Re-shape your delivery model utilizing AI with Oracle Digital Assistant

Looking to improve both user experience and productivity? Oracle Digital Assistant may be the right answer for you. Oracle Digital Assistant (ODA) is a powerful tool that enhances communication and productivity within organizations. It acts as a conversational artificial intelligence (AI) support system, providing seamless guidance to employees across various industries. Baker Tilly, an Oracle PartnerNetwork Member, has helped organizations like property management company, Equity Residential, leverage ODA to adapt to business growth.

Equity is a long-standing customer of both Baker Tilly and Oracle and has used many of Oracle’s products over the years. In 2023, they implemented Help Desk and Oracle Digital Assistant to automate repetitive tasks and offer support for Human Resources (HR) inquiries.

Baker Tilly Project Manager, Ben Penick, along with Equity Residential HR Centralized Business Operations (CBO) Manager, Liz Forker and Equity Residential HR CBO Representative, Samantha Kopczyk, presented on a recent Customer Connect session to highlight Equity’s ongoing success with the ODA.

Project planning and implementation

What was the motivation to broaden the use of Oracle Digital Assistant? How did you decide on the use cases you targeted for this implementation?

Forker: Equity has long wanted to move towards a self-service model. The larger HR team and our workforce sit in four different time zones, so we are not always available to help answer questions when they’re at work. We had previously rolled out the ODA for recruiting and knew that it could be further utilized to improve the user experience. As it currently stands, the CBO team handles all types of requests from employees.

Previously, the CBO was handling most of those requests via email or instant message (IM), as opposed to utilizing a ticketing system such as Oracle Help Desk. The true motivation for this entire project was to move the team away from email- and IM-based communication to a help desk which would allow for better tracking and reporting on requests. In addition, the CBO wanted to expand employee self-service capabilities to reduce the number of basic interactions that employees had with CBO and wider HR team.

To do this, we targeted a parallel rollout of HR Help Desk and various ODA skills. The digital assistant is the first line of defense for all user inquiries and, if an issue requires human intervention, the user is prompted to open a Help Desk ticket through the ODA. Because of this, we often refer to the two as one and the same within Equity.

Who was brought into the fold during the design and testing phases of this project?

Kopczyk: For design, our core team consisted of a few of our CBO resources. We wanted to ensure we had our subject matter experts on the team. We also included some executives, stakeholders and a few IT resources.

For testing, we brought in additional users that would only be testing from the perspective of a manager, an employee, or a leader with a large vertical hierarchy to cover all our bases.

Penick: Getting those different perspectives in design and the eventual testing phases was critical for our success in this project.

What recommendations do you have for other organizations starting a Digital Assistant implementation?

Forker: We recommend thorough testing, including a few basic end-users to ensure you’re not making the experience too complicated and thinking outside the box when designing the ODA. This can be as simple as trying to anticipate the various unconventional ways users will interact with the ODA. We also recommend having a wealth of dedicated IT resources, having a good implementation partner and communicating the changes early, often and in different formats to build a culture of change.

Penick: The Digital Assistant is a different product than the other Oracle tools most clients are used to deploying. Appropriate resourcing, thorough testing and unconventional thinking were critical to our project success here.

Digital Assistant Design

What was the project team’s strategy for identifying requirements for custom functionality?

Forker: Since we had quite a few resources dedicated to this project, the team was able to approach this with the lens of enabling everything and then disabling functionality as needed. The CBO team was uniquely equipped to identify the most common requests of employees due to their firsthand experience providing support, so the group was able to easily generate a list of critical requirements that the ODA needed to address.

How did Equity prepare employees for a deployment of this scale? The scope of this project expanded as it progressed, how did the team work to mitigate that risk?

Kopczyk: We did a few things to prepare the employee base for the significant changes that were coming while simultaneously ensuring we mitigated the risk of the expanded scope. One of the most crucial things we did was a soft launch. We only socialized the go-live date internally and to key stakeholders until we felt that we were ready to mass deploy. That doesn’t mean we didn’t communicate the upcoming changes to the employee population – we communicated early and often, letting employees know that changes were on the horizon and advertised high-level impacts without sharing an exact date. Additionally, the soft launch was targeted towards a select group of super-users that were able to stress-test the system. They were a tremendous help because they were able to identify some of the most common questions and issues before we deployed to the entire employee population. Lastly, we continue to identify opportunities to showcase the product to our employees, such as sharing weekly educational videos.

Overall outcomes

How do you feel the implementation went overall and what were some key roadblocks that Equity encountered throughout this implementation? How did the Equity team mobilize to overcome these roadblocks?

Forker: Overall, feedback on the ODA and Help Desk has been very positive. Employees were very familiar with the CBO team and accustomed to emailing or chatting with us directly, so getting them to use the ODA or Help Desk as the first point of contact was a challenge and continues to be a challenge.

Kopczyk: Our entire CBO team is focusing on redirecting users who continue to reach out to us directly for requests. We’ve put great emphasis on leveraging different formats for training and change management materials, including weekly training videos and how-to guides and live demo sessions. All of this has helped increase exposure to the new tools.

Forker: Some other roadblocks include being unable to test a realistic volume of notifications prior to going live and stretching our IT resources thin by launching several key HR projects at the same time at a busy time of year.

Equity has done a great job in aggregating data post-implementation. What key benefits has Equity seen since wider deployment?

Kopczyk: The most obvious benefit is the ODA is available 24/7, 365 days a year. We support a workforce that is 24/7/365, so our HR team working standard Monday through Friday hours can’t always be available. The ODA offers a constant support presence, pointing users to the information they need through self-service. As we continue to shift towards the self-service model, we’re hoping this will reduce the number of repetitive tasks for the CBO and free them up to focus on more urgent requests.

Oracle Digital Assistant integrates smoothly with existing Oracle Cloud services, empowering organizations to deliver personalized, efficient interactions to their users.