How to choose between an intranet, a Knowledge Portal, and a Conversational Assistant (Chatbot) for your self-service?

Intranets, knowledge portals, and HR chatbots can all help your organization be more efficient and help bring HR information to your employees, but which one to choose? Let's dig into some criteria you can use to make your choice!

Knowledge portals handle complex knowledge.

Knowledge Portals are self-service Knowledge bases. They are designed by experts who understand employees' questions and how to create dedicated articles to answer them. However, Knowledge Portals are poorly designed, with dense content aimed at experts and very hard to digest for a regular employee. To be efficient, portals require updating, and the content should be easy to read, with simple concepts and rich content such as videos, images, and gifs to keep the reader engaged.

Intranets provide contextualized help and communication services to help employees collaborate and access up-to-date corporate information.

An intranet is an interface where employees can find information, share it, and collaborate. Intranets are often associated with internal websites that provide access to company documents and policies. Still, they can include social media features such as blogs, forums, employee directories, or even job boards.

Intranets offer several benefits: they're focused on helping employees do their jobs more effectively; they provide a direct line of communication between companies and their employees; they create an easy-to-use environment for collaboration among coworkers.

Chatbots offer easy-to-use, 24/7, and highly accessible HR Support to Employees.

Regarding real-time support, chatbots are the best option for companies that want their users and employees to find information quickly, 24/7. Most of the time, employees don’t want to look into a heavy document; they just want a straight answer to their questions. And answering questions is what chatbots are good at (at least the good ones out there!)

AI Virtual Assistants are becoming more efficient and powerful: they can now display forms, and enriched content (for example, videos), connect to APIs and offer contextualized experiences,.… And they can be displayed everywhere (on an Intranet, as a widget on your different HRIS, in Microsoft Teams…), Instrumental for employees who want quick answers without having to leave their browser or navigate through various interfaces.

Time to focus: what is your primary goal regarding information accessibility?

When choosing between an intranet, a knowledge portal, and a Virtual Assistant for your employees, it's decisive to remember your main goal.

• Suppose you want to provide instant access to rich information (think: company policy or HR rules). In that case, a portal may be the right choice. Portals allow employees to access documents and articles carefully produced by experts quickly.
• An Intranet or Digital Workplace system might be better suited if you want a tool that enhances internal communication and collaboration between your employees.
• Lastly, the chatbot sounds like a safe choice if you want to provide a simple user interface that all your employees can easily use anywhere and anytime. Chatbots are now pretty efficient in processing natural language and can easily automate up to 80% of support questions they are asked.

Why choose when you can combine the three? Discover Clevy’s AI-powered Employee Portal

Discover Clevy’s AI-Powered Employee Portal, an AI-powered Knowledge Base, also accessible as a Virtual Assistant and that unifies access to all your internal app ecosystem. Our AI-Powered portal lets you combine each tool's strength to maximize your employee’s experience and optimize the level of automation of your HR support.

Our Employee Portal automatically learns from your employees' actions and preferences, providing them with the information they need at the right time. At the same time, an AI portal can respond intelligently to their questions and guide them through processes in real time—without any manual intervention from IT or HR.