One of our clients, a multinational professional services firm, recently saw spectacular improvement in the efficiency and effectiveness of their FAQ processes, through small edits to their chatbot and live 121 chat processes.
Regularly reviewing processes and user experience data can yield simple solutions that have huge effects on efficiency and candidate experience.
The initial challenge
As with many Early Careers teams, our client were receiving large numbers of candidate enquiries every day, and answering these questions and providing reassurance was taking up a large amount of recruiter time.
To help with this, we worked with our client to implement an FAQ chatbot to assist candidates with information on programmes, entry requirements, the application process, assessment stages, and organisational life.
The team were able to offload some of the heavy lifting required to repeatedly answer frequently asked questions on to the bot and ensure that candidates received quick answers to common queries at any time of the night or day, regardless of whether the recruitment team were online at the time.
For more difficult or complex questions, the bot handed over to Live 121 chat with a member of the Early Careers recruitment team.
This solved the initial problem of offsetting the volume of queries and getting easy questions answered quickly. However, over time the client found they were still dealing with high numbers of 121 chat conversations.
Regular reviews expose opportunities for improvement
With regular data reviews, it was found that the structure of the chatbot itself had a part to play in this candidate behaviour.
When we looked at the journeys candidates were taking through the chatbot, an interesting trend was revealed. Many candidates were not even attempting to find the answers to their queries through the chatbot, instead opting to select the Live Chat option as soon as it was presented. This was then leading to longer wait times for candidates to get answers for their questions, because the team were once again being overloaded with high volumes of frequently asked queries.
A simple but hugely effective fix
Once this behaviour had been identified, the Meet & Engage team worked with the client’s Early Careers team to conduct a review of the structure of the chatbot: the initial menu was restructured, making it easier for candidates to move through the options and find the information they were looking for. By tweaking the prompts and changing where and how the candidate is offered solutions, including where the offer to speak to a member of the team via Live 121 Chat is surfaced, the team were able to streamline the entire FAQ process and improve both candidate experience and recruiter efficiency.
After these small changes were made, the improved efficiency of candidate query handling was demonstrable:
- conversations handed over to the Live Chat team were down 44% compared to the same time period as the previous year
- conversations handed over to email were down 23% from the same time period as the previous year
- this resulted in approx. 4,800 fewer 121 conversations for the team to handle
- which equated to 16 hours per week saved for the team*
(*For this demonstration we estimated the average length of a 121 Live Chat conversation to be three minutes.)
Optimising the chatbot experience also has a knock-on effect on candidate experience:
- candidates receive the information they need on-demand, even out-of-hours
- enquiries that are more complex (requiring the human touch) receive better service from recruiters who are less overwhelmed with repeatedly answering the same FAQs
- teams have more time and energy to spend providing a great experience in all other areas of the process
Technology that works with you, not against you
The drag-and-drop functionality of Meet & Engage chatbots enables this kind of swift review and restructure. Our real-time editing allows changes to be made without down-time, enabling the Early Careers team to quickly implement their changes, without the need for a full rebuild, switching on the revamped chatbot at the click of a button once it was ready. Real-time editing also enables the team to continually review and tweak going forward, ensuring the information and service they provide are always up-to-date.
If you’d like to know more about how our candidate experience chatbots can improve your team’s efficiency, get in touch or request a demo and a member of our solutions team will be happy to help.
