The challenge
TELUS Digital’s HR help desk was experiencing a large influx of repetitive inquiries from team members, such as requests for benefits and compensation information.
Further, the TELUS Digital HR help desk was not available for support on evenings, weekends or holidays. As such, the response time for any requests during these time periods, regardless of complexity, was at least 24 hours.
TELUS Digital's conversational bot solution
In an effort to reduce the ticket volume of routine inquiries, TELUS Digital created a conversational bot to serve as a single point of contact for team members to speed up the response process and enable agents on the HR help desk to focus on more complex requests. The bot’s name, SARA, stands for Specialized Automated Response Advisor and was named through an internal contest.
The conversational bot presents user-specific responses by connecting to enterprise systems and pulling data from the back-end. The solution is regularly updated through continuous learning by gathering information from unhandled conversations, or conversations that required agent intervention, to ensure that the bot improves with each interaction.
Results
In addition to improved team member experience and first chat resolution, the TELUS Digital conversational HR bot has also resulted in:
- 24/7 availability
- Increased CSAT by 24%
- Decreased HR ticket creation by 27%
- Cost savings of over US $135,000 a year
- Time savings of over 6,900 hours a year
The solution has experienced strong adoption rates with approximately 4,300 unique users initiating over 10,000 conversations within five months of its launch. The bot now handles nearly 50% of all internal HR inquiries.
