How bots on Workplace are helping Moneypenny to engage staff, build culture and give back to the community.
Project Objective:
Automation and engagement
Client:
Moneypenny
Project Completion:
December 2019
PROJECT OVERVIEW
Bringing a new perspective to HR
Moneypenny was founded in 2000 with one goal in mind – to leave their clients and customers smiling after every phone call. They manage over 15 million calls and live chats for over 13,000 clients, ranging from sole traders to multinationals, in the UK and US. Their well-known reputation for delivering engaged and inspired personal assistants comes from their modern approach to human resources, culture building, and corporate social responsibility initiatives.
Using bots on Workplace, Moneypenny’s HR team has been able to create a suite of experiences that are driving engagement with staff, improving company morale and supporting CSR initiatives.
The challenge
Every day at Moneypenny, their staff of 800+ come to work energized and ready to provide the best phone answering service possible. For Emma Davies, Working Life Assistant at Moneypenny, a huge part of their success as a business comes from their ability to connect with staff in a meaningful, fulfilling way.
To achieve this, Emma and her team have redefined the meaning of Human Resources and Operations by reframing the mindset around work-life balance. Beyond the typical job duties and responsibilities, there is so much more that goes into a healthy working life for employees. Work-based relationships, professional growth, social responsibility, and community wellbeing are all key aspects that can leave a positive (or negative) impression on staff.
At Moneypenny, their corporate events and traditions are the heartbeat of company culture. Two of their feel-good initiatives this season involved providing fun activities to help bring staff together around the holidays.
To kick off the season of goodwill, Moneypenny wanted to hold a ‘promise auction’ where local businesses and staff promised prizes for everyone to bid on. The challenge was to minimise the amount of time it would take to organise and run while maximising the engagement and donations it could generate from staff.
On top of running the auction, the biggest holiday event of the year for Moneypenny’s HR team was fast approaching – ‘Festive Friday’ – a day where staff are serenaded by a Christmas choir, wear holiday jumpers, and get treated to a Christmas dinner. Festive Friday has been deemed as everyone’s “favourite day of the year” and, this year, Moneypenny wanted to use the day to provide some Christmas joy to underprivileged children and families from the local community
The solutions
Moneypenny’s HR team decided to first take on the promise auction, and to build a bot that automated the auction process, allowed staff to see and bid on the items on offer, and drove engagement with the initiative on Workplace.
The Auction bot was able to automate the majority of the heavy lifting involved in running an auction, starting with sending broadcast messages to all staff making them aware of the program. Staff were then able to browse through the different items on offer and see details around who the item/service had been promised by and what the current highest bid was. Staff could then choose to place higher bids for various items, with the highest bids then automatically updated in the bot.
To drive general awareness of and engagement with the program, as well as provide an opportunity for a bit of inter-company banter, each time a staff member placed a bid for an item the bot would then post their name and the bid amount to a Workplace group called ‘Moneypenny Promise Auction.’ This group housed details on the auction, became a real-time feed of bids and increased the competitive nature of the auction.
Emma and the Moneypenny HR team were then able to see the final bid results at the end of the auction and download a list of staff that won each item along with their corresponding highest bids.
Within minutes of the first broadcast going out, every single item had already had at least one bid, and 64% of all staff participated in the auction program.
Santa bot
After seeing the success of the Auction bot, Emma and her team were certain that bots could be used for many other use cases, and the charitable Toy Drive they had planned for ‘Festive Friday’ was another perfect opportunity to use bots to save time, increase engagement and drive company culture.
In previous years, a huge amount of admin and manual work had been involved in running Toy Drives – from sending emails about the initiative, creating and distributing gift buying guidelines, answering questions from staff and keeping track of who was donating what.
By using bots on Workplace, Emma was able to automate all these processes and more. Using the broadcast function, the bot introduced staff to the Toy Drive and encouraged them to sign up. For anyone that didn’t sign up, the bot was able to automatically remind them a few days later. For any staff who had joined since last year’s Toy Drive, the bot was able to supply them with all the necessary background information about the initiative. The bot then also told staff about other details such as gift budget, wrapping instructions, collection date and drop off locations.
For those who agreed to participate in the Toy Drive, the bot then automatically assigned different child personas to different staff members – something that used to be a very manual and time consuming process. Each persona included the age, name, hobbies and preferences of a child, from newborns to children in their teens. This ensured that all children were being thought of – not just toddlers and young children.
The bot was a huge success with 98.5% of staff who received the initial broadcast participating in the program and buying a gift, resulting in over 600 gifts being donated to local children and families in need.
Business impact
Each bot took less than one day to build and resulted in large increases in staff engagement, program participation, process completion and time saved.
Using a bot on Workplace to automate the Toy Drive resulted in 612 of the 621 staff who were sent an initial broadcast taking part in the program and buying a gift for a child – representing a 98.5% participation rate. Meanwhile, 64% of staff members used the charity auction bot to place a bid and helped raised thousands of pounds for charity – all while taking up 80% less time to organise than before using bots.
Results
0%
staff participation
0
gifts donated to local children
0%
more time efficient
"With TBP, I could build these bots myself, and I had the freedom to experiment on my own. I can create a solution for the problems I see every day in a matter of minutes. You guys were so appealing because anyone can do it.
It wouldn’t take up our IT or our Development team’s time – I could do it myself. We knew your company fit really well with how we work with the level of support you guys offer, and we’re always looking to partner with those types of companies."
Emma Davies
Working Life Analyst Architect
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To achieve this, Emma and her team have redefined the meaning of Human Resources and Operations by reframing the mindset around work-life balance. Beyond the typical job duties and responsibilities, there is so much more that goes into a healthy working life for employees. Work-based relationships, professional growth, social responsibility, and community wellbeing are all key aspects that can leave a positive (or negative) impression on staff.
