Espressive Launches Workday Integration to Deliver Single, Automated Source of Personalized Answers to HR Inquiries

Espressive, the pioneer in artificial intelligence (AI) for enterprise service management (ESM), announced its integration with leading HR systems such as Workday, SuccessFactors, and BambooHR, giving employees one place to go for immediate, personalized answers to all of their HR-related questions and issues. The Espressive AI-based Virtual Support Agent, Barista, understands thousands of employee phrases across the 100 most common Workday questions with use cases covering everything from onboarding to managing time off requests and invoices. Barista can assist employees by enabling access to information in Workday, such as PTO days and timecard information, using their natural language. Barista also updates information in Workday in real time across a wide range of use cases such as managing PTO, looking up employee data, and facilitating employee onboarding.

The pandemic caused many organizations to force fit an office-centric work model into a virtual world, resulting in up to a 33% decrease in productivity and making employee experience a top imperative for HR leaders in 2022. The pandemic also brought exponential growth in employee questions, exacerbated by the fact that answers are often vastly different depending on what state, country, and region employees reside in. While HR has made technology investments to help overcome these issues, each comes with its own interface which leaves employees frustrated. Espressive integrations solve these problems by giving a consumer-like employee experience with one place to go for all questions.

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“The advent of the hybrid workforce has inundated HR teams challenged with the dual responsibility of providing support for their on-site and remote employees while prioritizing the employee experience,” said Pat Calhoun, founder and CEO of Espressive. “Customers are looking for immediate ROI and want to avoid the complexity of building language recognition on a toolkit, such as those available from IBM Watson, ServiceNow, and Workday. The Barista virtual agent comes pre-equipped understanding the HR language of employees, while providing a single point for virtually any HR question.”

The integration of Espressive Barista with leading HR systems means employees can turn to Barista as the single, automated hub for questions across all HR tools. This improves the employee experience, which has a positive impact on productivity, satisfaction, and retention; increases employee use of HR tools; improves the ROI on HR technology investments; and frees up HR support staff from answering repetitive questions and continuously researching answers for all geographies, so they can focus on high touch interactions.

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With the Barista Workday integration, employees can interact with Barista to perform any actions as if they were using Workday, but with a consumer-like experience and through their natural language, such as:

• Manage Time-Off: Employees can find out their PTO balance, verify their PTO accrual rate, see a summary of hours worked, request time-off, and manage the lifecycle of a PTO request once it is created.
• Employee Data: Data such as employee ID number can be easily looked up.
• PO Status: The status of previously created purchase orders can be easily accessed.
• Invoice Status: Employees can search for and look-up the status of previously created invoices.
• Facilitate Employee Onboarding: HR can view and manage onboarding tasks that are part of a Workday workflow.
• Verify Pay Rate: Employees can verify their current pay rate.

Barista automates the resolution of up to 80% of HR questions on an expansive range of topics such as benefits, payroll, annual reviews, and company policies. Barista also automates employee workflows, such as vacation requests, onboarding, benefit inquiries as well as associated approvals. Even without integrations, organizations benefit from Barista as soon as the first day of deployment because Barista recognizes over 2.5 billion phrases, ingests the company’s current knowledge base, and includes researched responses for common industry questions. Future integrations with other leading HR systems will be available soon.

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