Building Our Own Chatbot: Why We Decided To Go In-House

Preface

Employees frequently need quick access to HR policy information, such as leave policies, benefits, and company guidelines. The traditional approach (like FAQs, Policy Blogs, Online Catalog of Policy documents, Call-to-HR, Chat-with-HR, Write-to-HR, etc) of addressing these queries could be time-consuming and may result in delays in getting accurate information. A solution was required to provide employees with immediate, accurate, consistent, and easily accessible answers to their HR-related queries.

With the advent of GenAI everyone expects machines to converse like humans and impersonate the traits (Personal, Professional and Friendly) of HR while conversing – being as human as it can get! We realized the need for a LLM powered Chatbot, which could listen, empathize and respond accurately to our employees and eventually help them answer any work (project, process, client, business) related questions.

The Rationale

Typically, the decision of Build-vs-Buy is taken based on the following factors:

• Cost of development, hosting and maintenance
• Technical capability to build and deploy
• Data privacy and security controls
• Functional knowledge of the application

In our case, we had the required technical and functional knowledge to build the most cost effective, fast and adaptable product, which could meet our needs.

Advantages Over Off-The-Shelf Solutions

There are many Chatbot application providers in the market and many of them provide LLM based solutions as well but having a home grown LLM application gives you following advantages:

Typically, the off-the-shelf products charge you basis – volume of messages or interactions, number of integrations (to transactional systems or knowledgebases), number of customizations, analytics, type of documents support, number of document uploads for context, security, support, etc. In a nutshell on – features, scale and customization. With a home-grown application, we took a Crawl – Walk – Run approach to be cost effective and deliver the MVP features.

LLM applications take less time to develop and more time to fine tune the responses. Mostly, the tone of the first version is very robotic and of a generic Chatbot, which reads like a legal document, and one needs to fine tune it with right “Prompting” to get the response to desired levels. This is a very iterative process and typically hundreds of prompts are run and tested to carve the most efficient “prompts”. Off-the-shelf solutions will have a limitation to the number of iterations (0 to few) and can never achieve the desired levels of human touch in response.

Building a Chatbot to be able to answer any HR policy related queries would require sharing all the HR Policy related documents with it, which would, typically, need your HR knowledge documents and data to go out of your network to the off-the-shelf service providers’ network. Home grown solution won’t require to do that addressing our data security concerns.

Alignment With Our Digital Transformation Goals

Developing the Chatbot, in-house, gave us the following advantages, which helped achieve our digital transformation goals:

• Efficiency Gains: The chatbot will significantly reduce the burden on HR departments, allowing HR professionals to focus on more strategic tasks rather than answering repetitive queries.
• Instant Access: Employees will have 24/7 access to HR policies, improving their experience and satisfaction.
• Cost Savings: With the automation of query handling, organizations can reduce HR staff workload and operational costs.
• Employee Empowerment: Employees will be empowered to find answers to their questions independently, boosting confidence in company policies and fostering a more transparent workplace culture.
• Scalability: As the chatbot can handle a large volume of queries, it will scale efficiently with company growth without requiring significant additional resources.
  

Conclusion

By building our own GenAI-powered HR chatbot, we achieved efficiency, cost savings, and data security while empowering employees with instant, accurate answers. EnFuse Solutions’ expertise in AI and digital transformation ensured a scalable, human-like solution aligned with organizational goals, driving productivity and enhancing employee experience seamlessly.