Using bots to keep the employee experience top of mind

The first employee experience challenge Flight Centre decided to tackle was onboarding their travel agents to Workplace. The built ‘Claire’ an Independent Agent Chatbot, that was able to onboard agents at scale and provide them with a great first impression of Flight Centre.

Alongside solving an operational need, another key function of Claire was to showcase what the benefits are of becoming an independent agent. Claire was able to welcome agents into their new environment, and ensure they had everything they needed to perform at their best.

Claire was able to compliment and improve the agent onboarding process by automating elements of it that were previously done manually. With Claire, Flight Centre was able to see how employees would react and engage to a digital assistant, while also providing their bot builders with a simple but compelling use case to launch with.

After launching Claire, Flight Centre moved on to a more complex operational bot named Lizzie. The goal of Lizzie was to assist with their organizational redesign during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Employees who were currently working or standing down from work had access to Lizzie so they could have commonly asked questions answered quickly and efficiently. Lizzie also directed staff to relevant materials by linking back to documents in a specific Workplace group. Lizzie was able to automate FAQs, ensure the process was as smooth as possible, and direct users to the important information they were looking for.

Before Lizzie, emails were flooding the inbox’s of the HR team at Flight Centre and it quickly became an overwhelming process to answer everyone’s questions. After this bot build, Lizzie was able to automate these processes for 40% of their 2,000 group members and relieve some of the pressure that normally would rest on HR and Operations.

The shifts in operations that took place during COVID-19 brought a wave of compliance requirements and new guidelines on how to work safely during the pandemic. With staff returning to the office, Flight Centre utilized The Bot Platform to create Bot Nanno that ensured staff were staying safe and following public health guidelines.

One of these requirements included a health check form that needed to be filled out every time a staff member entered the office. Instead of having to manually reach out to the 300 staff who were coming into the office each day to fill out their health check form, Bot Nanno saved time by automating this process at scale and ensured that staff were remaining compliant by checking in before coming into the office.

Bot Nanno helped staff feel confident they could safely go into the office if they wanted to, and saved the HR team huge amounts of time by avoiding this work manually.

After the success of Bot Nanno, Flight Centre took the same basic functionalities of the bot and adapted them to fit a different need – time tracking.

Users of the bot could clock in and out every day, get reminders to complete their time tracking in the morning and at night, and train people on a new process that was a legal requirement for the organization. Alongside assisting staff and automating another manual task, Bot Nanno 2.0 helped ensure legal compliance and embedded a new habit for staff.

The bot saw a consistent 80% interaction rate and staff were constantly giving feedback on how useful the bot was and how they thoroughly enjoyed the tone of voice and personality.