{"id":4288,"date":"2019-01-16T15:06:43","date_gmt":"2019-01-16T23:06:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/?p=4288"},"modified":"2023-06-22T13:06:08","modified_gmt":"2023-06-22T20:06:08","slug":"taking-the-sting-out-of-traveling-for-microsoft-employees-with-a-bot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/taking-the-sting-out-of-traveling-for-microsoft-employees-with-a-bot\/","title":{"rendered":"Taking the sting out of traveling for Microsoft employees with a bot"},"content":{"rendered":"
This content has been archived, and while it was correct at time of publication, it may no longer be accurate or reflect the current situation at Microsoft.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
When Microsoft employees fly around the world for work, they do so to create a human connection.<\/p>\n
Now those valuable face-to-face meetings are a bit easier, thanks to a non-human source\u2014a bot.<\/p>\n
The Microsoft Business Travel Letter Tool is a recently launched internal bot that makes the tedious process of filling out travel forms much easier for company employees, says Jay Clem, general manager of Human Resources IT for Microsoft Digital.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur use case for our international travelers turned out to be an ideal scenario to show how our Microsoft Bot Framework can be used to quickly build a bot with a lot of value,\u201d Clem says. \u201cSince they started using our travel letter bot, our employees are spending 80 percent less time filling out travel forms. They\u2019re also much happier\u2014we\u2019ve seen a 90 percent uptick in customer satisfaction.\u201d<\/p>\n
It used to be that company employees would laboriously fill out the same set of lengthy forms each time they wanted to travel internationally. For frequent travelers, this was particularly vexing.<\/p>\n
Until now.<\/p>\n
\u201cNow all you have to do is fill out the online form one time,\u201d says Joseph Jassey, the Microsoft Digital senior program manager who maintains and continues to develop the new bot. \u201cFollowing that, the bot can generate most of the information on its own, with little manual input, which cuts down the number of mundane tasks our employees need to do.\u201d<\/p>\n
And employee users are liking the bot\u2014a lot.<\/p>\n
\u201cWithin the first few days, we had 40 out of 43 employees surveyed returning positive feedback about the experience,\u201d says Carine Biesemeier, senior program manager in Microsoft Digital. \u201cOur biggest hope for the automation was that it would feel natural and be a personable experience\u2014just as if you are speaking with a person.\u201d<\/p>\n
The new digital assistant, which is embedded in the company\u2019s Human Resources portal, does not include first time international travelers, and this exclusion was a crucial part of the bot\u2019s design.<\/p>\n
Why?<\/p>\n
It comes down to being careful about how much you tackle with an individual bot. Employees planning their first trip abroad have many different concerns to address, including general questions about travel and conduct in a new location, says Shiran Sathananthan, a Microsoft Digital principal program manager whose team led the engineering and deployment of the travel letter bot.<\/p>\n
Sathananthan says it\u2019s easy to create a bot that has so many user scenarios that it becomes ineffective.<\/p>\n
\u201cGiven the myriad of ways there are to communicate the exact same ideas and questions, it can be challenging to translate the end user\u2019s intent so that a bot can assist effectively,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
To get ahead of this, limiting scope is critical.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s important to not try to boil the ocean,\u201d he says. \u201cA bot is most effective when it answers fewer questions and has a specific scenario.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bots work best for manual, repetitive, predictable tasks\u2014they are best at doing things like answering questions and resolving simple tasks. They are not as good when you need a large engineering effort or to build a complex scenario with lots of variables. \u201cThis ability to take on simple tasks is one of the reasons why Gartner identified bots as one of the ten most strategic trends of 2017,\u201d Sathananthan says.<\/p>\n
However, deciding when to build a bot is tricky.<\/p>\n
You\u2019re supposed to keep the number of things an individual bot does small, but that can lead to creating too many bots, which could lead to bloat. Conversely, creating fewer bots that have too broad of a scope or that try to handle too many scenarios can frustrate users.<\/p>\n
The travel bot is one of many digital assistants that Microsoft Digital is using to better serve employees, says Brent Schnabel, a Microsoft Digital user experience (UX) designer who helped put together a Chatbot Toolkit that is being used guide how employees can build better bots. Each is built on the Microsoft Bot Framework, which is what the company uses to guide teams who want to build their own bots.<\/p>\n
The Human Resources employees who manage the Microsoft travel program are also getting a lot of value out of the new travel letter bot, Jassey says.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe bot has dramatically reduced the number of tickets our HR practitioners have to deal with,\u201d Jassey says.<\/p>\n
Instead of having to help employees file loads of paperwork, the HR team is now using its time to make the traveling experience better.<\/p>\n
Biesemeier pointed to automation as an example. \u201cOne of the challenges in creating a great employee experience is repetitive tasks, so we were looking at opportunities to automate processes,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s also helping with security\u2014the travel letter bot also helps protect personal data.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe bot can pull metadata about employees as well as their travel data, but we carefully designed it to not retrieve or store passport numbers,\u201d Biesemeier says. Her role on the travel letter bot team was to gather requirements, identify scenarios, and define scope. She also led testing of the bot on HRWeb.<\/p>\n
Backing out one step, the larger Microsoft Bot Framework that the team used to build the travel letter bot also makes the whole operation more efficient.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe bot framework itself improves the self-service capabilities by doing the heavy lifting of answering bulk FAQs and reducing the shared service costs,\u201d Biesemeier says. \u201cWe are utilizing virtual assistance to reduce cost of shared services by reducing FAQ traffic, and improving the overall employee experience.\u201d<\/p>\n
The travel letter bot also is one of the first in the company to meet the company\u2019s strict accessibility standards, she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re very proud that our bot is helping to set an internal standard for accessibility for employees with special needs,\u201d Biesemeier says.<\/p>\n
The travel bot is built into HRWeb, the internal Human Resources web site that drives traffic to the bot and that socializes it.<\/p>\n
Sathananthan would love to see the focus on bots like this one continue to strengthen and become more centralized.<\/p>\n
\u201cFrankly, employees are comfortable communicating with the bots, and as long as the automation returns correct information, this trust and comfort is maintained,\u201d he says. \u201cWhether or not the bot fulfills this is dependent on how the bot is designed, which circles back to what we discussed about scope.\u201d<\/p>\n
Trust is needed, and to be trusted means having consistent, accurate results. To be accurate, the bot must be able to pull the intent or key words from client input.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor example, if someone writes, \u2018I need to travel to India on the 15th of December,\u2019 that is a rich piece of information to make use of,\u201d Sathananthan says. \u201cIf the bot only registers \u2018India,\u2019 it is missing the other details being given.\u201d<\/p>\n
All the employees who worked on the project all say they are excited to see where the company can go with the travel letter bot and others like it. They believe their hopes for progress are well timed as big changes are happening at Microsoft and within Microsoft Digital to advance automation and productivity.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe wanted to make sure we get this right from the beginning,\u201d Schnabel says. \u201cWe worked really hard to get the design right on the travel letter bot because it\u2019s laying the ground work for what\u2019s to come.\u201d<\/p>\n
It’s all about getting user experience right.<\/p>\n
\u201cWell-crafted UX starts with a deep understanding of the audience and the process involved,\u201d Schnabel says. \u201cTo get this business travel letter bot right, we researched employees who travel for work\u2014their pain points, requirements, and the process they needed to follow. Then we implemented the foundations of Conversational User Interface (CUI) design.\u201d<\/p>\n
As for the travel bot itself\u2014the team is most proud of its work to make the bot seem human.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt paid off too, and it\u2019s this kind of innovation that will drive us forward as a company,\u201d Biesemeier says. \u201cOur leadership team saw the original opportunity for automation, and once we all got together, we were able to make it happen.\u201d<\/p>\n
Learn more about automation and the company\u2019s bot framework.<\/a> To keep up with the changes being driven out of Microsoft Digital, follow our content on InsideTrack<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This content has been archived, and while it was correct at time of publication, it may no longer be accurate or reflect the current situation at Microsoft. When Microsoft employees fly around the world for work, they do so to create a human connection. Now those valuable face-to-face meetings are a bit easier, thanks to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":146,"featured_media":11573,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"_hide_featured_on_single":false,"_show_featured_caption_on_single":true,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"coauthors":[674],"class_list":["post-4288","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","m-blog-post"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\n