Frequently Asked Questions
Anthill is a new concept for most employers. There has never been a two-way communication solution quite like ours before, so we’re not surprised that people have lots of questions. The question shared with us most often, is: “Can something like this really exist, do so much, and be so simple?” The short answer is Yes! Check out other frequently asked questions below.
How can we help you?
We receive many questions about our deskless employee solutions and we’re happy to share more about how Anthill can help at your workplace. If you don’t see an answer to your particular question, please reach out to us anytime via phone, chat, or email by visiting our contact page.
Anthill is a 24/7 HR Support and Communications Center for employees who don’t work in the office — accessible on any phone through text messaging, in the language they prefer.
Anthill is a two-way workforce service center usable on any phone.
Anthill enables deskless and frontline workers to text in questions and receive automated responses. When meaningful conversations are needed to improve the employee experience, the system escalates their issue to a company representative. Employers can also send messages to their workforce in real-time or in pre-scheduled campaigns.
Anthill communications are accessible in more than 110 languages.
Anthill helps your frontline workforce get answers to their most pressing questions immediately, reducing repetitive conversations for your frontline managers.
Anthill eases the burden of disjointed internal communication channels across large frontline workforces.
Anthill enables employers to send mass messages to the entire team that are read by 97% of recipients in the first 5 minutes.* These outbound messages include anything from onboarding and emergency alerts, to company updates and schedule changes.
For inbound questions from frontline employees, Anthill is a simple way to automatically respond to routine questions by pulling answers directly from company software, resources, or previously answered FAQs. Only the most critical messages needing the attention of your leadership team arrive in their inbox.
New automations — outbound or inbound — can be added at any time with ease.
Anthill predicts, with “creepy accuracy*,” the factors that make your employees want to leave — in time for you to do something about it and prevent turnover.
Anthill helps employers gain insight into the needs of their workforce through an open communication channel and actionable insights for improved employee retention.
In the first 60 – 90 days — the most critical turnover window for frontline professions — the majority of employee turnover is due to miscommunication or a lack of information. Anthill enables you to provide effective onboarding that workers can receive on any type of phone. Workers will be able to ask questions so they can safely get the information they need to start their new role strong. Anthill helps you establish employee trust, which simultaneously benefits your organizational performance.
Anthill is an essential tool that also provides a way to measure your organization’s performance across 32 key drivers of turnover for frontline workers. You can see a snapshot — either by team or department — of the top driver of potential turnover at any given time.
Anthill enables employers and frontline managers to speak directly to their workforce and address issues before they result in turnover.
Your employees can now talk TO you, provide honest feedback, get answers to questions immediately, and get vital access to software and information you already have.
Frontline workers need to request schedule changes, find out how to get paid, request tax forms, and more, just like anybody else, but with legacy software systems designed for office workers these additional resources are very challenging or impossible to find for your entire workforce.
Anthill provides an easy-to-use, text-enabled service center in more than 110 languages. Additional questions from workers can be quickly addressed, setting them up for success at your company.
Text messaging is the most inclusive technology for modern employees. It allows your employees to use systems in the language they prefer. 20% of workers still use flip phones, many more don’t have a data plan to support an app, and app adoption overall is low and getting lower. Anthill works on any phone and in more than 110 languages, so it removes all of those barriers to corporate communications.
For the 2.7 billion individual employees who don’t sit at desks or computers to do their jobs, legacy software systems don’t fit into how they work and live. They don’t use computer software, email, and increasingly don’t download or use apps on their phone. For those who do not have education beyond a high school diploma, more than 20% do not have a smartphone*.
Text-messaging is the only way to reach the entirety of your frontline workforce and avoid creating disengaged employees. Text-messaging is the only communication channel that boasts a 97% open rate within the first 5 minutes of receipt*.
At Anthill, our customers see an average of an over 95% subscription rate to send and receive employer text messages – a much higher adoption and engagement level than any app on the market (but if you find one, let us know and we’ll owe you dinner!)
Most things an office worker can do while sitting at a computer!
Workers can view and make changes to their schedule, request time off, view pay history, check and sign up for benefits, review company policies, ask general questions, alert about a safety issue, and report an issue with a manager/colleague.
Anything your office employees can do, your deskless employees can do from their phone with Anthill’s company-wide communications.
You can absolutely use the systems you have already invested in — and we recommend it!
Our platform was built to help increase the use of the software, programs, and employee resources your company has already invested in. We know as an employer, you have invested a lot to support your workforce and reach your business goals. We are here to make sure those investments actually make it into the hands of the people who need these resources.
To be an employer of choice, it is important to not only offer great support, but to make sure it meets people where they are and that they actually use it. This is why we integrate with your HRIS, HCM, and other systems your human resources department may be using.
Share the list of tools that you use today and together we can come up with a plan to increase employee engagement levels and improve operational efficiency for those programs.
Yes! We take data security seriously at Anthill. We are currently SOC II (level 1) certified and take every precaution to ensure our systems are safe and secure.
We take security very seriously. We have a dedicated cyber security team that can work with your company through the information security review process. We are SOC-2 compliant, GDPR compliant, and HIPPA compliant.
Additionally, we routinely engage in proactive testing measures to ensure we remain an incredibly secure and trustworthy platform for our customers, no matter the company size.
Yes! We help keep all employee communications compliant, offer guidance where needed and provide an auditable record of conversations.
Anthill understands the importance of record-keeping, compliant employee communications, and compliant emergency management for your deskless workforce. Our tools provide a fully auditable record of all communication that your organization owns and can review at any time.
Also, Anthill is committed to compliant communication practices across a variety of workforce circumstances and can work with your organization to guide proper permission and use. Additionally, our product follows strict procedures for safety incidents and reporting around such incidents in partnership with your team. Connect with a member of the Anthill team to discuss specific measures we can take to partner with your organization and unique needs.
Anthill is ridiculously simple to set up and implement. Most clients are up and running within a week.
Anthill can set up very quickly and start to create engaged employees. We work with your team to ensure the right admin users, end users, and automations are there on day one so that Anthill immediately offers value to your team. We have had many customers go from a signed agreement to launch in as little as a week.
Our customer success team is there to make sure everything runs smoothly throughout implementation. Our goal is that you start strong and find more use cases and operational efficiencies as you make use of Anthill. We are able to stagger integrations and you can update automations at any time so you don’t need to commit to the final version of your product delivery in pre-launch planning. Anthill is fluid with the changing needs of your organization.
We work hard to make things simple for you. Our admin users routinely share that Anthill’s dashboard is straightforward and easy to learn – and we all know how easy it is to text.
Anthill is all about simplicity and making our product reflect technology you already know how to use. Not only do we make the end user experience incredibly simple with a text-messaging interface, we also make the dashboard for the employer admin-user as simple as an inbox. Even changing or setting up messaging automations is as simple as updating a social media status.
Additionally, our Customer Success team has built a robust library of tools to help you if you ever get stuck on a specific feature and is always available to answer any questions you have!
Automations are messages automatically sent to employees based upon rules or workflows you’ve established. It helps you work smarter and not harder as you communicate with your frontline and deskless workforce.
With Anthill, an automation is either 1) an outbound message or 2) a response to an inbound request/question. Both types of automations are automatically sent without a member of your team prompting that specific send instance at the moment. This enables you to set something up one time and have the action repeated continuously for your workforce. This makes your operations more efficient and your communication more consistent.
- For automated outbound messages, you can establish a pre-set list of tasks in Anthill that can be triggered by inbound messages from frontline employees or messages you’ve scheduled for a particular time. An example would be employee onboarding. You can set up all of your messages, links and menus in advance — timed in the sequence of your choice — and have them all go out to each new employee before they even start their first day.
- The most common type of automations in Anthill are responses to inbound requests. Instead of repeatedly answering questions on a topic, your team can set up an answer (or an integration to a software or resource) one time and have that response automatically sent out any time someone asks a related question. Our technology makes sure this is an intelligent process that connects the request from an employee to the right response based on their department, team, job or other important permission factors.
Automations work like magic, allowing your team to create compelling, high impact workforce communications with ease while knowing that those messages are making it to the right folks.
Anthill currently has a 97% subscription rate and an 85% weekly user rate.
Furthermore, users average 24 unique conversations per month! So yes, employees love to use Anthill!
We developed Anthill from extensive research into what deskless workers need and how they prefer to communicate (our founders have PhDs and spent their careers studying this topic).
The many barriers these workers face — such as language differences, types of phones, data plans or access to a computer — makes it difficult for them to use software or employee apps. Additionally, app adoption overall is low and getting lower. We decided to use text messaging because almost everyone can text and with our ability to auto-translate, frontline workers can receive texts in the most inclusive, understandable way.
If you aren’t sold on text messaging — no problem. We offer our platform through other channels and you can let your employees choose. In our experience, they choose texting. 🙂
Auto-replies alleviate the pressure of your team answering repetitive questions by automatically answering your most used questions. Think of it as a text version of FAQs.
Auto-replies are answers, menus or tasks for frequently asked questions that are automatically sent in response to an employee’s question.
Our powerful AI reads intent, so your employees don’t have to spell words correctly or even use the correct terminology. Our system will figure out what they are looking for and help them find the answer. It’s simple and easy to set up a new auto reply — as easy as writing an email!
Yes! Anthill integrates with many current HR software systems.
Anthill uses API hooks to pull/push information to and from current company software and resources. We already integrate with many common HR software systems (you can find a full list here) and are happy to work with you to integrate with any new tool you request.
We are set up for quick integrations and typically deliver new integrations within a one-month cycle. You can choose to pre-set integrations before launch or set up integrations after you see which company resources your employees need most. (Our product will show you what your employees are asking for help with. Pretty cool!)
How many do you have? That many!
Anthill is built to reflect your organization’s structure and internal communication strategy. We understand how critical it is to get the right information to the right team at the right time.
For this reason, we make it possible to segment Anthill by regions, departments, teams, and more. You can try Anthill with a team and you can scale Anthill across an entire, global organization. Let us know what your needs are and we can design a plan for you.
You can set permissions for admin users with the click of a button in your user menu.
Administrative users are given a persona depending on their use of the system.
We lay out the personas/permissions as follows:
- Full Access: This user can see all messages that come through the system. This includes the Q&A inbox and HR Messages.
- All Q&A: This user can see all messages in the Q&A inbox but not HR messages.
- Department Specific: This user can only see the Q&A messages from the department they are assigned to.
- Analytics Access: This user can only see user analytics.
Yes! We encourage you to set up Anthill to handle these tasks for you and free yourself up to handle the urgent, high touch conversations.
Most of our customers use Anthill for all of these things and more. You can send surveys directly through Anthill and have the data stored in the survey software you already use or on our platform.
For onboarding, you can set up all of your messages, links and menus in advance, timed in the sequence of your choice — and have them all go out to each new employee before their first day.
Emergency response is a great way to use Anthill and it can go both ways. You can alert your workforce to issues and they can alert you, too!
Anthill offers three service levels and tiered pricing based on workforce size.
Anthill works with our partners to find a package of services that match the needs of your organization. Please connect with one of our team members to discuss your specific service-level needs and the size of your workforce for a proposal.
Distribution, manufacturing, hospitality, and more.
Anthill is designed to be the simplest way to connect with company resources and can be used by any deskless, frontline and mobile employees. Our primary industries served today include:
Ask one of our value consultants if Anthill is a fit for your workforce and we can share relevant data about platform adoption for you to assess if our tool is a good fit.
How many do you have? That many!
Anthill works with companies ranging from 20 employees to 50,000+ employees.
See how much you can save with Anthill with our Calculator
See our calculator for an explanation of how we help companies save both from operational efficiencies and personnel cost. To see the impact these savings can have in your organization, please use our calculator or set up a time to meet with one of our solution consultants.
Our amazing Customer Success team is always available and we have searchable documentation available for customers.
Your company dashboard contains extensive resources to support you as you use the product at an individual level.
We also have a customer success team, which is available to answer your questions. Many of our customers choose to have regular check-ins with their customer success manager to ensure they are getting the full value from the product.
