Understanding Benefits Assistant

A chatbot is a computer program that maintains a conversation with a user in natural language, understands the intent of the user, and sends a response based on business rules and data of the organization. The Benefits Assistant is a PeopleSoft chatbot created for the Benefits users. This chatbot is designed to assist employees in looking up basic information about their current enrolled benefits, dependents and beneficiaries, vendor/provider information and administrator contacts. Apart from what PeopleSoft delivers, you can configure additional utterances for the chatbot based on your company’s requirements.

The Benefits Assistant is available for all Benefits users as a tile and/or as a widget at the lower right-hand corner of fluid Benefits pages. Click the tile or widget to open a chat window. The employee may begin interacting with the chatbot via a simple greeting, or start directly with a question in a conversational way. This feature is available for both desktop and mobile users.

With the Benefits Assistant tile, Benefits users can access the Benefits Assistant for quick answers to queries related to benefits using Oracle Digital Assistant (ODA), the Oracle chatbot technology platform. ODA allows enterprises to create and deploy digital assistants for their users. With ODA, you create:

  • Digital Assistants, which are artificial intelligence (AI)-driven interfaces that help users accomplish a variety of tasks in natural language conversations. For each digital assistant, you assemble one or more skills.

  • Skills, which are individual bots that are focused on specific types of tasks, such as changing your dependants/beneficiaries, tracking inventory, submitting time cards, and creating expense reports.

    You can add skills to digital assistants or deploy them to a channel on their own. Intents allow your skill to understand what the user wants it to do. An intent categorizes typical user requests by the tasks and actions that your skill performs.

    For details, refer to Oracle Digital Assistants and Skills.

    For Benefits Assistant, the Benefits Assistant skill consists of the following intents:

  • EntryGreeting

  • GetAdminContactInfo

  • GetDependentBeneficiary

  • GetLifeEventInfo

  • GetMainMenu

  • GetOpenEnrollmentInfo

  • GetPlanCost

  • GetPlanDetail

  • GetPlanProvider

  • UpdateBenefitSummary

  • ExitAssistant

  • unresolvedIntent

The entities associated with each intent are defined within the skill.

Entities

Associated Intents

LIFEEVENT_TYPE

GetLifeEventInfo

PLAN_CATEGORY

GetDependentBeneficiary

GetPlanCost

GetPlanProvider

GetPlanDetail

PLANTYPE

GetDependentBeneficiary

GetPlanCost

GetPlanProvider

GetPlanDetail

UpdateBenefitSummary

SUMM_UPD_FLAG

SUMM_UPD_ACTION

UpdateBenefitSummary

These services can be used to call relevant application functionality as part of a query. The Chatbot Integration Framework delivers some services that can be used to help the chatbot carry out various tasks that these services allow to perform. To integrate the chatbot with the application services, you need to create a proxy user. This proxy user is used for the chatbot to communicate with the application services.

The dialog flow definition is the model for the conversation itself, one that lets you choreograph the interaction between a skill and its users.

The Services used in Benefits Assistant are:

  • HCM.benefit.Services

  • HCM.benefit.GetChildNode

If users need to create new service, then they can use the Application Service Framework to create custom services.

For more information please refer the documentation on Application Service Framework https://support.oracle.com/epmos/faces/DocumentDisplay?id=2557046.1

For details, refer Configure a Component Service

Understanding Application Service for Chatbot Integration Framework

PeopleSoft Employee Digital Assistant

PeopleSoft Intelligent Chatbot ASsistant from Oracle (PeopleSoft PICASO) is a consolidated, single-point access chatbot where your employees can ask questions spanning multiple PeopleSoft applications like Absence, Benefits, Employee Directory, Expenses, North American Payroll, and more. For information on PeopleSoft PICASO, see Understanding PeopleSoft PICASO.

The Benefits Assistant helps employees with their queries on benefits-related information such as their plan details, plan costs, administrator contacts, provider/vendor contacts, life events and open enrollment dates.

Note: The Benefits Assistant provides answers for queries related to Open Enrollment only for organizations with the PeopleSoft Benefits Administration.

The Benefit Details Navigation Collection users can access the Benefits Assistant as a widget. The Benefit Details Tile dashboard users get the tile system delivered on the Benefit Details Tile dashboard and as a widget on all the fluid Benefits pages.

Note: The roles and permission lists are part of the standard PeopleTools security administration, used to grant access to components and pages. The roles and permission lists are discussed in detail in the PeopleTools: Security Administration documentation.

Examples of Use Cases

Benefits component from which the chatbot retrieves information

  • Tell me about my life insurance.

  • I want to know about my short term disability plan.

  • I want to know the plan detail for savings plan/ 401(K) plan/profit sharing/retirement/pension plans/vacation benefits/legal services?

Benefit Plan Detail

  • What is my insurance?

  • What is my health plan?

  • Tell me about my benefits.

  • I want to know the benefit plans I am enrolled in.

  • Show me my benefits summary.

Benefit Plan Category

Benefit Plan Type

  • List my Dependents

  • Who all have I enrolled as beneficiaries?

Dependents/Beneficiaries

  • I want to know the provider for my medical plan.

  • Tell me my provider details.

Benefit Vendor Information

  • I need an Admin contact

  • Health admin contact details

  • Ben admin

  • Contact details

Administrator Contacts