Chatbots can be implemented into a variety of business use cases, such as customer service, employee engagement, and human resources (HR). HR use cases can fulfill a variety of functions including retrieving payslips, determining paid time off or vacation balances, or finding entries in the employee directory. Putting these common, repeatable questions in the metaphorical hands of a chatbot can provide quick and efficient service to employees while freeing the HR department to focus on other facets of their jobs. At Fishbowl Solutions, we have helped two of our customers with Oracle HR solutions. One customer utilized Oracle Human Capital Management (HCM) Cloud and the other, PeopleSoft. As the name suggests, HCM Cloud is fully in the cloud while PeopleSoft is installed on premise. While both HR solutions have effective chatbot offerings provided by Oracle, we will focus on HCM Cloud in this blog post. Oracle provides 35+ delivered transactions with their HCM skills, and that number is consistently growing as customer demands grow and change. Just like apps on a smartphone, new versions continue to appear in the skill store that will add and improve functionality. The categories that these transactions fall under are compensation and payment, absence and time, onboarding, global HR tasks, goals and feedback, manager actions, approvals, and recruiting.

With all this great delivered functionality directly from Oracle, why is Fishbowl even necessary as an implementation partner? Effective and successful digital assistants (chatbots) require customization and monitoring in order to reach their full potential. Customizations can include simple items such as changing the phrasing of messages or changing the color scheme on the chat widget to fit your branding. They can also include more complex items such as extending existing conversation flows or implementing new features that can either include HCM or an entirely different system or API (application programming interface). In other cases, a newly built chat widget may require additional capabilities and customizations. In many cases, our customers want to start with a limited amount of use cases that will provide the most value before enhancing further in future phases. Once a chatbot has gone live, its usage must be monitored to make sure that the chatbot is not only behaving properly, but also that users are interacting as expected. If users are asking for their vacation time as “PTO,” and the bot hasn’t been trained to recognize this phrase, adjustments will be needed. This is also a good time to see which questions users are asking that the bot is not able to answer yet and plan future phases based on that. To see some capabilities of the delivered HCM skills with the default chat widget, view the above video, read this infographic, or contact us.