Cognitive Enterprise

Employee satisfaction is an important aspect of talent retention. Employees, often, do not feel challenged enough or do not have a clear idea of the next steps to aligning their career in the right direction. We, at the Talent Fulfilment Group (TFG) in Mphasis, faced similar issues. We observed that most of our employees wanted to be made aware of the happenings in the company on an immediate and personal basis, and this was difficult because we are an MNC, spread across multiple countries and time zones.

Thinking out of the box

It was difficult to think of a solution that could satisfy and resolve all of these issues. And then the Mphasis Hackathon happened that encouraged employees to come up with apps or products that use AI, speech recognition and NLP-powered Virtual Chatbots to simplify internal processes of the company as well as for all the other verticals we cater to. The event gave us several avenues to look at, to resolve our issues. It is from here that we decided to use cognitive technology to do for ourselves what we continually do for our customers.

We thought of an idea that was bot simple and functional—to create a virtual bot. This bot would help employees define their respective career choices at the organization. It would also handle queries related to internal job rotation, the release of resources to talent pools, open jobs available, contract management, and so on. To make sure we were on the right track, we gathered a group of employees who could give us unbiased feedback on the idea. After receiving a positive response, we formed a small group to execute the idea to fruition.

Enhancing productivity at the workspace

Three months later, with a lot of hard work, the virtual bot idea became a reality, and we christened it the TalBot. Thanks to this bot, the employees can now get answers to their queries in real time, giving them access to career choice options and clarifications on company policies. In case the bot gets a question it cannot answer, it provides the user with the email addresses of the respective teams that can answer the query. Additionally, we can now learn more about our employees, and their understanding of the policies and hence streamline the operations owing to these interactions. The benefits have been two-folds—one, it helps resolve general queries of our employees in real time, and secondly, it allows the team members to be more productive with their time.

Perhaps it is true that technology is bursting at the seams, and Cognitive Enterprise and Artificial Intelligence in the future will blur the lines of communication between human and bots. In the meantime, we will continue to use technology to create better experiences for not only our customers, but also for our internal processes to ensure employee satisfaction and well-being are at the forefront.