How to Create and Implement an Onboarding Chatbot

Employee onboarding is a critical part of running any business. As crucial as it is, though, it can also be a long, involved process, limiting available staff and productivity. Chatbot onboarding automation can help.

Chatbots are already popular among businesses, with more than half of all enterprises spending more on these tools than mobile apps. While customer service may be the most common use case for this technology, chatbots have a lot of potential in onboarding automation, too. Automating parts of the process with these bots can help companies take their hiring practices to the next level.

Benefits of Onboarding Automation

Chatbot-assisted onboarding has many benefits. One of the most significant is how it improves productivity.

Onboarding typically involves a lot of time-consuming tasks like documentation, scheduling, and answering FAQs. In fact, workers say they waste four and a half hours a week on work like this. Chatbots can automate these HR management processes to free professionals to focus on other things, letting departments accomplish more at once and boosting engagement.

Chatbots can also be available 24/7 to answer any questions applicants and recruits may have. Similarly, new hires with personal or sensitive questions may feel more comfortable with the anonymity of talking to a chatbot as opposed to another employee.

An automated chatbot also has a much smaller likelihood of error because it doesn’t get tired or distracted. Onboarding automation can even fix human errors by recognizing and highlighting mistakes in paperwork to help new hires fill out forms faster and more accurately.

HR departments can also use chatbots to run feedback surveys. As they collect information from applicants, they can suggest long-term improvements to the onboarding process. Making these changes will help both the company and its job candidates.

How to Implement Chatbot Onboarding

The onboarding process can look different between companies, so onboarding automation will vary between them, too. Here’s how you can implement a chatbot to meet your specific hiring needs.

Determine Your Chatbot’s Scope

The first step is to determine what exactly your onboarding chatbot should do. Look at your hiring process and talk to HR workers to find the parts where the most issues arise. Common types of recruiting chatbots include application screening, scheduling, skill testing, and FAQ bots.

Points in the process with the most errors or bottlenecks are the most likely to benefit from automation, so they’re a great place to start. Once you know where you want to apply your bot, you’ll be able to determine what it should do. You can then build a chatbot around those core capabilities.

Give Your Chatbot a Voice

Like any other chatbot, your onboarding bot should have a distinct voice. While this step is easy to overlook, it can have a surprisingly big impact on your hiring process.

How your chatbot comes across will influence applicants’ first impressions of your company. Consequently, you should model its word choice, punctuation, and conversation patterns after your team’s spirit and ideals. Remember to make it friendly to create a welcoming environment for new hires, but be careful not to make it too informal.

Connect the Bot with Necessary Tools and Information Database

For chatbot onboarding to work correctly, the bot needs the right information and access. To find this, ask HR workers what files and systems they use for each step in the process. Take note of these and ensure your bot can access them so it can fill out and file paperwork correctly and efficiently.

Similarly, it’s important to equip your chatbot with as much information as it needs to answer applicants’ questions. Remember, 42% of chatbot users cite their speed and convenience as the main reason for using them. If an onboarding bot can’t answer questions quickly and accurately, it won’t be very useful.

Start with a list of FAQs, then ask current employees what they wish they knew when they started at the company. Writing out answers to these questions and programming them into the bot will give it enough information to answer potential inquiries.

Review and Refine

After you’ve built your chatbot, make sure you test it before deploying it. Even after implementation, it’s important to periodically review it to ensure the onboarding automation works as it should.

Ask new hires and HR workers about their experience with the bot. You can even use the chatbot itself to run these questionnaires to save time. If any common themes emerge, you’ll know which areas the bot can improve in. Take this feedback to adjust the bot’s functionality, tone, role, or other factors to improve it.

Chatbot Onboarding Benefits All Parties Involved

Onboarding automation can be a game-changing business tool when implemented properly. A well-built and tailored chatbot can reduce HR’s workload, impress new employees, and make new hires productive more quickly.

The more you use your chatbot, the more you can refine it to create the ideal onboarding experience. When that happens, you’ll foster a more engaged, productive, and satisfied workforce.

Curious?

Give it a try for free on Landbot now. You can build a flow from scratch or use our onboarding bot template.