ProRail employees now get instant HR answers from chatbot Charlie

Information that existed, but was hard to find

In 2024, ProRail renewed its HR portal and reorganised all HR schemes and information in plain language. Findability improved significantly as a result. Yet employees still couldn't always quickly find the right answer in practice, given the sheer number of options and schemes ProRail offers its employees. Employees then turned to HR Services. That put pressure on the service desk with questions the answers to which were often already somewhere on the HR portal.

ProRail wanted one place where an employee could simply ask a question in natural language, and get an answer that takes context into account.

"Unlocking our HR information through a chatbot is a huge enrichment: by understanding context, synonyms and being able to ask follow-up questions, our employees are served much better and our HR colleagues are partly relieved."

Erik Koningen, Senior Information Manager HR, ProRail

A safety net for doubt, with privacy secured

Charlie only searches the information on the HR portal itself, not external sources. The information on the HR portal always remains leading. Charlie doesn't touch any personal data, and chat history is deleted after every conversation.

If an employee can't find what they need through the chatbot, they can simply say 'I'd like to speak to someone' in the chat. On weekdays between 9am and 12pm, they're connected live to HR Services, along with a summary of the conversation.

Outside those hours, Charlie creates a ticket in Dynamics itself. An HR Services employee can then choose to follow up by phone, email or chat.

Chatbot, chat function and Dynamics in one chain

The chatbot's value lies in the combination: a chatbot with a live chat function, on an internal network, with single sign-on, linked to Microsoft Dynamics with ticketing functionality. Microsoft had never guided a setup like this before.

ProRail built an initial proof of concept itself and brought in Microsoft to link the chatbot to a live chat function.

The choice for Copilot Studio was an obvious one. The HR portal runs on SharePoint, and the ticketing system is Microsoft Dynamics. By building within that Microsoft ecosystem, the solution stayed easy to maintain, and there was no need for expensive custom software.

The project's biggest challenge was in that link. Blis took final responsibility for technically connecting the chatbot and the chat function, and played a key role in doing so.

From single sign-on to a first pilot group

The first hurdle was single sign-on (SSO) from SharePoint. Logging in via SSO was necessary to properly arrange all access rights, and to pass on an employee's name at the moment someone gets connected to the chat function. Two rounds of improvements and testing followed, and then a first rollout to a small pilot group.

ProRail deliberately chose to start small, so any teething problems would surface before Charlie rolled out to all employees.

The organisation had to come along too: HR, support, functional and technical management and end users. Short lines of communication and close alignment kept everyone on board.

How Charlie reaches 95 to 98 percent correct answers

That high reliability came from intensive testing. The project team, end users and HR experts fired scenarios at Charlie, based on both frequently asked and deliberately obscure questions. Whenever an answer was missing, the content on the HR portal was supplemented. Content owners keep their own information up to date through a formal approval process, so Charlie never works from outdated answers.

What it delivers for ProRail

For ProRail, this means a large share of HR questions can now be handled instantly, while personal contact remains available where needed. The concrete time savings for employees, and the drop in workload at HR Services, are currently being mapped out. The pilot is running, and as of 17 September ProRail is scaling up to 1,200 users, a fifth of the organisation.

"The biggest advantage of working with Blis is the deep technical know-how, combined with an organisation and people who are genuinely accessible. There's direct personal contact, and the focus really is on thinking and moving along with us as a client."

Erik Koningen, Senior Information Manager HR, ProRail

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