Interviews

Conversational AI: They key to building a winning work culture

inFeedo was founded in 2013 with the mission to make the voice of 100 million employees heard & valued. Their Conversational AI and people analytics platform Amber was born in 2016 and is being used by HR leaders of 225+ global enterprises to build winning work cultures. “We help HR leaders understand their employees better, connect with them in a more personalised manner and build a culture of listening.” Tanmaya Jain, Founder & CEO, inFeedo shares more insights on how technology will play an important role in shaping the future of workplaces and employee experiences.

 

How has the larger HR tech industry evolved in the last few years, especially post the COVID-19 pandemic?
HR tech is one of the fastest-growing industries, globally. Despite slowdowns due to economic uncertainties and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, organisations continue to prioritise employee experience, engagement, and well-being. The pandemic has disrupted the way HR leaders looked at engagement and employee experience, and are now turning to technologies such as Conversational AI to be able to uncover hidden sentiments, and build winning work cultures.

Whether it is at the office, at home, or in a hybrid workplace, HR leaders need proactive tools which can help them engage with and listen to their employees at scale. Through these conversations they are looking to get insights into their employees’ mood and engagement, identify issues such as burnout and stress, predict employees that are at a risk of leaving and retain their top talent in the process.

We believe that people analytics, employee engagement and experience are taking centre stage for every business. For example, CHROs of more than 225 customers use Amber to have honest conversations with their employees, build a culture of transparency where every employee is heard, and get data-rich and actionable insights which help them build fulfilling work cultures with low attrition and high engagement.

 

What are HR leaders focusing on today, and how are you partnering with them on these initiatives?
Retaining top talent and building a culture where employees love to come to work are top priorities for HR leaders across the globe. Our customers deploy Amber as their Chief Listening Officer and she reports directly to the CEO. Using Amber, our customers have been able to retain 85% of their top talent, get 33X quantifiable ROI and save 2.5 days on an average in a week, for an HRBP.

 

How are HR leaders using technologies such as AI to uncover employee sentiment and build better work cultures?
Today traditional and non-contextual employee-HRBP connects, or anonymous, one-size-fits-all surveys do not help in understanding real employee sentiments or building engagement strategies. The workforce dynamics have changed significantly post the pandemic, and people-first leaders are banking on technologies such as Conversational AI to understand their workforce better. We are seeing HR leaders shift their attention to building a listening culture at scale, acting on employee feedback faster, and being able to retain and engage with employees better. Technologies such as Conversational AI help in getting actionable insights and add predictive capabilities to manage today’s workplaces. For example, Amber remembers feedback and contextualises every conversation accordingly. This helps build trust with the employees and results in better engagement.

 

How do you think organizations can better tackle quiet quitting?
Employees are taking a serious look at the way they lead their lives post the pandemic. Many decided that their jobs were dead ends, and quit in the “Great Resignation” wave. This mass exodus showed us that people no longer want to waste their lives doing work that they don’t like and will search for better opportunities that are in better sync with what they want in the long run. Quiet quitting is just an extension of this sentiment.

A common thread between all the recent workplace trends is that organizations assume they know what their employees are thinking, feeling, or experiencing. This has resulted in disruptions in the people management space that may seem sudden, but have been in the making for a long time. It is easy to fall back to traditional practices such as impersonal, one-size fits all anonymous surveys, etc. But that is a thing of the past. Especially when your employees are working from their favourite coffee shops or from the comforts of their homes. Traditional surveys are known to have an average response rate of 30% and are a pretentious way of telling your employees you care for them.

Today you need to personalise every conversation, create an ecosystem of listening, and close feedback loops faster. You need to listen closely to employees and take the time to understand their concerns. You need to listen for what they really want instead of assuming it for them. Building a listening culture hence should be the first step to being able to better tackle issues such as Quiet Quitting and more.

 

How are organizations using inFeedo’s Amber, and how is it different from other employee experience platforms?
Organizations use Amber for a variety of reasons including retaining top talent, understanding the true pulse of the workforce, and building delightful experiences for each employee in the organization.

Most organisations follow a typical year-end survey which may not be the best way to capture feedback any longer. Amber, on the other hand, works on an employee lifecycle model. She reaches out whenever an employee completes a milestone, such as a work anniversary or change in location, with relevant and contextual questions based on our Employee Experience Framework developed through extensive research by our People Science team.
This sets her apart from the other players in the market. Unlike other AI chatbots, interacting with Amber feels natural and human. The way that Amber is built, she shows empathy, has the capability to understand complicated feedback, and brings powerful insights to the people teams.

 

What are your future plans?
We have aggressive growth plans across two areas – market expansion and product innovation. From a market expansion point of view, we want to grow our presence in the mid-market and enterprise segment with organisations that have employees in the range of 500 to 120,000, and expand into the US. We have been able to successfully capture the market opportunity in South East Asia, and we have already started seeing success in the US. At our last fundraiser, we wanted to grow 6x in 2.5 years and we are on track to achieve this.

From a product perspective, we want to continue investing heavily into the depth of our existing product. With more than six years of experience in people science research, and a unique mix of people science and conversational AI teams, we have been able to stay a step ahead of the competition and we will continue to innovate and expand on our product leadership.

 

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