Business process automation for expert HR services

Is it possible to (partly) automate expert HR services? Can we build an easy-to-use tool to help highly skilled HR consultants perform their job in a more efficient way, having them spend less time on repetitive tasks and more time on interactions with customers?

That’s the question our customer Partena Professional had when we started working on chatbot Louise.

Louise, the Legal Partners’ digital assistant 

One of the paying services of the Legal Partners team is the assistance for customers during end of contract procedures. The result of these processes are the creation of documents such as dismissal letters, mutual agreements, contract termination, … for that client who wants to let go of an employee. Of course to get to that point, the HR consultant has to check if the law for dismissal is correctly followed (outplacement, early retirement, industry specifications, … ), calculate the dismissal period and resignation fee, register the case in Topdesk (a case management system) to ensure a correct follow-up and finally manually create the resignation letter.

Due to the regulatory deadlines and procedures, the services require a high standard of speed and accuracy. If the dismissal needs to start on a Monday, the letter has to leave on Wednesdays for example. Prior to working with chatbot Louise, the data was captured on paper (mostly during a phone call) when the customer asked for the service. It was then entered into different applications and systems to make the correct calculations and finally create a dismissal letter. The process took 60 minutes or more, depending on the complexity of the resignation and the experience of the HR consultant.

From PoC to Production in 3 months

In the fall of 2018, we started working on the prototype of Louise. After a few weeks of development, the Partena payroll consultants started using the chatbot. They captured the data from the client and immediately provided the relevant information to Louise. At that point, we could start testing the custom integration services we built for communication between the Conversational Interfaces and several webservices for the calculation of the dismissal period, the creation of tickets in Topdesk and the generation of custom resignation letters.


In the POC, it was the goal to create the dismissal letters automatically based on the calculation of the dismissal period. Partena Professional wanted to automate manual labor and copy-pasting values in different applications as much as possible, so their consultants could focus more on what matters: valuable person-to-person interactions with customers. Finally, when the dismissal letter is created by the chatbot, the letter is sent to the Legal Consultant as a final validation, prior to sending it to the customer.

After 1 month of intensive testing, Partena Professional wanted to put Louise in production so the Legal Partners Team could use the tool as part of their daily operations.

By investing in a scoped project that was used throughout the company, the adoption rate of new technologies grew enormously. Thanks to the flexibility and effort of Arinti, we were able to prove the value of chatbots in a few weeks.

Jonas Pollet, Innovation Manager @ Partena Professional

Strong business case and clear ROI

In February ’19, Louise was alive and kicking at Partena Professional. A team of ±900 payroll consultants started using the interface on a daily basis helping the customers in a shorter period but with great respect to quality levels. The dismissal advices only take 15 – 20 minutes check-up by the Legal Consultants which makes it 3 times faster and more efficient than her human colleagues. More importantly, the error rate has dropped significantly and the HR consultants are happy to off-board repetitive tasks to the chatbot, resulting in better, more and happier person-to-person customer contacts.

Louise is totally integrated in the company and is perceived as a colleague of the Legal Department.

In 2020, Arinti developed a public version of Louise, called “Alex” for Partena Professional. The chatbot can be found on their public website.