
To find out how KnowledgeWorks Global Learning develops customized virtual onboarding and learning programs for your chatbot interface, please contact: info@kwglobal.com.
