What is an internal chatbot?
An internal chatbot is an AI-powered tool designed to directly interact with employees, enhancing their experience and freeing up their time. Unlike customer-facing chatbots, which handle external queries, internal chatbots focus on improving internal processes.
They can be used across various platforms, including messaging and email services, or custom-built intranets, and can handle a wide range of tasks—from answering HR-related questions to providing a level of IT troubleshooting.
Internal chatbots fall into two categories:
- Rules-based chatbots: These operate on predefined rules and are best suited for handling straightforward, repetitive tasks.
- AI-powered chatbots: Using advanced tech like natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning, these chatbots can understand and respond to more complex queries, learning and improving over time.
Businesses are increasingly adopting AI-powered chatbots. We saw in our article on chatbot stats that ‘97% of companies anticipate new teams, such as training, customer support, and HR, to adopt generative AI in the near future’.
Such organisations are discovering that these advanced AI tools do more than just automate tasks—they also deliver substantial business value. By integrating AI into internal processes, organisations can experience a range of benefits including cost savings, improved productivity, and a better customer satisfaction score (CSAT).
How internal chatbots deliver business value
Internal chatbots go beyond just a tool of convenience, they’re a strategic asset that can drive measurable business outcomes. Here are just some of the ways an internal chatbot could help your organisation:
1. Reduce your costs
By automating routine tasks, chatbots reduce the need for manual intervention by team members, leading to significant cost savings. For instance, you could use a chatbot to handle common HR queries, like booking annual leave. This saves countless hours of work for your HR team, allowing them to focus on more strategic tasks, like improving employee engagement and driving organisational change initiatives.
You can use our AI assistant savings calculator to see just how much you could save.
2. Increase your productivity
With access to a chatbot that gives them instant access to accurate answers, your employees will spend less time searching for information or waiting for support. This can help to improve workflows and give your teams the chance to complete tasks more quickly, boosting overall productivity and allowing your people to focus on high-value activities, such as problem-solving, strategic planning, and creative projects that can boost your brand.
3. Hone your teams’ expertise
Chatbots contribute to a more efficient and engaging workplace by giving your teams immediate support to reduce frustration. This can lead to higher employee satisfaction, lower staff turnover rates, and improved engagement survey scores. You can read more about this aspect in our blog on real-world uses of AI opportunities for customer service teams.
4. Scale your support
As your company grows, the demand for internal support increases. AI chatbots can easily scale to handle a higher volume of interactions without any need for proportional increases in support staff, making them a cost-effective solution as you grow your business.
5. Get data-driven insights
AI chatbots can collect and analyse data on a large scale. By looking at data around employee interactions, an internal AI chatbot can provide valuable insights into common issues and areas where processes can be improved. This data can inform decision-making and drive continuous improvements to support team productivity and morale.
6. Prep for a customer-facing chatbot
As discussed on The Digital CX Podcast, more organisations are launching AI chatbots aimed at customers, but the advice is to launch them internally first. Having a chatbot for internal employees can help you iron out any issues using your employees to get direct feedback and highlight potential issues, without having to sacrifice customer satisfaction.
“The best practice seems to be to launch that thing internally. Let your internal teams use it first, poke holes in it and make sure it’s serving up the right information.”
How to introduce an internal chatbot in six steps
Launching an internal chatbot needs careful planning and execution. Here’s a step-by-step guide:
1. Define objectives
Start by identifying the specific challenges your organisation faces and how an internal chatbot can help address them. Clearly define the objectives you want to achieve, such as improving employee productivity by automating tasks, improving customer service by giving clearer insights to your agents, or improving internal communications with easier access to information. Make sure, too, these objectives match your broader business goals.
2. Choose your setup method
With our platform, there are a few ways to quickly get started creating your internal AI chatbot. These include:
- Auto-generation: Provide your website URL and we can automatically generate your AI assistant using content directly from your site. This takes just 10 minutes or less, making it the fastest option to get started.
- Start from scratch: Prefer a more customised approach? You can upload documents using Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) to train the AI assistant on highly specific information, depending on what your goal is.
- Let us handle it: If you’d rather leave the technical work to us, we can create and manage your AI assistant for you. With a decade of experience, we guarantee everything is set up for maximum effectiveness.
3. Integrate with existing systems
Your chatbot needs to integrate seamlessly with your existing business systems. For instance, our platform is designed for easy integration with tools like HR software, IT support platforms, and communication tools like HubSpot or Microsoft Teams. This guarantees that your chatbot will operate smoothly within your current workflow.
4. Develop and test
Whether you’re using our auto-generation feature or uploading PDFs and files, the next step is to develop your chatbot so it’s ready for your internal teams. Do this by customising its responses and features according to your needs. You’ll want to thoroughly test your chatbot, making sure it performs well in real-world scenarios.
5. Launch and monitor
Once your chatbot is ready, you can launch it to your employees. You can then use our dashboard to monitor its performance closely, gathering feedback to identify areas for improvement. Continuous monitoring allows you to make necessary adjustments to improve the chatbot’s success rate (successfully recognising and responding to queries without any help from your teams) ― our average is 96%, but you can achieve as high as 99.88%.
6. Tie to metrics and improve
You’ll want to establish some Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) or Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) to measure the impact and success of your chatbot. Metrics might include a reduction in support tickets, improved employee satisfaction, or time saved on routine tasks.
With our platform, you can access detailed analytics around demand, usage, success rates, and more, allowing you to track how your teams are using the AI assistant, and assess the chatbot’s performance over time. This insight means you can regularly review data, making sure your chatbot continues to meet your objectives.
Getting the most out of your internal chatbot
You’ll find that there are many ways you can use an internal chatbot to improve workflows for your teams:
- Employee onboarding: A chatbot could help new hires navigate company policies, procedures, and resources, giving them the confidence to find their own answers and source instant responses.
- Training and development: Having an internal AI assistant means it can help with training materials and resources to enhance employee skills.
- Internal FAQs: Your chatbot could answer frequently asked questions about HR policies, benefits, and IT support. This helps reassure your HR team that employees are getting the right information, while also freeing them up to help with more complex queries.
- Scheduling and reminders: Introducing an AI chatbot can help employees schedule meetings, set reminders, and manage their calendars efficiently, giving them more time to focus on business-critical tasks.
- IT support: You’ll find chatbots can be great at troubleshooting technical issues, while making sure they escalate complex problems to IT personnel.
- Feedback and surveys: Your AI assistant can collect feedback and conduct surveys to improve internal processes and employee satisfaction.
- Policy updates: If you have policy changes and important updates, you can have your AI chatbot communicate these developments to employees to make sure they’re compliant.
Remember, when you’re building your chatbot, functionality is essential, but it’s also fun to think about how to name your AI chatbot, how you’ll style it, and to make sure it’s unique and reflective of your brand.
Conclusion
Internal chatbots are powerful tools that can transform the way your organisation operates. By automating routine tasks, freeing up time for your employees, and delivering data around usage and demand, they offer you the chance to make meaningful changes and deliver a competitive edge for your business.
As AI technology continues to advance, the potential applications and benefits of internal chatbots will only grow. Introducing an internal chatbot is not just about keeping up with the competition—it’s about staying ahead and driving meaningful change for your teams, freeing them up to focus on value-adding tasks.
Ready to revolutionise your internal processes?
