Applying a chatbot for assistance in the onboarding process : A process of requirements elicitation and prototype creation

Sammanfattning: It has previously been shown that the quality of the onboarding process affects the chances of a new hire staying at a company, yet it is common that companies have problems in succeeding to maintain a well-organized onboarding. To aid new hires in their onboarding, and to lower the amount of work for the HR personnel, chatbots can be used. In this project, a chatbot was developed for the onboarding process of a large company. Interviews were held with new hires and HR personnel which were used to create requirements for the chatbot. These were divided into two categories; information and functional requirements. A third category, non-functional requirements, was created based on Microsoft’s guidelines for development of conversational AI. Based on the requirements, a chatbot prototype was built using Microsoft Bot Framework with the use of two cognitive services, LUIS and QnA Maker. Both the requirements and the prototype were created iteratively. The information that the interview participants requested from the chatbot was eitherpractical or personal information, or information about the employer, the internal systems, or other employees. It was revealed that the chatbot mainly needed to answer simple questions and didn’t demand any procedural conversation flow which made the use of QnA Maker appropriate. However, for questions and tasks that would benefit or require a procedural flow QnA Maker’s follow-up prompts could be used in future work to create multi-turn conversations.