HR HELP DIGITAL ASSISTANT (HRHDA)
on behalf of Honeywell
THE CHALLENGE
HR support is vital to the health and success of a company, but scaling that assistance when your company is a publicly-traded software-industrial leader with 100k+ employees around the world with varying levels of English language fluency, access to computers and governed by different regulatory environments is expensive.
THE DESIGN OBJECTIVE
How might we create a compliant, multi-lingual self-service experience that is so good employees will prefer it over traditional, more costly assistance methods?
The “unified” design of the HRHDA.
Live system in production. Had I asked a question it couldn’t answer, I would have been placed in chat with an HR Help agent instead.
It became clear early in the design process that this workflow was better suited to form pages than it was back-and-forth conversation. The experience I designed moves the user between the two as needed.
PROJECT DETAILS
Born from an innovation workshop I facilitated, HRHDA was created to provide better HR service, quicker, and at lower cost to Honeywell by means of an automated, chat-based system.
We set out to create a conversational interface capable of both answering employee questions and also assisting with common HR transactions like address changes and updating banking information. It would need to be intelligent enough to vary its response by its confidence level, sending out-of-scope topics automatically to a live support agent.
HR Help Digital Assistant is a still-evolving blend of chatbot and live agent help, pushing the capabilities of Oracle’s chat framework and allowing Honeywell’s 100k+ employees to get help on HR topics in seconds 24/7/365. HRHDA is a multi-phase project, built on a heavily customized instance of the Oracle Digital Assistant platform.
New capabilities have been added iteratively, with epics to-date including:
Initial MVP: Responsively designed web application built on the Oracle Digital Assistant (ODA) platform, interfacing with PeopleSoft.
Unified chatbot with live agent, allowing for seamless handover when the bot can’t answer an employee question.
Refinements and optimizations to the mobile site.
Microsoft Teams Integration, leveraging Honeywell’s enterprise chatbot for hand-off of HR topics.
Global deployment with support for multiple languages
TOOLS & METHODS
Facilitated innovation workshops with business leaders and technical subject matter experts to generate ideas and the basic business case.
Refinement of ideas and scope through subsequent workshops that focused on business value and scope.
Used a Jobs To Be Done approach to help drive consensus on scope and business objectives.
Proof of concept engagements with multiple vendors, pushing at boundaries of what was possible given the technical constraints and current state of the art.
Prototyping conversation designs using low-fidelity methods. Vetting flows in usability test-like sessions.
User story creation and grooming.
UX & UI Design in Sketch & InVision.
Usability Testing via in-person and remote sessions using prototypes and the live system.
WHAT I LEARNED
Chat can be powerful for helping people through processes, but don’t force a conversation when a form provides a better experience for the user
Conversational design is more than data-mining knowledge articles
Grading yourself on successfully matching the topic of the question is cheating. If you didn’t give the user a full and satisfying answer you haven’t succeeded — and you certainly haven’t deflected a support case.
Culture matters. Some employee and customer populations adjust to self-service easily, while others are more resistant. For certain sensitive topics chats are preferred as they maintain privacy —but only if they are perceived to be knowledgable and reliable.
Trust is hard to earn and easily lost. Roll out slowly and learn from your pilot audiences
It is still early days for AI, ML and NLP with regard to commercially available chat platforms. As we layer in capabilities for true “concierge” handoffs between bots, retaining context between user “turns” and better unsupervised learning methods chat will really start to shine as a trusted substitute for human assistance.
OUTCOMES
After its first two years, the HR Help Digital Assistant has handled tens of thousands of employee requests and has achieved:
$4.4MM in cost savings through deflected cases and decreased support staffing
84.7 (B+) System Usability Scale Score
Oracle Innovation Award Winner
High-level diagram explaining design approach for routing of employee questions.
HRHDA in Teams on an iPhone
The “unified” design of the HRHDA.
It became clear early in the design process that this workflow was better suited to form pages than it was back-and-forth conversation. The experience I designed moves the user between the two as needed.
Live system in production. Had I asked a question it couldn’t answer, I would have been placed in chat with an HR Help agent instead.
HRHDA mobile responsive web interface on an iPhone