With the pandemic forcing many organizations to go remote, HR teams are facing the challenge of engaging with their employees. Technology company Cactus Communications (CACTUS) has adopted an AI chatbot called Amber to meet this challenge.
– Anselmo Martyres, Senior Managing Editor, Branding
Hey Shefali!
This is Amber here. I’m here to spend a couple of minutes with you about your last 8 years at CACTUS.
When Shefali Sunderan-Harsha, Associate Director with CACTUS’s Presales team, received a prompt from Amber, she thought it would be another survey collecting feedback on her happiness quotient at the workplace. “I had attempted these surveys before and I was expecting the standard questions: Are you satisfied with your manager? Do you receive detailed feedback? Do you think you receive enough opportunities? etc. But Amber turned out to be very astute and asked just the right questions.”
Amber sounds like an HR rep who’s looking out for you at the workplace, except that “she” is an AI-powered employee engagement chatbot.
In early 2019, CACTUS had started exploring tools that would supplement the HR team’s efforts of reaching out to over 1000 employees. “We realized that with a workforce growing at the pace that we were, it would soon become difficult for the HR team to connect with each employee. We had to find a scalable solution that would allow us to gain meaningful insight and act upon the right sentiment in real time,” says Aloka Parulekar, Associate Director, Business Partnering and HR Operations at CACTUS.
Amber checked all the boxes for the CACTUS HR team: customizable, easy to use (which means easy uptake), and real-time data. The decision was sealed when the pandemic started making headlines and CACTUS decided to move its global offices, including the Mumbai office—the headquarters and its biggest office in terms of workforce—to a work-from-home model, thus making the need for such a tool even more urgent.
The team was initially skeptical about uptake among the workforce, which was used to discussing their issues with their managers or HR Business Partners face-to-face.
The HR team conducted a pilot with two business units over three months. The response was encouraging—Amber saw an adoption of 60% during the pilot phase. The team then decided to roll out Amber to all of its India employees. In just three months, it saw an adoption of 69%. As of January 2021, Amber has reached out to over 97% of Cactizens across its 8 global offices, initiated almost 1500 interactions, and received over 1050 responses (response rate: 70%).
Amber’s biggest USP is the confidentiality it offers its employees. Aloka explains that data and responses are visible only to the respective HR Business Partner. A trust statement at the start of the chat informs employees who can view their conversation, thus creating a trustworthy space where they can be candid and forthcoming.
Source: inFeedo.com
Detailed feedback, if any, is first discussed with the employee by the HR Business Partner, who seeks the employee’s approval before taking any next steps that involves sharing the information with anyone else. Employees can also choose to chat anonymously; in this case, not even inFeedo, the New York-based company that developed Amber, can find out who the respondent is.
At the moment, Amber initiates interactions on the basis of tenure-based milestones: 15 days (from date of joining), 30 days, 45 days, 90 days, 6 months, 1 year, and thereafter every year. At every milestone, Amber asks questions relevant to the completion of that milestone on various pre-determined dimensions like integration, work–life balance, career development, performance, and manager.
Amber has made employee outreach much more efficient for the CACTUS HR team. It offers a reliable scalable solution for gauging the mood and pulse of people at every key tenure-based milestone Also, Amber’s extensive dashboard allows HR Business Partners to view analytics associated with adoption rate, engagement score, the Net Promoter Score, and more.
Source: inFeedo
Amber is also helpful in flagging flight-risk or unhappy employees—cases that need to be looked into with more urgency—thus enabling faster retention intelligence for HR Business Partners. “We want to make sure that every Cactizen is looked after, but it’s nearly impossible to identify problems with one-one-one interactions. With Amber, we can gauge the mood of employees and identify people who need our attention faster,” Aloka says.
Yashmi Pujara, CACTUS’s Chief Human Resources Officer, talks about Amber’s impact. “The CACTUS HR team’s mandate has always been to place Cactizens first. Over the years, and particularly in the last one year of the pandemic, we’ve taken several steps to address the mental health and general wellbeing of Cactizens. Amber has only been able to help us scale up these efforts. We are taking steps to build more awareness of and confidence in the chatbot through contests and testimonials. We want Cactizens to know that the data Amber collects is used solely to help employees and is not meant for evaluating them in any way.”
So far, Amber has been implemented in over 100 organizations spanning industries as varied as media, banking, hospitality, healthcare, and FMCG, across more than 50 countries.
Tanmaya Jain, CEO & Founder at inFeedo, says, “Millions of employees have subconsciously become adverse towards starting their workdays. They clearly deserve a friend at work who listens, remembers, and prioritizes their concerns. Amber is that friend at work, who has been speaking to 300,000+ employees across companies like Tata Group, GE Healthcare, Airtel, AXA, and OYO and empowering the leadership team to understand and act on employee sentiment in real-time.”
inFeedo is working with CACTUS to roll out new extensions they have developed in recent times. These will further enhance the employee journey and provide deeper insight into the employee pulse.
