If there’s one thing business owners are constantly looking to save that isn’t money, it’s time. When certain tasks take up a large amount of time, it means your business may be spending more time performing routine busy work rather than actually focusing on being the best possible provider in whatever field your business may be in. You yourself may spend a significant amount of time performing tedious tasks, whether that be responding to an endless number of emails or combing through a vast amount of spreadsheets double-checking numbers and data. Ultimately, time spent performing these kinds of tasks is time not spent innovating and looking for ways to take your business to the next level—something that all of us would love to spend much more time doing.
This has long been a universal issue. At Payday HCM, we’re constantly looking for ways to streamline processes to save ourselves and our clients precious time. We’ve had numerous clients approach us with problems surrounding the amount of time they were spending performing various tasks. Not only that, but we’ve also had plenty of questions surrounding methods for improving the customer experience in the digital age. With so much communication taking place over email, it can be difficult not only to determine someone’s tone but can also lead to late intervention in potentially escalated customer interactions. Luckily, Payday is actively working with Teammate AI to help your business solve these issues.
In this article, we’ll go over the various tools—called Bear AI—Teammate and Payday are working to develop to help your business save time and money. We spoke with one of the product owners of Bear AI and Director of Operations at Teammate AI, Bill James, about the functionality of the Bear AI tools and how they can help automate certain tasks and help businesses improve their customer service.
In this article, you will learn:
The Origins of Bear AI
Firstly, we’ll go over the origins of Bear AI and how James’ team began developing the different automation and client interaction tools.
“Automation Mining” and Finding Processes to Automate
Prior to the actual development of the Bear AI tools, James was approached by Payday HCM CEO and founder Andy Siegel with the idea of using AI to automate certain processes involved in benefits administration and HCM services as well as to improve client interactions.
“We went through a methodology that we call automation mining that goes through various processes within the business to identify opportunities for some type of automation or AI to assist with those processes,” James said.
These conversations are important not only for identifying certain pain points or potential processes to be automated, James said, but also for the potential of new ideas to be born out of said discussions. The initial concept of Bear AI came from these discussions.
“How Can We Do It Better?”
On top of the idea of automating certain processes that take up a lot of time, James said that pushing the industry and leading innovation was another guiding principle surrounding the development of Bear AI.
“This is kind of born out of how can we do it better. How could we better service clients? How can we get ahead of things before they even know about it,” James said. “All three of these were born out of strategic discussions around where and how should AI or automation play a part in the growth of these businesses. And then, two, how can we provide better service to clients.”
What Tools Does Bear AI Offer?
Next, we’ll get into the actual bread and butter of what Bear AI has to offer: automated benefits reconciliation, an implementation import tool, and an email sentiment analysis tool.
Automated Benefits Reconciliation
According to James, one of the first parts of the process when thinking about what tools Bear would offer involved looking at the manual processes that were taking up a lot of time: enter benefits reconciliation.
“The current process is such that, when you go to reconcile bills with payrolls that are run for the companies that you're running them for, it's very manual… What this tool will do is it will allow you to upload the carrier invoice… (and) it gives you an opportunity to see what the AI is pulling out of that invoice,” James said.
The tool will allow you to upload the insurance carrier invoice alongside a reconciliation report to find any discrepancies between the two. The tool checks to ensure that the kind of coverage for each employee is correct, the invoice amount is correct, and that everyone who needs to be listed on there is listed.
“If everything looks good on both the invoice and the reconciliation report, it's gonna give you a green check mark that says, ‘Hey, nothing to look at here. Everything lines up the way that it should,’” James said.
On top of the tool being HIPPA compliant to ensure complete security with any sensitive data, James said the team also had to ensure that the tool was accurately cross-referencing the data from the invoice with the employee data.
“We had to build an AI model that would say, ‘Okay, here's this person (and) here's this person. How confident are we—and we actually give it a score—to say that Bill James equals William James’… So, what we say to the user then is, ‘Hey, we found these people. We are less than 90% certain that these things line up on these invoices. Who, if any, do you want to line them up to?’” James said.
Implementation Import Tool
In addition to automating benefits reconciliation, Bear AI can also help to automate the implementation process. For HCM providers or payroll companies, onboarding new clients who are moving from other systems can be a painstaking process, whether it be actually migrating all the information or dealing with the various file formats.
“What this tool is intended to do is to short circuit that very laborious and time-consuming process of getting the data from the existing payroll provider or platform and (translating) it very quickly into the import template for isolved,” James said.
The tool allows you to take the existing data in the format you might receive it from companies like Paylocity, Paychex, or QuickBooks, tweak it so that the data gets translated how you want it, and then transforms the information into a file format readable by isolved.
“So, it cuts out that portion of needing to cut and paste or manually enter data from existing payroll (systems) to get people set up and implemented as part of your onboarding processes,” James said.
Email Sentiment Analysis
You’ve almost certainly spent many minutes re-reading a text message you received, trying to decipher the sender’s possible tone. Now, just imagine that happening in email communications with your clients. Bear AI can help to eliminate this possible scenario with its email sentiment analysis tool.
“The intent of this tool is to basically give some early warning indication into potential customer service issues. So, things that are not quite problems yet but could be based on sentiment and communication between customer service folks and clients, as well as just providing some general analytics on emails that are coming and going through customer service inboxes,” James said.
The tool can be linked to individual email inboxes or to a team email inbox and provides you with data on the sentiment of emails received from clients, whether they be positive, neutral, or negative.
“So, if you have new customer service people or customer service folks… (and) you would like to identify training opportunities to improve customer satisfaction, response time, that sort of thing, the tool and the analytics behind it can be used for that,” James said.
The AI has a baseline model that the team built around, using data from Payday HCM to help it understand the different sentiments. This is important as customer service often isn’t easily narrowed down into three simple sentiments.
“In addition to that, it's not just based on individual messages themselves, but actually phrases and sentences within the messages because there's nuance to all of this stuff, especially in customer service. So, you can have an email that is generally neutral or maybe even positive. But buried within that positive email, there might be a negative sentence,” James said.
Looking Ahead: What’s To Come With Bear AI
While Bear AI may still be in hibernation while the team works to actively develop and improve the tools, we can still look at the road ahead to see the kind of impact Bear AI may have on your business.
Active Development and Improvement
Payday HCM, alongside other HCM service providers, is working with Teammate to continually improve and provide feedback on Bear AI’s functionality. This process has helped James’ team ensure that the tools provided by Bear will actually help the individuals who are coming face-to-face with these problems on a day-to-day basis.
“The cool thing is since they're the ones that feel the pain on a day-to-day basis, they have a pretty good idea of what would actually work and what would make their life and job easier… Because they're in it day-to-day, the ideas that these people and the teams come up with are really slick,” James said.
Who Is Bear AI For?
Now, you may be wondering, “Who are these tools actually for?” And while things like the benefits reconciliation and import tools are relatively targeted towards those in the HCM business, something like the email sentiment analysis tool can be used more broadly for any company that has client interactions.
“So, while we've kind of geared (the email sentiment analysis tool) towards customer service folks within the payroll industry, this is one that, if you have any type of customer service support that is being done through some type of inbox, this could be applicable to anyone that has that need,” James said.
Help Make Busy Work More Bearable With Bear AI
Bad customer service and busy work have two things in common: nobody likes them, and everyone tries their best to avoid them. Regardless, bad customer service still happens and busy work must still be done. For a business owner, delivering less-than-exceptional service to your clients and bogging your employees down in busy work can be two of the biggest things you look to prevent. As inevitable as it may seem, it becomes difficult to find an answer to this problem. With Bear AI, your business will be able to utilize the power of AI to automate certain tasks and improve your customer experience so that your organization can become the best version of itself that it can be.
Curious to learn more about Bear AI? Check out the website to learn more about Bear AI’s tools and functionalities. Then, check out our other articles on Bear’s email sentiment analysis tool and benefits reconciliation tool.
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