Pôle Emploi aims to deliver the finest IT support for its employees for them to best serve those looking for a job.
Pôle Emploi is a French governmental agency which registers unemployed people, helps them find jobs, and provides them with financial aid.
The agency employs 55,000 employees who give advice and supervise those seeking employment. The agency also provides a platform to help companies find and hire workers.
When the Covid-19 pandemic broke out in 2020, Pôle Emploi had to have all of its employees working from home in a matter of days.
Its workforce of 55,000 employees had limited experience using remote work tools such as laptops, VPN, Microsoft Teams, and more.
As a consequence of the pandemic, Pôle Emploi’s help desk saw the number of calls it received increase dramatically and was forced to deliver remote support on a much larger scale than ever before—and all without substantially increasing its headcount.
Pôle Emploi needed a new approach to perform remote support while also automatically resolving a significant share of the 190,000 internal calls that the IT support center received from its employees.
Virginie Laurent is the head of the IT Help Desk (named "Accueil Diagnostique" at Pôle Emploi).
Virginie's role consists in monitoring performance, defining optimization strategies, and selecting solutions for the contact center. The contact center employs thirty external agents who solve issues and recurring questions for Pôle Emploi's employees. The call center handles an average of 16,000 queries per month.
A solid Self-Service foundation in place
Pôle Emploi started its journey of providing its employees with the best self-service experience in 2019.
This includes self-service portals, self-ticketing, knowledge bases, and service catalogs. Its strategy is about empowering its employees with the best self-service solutions, so that they can deliver their mission in the most efficient way possible.
It’s important not to forget that every day agents help the unemployed find jobs and provide them with financial aid. It is fundamental that the support Pôle Emploi offer is fast and flawless.
When the Covid-19 pandemic broke out in 2020, Pôle Emploi knew it needed a solution that would take its self-service foundation to the next level and provide an even better experience and value for its employees and its organization.
Analyze data with Konverso Clustering solution
Pôle Emploi decided to take a bold new approach with Konverso. Its team was constantly working to create a more efficient, more productive workplace, but it had no real way of knowing what was slowing its employees down.
Pôle Emploi has always leveraged data from the tickets that come into the service desk. But existing analytics solutions can only review the structured data within tickets, such as assignee, priority, status, and resolution time.
While these analytics offer a view into the agent experience, they largely ignore the most critical information—for example, unstructured text describing the issue, work notes, and comments about an employee’s everyday frustrations.
Support ticket data is the way to find out what employees are going through and solve this problem.
By analyzing thousands of different issues, the Konverso clustering solution offers a granular view of the most significant issues affecting each employee.
This allows teams to remove inefficiencies and respond to employee frustrations as and when they happen.
Prioritize use cases that make the most impact
Thanks to the Konverso clustering solution, Pôle Emploi has been able to identify what frustrates employees the most, and implement scenarios around password reset, Smartphone enrolment, Microsoft O365, Data Migration, and more.
Konverso automatically solves employees' most common and repetitive issues.This way, Pôle Emploi can keep its agents focused on high-value tickets.
Pôle Emploi's team also spent a lot of time creating resources for employees to help themselves—from knowledge articles to forms and FAQs. However, its employees had a hard time finding them.
Konverso ensured that Pôle Emploi’s employees used their resources correctly, giving them the answers and forms they needed directly on chat. Konverso surfaced relevant snippets of information and let Pôle Emploi's employees easily access knowledge base articles.
Deliver an awesome Employee Experience across the board
Although Pôle Emploi invested a lot in its self-service portal, Pôle Emploi also recognized that its users have diverse digital journeys.
Therefore, delivering the best Employee Experience across channels is essential. In particular, Pôle Emploi has a growing user base on Microsoft Teams and smartphones. Now, employees have their IT support issues solved in seconds instead of days—all with a simple natural language chat in Microsoft Teams or on their mobile apps delivered via Intune.
The Chatbot is visible as an App in the left menu of Teams, its interface is very intuitive. It was deployed instantly to thousands of employees.
Impact and perspectives
Konverso provides 35+ out-of-the-box reportings that help Pôle Emploi monitor the Chatbot performance.
Among key KPIs, Pôle Emploi follows the volume of monthly chat sessions, deflection rate, NPS, and key recurring topics.
Pôle Emploi also uses a BI solution to aggregate data from Konverso and ServiceNow to produce dashboards.
Today, it matters to Pôle Emploi to know if the user has managed to solve their issue with the help of the bot or if they need to call and speak to an agent.
Today, Konverso instantly provides around 1,500 answers per month. Moreover, the number of conversations keeps increasing, as does the number of new users. Both are positive signs that the service provides value.
More importantly, 85% of Chatbot users do not request to be transferred to a live agent. Nevertheless, transfer to a live agent is always possible.
There are two options: either at the direct request of the users or initiated by the Chatbot. The Chatbot service thus generates a massive deflection of live chat interactions.
Regarding the NPS score, which represents whether people would recommend the bot to others, the result ranks between 11 and 40, which is more than reasonable.
Given these successes, Pôle Emploi would like to extend this new employee experience beyond IT, and HR is a natural extension. SelfBot could, in the future, answer questions on recurring topics such as “How do I book my holidays?” and “How can I supply new bank details?”.
Chatbot Adoption
Like many organizations, Pôle Emploi is wary of IT sprawl, which happens when too many siloed applications create complications for the service desk and friction for end users. Therefore, when implementing a new product, the team does so with the explicit purpose of simplifying the IT environment—not adding to its complexity.
To introduce the Chatbot service to employees, Pôle Emploi communicated using print and digital tools. Pôle Emploi also published information and videos on its Intranet and pushed them via email.
More recently, Pôle Emploi implemented the chatbot directly in Teams and made it available on enrolled smartphones, as it is a default application.
Although there was a learning curve at the beginning, employees quickly and easily adopted the chatbot in the very first conversations. It is straightforward to use.
Konverso as a partner
When Pôle Emploi began to search for an IT chatbot, they mostly found “toolkits”: solutions that required extensive building and maintenance to get off the ground. Ultimately, this type of chatbot posed two fundamental problems.
For one, Pôle Emploi’s IT team doesn’t have the time to script thousands of dialogue flows and edit those as its environment inevitably changes. And for employees, this scripted conversation approach creates a frustrating experience, leading to low adoption.
With advanced conversational AI, Konverso is unique in its ability to understand simple natural language from day one. While conventional chatbots attempt to approximate conversation, Konverso speaks IT immediately, meeting employees on their terms. 
