Sun Life Asia Service Centre India (ASCI), the Global In-House Centre of Sun Life Financial, has launched its first Employee Social media platform’s ChatBot, Nina, to provide quicker and better resolution to employee queries/issues that can be resolved anytime without establishing physical connect with support services. With a 90% millennial workforce, it is critical for Sun Life ASCI to ensure that it evolves with its diverse and young 1800+ workforce and enhance their employee experience by making it seamless and which supports greater productivity. COVID-19 has further accelerated the need for adoption of ChatBots to create a seamless digital employee experience, akin to customer experience.
Nina is the first interactive ChatBot on ASCI’s internal employee social media platform. She has already begun resolving employees’ technology related support queries. For eg; with hardware, conferencing tools, secure connectivity and so on. With Nina, conversational AI has also resulted in teams spending less time on routine work and getting more involved with strategizing towards business goals. The idea originated in an Technology team huddle discussion on improving employee experience for quicker and easier resolution of repeated queries/issues by building an intuitive virtual assistant to answer employee queries and resolve issues instantaneously. The company has also been running internal campaigns to create awareness on how to use the ChatBot. In the future, the organization is looking at widening the application to other areas like HR, Admin, Support services and also strategic content dissemination on key digital strategies.
In the first few weeks of its launch, Nina, has answered on an average 3.87 questions per user. The internal survey indicates 74% of users were either delighted or satisfied with the experience of engaging with her.
Amit Kumar Gupta, Head- Technology Services, ASCI says, “Employee experience is central to Sun Life ASCI’s journey of digital transformation. Our ChatBot Nina, is seen as a Virtual Assistant and a member of technology team. During this unprecedented pandemic, it has been incredible to see our technology and project teams come together and quickly deliver advanced solutions to infrastructural issues. Infact, the response to the bot has been extremely encouraging such that for the next MVP we are trying to incorporate more questions and launch it for other markets in Sunlife.”
Rajat Vibhas, Head- Business Excellence and Communications, ASC, says, “In order to build greater adoption and relatability with the Chat bot, we curated a unique persona for the chat bot in ‘Nina’. Her language, responsiveness and personality is friendly and she is always eager to help. While launching the Chat bot, we inducted her like a new employee on board and released communication around that. Today, people very clearly associate her imagery with a virtual colleague who they can reach out to anytime for any IT support related query.”
Customer experience is the key for success in the year 2020 and beyond. Which will require automation and team work as key ingredients. I think it will be dominated by tech and automation, AI and ML. New tools like chatbots are going to change how customer service is taken care by businesses.