by Replacing Traditional Surveys with Hubert.ai
Making Siemens a great place to work is at the very top of the priority list. Collecting and analyzing employee feedback is a cornerstone in this work. Traditionally this has involved long and tedious surveys, but with Hubert, insight was reached in a faster and more engaging way.
- Significantly increased response rate compared to traditional surveys
- Over 6 hours of manual work saved per evaluation
- Cut survey administration time with over 90%
- A holistic view of employee opinion & a reliable framework for decision making
Employee feedback is crucial for success
Siemens has been around for more than 170 years and as one of the largest manufacturing companies in Europe, they are now leading the way into the digital future for factories all over the world. With almost 380,000 employed, Siemens is also one of the world’s top 50 largest employers. Making sure employee feedback is heard and acted upon throughout the organization is one of the core explanations for their well known ability to keep and attract new employees. Like most other companies, Siemens had long relied on standard forms to collect feedback, but after gaining knowledge about Hubert, the management at the Siemens Factory in Amberg was interested to see how a new powerful digital tool could be used to understand employees even better.
The more traditional questionnaires used previously by the Siemens factory when conducting internal surveys suffered from a number of disadvantages. For example, no integrated text analytics were present and major manual data preparation had to be applied to reach real insights.
Maintaining an open communication with employees and making sure their opinions are heard and acted upon is crucial to support times of change like that of a digital transformation. Establishing this basis of trust is especially important in a time when the implementation of industry 4.0 marks a major shift in most production units of Siemens and is affecting nearly all employees in one way or another
A new way of collecting and analyzing feedback
The notoriously charming chatbot named Hubert represents a new generation of insight collecting and management. He is able to step in with personalized conversations where surveys fail to reach the goal. With real-time analysis of responses, Hubert is able to dig down to where opinions originate from and find out the reason why. He can ask the respondent to be more precise or follow up when more information is needed. The goal with Hubert is simply to mimic a real human interview facilitator – but at any given scale.
To train Hubert on some sector-specific lingo, we built the project in three steps where the first test was conducted by around 30 people that would chat with Hubert followed by a new test involving 150 people, followed by a large scale test involving 1500 people. By retraining the conversational logic and the text analytics on this data we were able to achieve a really good understanding of how to interpret feedback, ask relevant follow-up questions and identify the essence of the conversations.
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Finding answers and resolving issues quicker with Hubert.ai
Not only did Hubert manage to meet all of Siemens requirements in terms of functionality, user experience, design, and data privacy, Hubert also greatly exceeded all notions of what a great conversation between a human being and a chatbot actually is composed of.
From the first small scale tests, we learned more about how the employees were interacting with Hubert. Based on these findings, we added regional specific words and typical jargon for Industry 4.0 and Digitalization. We also learned that respondents have a habit of asking Hubert questions back as well. Some of which were quite sensitive in their nature. A frequent worry that came up was how Industry 4.0 would impact their work situation. In these cases, we trained Hubert to reflect the official policy of Siemens.
Final words
In a large corporation such as Siemens, it’s understandably hard to not just collect and analyze insights in a personal way. Spreading the feedback throughout different business units is vital to creating the tight-knitted community feeling that has proved to increase team performance and collaboration in large teams. With Hubert, we believe to have solved a large challenge for corporations of most sizes. We will continue striving forward to streamline collection and analysis of qualitative insights from large crowds as we continue to grow.
Want to know more about the latest advancements happening in the world of Qual?
If you are into qualitative research and wants to explore the changing world of Qual, then don’t skip our upcoming Qual360 conference which is going to kick off on Feb 17-19 in Berlin. The conference agenda has a great mix of client studies from leading brands such as Badoo, Kindoh, Unilever, Sky, Kao, Henkel, Electrolux, Colt, Beiersdorf and many more. Find out more details here.
