Automate Intake, Triage, and Coordination: HR

Here’s a question: As an HR professional, how much of your time and energy goes toward tasks like triaging help-desk inboxes, coordinating responses to unstructured HR requests—which can run the gamut from requests for systems access to reminders about documents that need to be completed, signed, and filed—and tracking the status of all the various correlated action items? 

The answer: probably more than half of your time. 

This time is lost to what’s called intake, triage, and coordination—or ITC. 

• Intake. The slew of unstructured internal emails, chat messages, and one-off requests that every person and team has to manage day-to-day.
• Triage. The task of determining how to prioritize and route these inbound requests.
• Coordination. Collaborating across departments, teams, and specialties to ensure the requests that come in are effectively dealt with. 

ITC problems have largely gone unnamed and unidentified until now, which is likely why you’re never heard of many solutions for them. But that’s changed.

Why are ITC tasks so taxing? It’s because they require manual work and take away time and energy from the work that requires your expertise and creativity. They also often require collaboration, which is problematic because most teams are siloed, with their own priorities, processes, and tools. 

Finally, most organizations have no organized way of handling ITC work, so individual workers are left to figure it out and execute on their own.

As an example, employee onboarding is one of HR’s primary tasks, but it’s typically rife with clunky ITC challenges. There are myriad steps, often involving multiple apps, systems, accounts, documents, and logins. Those steps are usually manual and time-consuming, pulling HR staff away from other critical tasks like recruiting, attending to company culture, and meeting other critical obligations like DEI initiatives.

Of course, that’s hardly a comprehensive example. HR-related requests tumble day-in and day-out into multiple inboxes and Slack channels—aliases like helpdesk@, benefits@, and so on. Most HR pros know that due chronic understaffing, all those messages may get funneled through just one or two people. Each request represents a problem to solve and additional people who need to be involved, and you have to manually go through the requests one-by-one. (Maybe you have a ticketing system.) And there you’ll find yourself, a highly skilled HR professional, burning your time just sifting through messages and triaging them. 

These problems can feel like an inevitable, necessary evil. But they’re not. And technology can help.

The solution

Enter: Tonkean. Tonkean is a first-of-its-kind process experience platform that makes it easy for HR pros to create personalized internal software solutions that can automatically intake, triage, coordinate, and standardize unstructured inbound requests. It enables you to create the structures, hierarchies, and processes you need, at any scale. And it allows you to easily track the status of all ITC-related work. 

And none of this requires the deep technical expertise of software developers or the IT department, because the Tonkean interface is entirely no-code. Anyone who’s adept at thinking through workflows can create custom software solutions to solve their ITC woes.    

What’s more, in Tonkean, all of those personalized automations integrate with every app, system, and tool your organization uses. For example, to onboard an employee, you can easily build a workflow where:

• The hiring manager can kick off the onboarding process on their own using a simple form
• The form automatically pulls data from the recruitment platform you use
• When hiring manager creates an action item or kicks off a workflow, anyone who needs to speak with the new employee will receive a notification in whatever communication app they prefer, like email, Slack, or Teams
• The new employee and any others can complete their tasks outside of Tonkean, in their preferred apps, but Tonkean will still track the progress.
• Whomever is leading the onboarding process can track the onboarding experiences across the organization through the dashboard

HR professionals can rein in request handling in a similar way. For example, with Tonkean, HR teams can create no-code workflow solutions that promote self-service, autohandle frequently asked questions, and automatically triage email inboxes. 

Here’s just one specific example—handling email inbox triage:

• Add Tonkean to your distribution list, or create a rule to forward all inbound emails to a Tonkean module. 
• Inside Tonkean, set up rules for emails that come in from various aliases, and use an NLP Triage Request item to identify what’s in the email.
• Define and predetermine what to do with various types of messages, like NDA requests or W-9 forms; for example, you automatically send a Google form, DocuSign, or an auto reply. 
• If an email doesn’t match one of your categories, create an item inside Tonkean that asks for more information, which then trains the NLP, so the next time an email of that type lands in your inbox, Tonkean will know what to do with it.

You can accomplish all of that using a single module, which you can create yourself without writing a single line of code. And Tonkean will track the status of every request and reply.

Results

Left unchecked, ITC challenges do much more than waste time. They burn employees out, inhibit both operational agility and personal creativity, and open up vectors for human errors. 

By automating critical processes like employee onboarding, and smoothing out low-level time-consuming tasks like request handling, you limit context switching and regain your time and energy. That’s inherently beneficial—both for HR and your organization more broadly.

But by doing these things, you also create an environment where HR pros can focus on their best and more important work, which leads to better job satisfaction and higher employee retention. 

You’ll also curb vectors for human error, and thanks to the tracking capabilities in a centralized, fully integrated dashboard, you’ll reduce your legal risk exposure, too. 

Enterprises all over the world are leveraging Tonkean to revamp the way they operate. In the process, they’re making more strategic and widespread use of technology that was previously accessible only to engineers. They're reducing costs and increasing capacity. They're improving the employee experience. They’re eliminating the need for change management. And they’re empowering employees to spend more time focusing on high-value work.

Want to learn more? Begin exploring the ways you can solve HR ITC challenges with Tonkean here.