Clarins UK Group

To help keep employees properly informed, the ‘Important Announcements’ bot is used to broadcast company announcements from the Leadership Team and their Paris Headquarters. This bot is primarily used to raise visibility and awareness of important company updates and provide employees with easier access to information.

Employees are sent a broadcast message directly to their Work Chat inbox, which contains a call to action from the Managing Director and a link to view in full on Workplace.

To encourage employees to engage with the content, the bot has been designed using eye-catching graphics, which are deployed as part of each important announcement. These graphics provide employees with a brief overview of the full content and encourage them to click through to read more.

The key objective of the Important Announcement bot was to ensure employees received this important information in a more agile and direct way. For frontline employees busy working on the shop floor, having a bot send these announcements directly within Workplace Chat helps bring content to their attention while also offering an easy to use experience on mobile and tablet devices. While a relatively simple use case, the program has proven successful with links to news posts generating a 76% CTR.

A survey done by Nintex revealed that out of 1,000 respondents, 39% admitted to observing broken document management processes within their organisation. In particular, 49% said they have trouble locating documents, 43% have difficulty with document approval requests and document sharing, and 33% struggle finding the correct document version.

All this confusion adds up to serious time. A report by Mckinsey revealed that employees spend 1.8 hours every day searching for and gathering information.

Clarins UK had already identified this issue as something they wanted to solve for their employees and had paid a 3rd party vendor to create a custom bot that linked to all of their HR policies and procedures by pulling the files directly from Sharepoint into the bot. The issue, however, was that the bot could not be updated by James, or anyone else internally and because frontline employees didn’t have a business email address, they were therefore unable to access the original documents directly from the Sharepoint library.

Using The Bot Platform, James was easily able to build his own version of the bot without writing a single line of code or needing to leverage a developer. The flexibility and functionality of the platform enabled James to build and customise the Clarins Assist: Document Search bot in such a way that it seamlessly replaced the previous bot without James having to communicate a new set of user instructions.

To solve the Sharepoint and accessibility issue for frontline employees who didn’t have a business email address, James was able to use features and functionality native to Workplace to create a group that would act as an evolving library of documents. By disabling commenting and posting from non-group admins, this Workplace group is easily controlled while still being accessible to all corporate and frontline employees.

James then set up an HR-maintained Google Sheet to host information such as the policy name, metadata, and Workplace post link URL. Using Integromat, the Clarins Assist: Document Search bot is able to search by file name and metadata, and then pings back the correct Workplace post with the associated document(s), whether that be one result or multiple.

Employees can then continue to search and, if they still can’t find what they’re looking for, the bot will direct them to the HR Workplace group so they can manually search through all documents, linked to via a pinned post.