Whispir’s office AI seeks to drive staff engagement in remote workforce

Cloud communications provider Whispir has developed a tool to ensure remote-working staff remain engaged with their employers.

Whispir chief executive Jeromy Wells: ‘It’s the next generation of how you measure engagement with employees. And it’s rich. It’s not just static emails.’ Picture: David Geraghty

Have you received an email or one of those mass corporate text messages from the boss and not opened it? Think again. Companies now have access to a tool that not only monitors open rates but if staff read the message, how long they spent reading it and how engaged they were with the boss’s words of wisdom.

ASX-listed cloud communications provider Whispir has launched a “recipient report” that uses artificial intelligence to provide corporate affairs departments with a list of staff who are most or least engaged.

But rather than be seen as a hi-tech version of Santa’s naughty or nice list, Whispir chief executive Jeromy Wells says the tool is to help businesses craft messages that resonate with staff by giving them greater insights into whether their corporate communications are hitting the mark.

“This is the first outcome of a quite substantial investment we have been making in artificial intelligence and machine learning. It provides a metric that people can then start to refer to … to see how effective your communication was to a particular group of stakeholders,” Mr Wells said.

“You can see what’s working and what’s not working. Not just who received it and who replied. You have a lot of other metrics to provide a blended engagement score.”

The report is part of Whispir’s $9.2m research and development pipeline and has been introduced across some of the company’s biggest customers as part of its core communications platform.

Whispir’s customers include BHP, Qantas, Telstra, Red Cross, Australia Post, Singapore Post, PwC, the West Australian government, and the NSW and Victorian ambulance services.

Whispir trialled the report on its own business first and found it lifted employee engagement by 53 per cent. Mr Wells said maintaining employee engagement and ensuring communications resonated with staff was critical, particularly as the COVID-19 pandemic triggers a shift to more remote workforces, with staff splitting their time between the office and working from home.

“With COVID and everything else that’s been going on, everyone is under a lot of pressure to be more effective, particularly with how do you measure a mood of an organisation and how do you capture that feedback.

“It’s the next generation of how you measure engagement with employees. And it’s rich. It’s not just static emails. It’s short sharp video content, recorded video messages, interactive text, the whole lot.

“Email for staff communications is now a dead channel.”

A copy of the report, seen by The Australian, showed employers can split their workforce from least engaged, most engaged or all staff, revealing how long an employee viewed a message, among other metrics, and calculating an engagement score.

Whispir’s communications platform uses SMS messaging to direct staff to a web-link that can host video, audio and text-based messages, allowing employees to answer questions from management and other two-way communication.

The company floated on the ASX in June 2019 after raising $47m from new investors at $1.60 a share.

Whispir was initially backed by Telstra Ventures, which retains a 3.7 per cent holding.

Telstra Ventures has predicted employee engagement and wellness tools to become one of the biggest technology trends in 2021, and has just invested $US5m ($6.4m) in a Canadian start-up, Certn, that specialises in deploying artificial intelligence to perform employee background checks.

“Certn is basically disrupting that background check industry,” Telstra Ventures investment manager Joseph An said.

“The thesis is the solutions out there are very stale and if you think about the pain points, Certn delivers background check results in minutes rather than days or weeks. which has sort of been the industry norm.

“Background checks haven’t been necessarily the sexiest industry or the most exciting industry in the past but with Certn because it’s seamless and so easy to use, there is a lot of buy-in from HR and people who are using the solution.”