Most CHROs think their HR team needs better time management. The real problem? They're drowning in support tickets.
Here's an uncomfortable truth about HR technology: most platforms create more work than they eliminate.
CHROs invest in sophisticated HRIS systems expecting efficiency gains, then watch their teams drown in support tickets. "How do I submit PTO?" "Where do I find my pay stub?" "What's our parental leave policy?" The same questions, hundreds of times, pulling HR away from retention strategy, workforce planning, and culture work that actually moves the business forward.
But research from Valior and HiBob in November 2024 revealed something striking: organizations using HiBob's AI-powered communication and self-service tools saw an 80% reduction in HR support requests. That's not incremental improvement, that's a fundamental shift in how HR operates. The difference? HiBob's "Ask Bob" chatbot and AI assistant handle the transactional work that's been burying HR teams for decades, giving them back the time to do what they were actually hired to do.
What We See: The Support Ticket Spiral
Across hundreds of mid-market companies, the pattern is remarkably consistent:
HR teams spend 40-60% of their time answering the same questions. Policy lookups, benefits explanations, PTO balance inquiries, payroll questions — the same handful of topics cycle through email, Slack, and help desk tickets. One CHRO at a 600-person fintech company told us her team of eight was fielding 300+ tickets weekly, with five people spending most of their time on FAQ-style responses.
Self-service portals don't solve the problem. Most HRIS platforms have employee portals, but employees don't use them effectively. Information is buried three clicks deep, organized by HR logic rather than employee questions, or written in policy language that requires translation. Instead of reducing tickets, portals just shift the question: "Where do I find X in the portal?"
The interruption cost is invisible but enormous. Every support ticket pulls an HR professional out of strategic work. Comp analysis gets paused to answer a PTO question. Workforce planning stops for a benefits inquiry. Retention strategy waits while someone explains how to update direct deposit information. The context-switching alone destroys productivity, and the strategic work that should be HR's focus keeps getting pushed to "tomorrow."
Onboarding amplifies the chaos. New hires generate 2-3x the support volume of existing employees. They need help with everything including system access, policy questions, benefits enrollment, manager identification, team structure. During high-growth periods, new hire support can consume entire HR roles, leaving no capacity for anything else.
Why This Matters Right Now
The support ticket spiral isn't just an efficiency problem, it's preventing HR from doing the work that justifies their seat at the executive table.
Strategic work keeps getting delayed. When HR spends 50% of their time on transactional questions, workforce planning doesn't happen. Retention analysis doesn't get done. Manager enablement programs don't launch. DEI initiatives stall. The work that actually impacts business outcomes, the work that boards and investors care about stays perpetually on the backburner because HR is too busy answering emails.
Employee experience suffers despite good intentions. When employees need to wait 24-48 hours for answers to simple questions, frustration builds. When they can't find information themselves, they feel dependent and disempowered. When HR seems perpetually overwhelmed, employees hesitate to ask important questions. The irony is painful: HR wants to be responsive and helpful, but the volume of requests makes that impossible.
HR-to-employee ratios look worse than they are. A company might have a healthy 1:80 HR ratio on paper, but if four of those five HR professionals spend most of their time on support tickets, the effective strategic HR ratio is closer to 1:400. The headcount exists, but the capacity doesn't.
Scaling becomes a staffing crisis. Every 100 new employees traditionally meant hiring another HR person just to handle the support volume. For fast-growing companies planning to scale from 500 to 1,000 employees, that math meant doubling the HR team size not because of strategic needs, but because of transactional workload.
The Early Warning Signs: Is This Your Reality?
You know the support ticket spiral is controlling your HR team when:
- Your HR calendar is dominated by "quick questions." Scheduled strategic work gets interrupted 8-12 times daily with "just one fast thing" that collectively consumes hours.
- Your team dreads Monday mornings. Weekend requests pile up, and Monday becomes support ticket triage day rather than strategic planning day.
- New HR hires spend 6-8 weeks just learning how to answer FAQs. Onboarding new HR team members means teaching them how to navigate the same 50 questions everyone else handles.
- You've built internal FAQ documents that nobody reads. You have comprehensive resources, but employees still ask the same questions because finding and understanding the documentation takes longer than just emailing HR.
- Your HR team's inbox never reaches zero. Despite working 50-hour weeks, the backlog stays constant or grows. Clearing tickets feels like bailing water from a leaking boat.
Ask yourself: If your HR team could eliminate 80% of support requests tomorrow, what would they do with that time? If you have a clear, strategic answer including retention initiatives, manager development, workforce planning, culture programs, then you already know this transactional work is holding you back from higher-impact work.
How HiBob's AI Changes the Equation
HiBob took a practical approach to AI that solves the support ticket problem without adding complexity: build intelligence directly into the platform where employees already work, and make it genuinely helpful rather than just technically impressive.
The "Ask Bob" Chatbot: 24/7 Instant Answers
The Ask Bob chatbot functions as a knowledgeable HR assistant available any time, anywhere. Employees ask natural-language questions like "How much PTO do I have left?" "What's our parental leave policy?" "How do I change my tax withholding?" and receive instant, accurate answers pulled directly from their specific employee data and company policies.
The chatbot doesn't just point to documentation; it provides the actual answer. Instead of "Your PTO policy is in the handbook on page 47," employees get "You have 12 days of PTO remaining for 2025, and your next accrual is January 1." The distinction matters enormously for user experience and ticket reduction.
The AI Assistant: Content Generation and Workflow Support
HiBob's AI assistant handles the repetitive content creation that consumes HR time: drafting job descriptions for open roles, generating shoutouts for recognition programs, creating poll questions for engagement surveys, writing emails for company-wide communications. The AI produces first drafts based on company values, historical context, and specific parameters, which HR can review and refine in minutes rather than starting from scratch every time.
For performance reviews, the AI assistant helps managers draft clear, effective feedback that ties to company values and historical context, surfacing key themes and growth areas. This doesn't replace manager judgment — it accelerates the writing process and ensures consistency across the organization.
AI-Powered Survey Analysis: From Data to Insights in Minutes
When organizations run engagement surveys, pulse checks, or lifecycle surveys, HiBob's AI processes large volumes of open-ended feedback and generates meaningful sentiment analysis. Instead of HR manually reading 500 survey responses and trying to identify patterns, the AI surfaces key themes, sentiment trends, and areas requiring attention automatically.
The platform provides structured, visual, actionable overviews of survey results in seconds, enabling HR to move quickly from data collection to action planning. For organizations committed to regular employee feedback, this eliminates the weeks-long gap between asking questions and acting on answers.
Predictive Dashboards: Proactive vs. Reactive HR
HiBob's AI-powered dashboards (expanding in 2025) transform people data into actionable insights without requiring data science expertise. The platform identifies trends and patterns — retention risks, engagement shifts, hiring needs, productivity changes and presents them visually for quick executive decision-making.
Instead of HR scrambling to create board-ready analytics in spreadsheets, the AI generates real-time dashboards showing exactly what leadership needs to see. This positions HR as strategic advisors who bring data-driven insights to business conversations, not administrators who compile reports.
What This Approach Gets Right
HiBob's AI strategy reflects a measured, responsible approach that many HRIS vendors lack:
It solves real problems, not hypothetical ones. The 80% reduction in support requests isn't a projection it's what Valior and HiBob research found in November 2024 among actual customers. The AI targets the transactional work that everyone agrees is painful: repetitive questions, content creation from scratch, manual survey analysis, dashboard building.
It keeps humans in control. The AI suggests, supports, and accelerates — but HR professionals and managers still make decisions. Job descriptions are drafted, not finalized. Feedback is generated, not approved. Survey insights are surfaced, not interpreted without context. This matters for compliance, accuracy, and organizational trust.
It works where employees already are. Instead of requiring new interfaces or separate AI tools, the Ask Bob chatbot integrates with Slack and Teams. Employees don't need to learn new systems or change behaviors — they ask questions the same way they always have, just with better, faster responses.
It reduces HR workload without reducing HR value. The goal isn't fewer HR people, it's HR people doing higher-value work. When the AI handles transactional questions, HR capacity shifts to strategic initiatives that actually impact retention, engagement, culture, and business outcomes.
The Value of Getting This Right
When HR teams cut support requests by 80%, the impact extends far beyond time savings:
Strategic initiatives actually launch. That workforce planning model you've been meaning to build? The manager development program you keep postponing? The retention analysis that's been waiting for six months? Suddenly there's capacity to do this work, and HR starts delivering on the strategic promise that got them hired.
Employee experience improves dramatically. Instant answers feel like great service. Twenty-four-hour delays feel like indifference. When employees can resolve questions themselves in seconds rather than waiting for email responses, satisfaction with HR increases, even though HR is doing less work.
HR's reputation shifts from reactive to proactive. Instead of being known as the team that answers questions, HR becomes known as the team that anticipates needs, identifies problems before they escalate, and brings data-driven insights to leadership conversations.
Onboarding scales without adding headcount. New hires get immediate answers to setup questions, policy inquiries, and system navigation without generating tickets. HR capacity spent on new hire handholding drops dramatically, even as hiring accelerates.
The HR team's energy changes. When you're not constantly interrupted with transactional questions, you have uninterrupted time for deep work. Projects get completed. Analysis gets done. Strategy gets developed. The exhaustion that comes from perpetual context-switching lifts.
The Bottom Line
The 80% reduction in HR support requests that HiBob customers experience isn't about replacing HR professionals, it's about freeing them to do the work that actually matters.
Most HRIS platforms promise efficiency but deliver administrative complexity. HiBob's AI takes a different approach: handle the transactional work that's burying HR teams, and give them back the capacity to be strategic business partners.
The Ask Bob chatbot answers employee questions instantly. The AI assistant drafts content in minutes instead of hours. Survey analysis happens automatically. Dashboards generate themselves. And suddenly, HR has time for retention strategy, workforce planning, manager enablement, and culture initiatives that move the business forward.
The question isn't whether your HR team could benefit from this kind of support. The question is: what would they do with 80% of their time back?
Want to see how HiBob's AI could transform your HR team's capacity? Explore their AI capabilities and talk to teams already using these tools to shift from transactional to strategic HR work.
