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Key takeaways: the Wobee Assistant answers your frontline teams' HR questions directly on WhatsApp, in their own language, with no app to install and no login to remember. It relies only on content approved by your HR team, cites its source and would rather not answer than make something up. Proof of receipt for mandatory information and no messages outside working hours round out the system.
A company is struggling to recruit frontline staff. It introduces an employee referral bonus: the measure is negotiated, funded and announced. A few months later, the verdict is in: frontline teams, the people best placed to recommend candidates, had never heard of it.
It is not a lack of effort; it is a problem of channel and access to information. To address it, Wobee is launching the Wobee Assistant, available in the platform and on WhatsApp. The idea: stop asking frontline employees to come to our tools, and go where they already are. Let's look at how it works and what it guarantees.
Frontline employees, also called deskless workers or non-connected employees, work without a computer or a work email address. Construction workers, cleaning staff, order pickers, field technicians: they often make up the majority of the workforce, and they are the people internal communication for frontline teams struggles most to reach.
In a survey conducted among Wobee customers, these employees explained in their own words what keeps them from accessing information.
Email is not their work tool: they don't check it, or only very rarely. When they log in to the platform, they find a lot of content and struggle to find the right answer. And questions come up on the job, not in front of a computer: when a question arises, the intranet password is rarely top of mind.
French is not always employees' native language. In construction in the Île-de-France region (Greater Paris), six out of ten workers were born abroad. Others are French speakers but uncomfortable with writing. This barrier runs across every team.
"French isn't my native language. I understand what people tell me. But what you write to me, I don't always understand."
"I'm not very comfortable with writing. I'm ashamed to write with mistakes."
Internal rules, paid leave, meal vouchers, sick leave: when they can't find the answer, employees ask their team leader, site manager or supervisor. The frontline manager becomes an HR relay and spends a significant part of the day on it, at the expense of operations. And when employees search on their own, they often give up.
The stakes go beyond convenience. According to the white paper Casser la barrière du terrain (Breaking the frontline barrier), 23% of voluntary departures in industrial mid-sized companies are linked to a lack of communication or belonging.
The long-standing barrier for automated assistants is trust. On an HR topic, a plausible but wrong answer costs more than no answer at all. An employee misinformed about their leave entitlement or the sick leave procedure means a potential dispute and lost trust.
The Wobee Assistant is a conversational HR assistant that answers employees' questions using only their company's content, on WhatsApp and in the Wobee platform. It is designed first and foremost for frontline teams, the people traditional tools don't reach.
Rather than bringing frontline employees to the company's tools, Wobee went where they already are: their phone, and WhatsApp. Four out of five French people already use this messaging app. The logic is reversed: it is no longer the company pushing information and hoping it gets read, it is the employee asking their question, at the moment it comes up.
Thanks to Wobee's WhatsApp integration, each company has a dedicated WhatsApp number. Employees save it in their contacts, and that's it.
For employees who use the Wobee intranet, a floating "Got a question?" button appears at the bottom right of every page and opens the assistant window. The assistant's name and welcome message can be customized: some companies give it a first name, such as "Cléa".
To see how it works in full, visit the page for our AI chatbot for frontline teams.
An HR chatbot is only useful if you can trust it. The Wobee Assistant was designed around simple rules.
The assistant builds its answers from the question-and-answer base and the documents configured in Wobee. It does not look elsewhere and does not fill in gaps on its own. What it says is what your HR team has approved.
When there is no relevant match in your content, the assistant does not improvise: it asks the employee to clarify their request. No approximate answers on topics as sensitive as sick leave or a leave balance.
Every answer shows the source document, with a clickable link. Employees can check the information and, along the way, learn where it lives on the platform.
The employee writes in Portuguese, Polish, Arabic or their native language. They receive the answer in that same language, built from the same source as the French version. It is a natural extension of Wobee's multilingual platform.
| Feature | What it delivers |
|---|---|
| Answers built solely from the company's content | Reliability, nothing made up |
| Clickable source cited under every answer | Verification, trust, learning the platform |
| Fully configurable question base and documents | HR stays in control of what is said |
| Access rights respected | No one receives information from a scope they don't have access to |
| Answer in the employee's language | Real access for non-French speakers and people uncomfortable with writing |
| Personal conversation history | Pick up a conversation with its context |
| Question categorization and CSV export | HR sees what the frontline really asks and spots gaps in its HR FAQ |
Setup is done in Configuration > FAQ. Your teams create question-and-answer pairs and attach resources or pages to them. Each question has a status: Draft, Published or Archived. Only published questions are used by the assistant.
Using WhatsApp for internal communication covers two very different uses. The Wobee Assistant handles each one with its own rules.
The employee seeks out the information when they need it. A question about health insurance on the way home from the job site, a check on the internal rules during a break: the answer arrives in seconds. Each employee can find their conversation history and pick up a conversation with its context.
For mandatory information, the challenge is to prove that every employee received the information and read it, in case of a dispute or an inspection. The Wobee Assistant provides this proof of receipt, alongside the mandatory workplace postings required on site under French law. For other communications (news, events, site life), employees opt in and opt out freely.
This is a condition set by frontline employees themselves: WhatsApp is on their personal phone, and their evenings are their own. The Wobee Assistant therefore sends no messages outside working hours. This design choice respects employees' right to disconnect and is key to winning teams' buy-in.
Employees receive information in their language, in their pocket, at the moment the question comes up, and never outside their working hours.
Using WhatsApp on an employee's personal phone raises legitimate questions. Wobee took them into account from the moment the assistant was designed.
To learn more, see our security, compliance and sovereignty page.
The Wobee Assistant delivers a concrete benefit at every level of the company.
They receive information in their language, in their pocket, at the moment the question comes up. No more waiting for their team leader or going to the HR office to find out how to request time off.
They get back the time spent acting as an HR relay. Simple questions get answered without them, and they can refocus on operations and supporting their teams.
They have proof of receipt for mandatory information. Above all, they can finally see what the frontline really asks: questions are categorized and can be exported to CSV. A question that keeps coming up without a satisfactory answer is a gap to fill in the HR FAQ.
The Wobee Assistant is linked to Wobee's Intranet module. It is designed for all employees, HR managers and platform administrators.
Your frontline employees don't lack interest in company life: what they lack is simple access, in their language, when they need it. By going to WhatsApp, the Wobee Assistant brings them the benefits you negotiated and the rules you wrote. To dig deeper, download our white paper Casser la barrière du terrain (Breaking the frontline barrier), based on input from more than 15,000 frontline employees.
Want to see the Wobee Assistant in action? Request a demo from our team. Already a Wobee customer? Contact your CSM to activate the assistant.
It is a conversational assistant that answers employees' HR questions directly in WhatsApp. The Wobee Assistant answers only from content approved by the company and cites its source in every answer.
No. Each company has a dedicated WhatsApp number. Employees save it in their contacts and ask their question, with no extra app and no login.
It relies only on the question-and-answer base and the documents configured by your HR team. If there is no relevant match, it does not answer and asks the employee to clarify their request.
It answers in the employee's language: Portuguese, Polish, Arabic and other languages. The answer is built from the same source as the French version.
No. The Wobee Assistant sends no messages outside working hours, to respect the right to disconnect.
No. The assistant respects the Wobee platform's access rights: each person receives only the information within their scope.
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