The Design and Evaluation of a Chatbot for Human Resources

Technological innovations in artificial intelligence and machine learning enable business operators to engage with their customers 24/7 through chatbots. Many customers expect around-the-clock support which puts a strain on human resources; augmenting human resources with a chatbot can reduce costs for an organization and increase customer satisfaction. This work presents the HR Chatbot: a chatbot that answers general questions about human resource topics (i.e. payroll, benefits) for a private university. The research involves a collaboration between computer scientists, user experience researchers, and human resource administration. This work addresses two research questions: What are employees at a private university looking for from a chatbot for human resources?; and what are the appropriate methods to evaluate and measure the success of a chatbot for human resources? The HR Chatbot uses IBM Watson Assistant services, and an initial prototype was designed from a document of 31 frequently asked questions. Three rounds of user testing were conducted with employees of the university. The initial tests revealed that the chatbot was perceived as useful, but many were dissatisfied with the responses, specifically the lack of responses. Errors in the chatbot were classified into different categories; the most common being that the question was not in the content scope for the chatbot. Thus, data from the initial studies informed the scope of the chatbot; the number of unique questions grew to 157 and the total number of questions increased to 463. The HR Chatbot has 90% accuracy and an average sustained usability score of 69.5, surpassing the benchmark score. Following the initial tests, the HR Chatbot was deployed in real-time on the human resources website. This work describes how a chatbot was created, evaluated, and deployed online. We hope that this work inspires and informs others to explore similar use cases with chatbot technologies.